GWOT Good News, GWOT Bad News

The good news is, al Qaeda's strength and prowess appears to be continuing to wane:

Unknown assailants fired at least three missiles from Jordan early Friday, with one narrowly missing a U.S. Navy ship docked at port, an attack that killed a Jordanian soldier. One missile fell close to an airport in neighboring Israel, officials said.

The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, said two American amphibious ships were docked in Aqaba when a mortar was fired toward them. The vessels later sailed out of port as a result of the attacks, U.S. Navy spokesman Lieutenant Commander Charlie Brown [No, that isn't a typo...] told The Associated Press in Bahrain.

Jordanian soldier Ahmed Jamal Saleh was fatally wounded when the mortar sailed over one of the U.S. ships and slammed into a warehouse, a Jordanian security official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The soldier died in the ambulance taking him to hospital; another Jordanian was also wounded, the official added.

A terrorist group claiming affiliation with AQ claimed credit for this attack. Why they did so is anybody's guess given how it turned out.

Cap'n Ed observes that the scattershot firing of Katyusha rockets is a significant climb-down in tactical effectiveness from the suicide bombing of the USS Cole almost five years ago and speculates that this may be the starkest indicator yet that the Bush "fight 'em over there so they're not hitting us over here" strategy is working by draining resources and manpower, as well as drying up the pool of suicide bomber recruits due to AQ's failure to drive the Coalition out of Iraq.

Of course, all it'll take to change that perception is one sleeper cell here in the States pulling off a major mass-casualty strike, but for now it looks like we're still winning.

And the bad news? We're still doing nothing, zippo, nada about the regime that has been at war with the United States for twenty-six years - The Islamic "Republic" of Iran:

The mullahs have torn off their conciliatory mask in order to bare their fangs to us, the Europeans, and the Iranian people. If we had an Iran strategy worthy of the name, our confused leaders would have pointed out the remarkable interview with the chief nuclear affairs negotiator, Hossein Musavian. It was broadcast on Iranian television August 4th, and made it quite clear that the Iranians deliberately tricked the Europeans into giving the mullahs an extra year to complete a vital part of their nuclear program in Isfahan.

"Thanks to the negotiations with Europe," he bragged, "we gained another year, in which we completed...Isfahan." This was quite a coup, at least in Musavian's humble opinion: "We suspended (the enrichment program) in Isfahan in October 2004, although we were required to do so in October 2003...Today we are in a position of power: (the program) in Isfahan is complete and UF4 and UF6 gases are being produced. We have a stockpile of products, and...we have managed to convert 36 tons of yellow cake into gas and store it..."

Remember that the Bush Administration has gone out of its way to let the EUnuchs take the lead in this ludicrously futile exercise.

Meanwhile, the mullahs are killing us. Time published a long report from Baghdad on August 14, entitled "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," which lays out chapter and verse of the mullahs' longstanding efforts — often coordinated with Assad's Syria — to drive us out of Iraq. It is the first time I've seen a major publication confirm what I reported months before Operation Iraqi Freedom: planning for the terror war against Coalition forces in Iraq "began before the U.S. invaded." And Time quotes a British military intelligence officer about the relative inattention paid to the murderous Iranian activities. 'It's as though we are sleepwalking'."...

The list of proven Iranian actions in the terror war against us is a very long one. To take just a few: In July, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch testified to the House International Relations Committee that "Iranian cadre were training Hizballah fighters in Lebanon," which Representative Tom Lantos quite reasonably found "profoundly disturbing." Hezbollah is operating in Iraq, and its infamous operational chieftain, Imad Mughniyah, remains at large even though the US Government has put a very high price on his head for decades. U.S. special forces in Hilla last fall captured documents and photographs of known Iraqi terrorists meeting with Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers in Syria. The celebrated Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon publicly stated that, after the liberation of Afghanistan, al Qaeda reconstituted its leadership in Iran, where they convened a strategic summit in November, 2002. One of the participants was a Syrian named Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who is now suspected by British authorities of being one of the masterminds of the lethal terrorist attack in London. According to Spanish newspapers, "Intelligence reports from foreign agencies last year placed Nasar in Iran."

The seemingly inescapable fact is that Iran is waging war on us, we are well aware of it, and we are not responding, even though most Iranians are dreaming of the day that the United States supports them against the mullahs.

Not only are we not responding, there appears to be a large, evidently dominant school of thought that argues that doing something, anything, would be even worse:

As if that were not enough, our expert community, in and out of government, incessantly warns that if we were to support the democratic opposition in Iran, it would actually hurt the chances of revolution, because the Iranians would be so angry they would rally around the mullahs in a blind nationalistic spasm. The deep thinkers should take a look at the mullahs' reaction to the ongoing revolt in Awaz, in Khuzistan province. The regime has blamed the whole thing on the British Government. This produced a memorable response from the British Ahwazi friendship society:

"Protestors are armed with rocks, tyres and anything else they can use in acts of civil disobedience. They do not have guns. Is Asefi afraid the British are smuggling rocks into Iran to overthrow the Revolutionary Guards? Does he think Ahwazis need special training from the British in order to throw rocks?"

Ledeen still believes that the Iranian people can overthrow the mullahgarchy with our passive assistance. He's certainly more of an expert than I am on the subject, but I remain skeptical. I think with this new public facade, the turbaned poobahs in Tehran are intent on, and more than ready to, make any such popular uprising a practical impossibility, with or without our help. And even if it is feasible there is unlikely to be enough time in which to bring it off before the mullahs announce their official entry into the nuclear club with a great, big BANG, either in a designated testing range or in Kabul, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, or Chicago.

But whether we lend moral and/or material support to the Iranian democratic insurgency, or carry out military strikes against known Iranian nuclear facilities, or fuse the two gambits through the use of special forces infiltration - or just invade and be done with it - we have to take pre-emptive action.

Bill Clinton has the secondary blood of three thousand Americans on his hands because he sat on his fat, pasty white ass and did nothing about al Qaeda despite having eight years to roll them up. It would be the bitterest of ironies if the man in whose lap the AQ threat was dropped, and who has not only neutralized them but flipped two of the four members of the "Arab crescent" from the dark side to the good side, AND whose stated policy is that Iran "will not be allowed to gain nuclear weapons" allowed all those gains to be squandered because of his own passivity in dealing with Terror Central.

UPDATE 8/20: The Brits managed to stop an al Qaeda chemical attack against their Parliament itself:

Scotland Yard believes it has thwarted an Al-Qaeda gas attack aimed at ministers and MPs in parliament. The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan.

Police and MI5 then identified an Al-Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video-recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the attack.

The encrypted e-mails are said to have been decoded with the help of an Al-Qaeda “supergrass”. By revealing the terrorists’ code he was also able to help MI5 and GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham, to crack several more plots.

That's a "thumb in the middle" story, since the plot(s) didn't fail (which is bad news) but were thwarted by competent and diligent intelligence work (the good news).

Still, "Senior officers are worried that security at the houses of parliament remains 'unacceptable'”.

And what of our houses of Congress? Given the still-dilapidated state of U.S. intelligence, that's a question I'd rather not contemplate - but which they had better be.

[HT: Hugh Hewitt]