WHITE HOUSE ADVISOR HINTS AT WAR WITH IRAN: WHERE ELSE BUT ON FOX NEWS

Whenever the Bush White House wants to sell a point to the American public they turn to their propaganda branch, FOX NEWS.

FOX NEWS has been chomping at the bit to go to war with IRAN and on Sunday Chris Wallace interviewed Stephen Hadley from the Bush White House on "Fox News Sunday."

Hadley lived up to continuing the drumbeat for war with IRAN and Chris Wallace was complicit in never stopping to question Hadley on where are all the troops going to come from to fight a war with IRAN when we don't have enough troops for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Editorial comment: The Bush White House and FOX NEWS will not be happy until we are at war with IRAN.

Stephen Hadley: Iran a threat in Iraq
Hadley Says US Still Has 'More Work to Do' in Iraq in Stemming Iran

HOPE YENAP News
Apr 13, 2008 18:46 EST
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=126669

With al-Qaida's influence diminishing in Iraq, U.S. troops have much work to do in stemming Iranian support for militias, President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday.

"Iran is very active in the southern part of Iraq. They are training Iraqis in Iran who come into Iraq and attack our forces, Iraqi forces, Iraqi civilians. There are movements of equipment.

There's movements of funds," Stephen Hadley said. "So we have illegal militia in the southern part of the country that really are acting as criminal elements that are pressing the people down there."

"Al-Qaida, they're on the defensive," he added, citing the illegal militias as an emerging threat. The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, "decided it was time to take control of the situation down there. ... He's had some success. He's taken control of the port (in Basra). But there's more work to do."

Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. will be as aggressive as possible to counter the increase in Iranian support for militias. He said the Iraqis "are in a position themselves to bring some pressures to bear on Iran."

"I think that one of the interesting developments of Prime Minister Maliki's offensive in Basra is that it has revealed to the Shia, particularly, in the Iraqi government, the level of Iranian malign influence in the south and on their economic heartline through Basra," Gates said in an interview aired Sunday.

"And so I think what has happened is that the hand of Iran has been exposed, in a way that perhaps it had not been before, to some of the Iraqi government," he said.

Gates also has acknowledged that future troop withdrawals will go more slowly than he had initially hoped last year. He told a Senate panel he expects Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in the war, to be able to make an assessment of further drawdowns by mid-September.

In the broadcast interview, Gates played down concerns that an extended U.S. presence in Iraq might lead to a confrontation with Iran.

"I think the chances of us stumbling into a confrontation with Iran are very low," he said. "We are concerned about their activities in the south. We are concerned about the weapons that they continue to send in to Iraq. But I think that the process that's under way is, as I said, headed in the right direction."

Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was struck during last week's hearings by the repeated references to Iran.

"Iran kept being mentioned. The fact that the Iranians are intruding," he said. "It was almost as if we were justifying our continued presence in Iraq with the fact that we may be in a conflict with Iran, and furthermore, the al-Qaida, wherever they may be. It's a very confusing picture to say the least."

"Because, essentially, we did not get into the overall status of our armed forces, our economy, and our ability to pay for this, quite apart from exactly who enemy is, what the priorities are, in terms of our expenditure of forces and money," Lugar said.

Hadley spoke on "Fox News Sunday," Lugar appeared on CNN's "Late Edition," while Gates and Pelosi taped interviews Friday that were broadcast Sunday on "Face the Nation" on CBS.
Source: AP News