General Clashes With Bush On Iraq

General clashes with Bush on Iraq

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle1381540.ece

2/15/2007

America’s top general appeared to contradict claims made by the White House and other US military commanders yesterday that Iran was arming Shia militants in Iraq. General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not know if Iranian-made material used to assemble roadside bombs in Iraq had been supplied on Tehran’s orders.

“That does not translate that the Iranian Government, for sure, is directly involved in doing this,” he said on a visit to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. “What it does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers.”

On Sunday US military officials in Baghdad said that al-Quds Force, an Iranian para-military organisation, was sending arms into Iraq. Weapons that they said were “coming from the highest level of the Iranian Government” included bombs that shot molten metal jets through the armour of American tanks, which had been responsible for killing 170 US troops and wounding more than 600. Last night a new Iraqi security crackdown was announced, which included closing the border with Iran.

General Pace’s public scepticism over the Iranian link is surprising given his record of intense loyalty to the Bush Administration, which has led him to be nicknamed in some circles “Perfect Peter”.

His comments followed remarks he made the previous day in Canberra, Australia, that: “I would not say that the Iranian Government clearly knows or is complicit.” Yesterday Tony Snow, President Bush’s press secretary, insisted that the Administration and General Pace were “not on separate pages”.

Mr Snow said that the apparent differences were because the general, who was airborne yesterday and could not be contacted, had been very precise in his use of language.

While the US did not have a “signed piece of paper” from the Iranian leadership authorising the weapons supply, al-Quds was “part of the Army and part of the Government”, he said.

But there has been widespread scepticism about the Administration’s claims among congressional Democrats and military experts. British officials, who had their fingers burnt over the dossiers detailing Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war, have also been urging caution about building another intelligence-led case.

Stephen Hadley, the President’s National Security Adviser, said this month that a presentation outlining the Iranian link had been postponed. There have been reports that it was intelligence chiefs, not the White House, who demanded that the briefing should be scrubbed of exaggerated claims.