In short, the president sees that it is a regional war, as it has been from the beginning, just as our enemies in Damascus and Tehran publicly told us it would be, even before a single American soldier set foot in Iraq. The two biggest causes of casualties in Iraq are non-indigenous: suicide bombers and constantly improving explosive devices deployed in and alongside roads. Eighty to ninety percent of all suicide bombers are foreigners (mostly Saudis who are trained in Syria), not Iraqis, and the explosives have long been known to be of Iranian design to contain Iranian components, and often constructed in Iran (see the latest intelligence news about al Qaeda reconstituting in Iran).
Moreover, the spinal column of the terror army in Iraq is intimately linked to Iran and Syria. As U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner recently put it, our recent successes in Iraq have been accomplished despite ongoing resistance from al-Qaeda, proxy groups like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their Lebanese Hezbollah surrogates. Bergner stressed that the activities of these Iranian forces, and joint instruments of Iran and Syria such as Hezbollah, are relentlessly increasing. “we’ve actually been very forthright in explaining the role that those groups are having and they are an increasing problem — one that’s having an increasingly destabilizing effect on both the government of Iraq and creating more problems for us to deal with.”
With all that, Bergner insisted “that there is no question that al Qaeda is the principle fueler of violence and sectarian attacks,” and is therefore our main target. But it is indisputable — and further information is emerging every day to confirm this — that al Qaeda itself is hardly an independent actor. Several years ago, Spanish judge Baltazar Garçon noted that the leaders of al Qaeda reconstituted their headquarters in Iran after being driven from Afghanistan. I wrote at the time that Osama bin Laden and key members of his family had gone to Iran, and other key figures, such as Zarqawi (the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, lest we forget), had created an international terror network from Tehran. I have no doubt that when we finally unravel the terror network, we will find that people like Zarqawi repeatedly went back and forth between Iraq, Syria, and Iran, as did — and does — arch terrorists like Imad Mughniyah of Hezbollah....
...Yes, our troops are magnificent (as New York Times reporter John Burns so well put it), and the Iraqi people are also magnificent (their courage and patience are inspirational, and if the Nobel Committee were up to its task, it would award the Peace Prize to the Iraqi nation, excluding the terrorists of course). But fighting brilliantly in Iraq alone cannot possibly win such a vast war. Bill Kristol knows that, which is why he says “we will have to do more...but we can.” Yes, we can. But will we? There is still no sign of that, and there are screams of horror at the very thought that we might support freedom in Iran, where significant numbers of people daily demonstrate their willingness to fight their oppressors.
Instead, every new revelation about Iran’s role in the terror war is greeted with the pathetic mantra “but this does not prove that the regime itself is involved.” As if General Suleimani of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force would dare launch operation after operation against us in Iraq without the explicit approval of his commander-in-chief, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Do our analysts not know that the Revolutionary Guards were created for the explicit purpose of responding to the whims of the Supreme Leader? Whenever the Guards move, they do so precisely because “the regime” has willed it.
Big wars require big strategies, and we do not have one. Yet. I believe the country would support one if the case were made clearly and honestly. Taking the war to our enemies in Damascus and Tehran does not require troops on the ground or bombs from the air, except in the limited cases of terrorist training camps and weapons factories. It requires, above all, two things: support for the democratic forces in Syria and Iran, and the will to confront our enemies. That will can be easily expressed, but no president has had the coherence and courage to do that. Iran has been at war with us for nearly thirty years, but no president has ever said we want an end to the terror regime in Tehran.
It’s long past time to hear those words.
