GEORGE BUSH’S administration has stepped up its threats against Iran, accusing the Islamic regime of supplying sophisticated roadside bombs to Shia groups in Iraq which have killed US soldiers.
This accusation coincides with a ratcheting up of tensions with Tehran over its uranium enrichment programme – which the US claims is aimed at developing a nuclear bomb and which Iran says is solely for peaceful purposes.
Last September Bush ordered the deployment of a major naval strike group including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower to the Persian Gulf just off the western coast of Iran.
And in late December 2006 five Iranian diplomats were arrested by US troops in Iraq. The US claims they are Iranian intelligence officers who were ‘meddling’ in Iraq’s affairs. However, it transpired that the Iranians had been invited by Iraq’s PM Nouri Maliki.
The arrests contradict the conclusion of the Iraq Study Group, headed by former US secretary of state James Baker, that the Bush administration should enlist the help of Iran and Syria in stabilising the situation in Iraq.
The US ‘roadside bombs’ claim against Iran is, according to Patrick Cockburn “similar in tone and credibility to those made four years ago by the US government about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion of 2003.” (The Independent, 12/2/07)
And, it is questionable how ‘sophisticated’ these roadside bombs are. Most of the improvised explosive devices used to kill US and British soldiers are heavy artillery shells looted from arsenals of the former Saddam regime and triggered by very unsophisticated remote control devices or command wire.
And while the US authorities continue with their ‘foreign meddling’ propaganda, and whatever Iran’s role in Iraq’s factional power struggles is, Iraq continues to sink further into a morass of sectarian violence, criminality, poverty and despair. Most of this has occurred since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the subsequent occupation by thousands of coalition troops.
