Pentagon, State Department Debunk Bush Fabrications on Iran

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Pentagon, State Department Debunk Bush Fabrications on Iran
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2007-09-19 11:15. Evidence | Iran

By Gareth Porter, IPS News

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's 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.

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