The Bush administration has long claimed that Iran is supplying arms to militas and other insurgents in Iraq to use in their attacks on American and British troops. But like many other claims asserted by Bush adminsitration and Pentagon officials regarding Iran and Iraq, it seems there is just one small problem with this charge: it doesn’t appear to be true. From Today’s edition of the Washington Post:
British Find No Evidence Of Arms Traffic From Iran
Troops in Southeast Iraq Test U.S. Claim of Aid for MilitiasBy Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; Page A21ON THE IRAQ-IRAN BORDER — Since late August, British commandos in the deserts of far southeastern Iraq have been testing one of the most serious charges leveled by the United States against Iran: that Iran is secretly supplying weapons, parts, funding and training for attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq. […]
There’s just one thing.
“I suspect there’s nothing out there,” the commander, Lt. Col. David Labouchere, said last month, speaking at an overnight camp near the border. “And I intend to prove it.”
Other senior British military leaders spoke as explicitly in interviews over the previous two months. Britain, whose forces have had responsibility for security in southeastern Iraq since the war began, has found nothing to support the Americans’ contention that Iran is providing weapons and training in Iraq, several senior military officials said.
“I have not myself seen any evidence — and I don’t think any evidence exists — of government-supported or instigated” armed support on Iran’s part in Iraq, British Defense Secretary Des Browne said in an interview in Baghdad in late August.
Well, as we all know, Bush and Co. have never let the facts get in the way of shoddy, and even fabricated, intelligence that supports their agenda before, so I don’t suppose they are about to stop now. If they say Iran is arming militias who attack American troops, don’t expect the lack of evidence for that claim to deter them in the least from spreading the story they want told far and wide via our subservient and complicit news media.
After all, as Donald Rumsfeld so famously put it when discussing the missing Iraqi WMD “[T]he absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” Who can argue with such a brilliant intellect as that?