The Republican Party is facing electoral disaster in November, so Karl Rove is playing his only remaining card: War with Iran.

Rove has been beating the Iran War Drums for months to prepare for his election-year fall marketing campaign. Back in 2002, Rove waited until after Labor Day, but the GOP's dismal polls have forced him to move his schedule up by two weeks. So today Rove made his Iran War Topic #1 on the TV news, pushing even John Mark Karr aside.

The peg for today's news is slightly bizarre: a pre-emptive attack on our own intelligence agencies by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee - the same Republicans who adamantly refuse to investigate the Iraq War lies. Here's the NY Times version by intelligence reporter Mark Mazzetti

Some in G.O.P. Say Iran Threat Is Played Down

WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — Some senior Bush administration officials and top Republican lawmakers are voicing anger that American spy agencies have not issued more ominous warnings about the threats that they say Iran presents to the United States.

Why would the Bush administration attack the intelligence agencies that it controls? Because the Neocons are once again "fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy" (remember the Downing Ssreet Memos?) but this time the intelligence agencies are refusing to go along with the lies.

Earlier this year, the intelligence agencies put new procedures in place to help avoid the type of analysis that was contained in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq and to prevent another “Curveball” — the code name of the Iraqi source who fed the United States faulty intelligence about Iraq’s biological weapons program. “I think that the intelligence community is being appropriately cautious,” said John E. McLaughlin, a former director of central intelligence.

“I think that what is going on is that people are holding themselves to a higher standard of evidence because of Iraq.”

This insistence on truth is intolerable to the Neocons, because the truth is that Iran is 10 years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon, according to the most recent National Intelligence Estimate. So House Republicans issued their report in an attempt to intimidate intelligence analysts, just as they did when the sold their Iraq War on the basis of manufactured lies.

We know how the Neocons play this dirty game. The question is whether we, the American people, will rise up to stop them from launching another war of lies. You can start by signing our petition at DontAttackIran.org.

Update 1: One of the Big Lies of Iran Warmongers is claiming that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wants to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm surprised to read Faiz at ThinkProgress echoing that lie by writing Ahmadinejad "called for the destruction of Israel," presumably through a nuclear attack. But Ahmadinejad never made any such threat. Back on May 4, Juan Cole wrote:

Every time you see a newspaper article that alleges that Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be wiped off the face of the map, please write the editor. Say that this idiom does not exist in Persian, and that what Ahmadinejad actually said was, "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." And you can cite me.

Update 2: Glenn Greenwald makes the same mistake:

isn't that supposedly what makes the Iranian president so evil, so Hitlerian -- that he openly speaks of eradicating Israel from the map?).