Gates: Iran boosts support for militias

Source: AP

WASHINGTON - 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. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. will be as aggressive as possible to counter that increase, adding that the Iraqis "are in a position themselves to bring some pressures to bear on Iran."

Speaking after he and his commanders spent three days 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 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


Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080411/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_iraq_107

Atimes:

"By all accounts, Iran played a decisive role in hammering out the peace deal among the Shi'ite factions in Iraq. A bloody week of human killing on the Tigris River ended on Sunday. Details are sketchy, however, since they must come from non-Iranian sources. Tehran keeps silent about its role.

The deal was brokered after negotiations in the holy city of Qom in Iran involving the two Shi'ite factions - the Da'wa Party and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) - which have been locked in conflict with Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in southern Iraq. It appears that one of the most shadowy figures of the Iranian security establishment, General Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) personally mediated in the intra-Iraqi Shi'ite negotiations. Suleimani is in charge of the IRGC's operations abroad."

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JD03Ak02.html

Sounds like they're really spoiling for a fight, huh?

We're certainly not.