In an interview with Guardian, published in England, US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said: “The common link throughout all that in Lebanon, here, and elsewhere, in the region has been Iran and in particular the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force.”
Crocker added: “But we have established that Lebanese Hizbullah, via Iran, has been involved in for example training of Iraqi operatives.”
The top US diplomat in Iraq today waded into the US presidential race debate over American troop withdrawals, warning that recent security improvements in the country could be jeopardized by setting an arbitrary timetable for redeployment.
“Over the last year we and the Iraqis have achieved a great deal here and we have both paid a high price for it,” Ryan Crocker told the Guardian. “Certainly my view, sitting here in Baghdad, is that it would be extremely risky to gamble on those gains by moving away from a conditions-based redeployment.”
His remarks appeared to be an implicit criticism of promises on troop withdrawals made by the two candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination.
That contrasts with the Republican frontrunner John McCain, who today told CNN that an untimely US withdrawal would bring about “genocide”.
Responding a question about the scheduled trip of Ahmadinejad to Iraq, Crocker said: “I’ve always believed that a stable, secure democratic Iraq is what Iran would want in the long-term. Not a destabilized society, with chronic security problems, which is what Iran’s actual acts on the ground now seem to be aiming at.”