WASHINGTON: In promising to stop Iran from meddling in Iraq, President George W. Bush returned to a strategy of confrontation in dealing with Tehran, casting aside what had been a limited flirtation with a more diplomatic approach toward it.
Bush accused Iran of providing material support for attacks on American troops and vowed to respond. "We will disrupt the attacks on our forces," he said in his speech Wednesday. "We will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
Bush said that the United States would send another aircraft carrier and its supporting ships to the Gulf. Administration officials said that the battle group would be stationed within quick sailing distance of Iran, a response to the growing concern that Iran is building up its own missile capacity and naval power, with the goal of military dominance in the Gulf.
Bush also announced the deployment of Patriot missiles to protect America's Gulf allies. A battery of such missiles is already in Qatar, having been moved there several months ago. The more combative talk reflects increased frustration in the administration with Iran, which American officials blame in part for the rising death toll in Iraq.
Military officials in Baghdad say that they have documented a gradual rise in the number of sophisticated roadside bombs using so-called shaped charges, a type of weapon that commanders believe is imported from Iran. According to military statistics, 78 coalition troops were killed and 243 were wounded by these bombs between September and December of last year, compared with 53 troops in the previous nine months.
American officials have provided members of Congress with information to support the contention that Iran is helping to orchestrate attacks on Americans in Iraq, but the administration has not made that information public.
The American officials say that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Quds force trains inside Iran and then dispatches operatives into Iraq, using contacts with Iraqi Shiite militias to attack American troops. "They're training to kill coalition forces," said one senior American counterterrorism official, requesting anonymity. "Their comments about wanting to see a stable Iraq are belied by this type of activity."
One American official who recently returned from a trip to Baghdad said that American commanders in Iraq believed Iran was using its vast political influence to press Shiite politicians not to forge any long-term agreements with Sunnis.
"We caught them with their finger in the cookie jar last month," a senior administration official said, referring to the arrest of five Iranians in Iraq who the Americans accused of running guns and planning sectarian attacks. The Iranians were eventually released by the Iraqi authorities.
American officials maintain that the latest moves should not be seen as preparations for a military strike against Iran. But they also said that Bush's top deputies, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, had decided that, barring some major conciliatory move from Tehran, American moves to engage Iran had run their course.
The United States has grown frustrated with what one administration official described as the "molasseslike" pace of diplomatic efforts at the United Nations to impose broad sanctions on Iran related to its nuclear program.
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