Iraq - No Iran Involvement Says US General

In the past, the Bush White House has been able to count on the support of the Pentagon when it comes to scaremongering in pursuit of votes. However, it looks like those members of the military who are hanging their asses on the line for Bush's neocon misadventure in Iraq are having serious second thoughts:

"There is nothing that we definitively have found to say that there are any Iranians operating within the country of Iraq," Major General William Caldwell, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, told a news conference.

U.S. officials have previously said the war between Israel and Iran-backed Hizbollah might encourage Tehran to make mischief in Iraq to pressure the United States, which has some 130,000 troops in the country.

"Iran has got Hizbollah in Lebanon. Iran has got some forces here. There is the possibility they might encourage those forces to create increased instability here," U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters last week.

It looks like Central Command just joined the ranks of those Newt Gingrich wants described as "enemies" and "insurgents".

Mind you, if the military in Iraq are trying to play down anything that could further inflame the nascent Iraqi civil war, who could blame them?

I wonder if a wish to save their own asses from the consequences of unnecessary additional warmongering is what is behind this story?

The U.S. military said Monday that a natural-gas line explosion was to blame for a series of blasts that killed 47 people in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood the night before. But residents and the Iraqi government insisted the destruction was caused by car bombs and a rocket barrage from a neighborhood where American forces operate.

The military's insistence that a gas leak caused the carnage is pissing of the Iraqi government - and a Sunni group has already said it launched the attacks - but I can see where playing down anything that would create more resentment and violence might be a good gambit from the point of view of the 135,000 or so U.S. soldiers in Iraq right now.