1 Boring Old Man

Iran Top Threat To Iraq, U.S. Says
Focus on Al-Qaeda Now Diminishing

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 12, 2008

Last week’s violence in Basra and Baghdad has convinced the Bush administration that actions by Iran, and not al-Qaeda, are the primary threat inside Iraq, and has sparked a broad reassessment of policy in the region, according to senior U.S. officials. Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates yesterday called Tehran’s "malign" influence, the officials said.

The intensified focus on Iran coincides with diminished emphasis on al-Qaeda in Iraq as the leading justification for an ongoing U.S. military presence in Iraq. In congressional hearings this week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said the U.S. military has driven al-Qaeda from Baghdad, Anbar province and central Iraq, and he depicted the group as now largely concentrated in a reduced territory around the northern city of Mosul. During their Washington visit, Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker barely mentioned al-Qaeda in Iraq but spoke extensively of Iran.

With "al-Qaeda in retreat and disarray" in Iraq, said one official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, "we see other obstacles that were under the waterline more clearly… The Iranian-armed militias are now the biggest threat to internal order."

Well, at least we saw it coming – Bush’s Iran-baiting, Cheney’s apocolytptic-crackpot-ism, Petraeus and Crocker’s repeated talk about Iran. Who knows if it’s fact or one of their endless campaigns, or if it’s a mix, or where the boundary lies? It’s the problem of having a government that specializes in lying and deceit. One simply cannot evaluate anything they say. Likewise, it’s impossible to guage different sources within the government, because they are always coordinated. Like their counterparts in the Republican media consortium, they all say the same things at the same time. Right now, it’s coming from William Kristol, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, all the usual suspects. The truth aside, it’s always some outside force that’s causing the problem – Sunni Insurgents, Baathists, foreign jihadists, Iranians, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in some-other-place, Shiite Militias.