US is ratcheting up the rhetoric accusing Iran of helping Iraq.

For the first time, the U.S. military said on Sunday that Iranian soldiers are in Iraq training insurgents to attack American forces.

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. commander who is in charge of a large swath of Iraq south of Baghdad, believes there are about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in his battlefield area, military spokeswoman Maj. Alayne Conway said.

Conway said that U.S.-led forces have not caught any of the Iranians, but she said military intelligence and recently discovered caches of weapons with Iranian markings on them indicate that the Iranians are there.

I have more then a healthy dose of skepticism over these stories. We all know that the Bush administration wants to start some shit with Iran, and then we start getting these reports that there are Iranian weapons being found or that they are helping to train the insurgents, and the whole thing reminds me of the build up to the Iraq war where every little thing was blown out of proportion. Back then we were told to connect the dots and then imagine that there are more dots to connect that made a picture they wanted us to see.

I would bet that if the military were to try and identify the country of origin of most of the weapons and explosives being used against us they would find that the main source would be the good old U.S. of A.

And it does not help their cause when this is the best they can do by way of proof:

Spokeswoman Conway said that since April, the military has found 217 weapons in four provinces south of Baghdad that it suspects were supplied by Iran. She said the military has not caught any Iranians or Iraqis smuggling weapons across the Iran-Iraq border, but she believes it soon will.

"Just because we're not finding them doesn't mean they're not there," Conway said.

"We have not found the Weapons of Mass Destruction, but the world knows that Saddam has them." So said everybody in the Bush administration in the lead up to invading Iraq.

We failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, are we going to fail to learn the lessons from Iraq as well?