Don’t Bomb Iran

Bush ties Iran to deadly Iraq bombs

Mon Mar 13, 5:42 PM ET

US President George W. Bush, stepping up a war of words with Iran,
accused Tehran of contributing to ever-deadlier roadside bombs used
against US-led forces and civilians in Iraq.

“Tehran has been responsible for at least some of the increasing
lethality of anti-coalition attacks by providing Shia militia with the
capability to build improvised explosive devices in Iraq,” said the US
president.

Bush said that support for terrorism and international suspicions that
the Islamic republic seeks nuclear weapons were “increasingly
isolating” Tehran and promised “America will continue to rally the world
to confront these threats.”

Asked about the linkage to Shiite forces, two US officials who declined
to be named pointed to previously reported ties between the
government of Iran and radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Bush’s charge came as he launched a public relations campaign to
revive support for the war he launched three years ago, with polls
showing the US public sour on his handling of the conflict and seeking
a quick US withdrawal.

Some 2,300 US troops have been killed, thousands more wounded or
maimed, and the conflict has cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Even some of the most prominent conservative backers of the March
2003 invasion have questioned whether the United States can achieve
victory amid deepening fears that sectarian violence in Iraq will flare up
into civil war.

“I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road
ahead will be smooth. It will not,” he said. “We will see more images of
chaos and carnage in the days and months to come.”

At the same time, as he has in the past, Bush rejected calls to set a
timetable for bringing home the roughly 130,000 US troops in Iraq and
pleaded for patience from the skeptical US public.

“We will not lose our nerve,” said the president. “The battle lines in Iraq
are clearly drawn for the world to see, and there is no middle ground.
The enemy will emerge from Iraq one of two ways: Emboldened or
defeated.”

Bush also declared that the United States has a strategy for dealing
with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like roadside bombs, a
weapon of choice for the insurgents targeting US and Iraqi forces.

US military intelligence sources have said that increasingly powerful
IEDs, with greater armor-piercing power and sophisticated triggers,
have been traced to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or to Hezbollah, the
Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon.

Bush said that there was evidence that some components in the most
powerful IEDs came from Iran, and that coalition forces had “seized
IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran.”

Last week, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld directly accused
the Islamic government in Tehran for the first time of sending Iranian
Revolutionary Guard into Iraq to make trouble.

On Monday, at least 14 Iraqis were killed in attacks around the country,
including a journalist and a young girl, as police discovered 21
executed bodies, security sources said.

That came a day after six car bombs ripped through four market places
in Baghdad’s Shiite district of Sadr City, killing at least 46 people and
wounding over 200 in Iraq’s worst blood-letting so far this year.

Bush acknowledged the violence but pointed to Iraqi elections and
efforts to form a government as critical victories and saying that US
troops can only go home when fledgling Iraqi security forces can
replace them.

Although he has rejected “artificial timetables” for a US withdrawal,
Bush said Monday he wanted “the Iraqis (to) control more territory than
the coalition by the end of 2006.”