The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The George W Bush administration's plan to create a new
crescendo of accusations against Iran for allegedly smuggling arms
to Shi'ite militias in Iraq has encountered not just one but two
setbacks.
The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to endorse
US charges of Iranian involvement in arms smuggling to Shi'ite
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and a plan to show off a huge
collection of Iranian arms captured in and around the central city
of Karbala had to be called off after it was discovered that none of
the arms was of Iranian origin.
The news media's failure to report that the arms captured
fromShi'ite militiamen in Karbala did not include a single Iranian
weapon shielded the US military from a big blow to its anti-Iran
strategy.
The Bush administration and top Iraq commander General David
Petraeus had plotted a sequence of events that would build domestic
US political support for a possible strike against Iran over its
"meddling" in Iraq, and especially its alleged export of arms to
Shi'ite militias.
The plan was keyed to a briefing document to be prepared by Petraeus
on the alleged Iranian role in arming and training Shi'ite militias
that would be revealed to the public after the Maliki government had
endorsed it, and that would be used to accuse Iran publicly.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told
reporters on April 25 that Petraeus was preparing a briefing to be
given "in the next couple of weeks" that would provide detailed
evidence of "just how far Iran is reaching into Iraq to foment
instability". The centerpiece of the Petraeus document, completed in
late April, was the claim that arms captured in the southern city of
Basra bore 2008 manufacture dates on them.
US officials also planned to display to reporters Iranian weapons
captured in both Basra and Karbala. That sequence of media events
would fill the airwaves for several days with spectacular news
framing Iran as the culprit in Iraq, aimed at breaking down US
congressional and public resistance to the idea that Iranian bases
supporting the meddling would have to be attacked.
But events in Iraq did not follow the script. On May 4, after an
Iraqi delegation had returned from meetings in Iran, Maliki's
spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said in a news conference that Maliki was
forming his own cabinet committee to investigate the US claims. "We
want to find tangible information and not information based on
speculation," he said.
Another adviser to Maliki, Haider Abadi, told the Los Angeles Times'
Alexandra Zavis that Iranian officials had given the delegation
evidence disproving the charges. "For us to be impartial, we have to
investigate," Abadi said.
Dabbagh made it clear the government considered the US evidence of
Iranian government arms smuggling to be insufficient. "The proof we
want is weapons which are shown to have been made in Iran," Dabbagh
said in a separate interview with Reuters. "We want to trace back
how they reached [Iraq], who is using them, where are they getting
it."
Senior US military officials were clearly furious with Maliki for
backtracking on the issue. "We were blindsided by this," one of them
told Zavis.
Then the Bush administration's plot encountered another serious
problem.
The Iraqi commander in Karbala had announced on May 3 that he had
captured a large quantity of Iranian arms in and around the city.
Earlier, the US military had said that it was up to the Iraqi
government to display captured Iranian weapons, and now an Iraqi
commander was eager to do just that. Petraeus' staff alerted US
media to a major news event in which the captured Iranian arms in
Karbala would be displayed and then destroyed.
But when US munitions experts went to Karbala to see the alleged
cache of Iranian weapons, they found nothing they could credibly
link to Iran.
The US command had to inform reporters that the event had been
canceled, explaining that it had all been a "misunderstanding". In
his press briefing on May 7, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner gave
some details of the captured weapons in Karbala but refrained from
charging any Iranian role.
The cancelation of the planned display was a significant story, in
light of the well-known intention of the US command to convict Iran
on the arms smuggling charge. Nevertheless, it went unreported in
the world's news media.
A report on the Los Angeles Times' blog "Babylon and Beyond" by
Baghdad correspondent Tina Susman was the only small crack in the
media blackout. The story was not carried in the Times itself.
The real significance of the captured weapons collected in Karbala
was not the obvious US political embarrassment over an Iraqi claim
of captured Iranian arms that turned out to be false. It was the
deeper implication of the arms that were captured.
Karbala is one of Iraq's eight largest cities, and it has long been
the focus of major fighting between the Mahdi Army and its Shi'ite
foes. Muqtada declared his ceasefire last August after a major
battle there, but fighting resumed there and in Basra when the
government launched a major operation in March. Thousands of Mahdi
Army fighters have fought in Karbala over the past year.
The official list of weapons captured in Karbala includes nine
mortars, four anti-aircraft missiles, 45 rocket propelled grenade
(RPG) weapons, 800 RPG missiles and 570 roadside explosive devices.
The failure to find a single item of Iranian origin among these
heavier weapons, despite the deeply entrenched Mahdi Army presence
over many months, suggests that the dependence of the Mahdi Army on
arms manufactured in Iran is actually quite insignificant.
The Karbala weapons cache also raises new questions about the
official US narrative about the Shi'ite militia's use of explosively
formed penetrators (EFPs) as an Iranian phenomenon. Among the
captured weapons mentioned by Major General Raied Shaker Jawdat,
commander of the Karbala police, were what he called "150 anti-tank
bombs", as distinguished from ordinary roadside explosive devices.
An "anti-tank bomb" is a device that is capable of penetrating
armor, which has been introduced to the US public as the EFP. The US
claim that Iran was behind their growing use in Iraq was the
centerpiece of the Bush administration's case for an Iranian "proxy
war" against the US in early 2007.
Soon after that, however, senior US military officials conceded that
EFPs were in fact being manufactured in Iraq itself, although they
insisted that EFPs alleged exported by Iran were superior to the
home-made version.
The large cache of EFPs in Karbala which are admitted to be
non-Iranian in origin underlines the reality that the Mahdi Army
procures its EFPs from a variety of sources.
But for the media blackout of the story, the large EFP discovery in
Karbala would have further undermined the credibility of the US
military's line on Iran's export of the EFPs to Iraqi fighters.
Apparently understanding the potential political difficulties that
the Karbala EFP find could present, Bergner omitted any reference to
them in his otherwise accurate accounting of the Karbala weapons.
Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst.
The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in
2006.
(Inter Press Service)
