(NYtimes)
The Bush administration will announce a long-debated policy of new sanctions against Iran on Thursday, accusing the elite Quds division of the Revolutionary Guard Corps of supporting terrorism, administration officials said Wednesday night.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The administration also plans to accuse the entire Revolutionary Guard Corps of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the officials said.
Of course this is purely a diplomatic move...
The announcement also intensifies the strained relations between the two countries. The administration has accused Revolutionary Guard members of providing weaponry and explosive devices used by Shiite militias against American troops in Iraq — a charge that Tehran has denied.
Interesting that GW Bush has changed the wording of the Kyle-lieberman bill to be a little less inflamatory
In August, White House officials said they intended to declare the entire Revolutionary Guard a foreign terrorist organization, but reports of such a move so raised the hackles of America’s European allies and some officials of the State and Treasury Departments that the administration put those plans on hold while the internal debate continued. The announcement planned for Thursday reflects a compromise.
Kyle Lieberman ammendment :
- that the United States should designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists, as established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and initiated under Executive Order 13224
This is sounding more and more like our buildup to war with Iraq. As AfterDowning street lays out, there is no concrete evidence to support that Iran is smuggling weapons into Iraq. Even US intelligence has not endorsed the claim that Iran is responsible for the increase of violence in Iraq by the Shi'ites. The main argument, that only Iran has the capability to manufacture EFPs strong enough to penetrate the US army has been proven untrue. The link is below but here are some excerpts.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/...
The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.
• At the same briefing, officials displayed one EFP and some fragments but did not claim that there was any forensic evidence linking that or any other AFP to Iran. (New York Times, February 12, 2007; Washington Post, February 12, 2007)
Although an officials at the briefing said shipment of EFPs had been intercepted at the border in 2005 (Washington Post, February 12, 2007), the only press report about such a border interceptions and there was no indication that such interceptions had produced any evidence of Iranian involvement. On the contrary, it quoted "coalition officials" as saying there was "no evidence to suggest that the government in Tehran is facilitating the smuggling of shape charges into Iraq." Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita and Brig Gen. Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the Joint Staff, continued to deny any knowledge of official Iranian complicity in EFP or any other arm supplies (Trevor Royle, The Sunday Herald, October 9, 2005).
Despite Petraeus’s assertion in September that the United States obtained "hard evidence" incriminating Iran from computer hard drives seized when the above detainees were captured March 22 of Iranian (Al Pessin, Petraeus Says Iran Wants Iraqi ‘Hezbollah Force’, VOA September 12, 2007.), none of the documentation has been made public, nor have any specifics have been provided on what the files show.