With the current strife in the Middle East as bad as it is, you wouldn’t think Bush administration officials would dare to make up reasons to get us into another war.

But there was Chris Hill, the State Department’s top Asia hand, saying Iranian officials were in North Korea for Kim Jong Il’s July 4th missile extravaganza.

“Explosive, if true,” as the British tabloids would say.

“Now, these missile tests . . .” Sen. George Allen, R-Va., asked Hill at a July 20 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Is it not true that there was at least one or more Iranian officials there to watch these missile launches?”

“Yes, that is our understanding,” Hill said.

Allen: “Well, the fact that the Iranians were there and . . . Hezbollah is armed, funded, protected and, for all intents and purposes, directed by Iran, that would be a great concern that Iran has those relationships militarily with North Korea, is that not correct?”

“That is absolutely correct . . .” Hill said. He added that, “truth in advertising,” he was not a missile expert “but you’re absolutely correct.”

“Well, they weren’t there just for U.S. Independence Day celebration, to see the rockets and missiles that North Korea sends off,” said Allen, who is locked in a gritty re-election fight with James Webb, the former Reagan administration Navy Secretary, Vietnam veteran and novelist who has turned against the Iraq war.

Hill’s remarks raced through the news wires, generating a special alert from CNN — and predictably excited comment from quarters rustling up support for another High Noon with Iran and North Korea.

Nobody could miss the underlying message of Hill’s testimony. The Heritage Foundation’s Peter Brookes, a retired Navy captain and China expert, certainly didn’t.

“Iran’s presence at the test site demonstrates an ongoing security relationship between Pyongyang and Iran’s interest in an ICBM-range missile that could someday be mated with a nuclear warhead to threaten the United States,” Brookes blogged after Hill’s scarifying testimony.

At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack was dogged with questions about Hill’s testimony.

“I don’t have anything to add to what Chris said. I think he was pretty clear,” McCormack said.

But sooner than you can say “slam dunk,” The Associated Press caught up to Hill, who readily admitted he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Hill . . . told reporters he could not confirm reports that Iranian officials had witnessed the July 4 launches,” the AP said. “He said he misspoke when he earlier told lawmakers that he could confirm such reports.”

Days later, some top experts I queried hadn’t heard of Hill’s retraction.

Daniel Pinkston, a Korea expert who heads the Monterrey Institute’s East Asia Nonproliferation Program, said by e-mail on July 24 that he had heard Hill’s comment about Iranians present at the launch, “but I did not know that it has now been retracted.”

“I don’t know if they were there and Hill slipped with an unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, or if Hill’s comment was in error,” Pinkston added. “It’s possible that Hill was mistaken or was referring to a widely quoted ‘fact’ that Iranians and/or Pakistanis were present at the May 1993 Nodong test in Musudan-ri.”

U.S. intelligence officials maintain they didn’t know Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist was supplying North Korea, Iran and Libya with nuclear bomb designs and technology.

But since North Koreans have reportedly been working on missile programs in Iran, says Monterrey’s Leonard S. Spector, a former leader of the Energy Department’s nuclear nonproliferation program, “it would not be surprising that Iranians were present in [North Korea] for the flight tests of July 4.”

And officials are rightly nervous about the evil twins’ nuclear ambitions.

The official disarray only puts U.S. national security officials in more bad odor, five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Either they are still clueless when it comes to accurate assessments of our adversaries, or they are deliberately misleading us again.

According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence did not have a clear picture of the rockets and missiles Iran had been supplying to Hezbollah when Israel attacked southern Lebanon.

“The arming of Hezbollah shows the blind spots of American and other Western intelligence services in assessing the [Iran weapons] threat,” the Times quoted officials on July 19.

Congress gives U.S. intelligence more than $44 billion a year to get an accurate picture of what Iran is giving Hezbollah.

Odd. Just last week, in this column, retired Col. Rich Reynolds, one of the U.S. Army’s top former Middle East hands, detailed what U.S. intelligence knows about Iran’s supplying rockets and missiles, some Chinese-made, to Hezbollah via an air bridge over Turkey to Damascus, from where they are trucked into Lebanon.

“Physical evidence does exist of weapons transfers from Iran to Syria and then from Syria to Lebanon,” Reynolds told me.

Reynolds said it is “only available within intelligence channels,” but he promptly laid out key details for me, some of which, he demonstrated, could be discerned with a trained eye via Google Earth’s satellite photos.

For that matter, he added, Hezbollah and al Qaeda commanders are using laptops and Google Earth in Beirut to “fly over” Israeli positions.

Indeed, we may be seeing the dawn of the Citizen Spy. Just as bloggers have disrupted the mainstream media’s control of news, so too are Web-sleuths turning up information U.S. intelligence doesn’t want known.

For example, The Washington Post reported on July 24 that Pakistan, a U.S. “ally” whose military leadership is infested with al Qaeda sympathizers, is expanding a plant capable of producing enough plutonium for 50 bombs a year.

The Post said it got its information from a private think tank whose analysts spotted the partially completed plant in commercial-satellite photos.

It came as a surprise to Congress, according to some accounts.

“What is baffling is that this information — which was surely information that our own intelligence agencies had — was kept from Congress,” Henry D. Sokolski, the Defense Department’s top nonproliferation official in the first Bush administration, was quoted as saying.

“We lack imagination if we think that this is no big deal.”

If this keeps up, Congress will be turning to Wikipedia for intelligence.

Wikipedia has its problems, but it can’t be much worse than what Chris Hill, and a long line of other Bush administration officials, have been telling Congress.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.