"They are trying to walk this back," said the official. "There are no smoking guns about Iran in Iraq."
WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - The George W. Bush administration’s campaign to seize and detain Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officials in Iraq, presented by Bush himself last January as a move to break up an alleged Iranian arms smuggling operation in Iraq, appears to have run its course without having been able to link a single Iranian to any such operation.
Despite administration rhetoric suggesting that the U.S. military had solid intelligence on which to base a campaign to break up Iranian-sponsored networks supplying armour-piercing weapons, what is now known about the kidnapping operations indicates that the actual purpose was to obtain some evidence from interrogations that would support the administration’s line that the IRGC’s elite Quds Force is involved in assisting Shiite forces militarily.
None of the six Iranians now held by the U.S. military, however, has provided any evidence for the administration’s case despite many months of very tough interrogation usually employed on "high value" detainees.
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The Jan. 10 raid was on an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil for 10 years with official Iraqi government approval. The U.S. military issued only a vaguely-worded rationale for kidnapping the five Iranians, saying they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces…"
That was a thinly-veiled allusion to their suspected membership in the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iraq’s Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, who demanded the release of the five Iranians, explained that they were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari pointed out that the men were working for the Revolutionary Guard Corps because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran’s borders.
[snip]
In December 2006, two accredited Iranian diplomats were kidnapped from the Embassy car on the way from praying at a mosque and later had to be released. But four other Iranian officials were kidnapped in the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Shiite political party called SCIRI, who had visited Bush three weeks earlier. They were in the home of the chairman of the Parliamentary security committee and head of the Badr organisation.
The official explanation was that they were being detained on "suspicion of carrying out or planning attacks against Iraqi security forces". But the Iraqi interlocutors are part of the Iraqi government which supports the occupation and opposes the Madhi army. If the Iranian officials detained were actually plotting with their hosts to attack Iraqi security forces, it would have meant that the SCIRI and the Badr Group were planning to attack their own government.
U.S. military officials claimed to the Washington Post that they had captured maps of Baghdad delineating Sunni Shiite and mixed neighbourhoods that would be useful for militias, lists of weapons systems and "information about importing modern, specially shaped explosive charges into Iran".
But Laura Rozen of the National Journal quoted a U.S. official as saying that the evidence was far less conclusive than was claimed. "They are trying to walk this back," said the official. "There are no smoking guns about Iran in Iraq."
None of the allegedly damning evidence was mentioned in the Feb. 11 military briefing to the U.S. media on the alleged Quds Force EFP smuggling, indicating that these claims were vastly exaggerated.
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.
POLITICS-US: Seizure of Iranians Failed to Validate Bush Line
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