WASHINGTON - Top US Democrats have expressed skepticism about US government claims that Iran is secretly channeling weapons to militants in Iraq, arguing the issue is best resolved through negotiations rather than confrontation.
The comments followed a US press conference in Baghdad, during which senior defense officials insisted that Iranian-built bombs smuggled into Iraq had killed at least 170 US and allied soldiers since June 2004 and wounded 620 more.
A compact disc distributed at the press conference contained photographs of alleged Iranian weapons seized in Iraq -- a Misagh-1 ground-to-air missile, explosively formed projectiles, or EFPs, and mortar shells manufacturing, according to their markings, in late 2006.
But the disclosures came less than a week after Congress released a scathing report by acting Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble, in which he argued that former US undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith had manufactured "inappropriate" intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda to bolster the case for an invasion.
And several Democratic senators said Sunday these circumstances were fueling their suspicions about the Bush administration's real motives.
"I look at this with a degree of skepticism, based on the record that these intelligence operations have provided us in the past," said Christopher Dodd, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has expressed an interest in running for president in 2008.
Dodd told CBS television he had no doubt that Iran played a role in the current developments in Iraq, but believed the issue should be resolved through diplomatic initiatives.
"It seems to me until we engage them in some way on a multiple of issues, including this one, it's only going to get worse," the Connecticut senator noted.
Former Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry expressed a similar view, acknowledging that he had no doubt that there were "Iranian instigators, agents in Iraq."
But Kerry told ABC News that Iran needed to be diplomatically engaged rather than confronted because "every leader in the region and every observer, every expert here in our country, tells us that Iran does not want a complete and total implosion in Iraq."
The Massachusetts senator assured the administration's new "evidence of Iranian meddling will be met by "a skeptical Congress, and appropriately so, because of the last experience with Iraq."
WASHINGTON - Top US Democrats have expressed skepticism about US government claims that Iran is secretly channeling weapons to militants in Iraq, arguing the issue is best resolved through negotiations rather than confrontation.