If you were paying attention to the world this week, you probably heard that a trusted aide and translator for the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan was arrested on espionage charges. Also, in the past day or two, British and American soldiers in Iraq raided houses thought to be important centers for Shia insurgents, only to wind up holding Iranian diplomats as captives. These diplomats were invited to Iraq by Jalal Talibani, who sat with President Bush in the White House earlier this month...

It's not the first time a member of George W. Bush's family has sat so close to someone whose ties to Iran might be more significant than they would appear at first glance. At the 2003 State of the Union address, Laura Bush sat beside Ahmed Chalabi, a close advisor to the Bush administration who was being groomed to lead the new government in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress(INC) cohorts had been on the CIA payroll for years until we discovered he had tipped off Iran to the fact that we had broken their encryption and could read messages they thought were private. How did Chalabi know? He said "a drunk American" told him.

Though the INC was important enough to merit large and regular payments from the CIA, their information grew increasingly less valuable, to the point where American analysts considered their input nearly useless by the time Bush took office. This presented a problem for Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon chums. Chalabi was the guy saying we'd be greeted with flowers if we invaded, but he had not been in Iraq in many years, and American intelligence agents viewed him and his fellow exiles as a poor information sources, but potential tools. They kept them on the payroll, but censored their views from serious documents. To circumvent this filter, Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans, run by Douglas Feith, who was considered extremely loyal, but not especially bright. This office was given privileged status in the intelligence hierarchy so its reports would not be vetted, and Chalabi's worthless claims were presented to the President and his Cabinet as truth. A parallel effort to corrupt British intelligence was known as Operation Rockingham.

We view Iran as a backwards state run by religious fanatics, but the truth is Western civilization started in the Middle East. The earliest evidence of domestic livestock comes from Afghanistan, and the roots of Christianity, mathematics and literature all trace back to Arab regions. Cities, trade routes, kingdoms and libraries flourished on the Arabian peninsula long before white men crossed the Atlantic. Arabs are intelligent, educated and shrewd, and with the recent news of continuing links between Iran and high-level British and American officials, perhaps it is time to put aside the notion that we are at war with simple zealots and ask ourselves what we have gotten in to.