US military intelligence sources have said that increasingly powerful IEDs, with greater armor-piercing power and sophisticated triggers, have been traced to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon.

Bush said that there was evidence that some components in the most powerful IEDs came from Iran, and that coalition forces had “seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran.”

Last week, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directly accused the Islamic government in Tehran for the first time of sending Iranian Revolutionary Guard into Iraq to make trouble. ~Agence France-Presse (via Yahoo News)

SCIRI: Your friendly, neighbourhood Islamic revolutionaries

Elsewhere in the story government officials reportedly have made references to ties between Tehran and Moqtada al-Sadr, which surpasses the old Hussein-bin Laden link on the incredulity meter. Maybe they got the Badr brigades, the armed wing of the officially Tehran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (which has been sitting in government in Baghdad for months), confused with Sadr, an Iraqi nationalist and past opponent of the constitution on the grounds that it was excessively sectarian. Naturally, in the world of this administration, it would be the Iraqi nationalist who eschews Shi’a sectarian identification who would be working with the Tehran government and not the armed faction that has been funded by Tehran for over a decade. Why would any serious person believe any of this?

If there has been Iranian support for the production or use of IEDs against our soldiers, Iran’s agents are more likely to be found among our “allies” in the Badr brigades and SCIRI than among Sadr’s minions, in which case delivering power into the hands of SCIRI has proven to be a colossal blunder and yet another bitter fruit of Mr. Bush’s foolish war. More likely, however, this entire story is probably just the latest in a string of deceptions designed to encourage military confrontation with Iran.