U.S.: No plans to attack Iran
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that the United States had no intention of attacking Iran and that any American military efforts against it would be confined to Iraq to disrupt the smuggling of bomb-making materials over the border.
"For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran," he said at a Pentagon news conference. "We are not planning a war with Iran."
Even if the Bush administration was able to establish that Iran’s top leaders knew and authorized the smuggling, Gates said, there would probably be no change in the Bush administration’s strategy of limiting its military response to actions within Iraq.
