When even Ha’aretz, the most liberal newspaper in Israel, recognizes the Iranian threat, one must declare Iran a threat.

The international community failed embarrassingly in its handling of the slaughter in Rwanda, and it is now having trouble dealing with the mass murder in Sudan’s Darfur province as well. And for all the denunciations and the shock, it seems that the international community is also standing by helplessly, doing nothing, in the face of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Jewish Holocaust and threatens the very existence of the State of Israel.

His open threats of destruction are backed by Iran’s efforts to arm itself with weapons of mass destruction that would be capable of carrying out this threat. Yet the international community is not excited. It has not gone into overdrive in order to at least deny Iran nuclear weapons.

The Bush Administration has authorized our troops to kill or capture Iranians in Iraq.

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country’s nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

“There were no costs for the Iranians,” said one senior administration official. “They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back.”

Now there is.

And, of course, the caveats:

The wide-ranging plan has several influential skeptics in the intelligence community, at the State Department and at the Defense Department who said that they worry it could push the growing conflict between Tehran and Washington into the center of a chaotic Iraq war.

[...] Two officials said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, though a supporter of the strategy, is concerned about the potential for errors, as well as the ramifications of a military confrontation between U.S. and Iranian troops on the Iraqi battlefield.

Once again, if the Iranians are advising our enemy on more and better ways to kill our soldiers, they are already at war with us. It boggles the mind that the world cannot recognize the proxy armies of Iran spread throughout the Middle East: Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. Iran pays the salaries of Hamas, Hezbullah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran is responsible for the death of thousands, including hundreds of American soldiers in Lebanon (and thank you, George Bush, for finally stating that in your State of the Union speech on Tuesday).

How is it that America has lost the ability to identify her enemies? Even when Iran holds conferences calling for the end of America, we still have pundits claiming that’s just rhetoric.

I think not. Take a look at the posts I’ve written about Iran today, and read the articles linked, and you will see a disturbing pattern. Iran has been at war with Israel for decades, and is now expanding that war to include the United States. Let’s stop pretending it doesn’t exist.

Suddenly, the news media are discovering that Iran is meddling in Iraq. Who knew? (Well, we did, but then, our opinions don’t count because we believe the war in Iraq was necessary.)

When Fadhil Abbas determined that his mother’s astigmatism required surgery, they did not consider treatment in his home town of Najaf, in southern Iraq. Instead they joined a four-taxi convoy of ailing Iraqis headed to Iran.

For more than two weeks last fall, Abbas, his sister and his mother were treated to free hotels, trips to the zoo and religious shrines, and his mother’s $1,300 eye surgery at a hospital in Tehran, all courtesy of the offices of Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraq’s ascendant Shiite Muslim cleric. Abbas returned to Najaf glowing over the technical prowess of Iran.

[...] Iran has dispatched 56 diplomats to staff its embassy in Baghdad and consulates in Basra and Karbala. It maintains informal liaison offices in the Kurdish cities of Sulaymaniyah and Irbil, the latter of which was raided Jan. 11 by U.S. troops, who arrested five Iranians. Each day, Iran provides 1,000 tons of cooking gas, about 20 percent of the Iraqi demand, and 2 million liters of kerosene. Iran exports electricity through Iraq’s Diyala province and plans to quadruple the amount with new projects, Iraqi officials say.

Iran has also extended a $1 billion line of credit to Iraq to help fund reconstruction and rebuilding. When Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and his delegation of ministers visited Iran in November, he asked for more help and said Iraq “would like to expand our relations in every field with the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“The economic power between the two countries, it’s enormous,” said Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq. “We can help them in technical issues and engineering. We have a lot of experience in building roads and airports.”

Iran is looking to become a superpower in the Middle East. Iran is also working on expanding its influence in Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine may need to be reinstated here.

I’m starting to see echoes of the Soviet Union, but on a much, much smaller scale. However, a nuclear-armed Iran would tip the scales in its favor. As to that, North Korea is apparently helping Iran perfect its nukes.

Everywhere you turn, it seems, Iran is there, stirring up trouble. I have a bad feeling about this.

Nobel Prize Laureate Israel Aumann, the game theorist, spoke at the Herzliya conference. Here’s the part of his speech that speaks directly to Zionism, and the threat of “post-Zionism”:

… and now a few words about a third threat, which is perhaps the greatest of all. It does not come from Iran, nor from terrorist groups, nor from any external source. It comes from within us. “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, your humble servant makes his living from game theory—among other things, very serious games: games of life and death and of existence and annihilation. The name of the game in game theory is motivation, incentives. Earlier, we discussed the motivations of those standing on the opposite side. Motivating ourselves is the most important thing, and the thing we are losing the most. Without motivation, we will not endure. What are we doing here? Why are we here? What are we aspiring to here? We are here because we are Jewish, we are Zionist, because of our ancient bond to this land; we aspire to realize our 2000-year-old hope of becoming a free nation in our land, the Land of Zion and Jerusalem. Without this profound understanding, we will not endure. We will simply no longer be here; Post-Zionism will finish us off. About half a year ago in Petra, Jordan, the prime minister said that we are tired. He was right. He was elected by the nation, and he expresses the sentiments of the nation. We are like a mountain-climber that gets caught in a snowstorm; the night falls, he is cold and tired, and he wants to sleep. If he falls asleep, he will freeze to death. We are in terminal danger because we are tired. I will allow myself to say a few unpopular, unfashionable words: our panicked lunging for peace is working against us. It brings us farther away from peace, and endangers our very existence. I think it was Churchill who said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The preparation includes material preparation, a fantastic army, effective tools of war, but above all, we are talking about spiritual preparation, about spiritual readiness to go to war.

Roadmaps, capitulation, gestures, disengagements, convergences, deportations, and so forth do not bring peace. On the contrary, they bring war, just as we saw last summer. These things send a clear signal to our “cousins” that we are tired, that we no longer have spiritual strength, that we have no time, that we are calling for a time-out. They only whet their appetites. It only encourages them to pressure us more, to demand more, and not to give up on anything. These things stem from simple theoretical considerations and also from straight thinking. But it’s not just theory: it has been proven and re-proven in the field over thousands of years. I returned today from a trip to India, where we heard about historical stories that illustrate the same. Capitulations bring about war; determination and readiness bring about peace. Ladies and gentlemen, we must tell our cousins that we are staying here. We are not moving. We have time; we have patience; we have stamina. Understand this and internalize it. And we must not simply say it to our cousins but feel it within ourselves. This and only this will bring peace. We can really live in peace and unity and cooperation with our cousins. But only after they understand and internalize that the Zionist state will be here forever.

Today, we start out in Iran’s proxy war against America, via IEDs in Iraq. The story has the usual caveats that the Bush Administration may be “exaggerating” the Iranian influence.

Why is the Bush administration escalating its accusations that Iran is backing Shiite extremists inside Iraq? One reason: mounting intelligence indicating Tehran has been supplying insurgents with electronic sensors that trigger roadside bombs used against U.S. troops.
The devices in question—which cost as little as $1 a piece—are called “passive infrared” sensors or detectors. They are commonly used to turn on lights or burglar alarms when someone or something passes in front of them. Over the past year, U.S. forces in Iraq have repeatedly fallen victim to sophisticated homemade bombs—known as IEDs, or improvised explosive devices—which are often rigged with passive infrared sensors.

Recent reports from U.S. intelligence agencies show that Iranian agents or brokers have ordered the devices in bulk from manufacturers in the Far East, said one U.S. counterterrorism official, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. Bruce Riedel, a senior intelligence official who retired from the CIA only two months ago, told NEWSWEEK he too was aware of reports that serial numbers of sensors retrieved from IEDs in Iraq have been traced to orders from Iran placed with infrared-sensor manufacturers in Taiwan and Japan.

The infrared devices are particularly deadly as triggers for homemade bombs. Unlike cell phones, radio-control systems or garage-door openers—some of the other devices that have been used by Iraqi insurgents to trigger IEDs—the infrared devices do not emit a signal that can be detected before they go off. As a result, it is particularly difficult for U.S. forces to locate and defuse IEDs rigged with such triggers.

And here’s the “objective” part of the article, trying to downplay the Iranian influence in Iraq. I suppose they think al-Sadr’s many trips to Iran for instructions, and the number of Iranian Revolutionary Guards instructing the “insurgents,” are just a “small percentage” of the killers of Americans.

One senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking recently to a group of reporters on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that only a “small percentage”” of IEDs found in Iraq show signs of possible Iranian origin, though the official indicated that because of their more sophisticated design, the Iranian-linked IEDs tend to be more deadly than Sunni homemade bombs.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t an act of war an act of war, whether it is only one instance, or ten thousand? If Iran is supplying deadly ingredients and the know-how to create IEDs to kill American soldiers, then it really doesn’t matter that it’s only a “small percentage” of the bombs. Especially because the kill rate in those bombs has risen—due, no doubt, to the “small percentage” of Iranian-built IEDs.