The sub-heading for a McClatchy News Service report dated this morning reads:
U.S. officials claimed that Iran gives bomb parts to Shiite Muslim militias that attack Americans in Iraq, but said they didn’t have a `smoking gun.’
No “smoking gun,” huh?
According to U.S. defense officials in Baghdad, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force is supplying “sophisticated armor-piercing improvised bombs” to Iraqi Shi’a militias. The Quds force is known to have supplied another militant Shi’a group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, with similar weapons technology. Said one defense official:
We need Iran to stop doing what they’re doing. It’s a force-protection issue.
According to Leila Fadel of McClatchy News, the officials released the information in an effort to put pressure on the Nouri al-Maliki government to get the Iranians to cease the arms deliveries. The article notes that the evidence of Iranian involvement in the Iraq conflict is mounting and is “more compelling” than was pre-war intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The mounting evidence against Iran comes amidst wide-spread criticism here in the U.S. regarding the apparent “bellicosity” of the Bush administration’s policy toward the Middle Eastern nation. Some fear that the administration is leaning toward an eventual, if not inevitable, military response to aggressive Iranian posturing in Southwest Asia—not the least of which is the burgeoning Iranian uranium enrichment program.
The McClatchy article quotes an anonymous Iraqi government official:
Iran does not deny outside interference. Iran actually says, `Yes, we are interfering.’ They justify this by saying, ‘The Americans and the British are threatening our security, and we have to take measures to react.’
In a briefing held yesterday, the U.S. defense officials claimed that the armor-piercing devices, along with 81mm mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, were discovered in Shi’a areas of Iraq. “The evidence of Iranian activity also included two identification cards that were seized in a raid on an Iranian liaison office in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, and on interrogations of Iranian and Iraqi detainees.”
I really don’t know how to take all this information. It’s bad enough that our forces in Iraq are contending with violence from both Shi’a militias and Sunni insurgent groups. Now it seems that we’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest in Iran, too boot.
And with the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps already stretched to the limit, I don’t know how credible we could possibly be in countering the increasing Iranian posturing. What do you think about the situation?
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