Fiddling Before Rome Burns

I saw a story today that, were it not for the fact that I puked my eyeballs blood-red only three and a half months ago, and that I knew it was coming, would have made me want to throw up:

The United States and Iran broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze Monday with a four-hour meeting about Iraqi security. The American envoy said there was broad policy agreement, but that Iran must stop arming and financing militants who are attacking U.S. and Iraqi forces.

That was just the lede. Unfortunately the details didn't reek any less:

The American envoy called the meeting "businesslike" and said at "the level of policy and principle, the Iranian position as articulated by the Iranian ambassador was very close to our own."

However, he said: "What we would obviously like to see, and the Iraqis would clearly like to see, is an action by Iran on the ground to bring what it's actually doing in line with its stated policy." [emphasis added]

So let's see if I've got this straight: Iranian policy and principle vis-a-vie Iraq is "very close to our own" - which is nonsense since they are waging a proxy war against our forces in Iraq - but what "we would obviously like to see" is "Iran actually carry out its stated policy."

So our envoy - a diplogent named Ryan Crocker, as if it matters - has in the space of two sentences said that his Iranian counterpart is full of crap, that this meeting was an utter waste of time, but in the third indicated a willingness to pursue further talks - if "invited" to them by the (Shiite, Iran-leaning) Iraqi government." Want to know how appalling this is? The only thing worse than another such invitation is not getting one.

Why would that happen? For the same reason that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is hedging his bets by cultivating the mullahgarchy: he can read the American media and the antics of the Democrat Congress and the polling on plummeting public support for the war effort as well as we can. He has no wish to go the way of Nguyen Van Thieu, the poor bastard who had the misfortune of being president of South Vietnam after another Democrat Congress pulled the plug on another war and tossed another hapless ally to the wolves. Better to be a vassal than to be a corpse.

It still doesn't excuse the Bush Administration breaking bread with these theocratic Nazis. What did it accomplish, other than to provide a stage for the Iranian envoy, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, to gloat:

Speaking later at a news conference in the Iranian Embassy, Kazemi said: "We don't take the American accusations seriously."

Crocker declined to detail what Kazemi had said in the session, but the Iranian diplomat _ formerly a top official in the elite Revolutionary Guards Quds Force _ said he had offered to train and equip the Iraqi army and police to create "a new military and security structure" for Iraq.

Kazemi said U.S. efforts to rebuild those forces were inadequate to handle the chaos in Iraq, for which he said Washington bore sole responsibility. He said he also offered to provide what assistance Iran could in rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, which he said had been "demolished by the American invaders."

Well. That certainly raises hopes for finding common ground, doesn't it?

Let's clarify one thing right off: "the American accusations" are a whole lot more than just "accusations". This video provides what looks a whole lot like proof.

Writes Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal, who is the disembodied interviewer in the clip:

Bear this is mind, when you watch this exclusive Pajamas Media video shot in Iraq. The video offers startling new evidence of Iran’s involvement in the insurgency. It is the first up-close, online video showing captured Iranian weapons. These particular weapons have not been shown to the public before.

Far from being offered up by the military, it took me weeks of wangling to see Major Weber. The military does not want to talk about the mortars, rockets and bombs flooding in from Iran. It has been burned by the press every time the subject comes up.

Senior officers also realize that the Democrat-led Congress doesn’t want to hear about Iran’s sinister role in Iraq and that President Bush does not want a confrontation with Iran now. To make the interview even harder to get, Major Weber’s specialty, Explosives Ordinance Demolition or EOD, has a culture of not talking to the press. Any EOD officer who does, owes his unit a case of beer for each appearance.

So conspiracy theorists who feel this exclusive Pajamas Media Video is military propaganda couldn’t be more wrong—the military would have been happier if the interview never happened.

Finally, Major Weber agreed to this exclusive interview with Pajamas Media on two conditions: that a public-affairs officer be present to interrupt him if he said anything with political ramifications, and that the conversation be limited simply to the weapons themselves.

I agreed to those conditions because a large story the rest of the media missed: the weapons themselves. These Iranian weapons and others like them are killing American soldiers.

Twice before the military has tried to present to the press overwhelming evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Iraq war, only to be met by hostile skepticism. The skepticism basically takes the form of three questions:

1) Couldn’t these weapons have been made anywhere?

2) Isn’t it fishy that these weapons were marked in English with American-style dates?

3) Isn’t all of this a ploy to justify a neocon war with Iran?

As you will see from the video, Major Weber can definitively answer the first two questions. As for the Daily Kos-inspired third question, well, who can address questions from planet Paranoid? And who should bother?

The New York Times, of all publications, provides more proof that the mullahs are feeding both the Sunni and Shiite sides of this supposed Iraqi "civil war":

An American Special Operations unit has killed a Shiite militant suspected of organizing a sophisticated attack on a government compound in January that left five American soldiers dead, several senior military officers said Friday.

The suspect, Sheikh Azhar al-Duleimi, was killed in a firefight after American troops raided a house in northern Baghdad on Thursday night, the officers said, in speaking in separate interviews. The raid was prompted by intelligence that Mr. Duleimi had recently returned from Iran, they said, where he had fled after the January killings.

In that attack, nine to twelve men dressed in American uniforms drove a convoy of sport utility vehicles into a government compound in Karbala, killing one soldier and abducting four others. Those four soldiers were killed shortly afterward as the police pursued the attackers. Fingerprints taken from Mr. Duleimi’s body matched those found in one of the captors’ vehicles.

“We think he was the leader on the ground in the assault,” said an officer with access to reports on the raid.

The Bush Administration has long asserted that the killings were carried out by Shiites with closes ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and cited the case as an example of possible retribution by Tehran after Iranians suspected of carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces were detained last year.

Next we have the *fact* of what has happened in Southern Iraq (centered on Basra) where the British have put Democrat war-fighting doctrine into practice, withdrawing their forces from active engagements against the local Shiite militias and leaving the door wide open for Iranian "influence" to grow cancerously and exponentially:

When he finished his conversation, the general - who didn't want his name published because he feared retribution from militias -stretched out his hand to me and said: "Welcome to Tehran."

I asked him about British claims that the security situation was improving. His reply was withering: "The British came here as military tourists. They committed huge mistakes when they formed the security forces. They appointed militiamen as police officers and chose not confront the militias. We have reached this point where the militias are a legitimate force in the street."...

"Most of the police force is divided between Fadhila which controls the TSU [the tactical support unit, its best-trained unit] and Moqtada which controls the regular police," the general said.

"Fadhila also control the oil terminals, so they control the oil protection force and part of the navy. Moqtada controls the ports and customs, so they control the customs, police and its intelligence. Commandos are under the control of Badr Brigade."

Tehran appears to already have the southern part of Iraq under their de facto control. All that remains is to finish chasing us out of the rest of the country and they can move in openly and formally and finally finish the war Saddam Hussein started twenty-seven years ago, as well as dealing "the Great Satan" its most humiliating defeat yet in the war that started the year before that when Islamist "students" - including current "President" Mahmoud "Adolph" Ahmadinejad - sacked our embassy and took its staff prisoner.

And they're not wool-gathering, either:

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

"Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq and it's a very dangerous course for them to be following. They are already committing daily acts of war against US and British forces," a senior US official in Baghdad warned. "They [Iran] are behind a lot of high-profile attacks meant to undermine US will and British will, such as the rocket attacks on Basra palace and the Green Zone [in Baghdad]. The attacks are directed by the Revolutionary Guard who are connected right to the top [of the Iranian government]."

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.

"Certainly it [the violence] is going to pick up from their side. There is significant latent capability in Iraq, especially Iranian-sponsored capability. They can turn it up whenever they want. You can see that from the pre-positioning that's been going on and the huge stockpiles of Iranian weapons that we've turned up in the last couple of months. The relationships between Iran and groups like al-Qaida are very fluid," the official said.

And not just limited to Iraq:

This is especially interesting in conjunction with the signs that Iranian-funded Hamas seems determined to provoke war with Israel this summer.

Which would make these defensive preparations all the more in-context:

Syria has agreed to supply Iran with at least ten out of fifty air defense systems that Damascus is in the process of buying from Russia, Jane's Defense Weekly reported in this week's edition.

The weekly publication quoted a source close to the deal as saying that while most of the Pantsyr-S1E systems were earmarked for Syrian Air Defense Command, "the end user for ten of the systems is Tehran."

And with all of this going on, with Iranian subversion in Iraq about as "secret" as Paris Hilton's boob job, with the mullahs either in possession of nukes or bloody close, the Bush Administration, whatever the extent of its domestic political prostration, is sending diplodiddlers to smoke the peace pipe with the very regime that has....

Well, let's let former Israeli Prime Minister and current Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu sum it up, as he did in a CNN interview last winter:

Unless the United States stops Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, America has only two to five years left....

"[Israel is] just the way station en route to you....They're out to get you; they're not out to get us. We're simply standing in their way. They're not interested in Israel per se. They're interested in bringing down Western civilization, led by the United States. That's why you're the "Great Satan" and we're just the "little Satan."

Unless he is stopped, Ahmadinejad will have nuclear capability within two to five years at most...and America will find itself embroiled in a nuclear holocaust.

Bebe also said "the world" - meaning the U.S. - must strike now to destroy the mullahgarchy before it's too late.

Mr. Netanyahu is, indeed, the Churchill of our time. Unfortunately, our time is, comparatively, the late 1930s, Iraq is Czechoslovakia, and the Bushies are flocking to Munich to strike a deal for "peace in our time."

They'll reap much the same sort of results - only "hotter."

And probably even quicker.