Debunking The Neocons' Iran War Measure

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/audits/63740

Debunking the Neocons' Iran War Measure
By Gareth Porter, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted September 27, 2007.

The Lieberman-Kyl Amendment is aluminum tubes all over again.

The Lieberman-Kyle amendment has just passed the Senate overwhelmingly after two sections were removed to satisfy Democrats that it will not serve as a backdoor authorization for war against Iran, using U.S. forces operating in Iran. Even after that compromise, it remains a poison chalice, because it endorses a set of "findings" that are fundamentally false and which are being used by the administration to lay the groundwork for a more aggressive policy toward Iran.

The amendment is based on the Bush administration's proxy war narrative which has been filling the news media for the past nine months. It cites General Petraeus's classic statement of the proxy war argument of September 12: "(I)t is increasingly apparent…that Iran through the use of the Iranian Republican (sic) Guard Corps Quds Force, seeks to turn the Sh'ia militia extremists into a Hezbollah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq."

It is not unreasonable to view the proxy war narrative as the equivalent for Iran of the infamous White House Iraq Group's carefully contrived -- and stunningly successful -- fall campaign in 2002 to prepare public opinion to support an invasion of Iraq.

The following six points summarize some -- but certainly not all -- of the evidence contradicting the line on which the poisonous Liberman-Kyl amendment is based.

1. The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.

• At the February 11, 2007 briefing, officials displayed one EFP and some fragments but did not claim that there was any forensic evidence linking that or any other AFP to Iran.
  
  
• One of the briefers admitted that it was only Iraqi smugglers who brought weapons into Iraq, explaining why no direct Iranian involvement could be documented.
  
  
• The official briefer who was a specialist on explosives, Maj. Marty Weber, claimed in a later interview that the use of "passive infrared sensors" in the deployment of EFPs in Iraq was "one of the strongest markers of Iranian involvement" in the traffic. But he admitted in the same interview that the electronic components needed to make the sensors found in Iraq were "easily available off the shelf at places like RadioShack."
  
  
• Another official who participated in the briefing, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, denied that the military was claiming that Iran was behind the traffic in arms to Iraq. He said in a follow-up press briefing on February 14, "What we are saying is that within Iran, that these EFP component parts are being manufactured. Within Iran weapons and munitions are being manufactured that are ending up in Iraq. And we are asking the Iranian government to assist in stopping that from happening. There's no intent to do anything other than that."

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3. The main argument made in the February 11, 2007 briefing for an Iranian official role in providing EFPs to Shiite militias -- the allegation that only Iran had the capability to manufacture EFPs or components for EFPs that can penetrate U.S. armor -- was quickly proven to be untrue.

• As early as mid-2005, U.S. military intelligence officials had already concluding that they believe the technology for making such armor-penetrating bombs was "spreading among a variety of insurgent groups," obviously including Sunni insurgents with no ties to Iran or Hezbollah. At least one insurgent cell in Baghdad was already "attempting to make the charges locally."
  
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• Senior military officials in Baghdad told a reporter days after the February 11 briefing that U.S. forces had been finding an "increasing number of advanced roadside bombs being not just assembled but manufactured in machine shops." One official was quoted as saying that the impact of those Iraqi-machined EFPs on armored vehicles "isn't as clean but they are almost as effective" as the EFPs being imported.

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1. K&R

Thanks for posting, Hissy.

Wat