Iran is at war with us -- will someone please inform the U.S. government?

By Aussiegirl

Not much more to add to Ledeen's powerful article. Is anybody home? The threat of the "comfy chair" just won't cut it.

Iran is the elephant in the sitting room -- the U.S. is turning a blind eye and deaf ear to Iran's involvement in everything that is going wrong in Iraq. If we do nothing, then liberating Iraq will have created a greater Iran, with the Iranians annexing Iraq defacto, because of the Shia majority in Iraq. If nothing else, Iran can keep making things unstable and violent there for a long, long time. The same is true for Syria. We don't want to make the same mistake we did in Vietnam, where we did not bomb the sanctuaries because they were over the border. Iran is pulling all the strings -- of Zarqawi, Mookie Sadr and a bunch of other insurgents in Iraq -- the way out of Iraq goes through Iran -- except we are trying to pretend that's not the case.

Michael Ledeen on Iran on National Review Online

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dying of cancer. But he is convinced that his legacy will be glorious. He believes that thousands of his Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers effectively control southern Iraq, and that the rest of the country is at his mercy, since we present no challenge to them — even along the Iraq/Iran border, where they operate with impunity. They calmly plan their next major assault without having to worry about American retribution. The mullahs have thousands of intelligence officers all over Iraq, as well as a hard core of Hezbollah terrorists — including the infamous Imadh Mughniyah, arguably the region’s most dangerous killer — and they control the major actors, from Zarqawi to Sadr to the Badr Brigades.

Khamenei and his top cronies believe they have effectively won. They think the U.S. is politically paralyzed, thanks to the relentless attacks of President Bush’s opponents and the five-year long internal debate about Iran policy, and thus there is no chance of an armed attack, even one limited to nuclear sites. They think Israel is similarly paralyzed by Sharon’s sudden departure and the triumph of their surrogate force, Hamas, in the Palestinian elections. They despise the Europeans, and hardly even bother to pretend to negotiate with them any more. They believe they have a strong strategic alliance with the Russians and they think they have the Chinese over a barrel, since the Chinese are so heavily dependent on Iranian oil. Recent statements from Beijing and Moscow regarding the chance of U.N. sanctions will have reinforced the Supreme Leader’s convictions.

[...]It’s time to take action against Iran and its half-brother Syria, for the carnage they have unleashed against us and the Iraqis. We know in detail the location of terrorist training camps run by the Iranian and Syrian terror masters; we should strike at them, and at the bases run by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards as staging points for terrorist sorties into Iraq. No doubt the Iraqi armed forces would be delighted to participate, instead of constantly playing defense in their own half of the battlefield. And there are potent democratic forces among the Syrian people as well, as worthy of our support as the Iranians.