But McCain may not be wrong to suggest that Iran is backing Sunni as well as Shiite terrorists in Iraq.

As the Wall Street Journal noted in January 2007, American intelligence had unearthed documents in Iraq suggesting cooperation between Iran's Quds ("Jerusalem") force and people affiliated with al Qaeda in Iraq, among other Sunni groups, confirming the suspicion of Iraqi liberal Mithal al-Alusi that Iran was playing both sides in Iraq.

And according to a July 2007 New York Sun article:
  • One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate's senior leadership structure.

    That is a consensus judgment from a final working draft of a new National Intelligence Estimate, titled "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland," on the organization that attacked the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Like any intelligence, this may be a mistake, disinformation or otherwise false or not the whole truth. But the notion that because Iran is a "Shiite country" it would never cooperate with Sunni extremists is simpleminded nonsense. Iraq is majority-Shiite too, and the two countries fought a brutal war for eight years in the 1980s. Political alliances do not always follow the lines of sectarian or other natural affinities.

Either way, it's hardly proof of old age or disingenuousness on McCain's part.