Interference by Iran rising in Iraq War

Iran’s role in the Iraq War makes it unlikely that U.S. troop withdrawals will continue.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iranian support for militias in Iraq has grown, top U.S. defense leaders said Friday, asserting that recent battles in Basra gave the Iraqis an eye-opening view of Iran’s increased negative role there.

More broadly, the outlook for more progress toward stabilizing Iraq and reducing the U.S. troop presence is clouded by several other potential pitfalls in coming months, including the prospect of increased violence with the approach of provincial Iraqi elections this fall, Gen. David Petraeus said in an interview at the Pentagon with a group of reporters.

Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, also cited the return of refugees and the release of security detainees as potential sources of instability to be considered as he determines when, and at what pace, U.S. troop withdrawals should resume after July. He reiterated that though he hopes further withdrawals are possible, he will be careful not to reduce so quickly as to jeopardize the security gains of the past several months.

In separate remarks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. will be as aggressive as possible to counter the increase in Iranian support for militias, adding that the Iraqis “are in a position themselves to bring some pressures to bear on Iran.”

Speaking after a series of hearings on Capitol Hill mapping out progress in Iraq, Gates also acknowledged that future troop withdrawals will go more slowly than he had initially hoped last year.

“I think that the process has gone a little slower,” Gates told a Pentagon news conference Friday. He said that plans — endorsed by President Bush on Thursday — to halt troop withdrawals at least until mid-September would make it a “real challenge” to pull out five additional brigades by the end of the year.

Last year Gates said he was holding out hope that the U.S. presence in Iraq could drop to about 10 brigades — or roughly 100,000 troops — by the end of this year. On Thursday, he told senators he had abandoned that hope.

Iran’s role has been one of the complicating factors.

“I think that there is some sense of an increased level of supply of [Iranian] weapons and support to these groups,” said Gates, referring to what the military has termed “special groups” of Shiite militants. “But whether it’s a dramatic increase over recent weeks, I just don’t know.”

Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recent clashes between Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias in Basra highlighted the increase in Iranian support.

“I think the Iraqi government now has a clearer view of the malign impact of Iran’s activities inside Iraq,” said Gates. “I think they have had what I would call a growing understanding of that negative Iranian role. But I think what they encountered in Basra was a real eye-opener for them.”

In his interview, Petraeus would not discuss Iran on the record.

Late last year, military commanders suggested Iran may be slowing the flow of illegal weapons across the border into Iraq. And Tehran recently helped broker a truce between the Iraqi government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army is battling U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad.

On Friday, Gates and Mullen discounted that suspected decrease in weapons flow.

In related comments, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq, said Friday that the Bush administration wants to test whether Iran is really interested in talking to the United States about Iraq.

Crocker said that even though Iran has backed out of recent appointments to meet with him for such discussions, he’s ready and waiting for the meeting. He said the administration thinks it’s worthwhile to make the case to Iran that it should butt out of Iraq’s internal affairs.

Gates, meanwhile, said Friday that he doubts Muqtada al-Sadr would be subject to arrest by U.S. forces. Al-Sadr is believed to be in Iran while elements of his militia in the Sadr City section of the capital fight Iraqi government troops supported by the U.S. military.