Explosive charge blows up in US's
face By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - When the United States
military command accused the Iranian Quds Force in
January of providing the armor-piercing EFPs
(explosively formed penetrators) that were killing
US troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had
been producing their own EFPs for years, a review
of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in
Iraq shows.
The record also shows that the
US command had considerable evidence that the
Mahdi Army of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr
had
received the technology and the training on how to
use it from Hezbollah, rather than Iran.
The command, operating under close White
House supervision, chose to deny these facts in
making the dramatic accusation that became the
main rationale for the present aggressive US
stance toward Iran. Although the George W Bush
administration initially limited the accusation to
the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert
that top officials of the Iranian regime are
responsible for arms that are killing US troops.
British and US officials observed from the
beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely
resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against
Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, both in their
design and the techniques for using them.
Hezbollah was known as the world's most
knowledgeable specialists in EFP manufacture and
use, having perfected this during the 1990s in the
military struggle with Israeli forces in Lebanon.
It was widely recognized that it was Hezbollah
that had passed on the expertise to Hamas and
other Palestinian militant groups after the second
Intifada began in 2000.
US intelligence
also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the
training of Mahdi Army militants on EFPs. In
August 2005, Newsday published a report from
correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shi'ite fighters
had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah
techniques for building the bombs, as well as for
carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi
and Lebanese officials.
In late November
2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN
and the New York Times that Hezbollah troops had
trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi Army fighters in
Lebanon.
The fact that the Mahdi Army's
major military connection has always been with
Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the
presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired
anti-armor weapon. Although US military briefers
identified it last February as being Iranian-made,
the RPG-29 is not manufactured by Iran but by the
Russian Federation.
According to the
Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, RPG-29s were imported
from Russia by Syria, then passed on to Hezbollah,
which used them with devastating effectiveness
against Israeli forces in the 2006 war. According
to a June 2004 report on the well-informed
military website Strategypage.com, RPG-29s were
already turning up in Iraq, "apparently smuggled
across the Syrian border".
The earliest
EFPs appearing in Iraq in 2004 were so
professionally made that they were probably
constructed by Hezbollah specialists, according to
a detailed account by British expert Michael
Knights in Jane's Intelligence Review last year.
By late 2005, however, the British command
had already found clear evidence that the Iraqi
Shi'ites themselves were manufacturing their own
EFPs. British Army Major General J B Dutton told
reporters in November 2005 that the bombs were of
varying degrees of sophistication.
Some of
the EFPs required a "reasonably sophisticated
factory", he said, while others required only a
simple workshop, which he observed, could only
mean that some of them were being made inside
Iraq.
After British convoys in Maysan
province were attacked by a series of EFP bombings
in late May 2006, Knights recounts, British forces
discovered a factory making them in Majar al-Kabir
north of Basra in June.
In addition, the
US military also had its own forensic evidence by
the autumn of 2006 that EFPs used against its
vehicles had been manufactured in Iraq, according
to Knights. He cites photographic evidence of EFP
strikes on US armored vehicles that "typically
shows a mixture of clean penetrations from
fully-formed EFP and spattering ..." That pattern
reflected the fact that the locally made EFPs were
imperfect, some of them forming the required shape
to penetrate but some of them failing to do so.
Then US troops began finding EFP
factories. Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in
the Los Angeles Times in mid-February that US
troops had raided a Baghdad machine shop in
November 2006 and discovered "a pile of copper
discs, five inches in diameter, stamped out as
part of what was clearly an ongoing order".
In a report on February 23, NBC Baghdad
correspondent Jane Arraf quoted "senior military
officials" as saying that US forces had "been
finding an increasing number of the advanced
roadside bombs being not just assembled but
manufactured in machine shops here".
Nevertheless, the Bush administration
decided to put the blame for the EFPs squarely on
the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Corps, after Bush agreed in autumn 2006 to target
the Quds Force within Iran to make Iranian leaders
feel vulnerable to US power. The allegedly
exclusive Iranian manufacture of EFPs was the
administration's only argument for holding the
Quds Force responsible for their use against US
forces.
At the February 11 military
briefing presenting the case for this claim, one
of the US military officials declared, "The
explosive charges used by Iranian agents in Iraq
need a special manufacturing process, which is
available only in Iran." The briefer insisted that
there was no evidence that they were being made in
Iraq.
That lynchpin of the
administration's EFP narrative began to break down
almost immediately, however. On February 23, NBC's
Arraf confronted Lieutenant General Ray Odierno,
who had been out in front in January promoting the
new Iranian EFP line, with the information she had
obtained from other senior military officials that
an increasing number of machine shops
manufacturing EFPs had been discovered by US
troops.
Odierno began to walk the Iranian
EFP story back. He said the EFPs had "started to
come from Iran", but he admitted "some of the
technologies" were "probably being constructed
here".
The following day, US troops found
yet another EFP factory near Baqubah, with copper
discs that appeared to be made with a high degree
of precision, but which could not be said with any
certainty to have originated in Iran.
The
explosive expert who claimed at the February
briefing that EFPs could only be made in Iran was
then made available to the New York Times to
explain away the new find. Major Marty Weber now
backed down from his earlier statement and
admitted that there were "copy cat" EFPs being
machined in Iraq that looked identical to those
allegedly made in Iran to the untrained eye.
Weber insisted that such Iraqi-made EFPs
had slight imperfections which made them "much
less likely to pierce armor". But NBC's Arraf had
reported the previous week that a senor military
official had confirmed to her that the EFPs made
in Iraqi shops were indeed quite able to penetrate
US armor. The impact of those weapons "isn't as
clean", the official said, but they are "almost as
effective" as the best-made EFPs.
The idea
that only Iranian EFPs penetrate armor would be a
surprise to Israeli intelligence, which has
reported that EFPs manufactured by Hamas
guerrillas in their own machine shops during 2006
had penetrated eight inches of Israeli steel armor
in four separate incidents in September and
November, according to the Intelligence and
Terrorism Center in Tel Aviv.
The Arraf
story was ignored by the news media, and the Bush
administration has continued to assert the Iranian
EFP charge as though it had never been questioned.
It soon became such an accepted part of
the media narrative on Iran and Iraq that the only
issue about which reporters bother to ask
questions is whether the top leaders of the
Iranian government have approved the alleged Quds
Force operation.
Gareth Porter
is an 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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