Bush's 'proxy war' claim over Iran
exposed By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - In his prepared statement to
the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs
and Armed Services committees last week, General
David Petraeus claimed that Iran is using the Quds
Force to turn Shi'ite militias into a
"Hezbollah-like force" to "fight a proxy war
against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in
Iraq".
But Petraeus then shattered that
carefully constructed argument by volunteering in
answering a question that the Quds Force, an
elite unit of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps, had in essence left
Iraq. "The Quds Force itself, we believe, by and
large those individuals have been pulled out of
the country, as have the Lebanese Hezbollah
trainers that were being used to augment that
activity."
Petraeus' contradictory
statements on the Quds Force are emblematic of a
US administration propaganda line that has in
essence fallen apart because it was so obviously
out of line with reality. Nine months after the
George W Bush administration declared that it was
going to go after Iranian agents in Iraq who were
threatening US troops, the US military still has
not produced any evidence that Quds Force
operatives in Iraq were engaged in assisting the
militias fighting against US troops.
The
US military command in Iraq has failed to capture
a single Quds Force member it could link to the
Shi'ite militias. And the evidence that has
emerged over the past nine months about Shi'ite
militias and their relationship to Iran suggests
that Quds Force personnel in Iraq never had the
mission of assisting Shi'ite militias, as claimed
by the Bush administration.
It appears
that an increasing number of military intelligence
officers in Iraq have concluded that the Quds
Force has been steering clear of working directly
with Shi'ite militias attacking US troops, to
avoid giving the Bush administration a pretext for
aggression against Iranian territory.
In a
military briefing presented in Baghdad on February
11, an unnamed US official stated flatly that
weapons were being smuggled into the country by
the Quds Force, but the briefers failed to present
any specific evidence to back up the assertion.
Since that briefing, the US military
command has captured the alleged deputy head and
key logistical officer of the main Iraqi EFP
(explosively formed penetrator, or
armor-penetrating explosives) network and a
Hezbollah operative who was a liaison with the
network, as well as a number of what it called
"suspected members" or "suspected leaders" of a
"secret cell terrorist network known for
facilitating the transport of and EFPs from Iran
to Iraq".
But the interrogations of these
detainees have not led to the capture of a single
Iranian official. Nor has the US military been
able to identify a link between any Iraqi militia
member and any Iranian official. On July 6,
Major-General Rick Lynch, commander of US
operations south of Baghdad, told reporters his
troops had not captured "anybody that we can tie
to Iran".
Even more devastating to the
"proxy war" line, Lynch's spokeswoman, Alayne
Conway, acknowledged on August 19 that they had
not caught anyone supplying arms from Iran to the
Iraqi Shi'ite militias.
There has long
been some evidence, however, of a link between
Shi'ite networks for procuring EFPs and other arms
and the Lebanese Hezbollah. The leader of a Mahdi
Army group that was carrying out attacks against
British forces, Ahmad Jawwad al-Fartusi, who was
arrested in September 2005, had lived in Lebanon
for several years and was known to have personal
contact with Hezbollah, according to a March 27
New York Times report.
Along with evidence
of a growing relationship between Hezbollah and
Muqtada al-Sadr's army, which has now culminated
in a Sadr office in Beirut, such past links
between the two Shi'ite groups suggest that
Hezbollah's assistance to the Shi'ites need not
have been ordered by Tehran.
US and
British officials have acknowledged in the past
that the EFP technology being used in Iraq might
have entered Iraq from Hezbollah in Lebanon rather
than from Iran.
The premise that the Quds
Force agents in Iraq were involved in training
Shi'ites to carry out operations against US troops
was shattered when Lynch told reporters on August
19 that the Iranians were "facilitating the
training of Shi'ite extremist" militiamen in Iraq.
That clearly implied that the training was being
done by Hezbollah.
The Washington Post and
other news outlets quoted Lynch's statement but
nevertheless reported that Lynch had charged that
Iranians were doing the training. A spokesperson
for Lynch confirmed to Inter Press Service that
Lynch had not made any allegation about Iranians
training Shi'ites in Iraq.
Petraeus dealt
the final blow to the notion of a Quds Force
training role when he noted that the Hezbollah
trainers had also been withdrawn from the country.
The briefing by US military spokesman
Brigadier-General Kevin Bergner on July 2 was
aimed primarily at advancing the theme that
Hezbollah acts in Iraq as a "proxy" for Iran. But
the real significance of the briefing - unreported
in the US news media - was the first suggestion by
a US official that the Quds Force personnel in
Iraq might have avoided direct contacts with
Shi'ite militias altogether.
Asked by a
journalist why the Quds Force would "subcontract"
the training of Shi'ite militias to Hezbollah,
Bergner answered that Hezbollah could "do things
that perhaps they didn't want to have to do
themselves in terms of interacting directly with
special groups".
Without mentioning any
pullout of Quds Force personnel, Conway said on
August 19 that Lynch estimated there were 50 Quds
Force agents in his entire area of responsibility
in southern Iraq. Four days later, Lynch clarified
that estimate, telling reporters that 30 of those
estimated 50 agents were "surrogates" - presumably
referring to Hezbollah operatives engaged in
training Shi'ites in southern Iraq.
Although it was buried in the August 19
story inaccurately reporting Lynch's statement
about training in Iraq, Megan Greenwell of the
Washington Post reported the much more significant
fact that "some military intelligence analysts
have concluded there is no concrete evidence"
linking the Quds Force in Iraq with the Shi'ite
militias.
The charge that Iran is using
the Quds Force to fight a proxy war is an effort
to raise tensions with Iran by suggesting a
potential reason for a US attack against that
country. Similarly, the pressure for targeting the
Quds Force in Iraq late last year came from senior
officials in the Bush administration who wished to
demonstrate US resolve to confront Iran, according
to an in-depth account of the origins of the plan
by the Washington Post's Dafna Linzer published on
February 26.
That policy was regarded with
"skepticism" by the intelligence community, the
State Department and the Defense Department when
it was proposed, Linzer wrote, because of the fear
it would contribute to an escalation of conflict
with Iran.
"This has little to do with
Iraq," a senior intelligence officer told Linzer.
"It's all about pushing Iran's buttons. It's
purely political."
Gareth Porter
is a historian and national-security policy
analyst. His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in June 2005.
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