From AFP: Bush warns Shiite leader over Iran, Syria roles in Iraq.
US President George W. Bush told Iraqi Shiite leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim that Iran and Syria must halt their "destructive activity" in Iraq, a Bush aide said.Bush said later in a television interview he was confident that Hakim and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki "are committed to ending murder" in the violence-riven country. ...
Hakim, who heads the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and leads the largest bloc in Iraq's parliament, said after the meeting that he opposed a regional or internationally-imposed resolution to the country's problems.
What sort of "destructive activity"? From ABC News: EXCLUSIVE: Iranian Weapons Arm Iraqi Militia.
U.S. officials say they have found smoking-gun evidence of Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq: brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories. According to a senior defense official, coalition forces have recently seized Iranian-made weapons and munitions that bear manufacturing dates in 2006.This suggests, say the sources, that the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias, rather than taking a roundabout path through the black market. "There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval," says a senior official.
Iranian-made munitions found in Iraq include advanced IEDs designed to pierce armor and anti-tank weapons. U.S. intelligence believes the weapons have been supplied to Iraq's growing Shia militias from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is also believed to be training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran.
Evidence is mounting, too, that the most powerful militia in Iraq, Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, is receiving training support from the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah.
Two senior U.S. defense officials confirmed to ABC News earlier reports that fighters from the Mahdi army have traveled to Lebanon to receive training from Hezbollah.
There have already been a number of other reports about Iran's proxy war in Iraq (see here, here, here, and here). So a terrorist-sponsoring Shiite state is supplying Shiite militias in Iraq with weapons and training. And yet rather than go on the offensive and take the fight to the source -- Iran -- Bush is betting that "moderate" Shiite Islamists in Iraq will somehow decide to crack down on the murderous Shiite Islamists.
If that approach seems more than a little suicidal to you, then I highly recommend the following essay in The Objective Standard: "No Substitute for Victory": The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism by John Lewis. This is a must-read analysis of the War on Terrorism that compares two starkly different approaches to waging war against a determined, ideologically motivated enemy. Dr. Lewis covers a broad range of important issues, so excerpts will not do it justice. But compare the following to Bush's approach above. From the essay:
History is clear: All-out force against fanatical killers is both practical and moral. It led us to our two most important foreign policy successes—the defeats of Germany and Japan in 1945—and to the permanent peace with those nations that we take for granted today. Such a course was practical and moral then, and it is practical and moral now—an affirmation, and a defense, of life and civilization. ...The political centerpiece of Islamic Totalitarianism today—the state in which Islam is most militantly welded to political power and contempt for America and the West—the world leader in the violent spread of Islam—is Iran.
The Iranian Islamic State was born in an act of war against America—the seizure of the American embassy in 1979—and has chanted “Death to America” ever since. Even Muslims at odds with Iran for sectarian reasons, such as many followers of Osama Bin Laden, draw inspiration from it as they engage in their own jihads against the West. Bin Laden’s most important effect in this regard has been to energize and empower radical Muslims to rise above the petty squabbles between Persian and Arab, and between Sunni and Shiite, to join Iran against the “Great Satan”: America. Hezbollah, Hamas, and company are dependent on Iran for ideological, political, and economic strength. It is Iran that addresses the U.N. as a world leader; it is Iran that is openly committed to acquiring the weapons needed to take control of the Middle East; it is Iran that poses as the defender of Muslims against the West (for instance, through loyal clerics in Iraq); and it is Iran that has gained power since the U.S. removed its strongest regional opponent in Iraq.
The conclusion is inescapable. The road to the defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism begins in Tehran. America, acting alone and with overwhelming force, must destroy the Iranian Islamic State now. It must do so openly, and indeed spectacularly, for the entire world to see, for this is the only way to demonstrate the spectacular failure and incompetence of the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a whole.
Read it all. Note especially the photo of a 1945 memo regarding Shintoism.
UPDATE -- Dec. 6: From U.S. News & World Report: The Mullah Menace by Mortimer B. Zuckerman.
Question: What's the most dangerous geopolitical development in the 21st century? Answer: Iran's emergence as the Middle East regional superpower. Why? Because it places the center of the world's increasingly stretched energy resources more and more under the influence of an oil-rich, fundamentalist, pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic regime that has not only nuclear ambitions but the means to realize them.Posted by Forkum at December 5, 2006 05:20 PM
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