Category Archives: War Commentary

Iranian Terror Cells

I wish I didn’t find this credible:

Kahlili says Iranian terrorist cells inside the U.S. have weapons, explosives, money and safe houses; they use contacts with Mexican and Latin American drug cartels to smuggle explosives and weapons into the U.S.

“They have very detailed information about sensitive sites such as bridges, railroads, airports, military bases, power plants, nuclear sites, water plants, railway stations,” he says.

If the U.S. or Israel attacked Iran, he says, sleeper cells inside the U.S. would launch suicide bombings and sabotage. Iran would attack Israel, and U.S. bases in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, he warns.

Kahlili says Iran has intelligence agents inside American universities, Islamic cultural centers and charitable institutions, posing as academics, policy experts and officers of nonprofits. They try to influence policymakers to encourage negotiations in order to give Iran time to develop nuclear weapons.

Kahlili says the Iranian leadership is motivated by Mahdism, the messianic belief that the 12th imam of Shiism, the Mahdi, will one day reappear to establish universal Islam. The trigger is the destruction of Israel.

Sanctions against Iran won’t work, Kahlili argues. “It’s not about the economy. It’s about ideology,” he says.

Of Obama’s many foreign-policy disasters, history may view his indifference to the Green Revolution, or indeed to the very notion of Iranian regime change, as his biggest.

Forget Syria

We need to neutralize Iran:

It is unseemly and stupid for Washington to remonstrate with the Russians for playing the spoiler in Syria, for example by providing the Assad regime with attack helicopters. The way to deal with this dog is to beat up the dog’s owner, namely Tehran. Washington’s pathetic display of solicitude towards a terrorist regime that uses negotiations to buy time for nuclear weapons development aggravates every other problem in the region, Syria above all.

Yup.

Another Spy Outed By Democrats

First Valerie Plame, and now this:

Not only is the supposed CIA asset not a CIA asset at all, but the entire operation was exposed prematurely and the double-agent’s life was immediately threatened by an intelligence leak that very well may have come out of the White House for political gain.

As the story broke, the establishment media was more than happy to attribute the intelligence coup to the CIA and the Obama administration, describing the mole as a “CIA informant.”

It turns out that wasn’t true. The double-agent hadn’t been recruited and placed by the CIA, but by British intelligence, who also managed the operation. In fact, the Americans had only recently been made aware of the joint British-Saudi effort.

The leaks about the operation from the American side have infuriated British intelligence officials, who had hoped to continue the operation. The leaks not only scuttled the mission but put the life of the asset in jeopardy. Even CIA officials, joining their MI5 and MI6 counterparts, were describing the leaks as “despicable,” attributing them to the Obama administration.

Of course, this one was much worse than the Plame slip. I’ll bet there are a lot of people in the British government who can’t wait for November, either.

Geert Wilders

Some meditations on him, and the troubled Netherlands, from Mark Steyn:

…in the end the quiet life isn’t an option. It’s not necessary to agree with everything Mr. Wilders says in this book — or, in fact, anything he says — to recognize that, when the leader of the third-biggest party in one of the oldest democratic legislatures on earth has to live under constant threat of murder and be forced to live in “safe houses” for almost a decade, something is badly wrong in “the most tolerant country in Europe” — and that we have a responsibility to address it honestly, before it gets worse.

A decade ago, in the run-up to the toppling of Saddam, many media pundits had a standard line on Iraq: It’s an artificial entity cobbled together from parties who don’t belong in the same state. And I used to joke that anyone who thinks Iraq’s various components are incompatible ought to take a look at the Netherlands. If Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs can’t be expected to have enough in common to make a functioning state, what do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian bi-swinging stoners and anti-whoring anti-sodomite anti-everything-you-dig Muslims? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of the Netherlands?

It’s long, but read the whole thing.