So far this story is only being reported in the Australian news media. Odd, given that it is a story of significant importance. Via TPM, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is explicitly refusing to back up the claims made yesterday in an anonymous military briefing linking the Iranian government with the Iraqi insurgency. Here's an excerpt:
The top American military officer, General Peter Pace, declined Monday to endorse the conclusions of U.S. military officers in Baghdad, who told reporters on Sunday that the Iranian government is providing high-powered roadside bombs to insurgents in Iraq. General Pace made his comments during a visit to Australia, and VOA's Al Pessin reports from Canberra.
General Pace said he was not aware of the Baghdad briefing, and that he could not, from his own knowledge, repeat the assertion made there that the elite Quds brigade of Iran's Republican Guard force is providing bomb-making kits to Iraqi Shiite insurgents."We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran. What I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se [specifically], knows about this," he said. "It is clear that Iranians are involved, and it's clear that materials from Iran are involved, but I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."
And while we're on the subject of that briefing... Yesterday I commented on the bizarre fact that the news media had allowed the briefing to take place off the record. Today I'd like to focus on its content.
But first, let's take a trip down memory lane. On October 30, 2006, the NY Times reported the following:
The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded.
The report was undertaken at the request of Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and who recently expressed an assessment far darker than the Bush administration’s on the situation in Iraq.Mr. Warner sent his request in May to a federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. He also asked the inspector general to examine whether Iraqi security forces were developing a logistics operation capable of sustaining the hundreds of thousands of troops and police officers the American military says it has trained.
The answers came Sunday from the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands.
Now let's take a look at the claims made in yesterday's anonymous briefing:
In a news briefing held under strict security, the officials spread out on two small tables an E.F.P. and an array of mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades with visible serial numbers that the officials said link the weapons directly to Iranian arms factories. The officials also asserted, without providing direct evidence, that Iranian leaders had authorized smuggling those weapons into Iraq for use against the Americans. The officials said such an assertion was an inference based on general intelligence assessments[...]The senior American military official did make it clear that declassifying the material took place only after weeks of analysis on what information could be useful to hostile forces — information that has mostly been kept out of the public eye since the E.F.P.s began turning up in Iraq. “We publicly have not acknowledged E.F.P.s for the past two years,” the senior military official said.
Laid out on the tables themselves were the tailfins of dozens of apparently used mortar shells, as well as intact mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades, cases for some of the weaponry, the E.F.P., and two identification cards the officials said were taken in the Erbil raid.
The shells had serial numbers in English in order to comply with international standards for arms, the officials said. One grenade, for instance, was marked with the serial number P.G.7-AT-1 followed by LOT:5-31-2006. The officials said that the serial numbers clearly identified the grenade as being of Iranian manufacture and the date showed that it had been made in 2006.
We can't keep track of the serial numbers on our own weapons, we we can definitely track the ones on other peoples weapons. Or something.
My point isn't that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. They're not. It's simply that given their past behavior, I'm not prepared to give these people the benefit of the doubt. And given that they won't even give the presentation on the record, well....
As for the coverage of the presentation itself, I have to say that 24 hours out, it is getting much, much better. The latest NYT article, from which the above was taken, comes complete with competing analysis calling much of the report into question. Once again, however, it was all done off the record.
Call me crazy, but if you're going to accuse a foreign government of an act of war, shouldn't you have to do it on the record? Because if for whatever reason you cannot, maybe you shouldn't be making the claim at all.
UPDATE: CNN is reporting on yet another new angle for this story. Those "Iranian" weapons shipments? They are going to one of the groups that this administration supports - SCIRI. In fact, Bush himself met with the head of SCIRI in the White House back in late 2006.
SCIRI is, for the record, one of the groups were counting on to help unify Iraq. For those who have been paying attention closely these past few years, neither their opposition to the US nor the support they receive from Iran should be anything new. It's new to the administration, of course, but...
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