10 May 2008
In
a sharp reversal of its longstanding accusations against Iran arming
militants in Iraq , the US military has made an unprecedented albeit
quiet confession: the weapons they had recently found in Iraq were not
made in Iran at all.
According to a report
by the LA Times correspondent Tina Susman in Baghdad: “A
plan to show some alleged Iranian-supplied explosives to journalists
last week in Karbala and then destroy them was canceled after the
United States realized none of them was from Iran. A U.S. military
spokesman attributed the confusion to a misunderstanding that emerged
after an Iraqi Army general in Karbala erroneously reported the items
were of Iranian origin. When U.S. explosives experts went to
investigate, they discovered they were not Iranian after all.”
The
US , which until two weeks ago had never provided any proof for its
allegations, finally handed over its “evidence” of the Iranian origin
of these weapons to the Iraqi government. Last week, an Iraqi
delegation to Iran presented the US “evidence” to Iranian officials.
According to Al-Abadi, a parliament member from the ruling United Iraqi
Alliance who was on the delegation, the Iranian officials totally
refuted “training,
financing and arming” militant groups in Iraq . Consequently the Iraqi
government announced that there is no hard evidence against Iran.
In
another extraordinary event this week, the US spokesman in Iraq, Maj.
Gen. Kevin Bergner, for the first time did not blame Iran for the
violence in Iraq and in fact did not make any reference to Iran at all
in his introductory remarks
to the world media on Wednesday when he described the large arsenal
of weapons found by Iraqi forces in Karbala.
In contrast, the Pentagon in August 2007 admitted
that
it had lost track of a third of the weapons distributed to the Iraqi
security forces in 2004/2005. The 190,000 assault rifles and pistols
roam free in Iraqi streets today.
In the past year, the US
leaders have been relentless in propagating their charges of Iranian
meddling and fomenting violence in Iraq and since the release of the
key judgments of the US National Intelligence Estimate in December that
Iran does not have a nuclear weaponisation programme, these accusations
have sharply intensified.
The US charges of Iranian interference in Iraq too have
now collapsed. Any threat of military strike against Iran is in
violation of the UN charter and the IAEA's continued supervision on
Iran's uranium enrichment facilities means there is no
justification
for sanctions.
CASMII calls on the US to change course and enter into
comprehensive and unconditional negotiations with Iran.
For more information or to contact CASMII please visit http://www.campaigniran.org
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