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2 US's smoking gun on Iran
misfires By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The first major effort by the
administration of US President George W Bush to
substantiate its case that the Iranian government
has been providing weapons to Iraqi Shi'ites who
oppose the occupation undermines the
administration's political line by showing that it
has been unable to find any real evidence of an
Iranian government role.
Contradicting
recent claims by both Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates that
US
intelligence had proof of Iranian government
responsibility for the supply of such weapons, the
unnamed officials who briefed the media on Sunday
admitted that the claim is merely "an inference"
rather than based on a trail of evidence.
Although it was clearly not the intention,
moreover, the briefing revealed for the first time
that the Iranians and Iraqis detained by US forces
in recent months did not provide any evidence
implicating either the Iranian government or the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards in the acquisition of
armor-piercing explosive devices and other weapons
by Iraqi Shi'ite groups.
In the end, the
administration presentation suggested that there
could be no other explanation for the presence of
Iranian-made weapons than official government
sponsorship of smuggling them into Iraq. But in
doing so, they had to ignore a well-known reality:
most weapons, including armor-piercing
projectiles, can be purchased by anyone through
intermediaries in the Middle East.
Indeed,
General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview published
while he was on a visit to Indonesia that he did
not know whether Iranian-made material used to
assemble roadside bombs in Iraq had been supplied
on Tehran's orders. And speaking on CNN, CentCom
Commander William Fallon, the top commander of US
forces in the Middle East, was asked about the
administration's claim over Iran supplying weapons
to Iraq. "I have no idea who may be actually
hands-on in this stuff," Fallon said.
The
briefing in Baghdad on Sunday displayed a number
of weapons or photographs of weapons said to have
been found in Iraq, including what were called
"explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), which the
officials said were smuggled into the country by
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force. The
RPG-7s and 81-millimeter mortar rounds shown to
reporters did indeed have markings showing that
they had been recently manufactured, and there is
no reason to doubt that those weapons were
manufactured in Iran.
The argument for
Iranian official responsibility assumes that such
weapons are so tightly controlled that Shi'ite
groups could not purchase them in small numbers on
the black market in Iran, Syria or Lebanon. It is
well documented, however, that the Shi'ites have
resorted to black-market networks to obtain EFPs.
An article in Jane's Intelligence Review
last month by Michael Knights, chief of analysis
for the Olive Group, a private security-consulting
firm, reports that the British discovered that
there was indeed an organization in Basra engaged
in arranging for the purchase and delivery of
imported EFPs and that it was composed entirely of
police officials, including members of the Police
Intelligence Unit, the Internal Affairs
Directorate and the Major Crimes Unit. They found
that members of the organization followed no
specific Shi'ite faction, but included members
from all the factions in Basra.
The
Washington Post quoted one of the US officials at
the briefing as saying that there was no
"widespread involvement" of the Iraqi government
in supplying weaponry, thus implicitly conceding
that some Iraqi government officials are indeed
involved in the weapons traffic.
By
insisting that the Iranian government was
involved, the Bush administration has conjured up
the image of a smuggling operation so vast that it
could not occur without official sanction. In
fact, as Knights points out, the number of EFPs
exploded monthly has remained at about 100, which
clearly would not require high-level connivance to
maintain a flow of imports.
The PowerPoint
slides presented to the press in Baghdad ended
with a slide that in essence confirms that the
evidence points not
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