Next Week: Iran Mischief Briefing, Part Deux

According to the Defense Dept., the U.S. has new evidence of Iranian munitions being used by Iraqi militias against U.S. soldiers and Green Zone targets. Defense Secretary Gates said, for the first time, that he thinks it's not just weaponry that happens to make its way into Iraq, but a concerted policy by the Iranian government to inflict harm on U.S. personnel. And, reports Yochi Dreazen in The Wall Street Journal, next week, the U.S. will present a briefing on the new evidence from Baghdad:

"You can see the manufacturing dates right on the armaments themselves," one senior commander in Baghdad said. "These are very clearly weapons that were made in the last month or so."

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top American military spokesman in Baghdad, said U.S. officials were "working on a briefing that we hope to be able to deliver in the next week or so." He said he would not be "disclosing the substance of the brief."

Things to watch: the solidness of the evidence, of course -- not so much on whether the munitions are Iranian, but whether there's evidence, as opposed to inference, that the Iranian government meant for the weapons to attack the U.S. Also, now the commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, is about to ascend to regional commander. As Dreazen points out, Petraeus has been rather critical of Iran. Last year, the U.S. presented a similar briefing about Iranian culpability for U.S. casualties, but there wasn't, you know, another war. That was in part because the old regional commander, Adm. William Fallon, opposed one. What will Petraeus do?

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