IRAN'S MALIGNANT ISLAMIST REVOLUTION
By Michael D. Evans
Under the noses of allies fighting to impose peace on Iraq, Iran has built up its religious, military, and political infrastructure in that wartorn county. Its Revolutionary Guard – the same force it deployed to export its Islamist revolution to Lebanon – has thoroughly infiltrated the key positions of power. Hundreds of Iranian mullahs and businessmen have established important footholds in the Iraqi religious and commercial communities.
Intelligence experts say Iran is preparing to use Iraq as a deterrent against an attack by the United States or Israel on its nuclear facilities. Iranian agents have established a huge terrorist infrastructure in Iraq, gathering intelligence on coalition forces, stockpiling weapons, smuggling arms and fellow agents across the common border, and recruiting fighters. One estimate is that the Revolutionary Guard has trained – and armed – some 40,000 Iraqis, who are primed to oppose a Sunni attempt to regain power.
Iranian-made explosive charges that can penetrate the strongest armor are used daily to kill coalition troops – just as they were used last year by Iran’s Hizbullah proxy against Israeli armor in Lebanon. US officials have told ABC News that they have intercepted shipments of the deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.
Teheran is thus poised between unleashing untold chaos in Iraq in response to a US or Israeli attack or continuing its steady, mounting subversion of Iraqi society in order to firmly establish Shi’ite rule.
With regard to attacking the United States, the 9/11 Commission Report makes clear how the extremist regime in Teheran aided al-Qaida. It notes (pages 240-241) that the Republican Guard helped several of Osama bin Laden’s September 11th hijackers cross into Iran from Afghanistan. In a most sinister link to Iran’s long line of terrorism, the report notes that top Iranian terrorist Imad Mugniyah personally escorted bin Laden’s attackers to Teheran. Mugniyah masterminded the suicide bombing of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, in which 241 American servicemen were murdered.
Hardly a week goes by without another revelation about Iran's support for the ongoing intifada against Israel, whose existence the ayatollahs oppose. Israel’s government has identified Iran as the creator of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which it supports with money, arms, and training.
Iran supports global jihad with impunity and its open pursuit of a nuclear capability has been met mainly with talk. The United States recently reversed a three-decade-old policy against talking with Iran, on the grounds it is a terrorist state. Faced with Iran’s stonewalling on its “right” to manufacture the fuel for nuclear weapons, President George W. Bush was apparently persuaded by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that opening negotiations with Teheran would be the "prudent" thing to do.
Somehow it has become acceptable to talk with the country that has been murdering Americans through its terrorist proxies, whose arms and money flow to Islamist groups spreading terror like a malignant cancer throughout the world, and whose leader repeatedly threatens to “wipe Israel off the map.”
Set aside, for the moment, how a nuclear-emboldened Iran might act toward Israel and just think how many suitcase nukes Teheran might be able to detonate around the world. Its Islamofascists have already struck in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Madrid, London, New York, and elsewhere.
According to Rice, President Bush "wants a positive relationship between the American people and the people of Iran" on education, culture, sports, trade, and investment. “People to people” sounds so warm and cuddly, except that one people lives in a democracy and the other under a fundamentalist dictatorship that sentences writers it doesn’t like to death.
There is a direct line connecting Hitler’s Munich of 1938 with Arafat’s Munich of 1972 and Ahmadinejad’s Teheran of 2007. It is self-destructive folly for the West to think that appeasing an Islamofascist psychopath will not embolden him to extort more rewards for terrorism.
Mike Evans is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Final Move Beyond Iraq published by Frontline.
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