‘You can clearly see what they are doing in Iraq.” Sen. Lindsey Graham was talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically the death trade plied by the mullahs, their Revolutionary Guard Corps, their Hezbollah operatives, and the assorted jihadists under their control. And while the plying is being done “in Iraq,” it is being done against America.
Senator Graham elaborated that Iran is setting the stage to frame the long-scheduled withdrawal from Iraq as a case of the United States being “driven out,” a cowardly retreat under fire. Nor is this happening solely in Iraq. Iran’s fortification of the Afghan Taliban also continues at a steady clip. It may even be spiking now as the planned drawdown of American forces gets under way. Again, the mullahs are determined to pose as Allah’s avengers, casting the infidels out of Dar al-Islam.
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They are getting plenty of help from the Obama administration. The U.S. withdrawal is being driven by the political calendar, not conditions on the ground. Thus our enemies — and Iran has always been our principal enemy — get to make it look like whatever they want it to look like.
So, as 33,000 U.S. troops begin making their quietus, the Taliban and its jihadist allies are emboldened, not vanquished. In fact, Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reports that superior Iranian rockets enable our enemies to fire from 13 miles away, twice the range of the Taliban’s former arsenal. With U.S. air power paralyzed by the demagoguery of Iran’s new best friend, Hamid Karzai — the Afghan president minted by our government’s Islamic-democracy project — it gets awfully difficult to defend against such attacks.
Defending themselves is about all our troops will be able to do in the coming months. Karzai and the mullahs have finalized a joint defense and security agreement — in the jihadi pincer, Iran arms both the sharia “democracy” and its Taliban opposition; it’s the American troops getting squeezed. Meanwhile, fresh off the anti-American duet Iraq’s Pres. Jalal Talabani crooned with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the mullahs’ recent “anti-terrorism” summit, Iran’s vice president visited Baghdad this week to call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another democracy project success story. As they forged deeper economic, security, and cultural ties, they also marked a month in which 15 Americans were killed in Iraq, making it the worst month for U.S. forces in over two years.
You may recall that time in 2009 as the fleeting period of euphoria after President Bush’s troop surge transformed Iraq just as it was about to become a humiliating American failure. According to received Washington wisdom, the surge was a triumph — indeed, so spectacular a triumph that even President Obama now claims the Iraq mission as his own, as if we all share the Obamedia’s amnesia about their hero’s prominence in Harry Reid’s anti-surge legion of “This war is lost” Democrats.
To be sure, Iraq is Obama’s kind of foreign-policy triumph. The strategy was not to defeat the enemy but to stabilize a sharia democracy and protect a population that remains rabidly anti-American. So we have built Baghdad into a reasonably stable Iranian client state, pulled ever deeper into the mullahs’ orbit.
Iran has spent eight years killing Americans in Iraq. We responded by doing nothing. Attacking the source of the problem might have jeopardized Iraq’s fragile new government, whose leading factions are beholden to Tehran, a complication we chose to paper over. In fact, even as democracy-project enthusiasts crowed about Iraq’s purported evolution into a key American ally against the jihad, the Bush administration acceded to Maliki’s demand that Iraq not be used as a staging ground for U.S. operations against other nations (translation: against Iran, the kingpin of the jihad). It seems the only country we’d be permitted to attack from Iraq is Israel. And that’s no joke: Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski actually suggested that the U.S. would shoot Israeli bombers down over Iraq if they dared try to take out Iran’s ripening nuclear arsenal.
Iran Is at War with Us
Are we at war with Iran?
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Yes. It looks like we, and the Israelis, just hacked their nuclear enrichment computers by using the Stuxnet worm thereby setting them back for perhaps a decade.
"Iran’s fortification of the Afghan Taliban also continues at a steady clip."
What evidence do you have to support this statement? There is significant evidence to claim that Iranians are selling arms to Hezballah and to insurgents in Iraq But your claim that they are supporting the Taliban is baseless propaganda. Reread the history of the region, please. Stop making claims solely based on you narrow view of the world.
Baseless propaganda? Maybe you should put in about 30 seconds of research before you make groundless accusations of narrow world views. From the ultra right BBC...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12694266
See how easy fact checking is in the internet age.
What evidence there is that Iran trains and supplies the Taliban? Oh boy, you should start reading The Country Reports on Terrorism that are published by the Department of State. It's all in there. But I know the department is currently headed by this right wing extremist Hillary Clinton and therefor probably not trustworthy.
Great work, Mr. McCarthy. I wish you would set our foreign policy and not the blend of appeasers and interventionists for Arab "democracies". The foreign policy guidance of GWB (2nd term) and BHO prevent our military of winning any wars and we should just stop the bleeding - both financially and literally.
BBC reported March 9th of this year that British Special Forces had seized rockets from Iran bound to the Taliban.
You may note that the BBC is anything but Fox News.
Your article is right on the money. Iran is obviously at war with us and has been for decades. US troops are being attacked daily in Iraq with Iranian-supplied rockets, mortars and EFPs. Shipments of rockets from Iran have been intercepted in Afghanistan as well. There is no question Iran is seeking to undermine our interests and kill our soldiers in both countries.
Great observation: "'Intervention' in 2011 has become what 'negotiation' was in the Obama hey-day of 2009 — something purportedly good for its own sake. The inconvenient reality is that, if it is not based on a strategy designed to defeat America’s enemies, it is inevitably counterproductive."
Assuming Iran has been at war with us since 1979, what are the likely long term consequences to the U.S. of not fighting back?
Perhaps historians will someday be able to integrate the insidious progression of Iranian strategy toward the triumph of Islam over the world, for which the Ayatollah Khoumeini yearned and planned. From 1979 forward, Iran has systematically undertaken jihad against the Western notion of democracy, symbolized by the “Great Satan”. From Afghanistan thru Iraq, to Syria and Lebanon, and ultimately to Venezuela, Iran has been pursuing a generational strategy, but one that may be nearing the planned end-stage.
We know the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons, and have already tested ballistic missiles for delivery vehicles. More chilling should be the awareness that they have been busily studying techniques for launching at sea, with testing carried out in the Caspian Sea. When Iran possesses a couple launchable nuclear warheads, the time may have come.
As Europe becomes Eurabia, the final attack may come from inconsequential tramp freighters steaming off our coast, from which could be launched one or a few high altitude nuclear detonations, producing an electromagnetic pulse that can paralyze everything from the avionics of our warplanes, to our electrical grid, your automobile ignition, and even the transistors in our pacemakers. The stone age would become a reality for us, and the Caliphate an inevitability for mankind.
Obama has discounted Iran as a “tiny country”, and has repeatedly and futilely extended his condescending hand, seeming to lack comprehension of the threat. Iran spits on his hand in defiance, and aspires to dominate the world for Allah.
Yes, Iran is at war with us, and I could use your help persuading my squish friends. In particular, I would like to have been able to link to your article from my Facebook page, but your headline is too brassy, altogether lacking subtlety in its approach. And it becomes bizarre when set next to a photo of you grinning as if you're shortly expecting to mount the reader. Ease up and get linked.
The USA isn't going to take out Iran unless Iran attacks us first. This is reality, and will not change. The only possibility of preemptively taking out Iran falls upon Israel. Israel (supposedly - not proven) has a large nuclear arsenal and could dispense with Iran quickly. However, Israel would face the possibility of massive retaliation in kind from any nukes or bioweapons that Iran has deployed in secret. Israel is clearly not willing to take that risk or else they would have obliterated Iran already. Dirty tricks like Stuxnet have only set Iran back a year or so. Thus, Iran gets to become a real nuclear weapons power without real hindrance of any kind.
What, no Al-Qaeda and Osama in there? Do you know how many branches of the Taliban there are? Do you know that the Taliban are Sunni and that Iran are mostly Shia? So what is the solution? Bomb Iran to the stone age and rebuild it like the rest of the ME?
I think Pakistan and the ISI are more of an enemy to us than anyone there despite the billions we gave them and the goodwill (they don't want F/A-18 from us for various reasons) we lost with our real ally India in the region.
Iranian elite soldier held for smuggling arms to Taliban
London Evening Standard 24/Dec/2010
"A member of the elite al-Quds force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard has been captured in Afghanistan and accused of arms smuggling.
Nato said he was detained on Saturday in southern Kandahar province, the current focus of Nato offensives. He was held in the Zheri district, known as the birthplace of the Taliban, and was involved in smuggling weapons from Iran to Afghanistan.
“The now-detained man was considered a Kandahar-based weapons facilitator with direct ties to other Taliban leaders in the province,” said the Nato statement.
A senior Afghan security official said coalition forces had been monitoring the man for some time. He added: “Iranian intelligence officers are helping the Taliban and drug dealers in the south. We deal with it every day. This is a known fact now.”
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Report - Iran smuggling weapons across border to Taliban
For Al-Shorfa
2010-03-19
Iran has been supporting the Taliban insurgency by smuggling weapons across its border with Afghanistan, according to a report by Britain's Channel-4 News Thursday (March 18th). The weapons include mines, mortars and plastic explosives. Among the sources quoted in the story was a senior local commander of the Taliban, who told the Channel 4 team that Iran's importance to the Taliban "was crucial especially as the West was pressuring Pakistan to close its borders to the Taliban."
"Day by day the Iranian border becomes more important for us," he said. "Especially now in Pakistan there are many problems for the Taliban and many of the Taliban have been imprisoned and also they arrest any Taliban who comes out of the Madrasas [religious schools]."
But a Western official in Kabul says Iran is probably not interested in "tipping the balance" of power to either side. Instead, Iran is more interested in providing "just enough support to fuel the ongoing insurgency, bogging down the West, the Afghan government and the Taliban in this costly conflict."
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2/9/2011
NATO forces intercepted the most powerful Iranian-made rockets ever smuggled to the Taliban in Afganistian, The Associated Press sited an international intelligence official as saying Wednesday. The rockets were to be used for the Taliban's spring campaign.
NATO troops captured a three-truck convoy carrying 50 122 millimeter rockets in Southern Nirmuz, near the Iranian and Pakistani borders, the official said.
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Of course the above examples won't be enough for someone like you. And the suggestion of a simple google search which would return at least a dozen more reports, would be met with equal disinterest.
Because it's not proof that you want. Your goal is to distort the truth.
We are in a Cold War with Iran. The worst thing we could do is start bombing them. The regime is very unpopular with the people and bombing them would only strengthen their hand.
My comment was directed to mc halbe, who denied Iran was supplying the Taliban. NATO said the rockets were a step up fro the arms that had been flowing from Iran to the Taliban, implying that they've been running arms to them before these rockets.
Mr. McCarthy -
Overall, I agree with you. But, you neglected to discuss the impact of the absurd CIA NIE regarding Iran's nuclear program on the Bush administration. The administration was clearly headed towards a more "kinetic" solution to the problem before the CIA bureaucracy generated the NIE's "unfortunate" wording.
You want to know when we started losing wars? When we changed the name of Department of War to the Department of Defense. Coincidentally, since that time every war we fought has either been to a stalemate (Korean War, Vietnam War, Desert Storm, Iraq War) or has been a long, draw out slog (the "War on Terror"). Our goal is not to win wars anymore, but to try to bring "democracy" to places where it's never been. We are all the worse off for it.
