Oh, no. Not dhows! The weapons of mass destruction in the 8th Century. The Saffarids are coming to get us! From The New York Times.

Overhead imagery showed fully assembled missiles, stoking fears that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps would fire them at United States naval ships. Additional pieces of intelligence picked up threats against commercial shipping and potential attacks by Arab militias with Iran ties on American troops in Iraq. But just how alarmed the Trump administration should be over the new intelligence is a subject of fierce debate among the White House, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and America’s allies...

...As military officials struggled to show that the threat from Iran was growing, intelligence officials declassified a photograph of one of the small boats, called dhows, carrying what was described as a functional Iranian missile. The Pentagon has not released the photograph. On its own, two American officials said, the photograph was not compelling enough to convince the American public and lawmakers, or foreign allies, of the new Iranian threat. But releasing other supporting images could compromise secret sources and methods of collecting intelligence, the officials said.

Translation from the original Weaselspeak: "The bullshit we're peddling isn't convincing enough even for us, but we'll peddle it anyway and, no, you can't see the photo that's so unconvincing that we felt impelled to share its existence with the world."

I don't know. Maybe the guided-missile dhows are manufactured in the same plant that produced Saddam's balsa-wood anthrax gliders. What I do know is that we can all hope that Cheney and Wolfowitz and many of the present-day Never Trumpers who shilled for that disaster queered the spin pitch for Bolton and Pompeo and Tom Cotton—and El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, who's obviously just along for the ride. Or that the Democratic members of Congress aren't hankering to cast another vote that will haunt them for the next 20 years. So far, the inmates down at Camp Runamuck have been comically bad villains and, at best, clumsy vandals. This is a whole 'nother thing.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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