on and off message

A top Iraqi official said Sunday there was no conclusive evidence that Shiite extremists have been directly supplied with some Iranian arms as alleged by the United States.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq does not want trouble with any country, "especially Iran."
Al-Dabbagh was commenting on talks this week in Tehran between an Iraqi delegation and Iranian authorities aimed at halting suspected Iranian aid to some Shiite militias.

Asked about reports that some rockets made in 2007 or 2008 and seized in raids against militias were directly supplied by Iran, al-Dabbagh replied: "There is no conclusive evidence."

Come on Ali, get with the programme:

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called reporters late Sunday night to clarify remarks he made at a news conference earlier in the day, when he appeared to say that there was no hard evidence that Iran was allowing weapons to come into Iraq. Dabbagh said his comments had been misinterpreted.

"There is an interference and evidence that they have interfered in Iraqi affairs," Dabbagh said in an interview arranged by a U.S. official. When asked how he would characterize the proof that Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq, he said: "It is a concrete evidence."

Via. I think the interesting thing here is the way in which the Iraqi government has become a kind of operational liaison between the US and Iran, since the Iranians brokered the last ceasefire between the Sadrists and the Green Zone Iraqis. So I tend to think that the current bout of message re-inforcement isn’t a precursor to war, but a bout of chest beating before negotiations, either direct or through the ISCI/Dawa axis. It’s also an acknowledgment that the information product known as the surge has become obsolete.

Of course, the mistake here would be to think of war as a discrete act meant to impose a defined end state, instead of escalation from mutual opposition into open ended violence and economic blockade – which itself may be part of a negotiating strategy.

The Iranian countermove here seems to be to shift back towards support of the Sadrists