Defenders of the faith

Iran held their annual "Army Day" celebration in Tehran on Thursday. Aside from the customary chants of "death to America, death to Israel" some of the big wigs expanded on that theme:

"In a not so distant future, we should reach a point to have the most powerful military equipment in the world so that no one even think about invading our borders." Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said in his Friday prayer sermon carried live on state radio.

"And not only that of the Islamic republic, but also the borders of Islam ... We must defend oppressed Muslims everywhere so that the enemies do not dare to attack Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq."

Here's a propaganda packaging of last year's Army Day:



As to the current rhetoric, it's not clear whether they mean the current occupiers of those countries or other future invaders should we leave. Nevertheless, it's appears a direct threat based on acquisition of additional deterrent capability, understanding the weakness of our present thinned out military deployment and our aversion to a draft. There's only so much an air attack can do, for instance, if we take out their nuke sites and they send a million men/suicide brigades into both Iraq and Afghanistan we'd likely be overwhelmed. That's the current deterrent.

How does this square with our presidential candidates? Barack and Hillary are both advocating we leave Iraq and move troops to Afghanistan, so it's unclear whether that maneuver would fit the invaders bill since we're already there. Perhaps if a surrounding Sunni country were to fill the void left in Iraq by our departure they would technically qualify as an "invader" despite their Muslimness. Iran wasn't very
specific.

Barack's rhetoric is perhaps even more complicated, as he's hinted at rolling tanks into Pakistan to chase down bin Laden if the intelligence arises. At last check Pakistan was a Muslim country, so that appears to fit the bill.

Yet whenever anymore on the right mentions challenging Iran--the country making more daily threats than any other in the world, we get reactions like this:

Further, why would Iran strike at the U.S. with terrorism when they have been doing everything possible to avoid a war that would devastate their country?

Or nutball stuff like this:

Bush and Cheney have less than two years to go in their current role and want to go down in the history books as the heroes of the Pax Americana, as the men who managed to conquer the Middle East and its oil, as the men who took full-spectrum dominance seriously, while in their own country booking successes through exorbitant profits for the military-industrial complex and the realization of radical legislation.

So, if we challenge a country with a record of attacks on America a mile long we're oil mongers. Yet Barack Obama has said he'll attack AQ whenever and wherever he finds them. We know he means Pakistan, but no one has yet bothered to ask whether that would also include Iran (sections of which are Sunni, such as Baluchistan) or even the Hub of Islam itself--Saudi Arabia. After all.

But whatever the case it's a complicated picture, no doubt:

Bush can also see China and Russia waiting in the wings, not to promote conflict but to take advantage of self-destructive missteps that the United States takes that would give them more leverage over and control of global energy flows. Iran has the third-largest undeveloped oil reserves in the world and the second-largest undeveloped natural gas reserves.

Bush also knows that Iran controls "the temperature" of the terror networks it runs. Bombing Iran would blow the control gauge off, and Iran's terror networks could mobilize throughout the Middle East, Afghanistan and even the United States

Then again, one might say the most important valve was removed a few months ago. There was a time some thought that valve was THE most important one:

The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of Al-Qaeda. The Israeli sources claim that for the past two years Iraqi intelligence officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with Ayman Al Zawahiri. According to the sources, one of the Iraqi intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October by the Pakistanis near the border with Afghanistan. The Iraqis are also reported to have established strong ties with Imad Mughniyeh.

"We’ve only got scraps of information, not the full picture," admits one intelligence source, "but it was good enough for us to send a warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented massive terror attack was expected. One of our indications suggested that Imad Mughniyeh met with some of his dormant agents on secret trips to Germany. We believe that the operational brains behind the New-York attack were Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, who were probably financed and got some logistical support from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (SSO)."

Mughniyeh was the only one believed to have tried it before. On April 12th 1997, he was reported to be only two hours away from achieving the highest goal of any terrorist organisation (until last week): blowing up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. A man carrying a forged British passport with the name Andrew Jonathan Neumann was in a Jerusalem hotel preparing a bomb he was supposed to take on board an El-Al flight leaving Israel, when it accidentally went off. Andrew Jonathan Neumann was very badly injured but strong enough to reveal later to the Israelis that he was not British but Lebanese, and that his operation was supposed to be a special "gift" to Israel from Imad Mughniyeh.

Hmm. The next president will be handed an armload. Unfortunately there's no "magic wand to wave" to make it all go away.