WASHINGTON, Feb 12: Two Democratic lawmakers have accused the Bush administration of doctoring intelligence reports to support a belligerent policy against Iran.
The allegation by Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Ron Wyden of Oregon followed a US military intelligence report released on Sunday, blaming Iran for supply deadly weapons to anti-US militias in Iraq.
The report claimed that Iran is supplying deadly shoulder-fired missiles and armour-piercing bombs to Iraqi insurgents, along with TNT, triggering devices, rockets and other weapons.
“I am worried about that. That’s how we got into the mess in Iraq,” Senator Dodd said on CBS television news show.
Mr Wyden told CNN that “the administration is engaged in a drumbeat with Iran that is much like the drumbeat that they did with Iraq. We are going to insist on accountability.”
Senator Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat and members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told FOX News that he too had doubts about some points in this intelligence report.
“Explosives seem to be flowing into Iraq from Iran, but does it stem from a deliberate government policy or rogue elements with the Iranian government?” he asked.
But Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, dismissed such suggestions, saying that the United States is using military interdiction to block Iranian interference in Iraq. “I don’t think the American people ought to be concerned that some precipitous action is fixing to occur,” he said.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations Javad Zarif has rejected the US claim that Iraqi militias are using Iranian weapons for attacking American soldiers in Iraq.
He told a popular US radio show this weekend that Iran has “no interest” in providing weapons to any insurgent group in Iraq.
“The problem is that the United States has decided on a policy and is trying to find or fabricate evidence if it cannot find one – and I believe it hasn’t been able to find an evidence – in order to substantiate and corroborate that policy,” Mr Zarif said.
Commenting on the US report, BBC said on Monday that some analysts fear that “the US is softening up world opinion for an attack on Iran. Such an attack would be aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities”.
The BBC commentator also notes that this may also be “the old tactic of blaming someone else for your own problems”.
The report says that many people will not distinguish between the militias that Iran is said to supply and the insurgents who have been the cause of much of the violence.
“The allegedly Iranian supplied bombs are said to have caused the deaths of 170 American soldiers, but overall 2,497 soldiers have been killed in hostile incidents,” most of them at hands of insurgents, the report notes.
“The claim serves the purpose of helping to lay the blame for the whole insurgency at Iran’s door.”
The US military report – “Iranian Support for Lethal Activity in Iraq” – states that the US military found Iranian Misagh-1 portable anti-aircraft missiles after a failed attempt to shoot down a plane at Baghdad’s airport in 2004.