WASHINGTON — U.S. officials from President Bush to a top general in Baghdad said Wednesday that there was no solid evidence that high-ranking officials in Iran had ordered deadly weapons to be sent to Iraq for use against American troops, backing away from claims made by military and intelligence officials in Baghdad this week.
But Bush continued to maintain an aggressive posture toward Tehran, saying elite Iranian Quds Force operatives were supplying weapons to insurgents in Iraq.
"What we don't know is whether or not the head leaders of Iran ordered the Quds Force to do what they did," he said.
"What matters is that they're there," Bush said, adding, "What's worse: that the government knew or that the government didn't know?"
Bush then issued a threat that hinted at a direct clash with Iranian units.
"When we find the networks that are enabling these weapons to end up in Iraq," he said at a late-morning White House news conference, "we will deal with them."
The Quds Force is a special unit of the Revolutionary Guard, which is a force separate from Iran's military, created to safeguard and spread the 1979 revolution that established Shiite clerical rule in the country.
Critics have accused the Bush administration in recent days of overstating claims of official Iranian involvement in Iraq's violence.
On Sunday, U.S. officials in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity alleged that Iranian officials at the "highest levels" of the government, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were behind the smuggling of a deadly type of explosive device used against U.S. forces.
But during news conferences Wednesday in Washington and Baghdad, Bush and Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, appeared to step back from that claim, just as Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did in interviews this week.
Caldwell characterized the recent statements about Iranian weapons in Iraq as a diplomatic endeavor to persuade Iranians to stop the flow of such weapons.
"We want to tell [the Iranians], 'You need to stop,' " he said. " 'We need your assistance.' "
The controversy surrounding the claims revolves around the nature of wartime intelligence work, which often requires making conclusions based on classified information, confidential sources, circumstantial inferences and historical patterns rather than the type of evidence that could prove a court case.
