WASHINGTON - Security analysts and critics of the Bush administration are questioning the quality of intelligence presented by three unidentified US officials in Baghdad on Sunday to demonstrate the Iranian government's ties to sophisticated explosives that have killed 170 US soldiers in Iraq.
Some skeptics also say that US officials in Iraq and their British counterparts have known for more than two years that armor-piercing explosives were being smuggled from Iran, but had never displayed them to the media until Sunday, prompting critics to ask why the administration is choosing this moment to highlight the alleged misdeeds of the Iranian regime.
Daniel Serwer, a specialist at the US Institute for Peace, a Washington-based think tank, said he was not convinced that the Iranian government had decided "at the highest levels" to provide weapons to target US troops, as the three US officials told reporters.
"The question is not so much about whether there are Iranian weapons inside Iraq," said Serwer, who served as executive director of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission on Iraq. "Sure there are. The question is whether there is a conscious policy by the Iranian government or some part of the Iranian government to support lethal attacks against Americans. I haven't seen any proof of that yet."
General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also downplayed accusations against the Iranian government. He told reporters yesterday in Indonesia that although material from Iran had been used in the bombs, "That does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this."
US officials in Iraq have talked in classified briefings about Iranian-imported bombs capable of piercing a Humvee since the fall of 2005. In one briefing, a senior army officer described capturing Iranian smugglers who were part of a network that brought the explosives to the Mahdi Army, an extremist Shi'ite militia, through two Iran-Iraq border crossings. At the time, military officers discussed such weapons smuggling without any claims that Iranian officials were behind it.
But in Sunday's briefing for reporters in Iraq, the US officials asserted that the deadly "explosively formed penetrators" were brought into Iraq by the Quds Force , an elite arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that is believed to be under the control of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. One of the officials said the involvement of the Quds Force showed complicity "at the highest levels" of the Iranian government in the provision of weapons that had killed US soldiers.
The officials also displayed rocket-propelled grenades and mortars with markings that, they said, showed they had been made in Iran.
A Washington-based US official who closely follows the Middle East said yesterday that the briefing grew out of a larger US decision to neutralize the operatives of the Quds Force in Iraq. He asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
In December and January, US officials arrested Iranian officials accused of being Quds Force members in raids in Baghdad and the northern city of Erbil. But little documentary evidence collected in those arrests -- save for two Iranian identification cards -- was shown to reporters on Sunday.
US officials have been debating for months what kind of information to release about Iran's role in Iraq. Weeks ago, after the Iranian government challenged the United States to prove its accusations of weapons smuggling, US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad promised reporters that a presentation would be made.
Earlier versions of the presentation were rejected by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior officials as inadequate. Two officials who made Sunday's presentation -- a ballistics specialist and an intelligence analyst -- were not named because of "security concerns," State Department officials said. A third official also declined to be identified.
Lou Fintor , a spokesman for the US Embassy in Baghdad, said in a telephone interview that officials decided to make the presentation because of an increase in attacks by the types of bombs that Iran is believed to be supplying.
But the US military in Baghdad and the Department of Defense in Washington refused to provide statistics to back up that assertion. A spokesman for the British foreign office in London said Britain shares the US concern about Iran arming dangerous militias, but that he could not confirm any increase in attacks by Iranian-made weapons.
A senior Democratic senator compared the US allegations to the charges against Iraq's former President Saddam Hussein in the months before the US invasion in March 2003.
"I am deeply troubled by this administration's escalating rhetoric against Iran, especially intelligence from unnamed officials that is not fully documented," Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement. "It is frighteningly reminiscent of the pattern we saw in the drumbeat that led to the war with Iraq."
US officials insist they have no plan to attack Iran, but Washington has stepped up its pressure on Iran in recent months, asserting that Tehran is trying to build a nuclear weapon and funding extremist militias in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
Hillary Mann Leverett , who dealt with Iran as a member of the National Security Council staff during President Bush's first term, said Iranian weapons could be smuggled in by Iraqis who wanted to arm themselves for protection during a civil war. She said she believes the effort to link the Iranian government itself to US deaths in Iraq is part of a larger strategy to lay a legal justification for targeted strikes inside Iran.
She noted that Bush's speech announcing his decision to increase US troops in Baghdad asserted that Iran was "providing material support" for fighters who were killing US troops.
"By international law, that means you literally have a cause under the UN charter to justify an attack," said Mann, who now runs Stratega, a consulting firm that performs risk analyses for companies on the Middle East. Mann said the Bush administration might be planning to launch targeted strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and that weakening the Quds Force in Iraq would be a way to weaken Iran's ability to retaliate for such an attack. The Quds Force is in a unique position to retaliate against US troops in Iraq because it has deep ties with Shi'ite politicians and has trained and armed Shi'ite militias since Hussein's regime.
Another reason that analysts are skeptical about the new US emphasis on Iran as a key enemy of US troops in Iraq is that the vast majority of US casualties have taken place in areas controlled by the Sunni insurgency, not by the Shi'ite militias who are closely linked to Iran.
According to data compiled by the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (icasualties.org), a nonprofit group that tracks US deaths, a staggering 60 percent or more of US deaths have occurred in areas where Sunni insurgents are active. Those insurgents are believed to receive much of their funding and weapons from private donors in Sunni Arab countries, including Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, not Iran. Only 4 percent of US casualties have taken place in Shi'ite controlled areas in the provinces, while about a quarter of total US fatalities have taken place in Baghdad, where both Shi'ites and Sunnis fighters operate.
That data goes against the assertion on Sunday by a US official that "Iran is a significant contributor to attacks on coalition forces."
"It seems to be a relatively small segment of anti-US activity," said Kenneth Katzman , a Middle East analyst with the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. "Even if this activity were to completely stop, that would not materially affect the threat to US troops."
© Copyright 2007 The Boston Globe
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