Papers Back Bush Claims of Iran Role in Iraq War

The largest unauthorized disclosure of classified government documents in U.S. history confirms a long-standing assertion of President George W. Bush at the start of the 2007 troop surge: Iran was orchestrating one side of the Iraqi insurgency.


Field reports made public by the website WikiLeaks on Friday show that U.S. military intelligence agencies had many strands of evidence revealing that Iran provided paramilitary training to Shiite Muslim insurgents at the height of the civil war in Iraq.

"This confirms the degree of operational involvement the Iranian Revolutionary Guard used in anti-U.S. operations in Iraq," said Kenneth Katzman, a Gulf affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "It confirms the degree to which Iran was involved in operations that directly targeted U.S. forces."

In September 2007, Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, proposed a resolution condemning the Iranian role in subversion in Iraq. The amendment called for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to be officially designated a foreign terrorist group, something Mr. Bush did in 2008.


Barack Obama, as a Democratic senator from Illinois, opposed the resolution at the time but also used the vote in support of the measure by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York, to attack her anti-war credentials during public debate in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.

In a letter to Iowa voters from October 2007, Mr. Obama said the resolution was dangerous because "George Bush and Dick Cheney could use this language to justify keeping our troops in Iraq as long as they can point to a threat from Iran. And because they could use this language to justify an attack on Iran as a part of the ongoing war in Iraq."

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