US spoiling for a fight: Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said Iran had acted with restraint over the [naval] incident but the United States sought to use it to paint the Islamic state in a negative light. “What we witnessed shows that some circles inside the United States are still pursuing its adventure-seeking policies,” Hosseini told a news conference. His comments were translated into English by Iran’s Press TV satellite station. “But their plans fell flat and we advise them not to pursue such policies of fooling the people in the region and now I think they have to apologize to the people of the region and also to the American nation,” he said. Iran rightly accuses US of messing up middle east. You know damn well Iran is right and Bush’s so called middle east Democracy program has set the entire middle east up for an explosion that will not be prevented. Can anyone name one country Bush has not meddled with? — An Average American Patriot

Bush the embellisher: It is very likely that a Pentagon video showing Iranian patrol boats confronting three US warships in the Strait of Hormuz was deliberately embellished to back up US president George Bush’s efforts to enlist allies to confront Iran. The video was released on the eve of Bush’s departure on “a five-day, five-country tour of the Arab world…to build a common front to pressure Iran – which Mr. Bush said…’was a threat to world peace’ – into ceasing its efforts to acquire nuclear technology.” There are a number of reasons to believe Iranian patrol boats did not provocatively confront US warships in international waters, and that the evidence they did was “sexed up,” to borrow a phrase used to describe Bush administration efforts to cherry pick evidence to fabricate a casus belli for its 2003 military conquest of Iraq. — What’s left?

Bush in Bahrain, not all bad news: My friend Scott MacLeod has an interesting interview today with a female Bahraini democracy activist on Time.com. Ghada Jamsheer said that she did not protest his visit to Bahrain yesterday because she said that his push for more democracy and transparency had given her and other activists a tiny space to speak out in: “There are a lot of demonstrations. I didn’t participate, because I feel that until Bush started his democracy project, we could not talk in Bahrain. You know what I mean? After he started this, at least we could talk. There are still criminal courts [for dissidents], there is a lot of pressure and dirty games from the royal court against human rights activists, including me. But still, we now have a petite space, we can work in it, we can talk. So I am not against the visit of Bush to Bahrain. I am silent.” — Rasheed’s World

“The Wrong Message From the Wrong Man”: Although the status of the Bush team’s Iraq’s yellowcake assertion is still open – the Bush team is now asking the world to accept another world security assertion against a country the IAEA found no EVIDENCE of what the Bush team asserts. Can you believe the Bush team? The Bush team never “came clean” about the Iraqi yellowcake fiasco. Now it is asking, once again, for the world’s “TRUST “. Where will the Bush team get its “evidence” of GLOBAL SECURITY THREATS from? Does the Bush team need evidence? — Joejolly’s Weblog

Oblivious to contradictions: … President Bush says he’s looking “to bring peace to the Middle East” and to contain Iran’s “hostile aspirations.” Writing for Asia Times Online, M.K. Bhadrakumar reported that the President told the Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahnronot, that “Part of the reason I’m going to the Middle East is to make it abundantly clear to nations in that part of the world that we view Iran as a threat, and that the National Intelligence Estimate [NIE] in no way lessens that threat, but in fact clarifies that threat.” Here, Bush invokes the very NIE that contradicted his claims that Iran was a dire nuclear threat into a supporting document for his claims that Iran is a dire threat. — Buzzflash