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Raising a new complaint about Iran, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused Tehran of dispatching elements of the elite Revolutionary Guard to stir trouble inside Iraq.

Rumsfeld offered few details but suggested the Iranians, who fought a nearly decade-long war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s and share a largely unguarded border, eventually would regret this move.

“They are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq,” he told a Pentagon news conference, “and we know it. And it is something that they, I think, will look back on as having been an error in judgment.”

Rumsfeld did not offer any elaboration except to say that the infiltrators were members of the Al Quds Division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the network of soldiers and vigilantes whose mandate is to defeat threats to the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Al Quds Division is responsible for operations outside Iranian territory.

Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials have previously complained of Iranian complicity in the movement of explosives and bomb-making material across the border into Iraq, but Rumsfeld had not mentioned Iranian forces before.

He initially said the infiltrators were doing “things that are harmful to the future of Iraq,” but later when asked specifically whether they were gathering intelligence or fomenting violence Rumsfeld said he did not know what their mission was.

Appearing with Rumsfeld at a Pentagon news conference, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that although there have been indications of Iranian-manufactured weapons coming into Iraq, “the most recent reports have to do with individuals crossing the border.” He said he has an estimate of the number but declined to reveal it.

Pace said he did not know whether the individuals entering Iraq from Iran were sent by the Iranian government. Asked the same question, Rumsfeld replied, “Of course. Quds force, the Revolutionary Guard, doesn’t go milling around willy-nilly, one would think.”

Rumsfeld also rejected assertions by some that Iraq has slipped into a civil war. He asserted that media reports have overstated the violence in Iraq since an attack last month on a revered Shiite mosque that touched off a wave of violent reprisals between religious sects.

“I do not believe they are in a civil war today,” Rumsfeld said, with Pace at his side. “There has always been a potential for civil war,” Rumsfeld added.

The secretary spoke nearly two weeks after the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra, which has touched off violent reprisals between sects that have killed hundreds of Iraqis. Hoping to keep Iraqi efforts to form a unity government moving forward, U.S. officials have acknowledged concern about the violence, but repeatedly denied that they fear a full-scale civil war is erupting.

Rumsfeld acknowledged that the attack on the mosque has delayed efforts to form a unified government in Iraq in which Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds would share power.

“Their efforts to fashion a unity government that will represent all elements of their society is clearly being delayed by the situation in Iraq,” Rumsfeld said. But he also asserted that Iraqi leaders had thus far passed the test of holding the country together and containing insurgents’ efforts to ignite a civil war.

“They have to be fully aware that if this does not work, they and all of the people who have supported them lose everything, if this turns into a civil war. They can’t want that,” he said. “My impression is they will sort through this and fashion a government of some sort” that governs from the center.

Pace said he believes the people in Iraq “have looked into the abyss and said that’s not where we want to go.”