It appears that tackling Iran is the last thing the State Department wants to do. But the Brits are beginning to be concerned with Iran’s mullahs meddling in Iraq. As Michael Ledeen explains, they have good reason to be concerned:
Inside Iraq, there are thousands of Iranian agents at work: radical Iraqi mullahs who were trained in Iranian mosques since the early 1980s, top officers of the Revolutionary Guards, various thugs and killers, and even the head of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, Ali Panahi, who was dispatched to Karbala to organize the anti-American demonstrations after the fall of Saddam, and then to Baghdad. The new American in charge of Iraq, Jerry Bremer, was so alarmed at what he saw in Iraq that he has been peppering the intelligence community for more information on Iranian operations ever since he arrived.
Iran’s deep connections to Hezbollah are also a key reason for the intractability of Palestinian terror. There’s much we can do short of military intervention: financial and logistic support for the student and opposition movement; aggressive attempts to monitor Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; outreach to dissidents through the Internet and Iranian exile radio; and so on. But military power shouldn’t be ruled out either. We are still at war. Iraq will never be successfully pacified or reconstructed without regime change in Iran. The connections between Iran’s ruling Islamofascist elite and al Qaeda need to be the subject of intense and sustained intelligence work. I suspect that we might find greater links between Tehran and al Qaeda than with any other terrorist-sponsoring state. Yes, we need to focus on Iraq right now. But not at the expense of the real source of trouble in the region.
The Dish 