An intensifying US campaign against Iran
Amid US charges of Iran's hand in Iraq's instability, some counsel caution.
from the August 24, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Still, other charges have not stuck and some have been retracted. US intelligence sources claimed in Baghdad in February, for example, that the sophisticated manufacture of EFP parts led them to believe that they could only have been made in Iran and that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would almost certainly have been aware of it.
Shortly afterwards the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, said that he could not confirm that Iran's government "clearly knows or is complicit." US forces have also raided numerous EFP workshops inside Iraq and found such explosives ; they are often used in the oil industry.
Likewise, initial speculation by US officials pointed to "Iranian-trained operatives" in a January attack in Karbala, in which militants dressed as US soldiers and speaking English drove into a US base, kidnapped US troops, and killed five. Months later, the top US general in Iraq denied finding any tie to Iran.
Still, headlines linking Iran to the Karbala killings emerged again in early July, after a US general said that two captured operatives, a Lebanese Hizbullah member, and an Iraqi group leader, said that Iran's Qods Force "knew of and supported planning" for the attack. But in late July, Time magazine reported – based on an internal US Army investigation and interviews with US and Iraqi witnesses – that details "suggest" an inside job by the Iraqi police.
The result of this buildup of US allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq could also prove to be a prelude to war: "If you can make the case that Iranians are actually killing Americans, that makes it extremely difficult for those opponents of military action to depict the administration as warmongering," adds Parsi, also the head of the National Iranian American Council.
Iranian officials deny undermining US efforts in Iraq, though senior officers note that US forces throughout the Gulf and in Iraq and Afghanistan are often within Iranian missile range. Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi vowed this week that "America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future."
Some hard-liners in Iran, who today exert strong influence over every power center in the Islamic Republic, welcome the steady drumbeat from Washington as proof of US ill intent, says Hadi Semati, a political scientist in Tehran.
"I haven't seen this level before [of] a systematic [US] propaganda campaign, partly disinformation, partly probably true, but exaggerating it … to blame Iran for everything," says Mr. Semati, who recently spent three years at think tanks in Washington. "It reinforces the idea that people have in this town [Tehran] that any discussions on Iraq are purely tactical, and that the Americans are not serious."
The Iraq effort "is already a failure," says Semati. "Blaming Iran serves a purpose of partially, or even mostly, from the perspective of hard-liners in Washington, making the situation look better."
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