Iran denial on Iraqi weapons a big mistake

AP/Fox News:

Iran on Monday rejected U.S. accusations that the highest levels of Iranian leadership have armed Shiite militants in Iraq with armor-piercing roadside bombs, a day after U.S. military officials in Baghdad said they had traced the weapons to Tehran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a televised interview aired Monday that his country was opposed to conflict and bloodshed in Iraq and that problems in Iraq should be solved with dialogue, not the use of force.

"There should be a court to prove the case and to verify the case. The position of our government ... is also the same. We are opposed to any kind of conflict in Iraq,"

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Here the CIA is ready to give these guys a pass by suggesting that the weapons may have bee supplied by rogue elements and these guys make the mistake of denying the obvious rather than taking the CIA lifeline.

As Andrew McCarthy points out:

...

Sure. Khamenei has reaffirmed that "Death to America" is Iran's motto, Ahmadinejad says a world without America is achievable, we have 30 years of evidence of the Iranian regime acting on those assumptions, and we know the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Quds (Jerusalem) Force have long been the mullahs' arms for exporting their revolution. But when we catch the Iranians red-handed killing American troops in Iraq, the CIA figures it may not really be the regime but rogue elements....

It is easy to understand why the CIA reputation has slipped.