Defense Chief Again Says U.S. Will Not Wage War With Iran
WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that the United States had no intention of attacking Iran and that any American military efforts against it would be confined to Iraq to disrupt the smuggling of bomb-making materials over the border.
“For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. “We are not planning a war with Iran.”
Even if the Bush administration were able to establish that Iran’s top leaders knew and authorized the smuggling, Mr. Gates said, there would probably be no change in the Bush administration’s strategy of limiting its military response to actions within Iraq.
Questions about the administration’s intentions toward Iran have re-emerged in recent days after senior officials, beginning last weekend, laid out what they said was evidence that bomb-making materials from Iran were being supplied to Shiite militants in Iraq.
Mr. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeated Thursday that weapons used against American troops were coming from Iran and that personnel from the Quds Force, a paramilitary arm of the country’s Revolutionary Guards, were involved.
But both officials said, as President Bush did at a White House news conference on Wednesday, that they lacked evidence that Iran’s top leaders were involved in the weapons smuggling.
“Whether or not more senior political leaders in Iran know, we don’t know,” Mr. Gates told reporters in the Pentagon. “Frankly, for me, either way it’s a worry.”
General Pace ignited some controversy earlier this week while visiting Indonesia, when he told reporters that American forces had confirmed that some bomb materials found inside Iraq were made in Iran, but “that does not translate that the Iranian government, per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this.”
Those remarks conflicted with comments by a senior Defense Department analyst who said, at a briefing in Baghdad over the weekend, that the effort was being directed “from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”
Asked about the discrepancy, General Pace said Thursday that the analyst in Baghdad “didn’t make a clear enough break between fact and assessment” when he said there was high-level Iranian involvement, “or those listening didn’t hear the break between fact and assessment.”
Mr. Gates said he was sensitive to the public skepticism about American intelligence claims as a result of faulty prewar intelligence about Iraq. He said he insisted that the statements about Iranian weapons smuggling “make it exactly clear what we know and what we don’t know.”
In an interview on Thursday, the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said the United States could not invade Iran without specific Congressional authority.
“The president has said that he supports a diplomatic solution of the situation in Iran,” Ms. Pelosi said, speaking to six reporters in her office. “I would take him at his word. I do believe that Congress should assert itself, though, and make it very clear that there is no previous authority for any president to go into Iran.”
Defense Chief Again Says U.S. Will Not Wage War With Iran - New York Times
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