At last, somebody from outside the Village looks at the stories Bush has been telling on Iran. McClatchy:

Despite President Bush’s claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger “World War III,” experts in and out of government say there’s no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Oh my gawd! Say it’s not so! But wait—Maybe the Iranians trucked the weapons across the border to Syria?

Bush’s rhetoric seems hyperbolic compared with the measured statements by his senior aides and outside experts.

You’re kidding!

(Of course, election 2008 is too far away to really start catapulting the propaganda. Let’s be reasonable, here, people.)

All snark aside, there’s some evidence. But there’s not nearly enough evidence to support the conclusions Bush is drawing (or that tainted sources from Israel are drawing). You might almost think Bush wants another war, so heavy is the rhetoric.

The article gives a good list of the various claims; here’s the bottom line:

Bush and Cheney’s allegations are under especially close scrutiny because their similar allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program proved to be wrong. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Iran’s claims that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including the country’s vast petroleum reserves, its dealings with a Pakistani dealer in black-market nuclear technology and the fact that it concealed its uranium-enrichment program from a U.N. watchdog agency for 18 years.

“Many aspects of Iran’s past nuclear program and behavior make more sense if this program was set up for military rather than civilian purposes,” Pierre Goldschmidt, a former U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, said in a speech Oct. 30 at Harvard University.

If conclusive proof exists, however, Bush hasn’t revealed it. Nor have four years of IAEA inspections.

I trust the IAEA. They got it right with Iraq. I don’t trust Bush. He wanted to go to war with Iraq for the oil, and did. And Bush wants to go to war with Iran so bad he can taste it. The rational course is to go with what worked in the past—or would have worked if Bush had allowed it to—and let the IAEA process play out.

Whether the Village—aided and abetted by warmongering Lieberman-style Democrats like Hillary—is capable of rationality is another question, of course.

NOTE This McClatchy story is great—real reporting—but it hasn’t garnered a lot of linky goodness. Too bad. I gusss Bush lying about nuclear weapons to make a false case for war is old news. But it’s great McClatchy got this on the record, in case we need the benchmark later.