But it wouldn't make sense for Iran to get Americans killed whether they wanted the US out or tied down in Iraq. The Badr leader's appeal for us to keep US forces in Iraq weighs against the idea that they wanted us out, suggesting that Iran's goal would likely have been to traumatize the US (if Iran did in fact send EFPs). Yet we wouldn't logically stay tied down in Iraq to stop EFPs from being used against Americans if we claimed that Iran was sending them, particularly if we wanted to fight Iran anyway -- getting out of Iraq would solve the problem by itself.
Simply leaving would also free us worrying about being attacked by the proxy government we were building up if we attacked Iran, so it wasn't against Rumsfeld's or the military's long-term interests to allow Iran's proxies to control Iraq as long as they were preoccupied with fighting the Arab Sunnis and preventing the Kurds from breaking away with their oil.
Conservatives claimed that Iran was sending EFPs to the Mahdi Army until the US left. This includes the period in which the Badr Brigade clashed with the Mahdi Army (2007), Sadr called for two consecutive six-month ceasefires, and the Iranian-backed government fought heavily to thoroughly disarm the rogue, "Iran-backed" elements (2008). The Spring fighting in 2008 coincided with the highest use of EFP attacks. That article points out that the American deaths from EFPs total 196 during the occupation, despite their high lethality rate, while roughly 300 additional deaths were linked through still-classified evidence to other alleged Iranian weapons. What could Iran have hoped to achieve by continuing this for so long at its own risk?
Interestingly, the Maliki government had asked for Humvees for the Iraqi Army a year before, and started receiving them around this time. They had already received 400 MRAPs by 2007, which EFPs would be needed to defeat. The Humvees had Iraqi insignias, but EFPs were often triggered by passive infrared sensors turned on beforehand, when they were at a distance. Thus, Iranians would have been arming insurgents against their own powerful proxy, refusing to ask them to temporarily lay down their arms along with the more loyal followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.
There has always been unjustified secrecy surrounding the allegations:
"The officials said they would speak only on the condition of anonymity, so the explosives expert and the analyst, who would normally not speak to the news media, could provide information directly. The analyst's exact title and full name were not revealed to reporters. The officials released a PowerPoint presentation including photographs of the weaponry, but did not allow media representatives to record, photograph or videotape the briefing or the materials on display.
"The process of the briefing, delayed by more than two weeks, was unusual. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said in a recent meeting with reporters that the original media presentation had overstated the evidence against Iran and needed to be toned down."
Given all of this information, our military should prove the allegations from the Bush period before we believe them. They should release the videos of purported confessions by Iranian-trained militants that have been paraphrased in text, along with the identities of the confessors, so that they may be reviewed for authenticity. If that happens, we will know whether Iran trained anyone to plant IEDs. If we can't see the recordings, we have to presume that the texts are more falsified evidence from the neocons heading the military (recall the earlier linked article involving the claim about Mohammed Atta and his brother). While our troops were in Iraq, it is conceivable that the confessions contained information that we didn't want made public for security reasons. But given that we clearly want to start a war against Iran, and given that our conflict with Iraqi Shia has long ended, what excuse could justify not releasing the tapes?
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