Iran: not so easily defended by the left...

Romancing the Mullahs
By Joseph Klein
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/20/2007

In the alternative universe inhabited by the radical Left, Iran’s mad mullahs want nothing more than peaceful co-existence with the United States and Israel. Vice President Cheney and Senator Lieberman are the war-mongers, we are told - egged on by the Zionists and the Jewish lobbyists who control the key power centers in Washington, D.C.


You can read an example of this kind of pro-Iranian propaganda in a blog, featured on the August 17th edition of the Left-wing Huffington Post, entitled Cheney, Lieberman and Iran War Conspiracy. The author, Dr. Gareth Porter, is described on his blog as an investigative historian, journalist on U.S. national security policy and frequent writer on Iran and Iraq.


Porter is one of the radical Left’s most prolific commentators who lash out against the Bush Administration’s policy toward the Islamic fanatics running Iran today. His articles appear regularly on Left-wing sites like Huffington Post, American Prospect, Antiwar.com, and TomPaine.com.


Gareth Porter, along with Noam Chomsky, are heroes of the radical Left movement for their long record of denouncing American policies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, which they say are built on lies and reflect our country’s imperialistic designs to dominate the world with military force. Consistently on the wrong side of history as millions have been liberated from the yoke of oppressive regimes by the sacrifices of the American people, these Leftist idols plow on with their defense of the indefensible. Giving the benefit of the doubt to their own democratically elected leaders rather than some of the world’s worst tyrants is simply not part of their DNA.


Porter’s writings on Iran provide clues to this boneheaded ‘thinking’. For example, in one recent article, Porter claimed that “[D]espite the administration’s complaints that Iran is supporting the Shiite militias who are causing sectarian violence, the United States itself is the quartermaster of the forces of sectarian civil war.”


Our tireless attempts to foster a viable ruling coalition representing the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, operating in a constitutional framework within which they can settle their differences peacefully, floats completely over this radical apologist’s head.


In another article, Porter blamed American reporters for trumping up a story about Iranians killing Americans in Iraq, even though we know that some sophisticated Improvised Explosive Devices used by Iraq’s Shia militants to kill and maim our troops have been traced to Iran.

Porter has also charged that the Bush Administration covered up a major peace overture that Iran made back in 2003, a charge which has seeped into the mainstream press as well. Porter’s charge is based on a copy of an unsigned faxed letter which he recently received. The letter purportedly had been originally relayed from the Iranian government via the Swiss Ambassador to Iran.


Porter and other Bush-bashers claim that the war-mongers in the Bush Administration spurned the Iranian government’s supposed offer of broad concessions to the United States, including cessation of terror and adoption of the Arab peace initiative recognizing Israel under certain conditions, in return for a softening of the US attitude toward Iran. Ever since they first received the letter in 2003, Administration officials have denied the letter’s existence because, Porter says, it would undercut their claims “that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.” As far as Porter is concerned the letter proves the Iranians’ peaceful intentions, and contrariwise its rejection by the United States proves our government’s aggressive, militaristic intentions.


Whether this letter is authentic or not is still a mystery. Secretary of State Rice claims that she never saw the letter. The Swiss embassy has reportedly acknowledged privately that Tim Guldimann, the Swiss ambassador who served as the intermediary, was freelancing.


Four Presidents before George Bush have tried the negotiation route with Iran, which ended in failure and humiliation. Negotiations between Iran and the Europeans have also proven fruitless for years. The Iranians simply used these negotiations as a cover to buy time for their uranium enrichment program. So there was no reason to expect an even more ambitious negotiation of a comprehensive peace to have any chance of success – in 2003 or today. In any case, the purported offer contained in the 2003 letter was made by the reformist regime that was subsequently swept out of the government by the arch-conservative mullahs and their hand-picked President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map. That is not a starting point for real negotiations to any rational person.


Nevertheless, let us assume for the moment that Porter is right and the letter is legitimate. If so, the Iranians effectively conceded their influence and involvement with the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad by offering for negotiation the following:


“1) stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad etc.) from Iranian territory, pressure on these organizations to stop violent action against civilians within borders of 1967.

2) action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon”


The letter also pledged “Iranian commitment for enhanced action against Al Qaida members in Iran” which can be taken as an admission that Osama bin Laden’s gang was finding refuge there.


Of course, we do not need the letter to substantiate the Iranian regime’s funding, training and harboring of terrorists who serve as their proxies to kill innocent civilians in the name of their fanatical Islamic theology. The proof of their complicity in terrorist acts around the world and in the killing of Americans since the mullahs came to power in 1979 is overwhelming. At long last, the Bush Administration has decided to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, which will allow our government to put more economic pressure on international companies that continue to do business with these thugs and to strike them wherever we find them.


Years before Porter decided to attack his own country for questioning the Iranian theocracy’s good intentions, he had defended one of the worst genocidal regimes in modern times next to Nazi Germany – the Khmer Rouge, which had slaughtered more than a million of their own people in Cambodia after the United States pulled its troops out of the region. He praised the “new revolutionary government” for its food policy and denied that a systematic slaughter of this scale ever took place. In testimony before a Congressional committee as a so-called expert on Southeast Asia at the time, he called reports of such mass slaughter nothing more than a “myth” perpetrated by the authors of a Reader’s Digest book and publicized by Time Magazine. This caused Democratic Congressman Solarz to compare Porter’s denial of the Cambodian genocide to the rants one would expect from a Nazi Holocaust denier.


Perhaps the statement in Porter’s Congressional testimony that reveals the most about the radical Left mindset is the following:


“There has been and will be a price paid in human lives, in hardship and suffering, and in the loss of certain values, in the revolutionary transformation of any society. Cambodia is no exception to that principle.”


Flash forward to today. The Iranian Islamic regime is killing its own people in the largest wave of executions in Iran since 1984 when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the shooting of thousands of political prisoners. Over the past two months alone, at least 118 people have been executed, including four who were stoned to death. It has been reported that one hundred fifty more people, including five women, are scheduled to be hanged or stoned to death in the near future.


We do not hear a peep from the radical Left about such human rights atrocities committed in the name of Islamic ideology. After all, there is “a price paid in human lives…in the revolutionary transformation of any society.” Indeed, the Iranian regime born in revolution against Western influence is one that Porter and his fellow Leftists appear to trust more than they trust their own government. In their worldview, if it were not for Bush’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Islamic theocracy ruling Iran and his “administration's drive for greater dominance in the Middle East”, everything would be coming up roses in our relationship with Iran.


Denying the realities of mass slaughters committed by Communist totalitarian states and Islamic jihadists, radical Leftists have long been accustomed to believing the best about our enemies and the worst about our democratically elected leaders. To them, revolutionary transformation of societies to some utopian notion of perfection can excuse the blood that must be spilt to achieve the revolutionary goals. They would do well to pay heed to these telling words of Prophet Isaiah, but alas they never will: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; they put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Woe

 

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293710,00.html



I really hope they do "punch", rather than the sissy slaps they have undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan because I will delight when the U.S. punches back!...

Iran's Revolutionary Guards: We Will 'Punch' U.S.
Saturday, August 18, 2007



TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said they would not bow to pressure and threatened to "punch" the U.S., in their first response to Washington's plan to list them as a terrorist organization, newspapers reported Saturday.

Local press in the Iranian capital of Tehran quoted Revolutionary Guards leader Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi saying that he could understand Washington's ire toward the group because of their "leverage" against the U.S.

"America will receive a heavier punch from the guards in the future," he was quoted as saying in the conservative daily Kayhan. "We will never remain silent in the face of U.S. pressure and we will use our leverage against them."

There was no elaboration on what Safavi meant by the punch or the organization's "leverage."

Washington has accused the Guards of supporting militias and insurgent groups attacking U.S. forces in Iraq—charges Iran denies.

The fact that the remarks, made on Thursday in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, appeared in local newspapers rather than the official state news outlets suggest the comments are for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, other Iranian officials continued to speak out against Washington's move to register the group as a terrorist organization, with a government spokesman calling the claims "baseless," on the Web site of the state broadcasting company.

"The claims of the U.S. are baseless and have no takers around the world," he said Saturday, noting that "the U.S. has endangered the world many times under the excuse of fighting against terrorism."

On Tuesday, an unnamed official in the Bush administration said the U.S. planned to list the Guards as terrorist group in order to squeeze Iran.

The move was seen as an effort to pressure businesses the corps is thought to control, from construction to oil sectors. It would be the first time the U.S. would put a foreign government's military agency on the list, which includes the Al Qaeda network and the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.

Iranian armed forces spokesman Gen. Ali Reza Afshar hit out precisely against this attempt to declare a state body terrorist in an editorial Saturday in the country's largest circulation newspaper, calling it illegal.

"America's long time hostility against the Guard is clear and understandable, but this move against organization that is part of Iran's armed forces is illegal," he wrote in the daily Hamshahri.

The estimated 200,000-strong Revolutionary Guards is an elite force separate from Iran's regular military and has its own ground, naval and air units.

 

U.S.: Americans tracking Iranian forces in Iraq
Meanwhile, mortar barrage slams into Baghdad, killing 12, wounding 31



BAGHDAD - American forces are tracking about 50 members of an elite Iranian force who have crossed the border into southern Iraq to train Shiite militia fighters, a top U.S. general said Sunday. The French foreign minister, meanwhile, arrived in Baghdad on a groundbreaking visit after years of icy relations with the United States over Iraq.

In Paris, the foreign ministry said Bernard Kouchner was in “Iraq to express a message of solidarity from France to the Iraqi people and to listen to representatives from all communities.”

Merely stepping onto Iraqi soil was a major symbol of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s efforts to end any lingering U.S.-French animosities over the 2003 Iraq invasion.


In east Baghdad, a mortar barrage slammed into a mainly Shiite neighborhood, killing 12 and wounding 31, police said, and a major battle raged north of the capital where residents of a Shiite city were fighting what police said was a band of al-Qaida in Iraq gunmen.

Separately, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, whose command includes the volatile southern rim of Baghdad and districts to the south, said his troops are tracking about 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in their area — the first detailed allegation that Iranians have been training fighters within Iraq’s borders.

“We know they’re here and we target them as well,” he said, citing intelligence reports as evidence of their presence.

He declined to be more specific and said no Iranian forces have been arrested in his territory.

“We’ve got about 50 of those,” he said, referring to the Iranian forces. “They go back and forth. There’s a porous border.”

Iran denies accusations
The military has stepped up allegations against Iran in recent weeks, saying it supplies militants with arms and training to attack U.S. forces.

Iran denies the allegations and says it supports efforts to stop the violence.

The Bush administration is moving toward blacklisting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist” organization, subjecting at least part of the entity to financial sanctions, U.S. officials said this week.

A decision has been made in principle to name elements of the corps a “specially designated global terrorist” group, but internal discussions continue over whether it should cover the entire unit or only the Guard’s Al-Quds force, the most elite and covert of Iran’s military branches, which has equipped and trained Muslim fighters outside Iran’s borders.

Lynch, whose mission is to block the flow of weapons and fighters into the Baghdad area, said Sunni and Shiite extremists have become increasingly aggressive this month, trying to influence the debate in Washington before a pivotal progress report on Iraq.

He singled out the Shiite extremists as being behind rising attacks using armor-piercing explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, which he said were largely assembled in Iraq from parts smuggled in from Iran. He also noted a marked increase in Iranian-rockets that have been increasingly effective against U.S. bases.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20343131/

 

I didn't quite say that,... but it is telling concerning the muted acknowledgement of Iran's contribution to the tactics of terror against us from much on the left...

 

LOL...

Where do I start? Too many fools...too few bullets...

There are those on the left who defend Iran...That is undeniable. You have your Fellowship of the reconciliation...Code Pink...Peace Action...Michael Moore...(sigh)...Global exchange...and posters here who are NOT ready to admit...and so on and so forth...

...too few bullets...

 

High Stakes Game in Northern Iraq
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/23/2007

Over the past week, with Iranian shells raining down on Iraqi villages in Kurdish areas along the border zone in the north, Iran’s leaders have engaged the United States in a high stakes game that has gone virtually unreported in the elite media.

Iran has massed thousands of troops along its northwestern border in preparation for a ground assault against Iranian Kurdish fighters who have sought refuge in the rugged Qanbil mountains in northwestern Iraq.

On Tuesday, villagers found leaflets bearing the official Islamic Republic of Iran logo, ordering them to leave the area or face the consequences.

“Our enemies, mainly the Americans, are trying to plant security hurdles in our country (Iran),” the leaflets said. “They achieve this through using agents in the areas of Qandil and Khanira inside the Kurdish region. 'The authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran will work on cleansing this area.”

Hundreds of Iraqis from the villages of Qandoul and Qal’at Diza, close to the Iranian border in the province of Sulaymanyah, fled as a result of the Iranian shelling, according to wire service accounts.

Should Iran be allowed to carry out its planned attack, it would amount to an overt aggression against its neighbor. But the potential damage is far worse, because of the deep U.S. engagement in Iraq.

A successful Iranian attack against opposition Kurds from the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (known as PJAK) based in Iraq, will strike a triple blow against America.

Not only will the Iranians have violated Iraq’s sovereignty, guaranteed until now by the United States; they will have shown that despite the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the United States “can do nothing” against Iran, as the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, liked to say.

Even worse: if the United States sits this one out, we will send a terrible message to Iranian opponents of the regime in Tehran that despite all our calls for “freedom” and “democracy” in Iran, we will not intervene to prevent them from being massacred, even when we have the opportunity and the forces in place to save them from certain death.

And yet, unless Congress and the White House react immediately, that is precisely what is going to happen.

An Iranian victory in northern Iraq will have far-reaching consequences, and will further embolden president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is engaged in political, military, and intelligence hardball with the United States on multiple fronts, including inside Iraq.

Just last week, U.S. forces arrested another “high-priority” Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer in Baghdad, and accused him of funneling aid to Iraqi insurgents.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver announced the arrest on August 15, and said that coalition forces “will continue their focused operations against unhelpful Iranian influence interfering in Iraq.”

An unnamed U.S. official said that the Iranian Guardsman was responsible for smuggling explosively-formed penetrators, Katyusha rockets and other weapons into Iraq, and “had direct ties to senior militant leaders and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.”

Another U.S. military spokesman. Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, told reporters in Iraq on Aug. 14 that Iran had recently provided 240 mm long-range rockets to insurgents in Iraq for attacks on U.S. forces.

"The 240 mm rocket is a large-caliber projectile that has been provided to militia extremists groups in the past along with a range of other weapons from Iranian sources," Bergner said.

Similar Iranian-made rockets I examined last summer in Haifa and in other northern Israel towns and cities had been fired against Israeli civilian targets by Hezbollah with warheads containing thousands of miniature ball-bearings, designed to kill and maim.

On May 25, PKK guerillas in Turkey derailed a train bound for Syria for Iran, ostensibly carrying construction materials. When prosecutors went through the wreckage they found an Iranian-made rocket launcher and 300 rockets bound for Hezbollah in Syria, according to Turkish press reports.

There is no way those weapons could have transited Turkey on the Turkish national railroad without someone in the Turkish government knowing what was going on.

Iran is banking on its secret “entente” with Turkey – to supply Hezbollah through Syria, and to smash the bases of each other’s opposition Kurds in Iraq - to deter the United States from any military intervention in northern Iraq.

The Turks have been threatening for months to go after the PKK, who have tens of thousands of fighters training in camps inside Iraq, along the Turkish border.

And so the Iranians have spread the rumor, which until now has been accepted at face value, that its own Kurdish dissidents (PJAK) are actually the Iranian branch of the PKK, which the U.S. has designated as an international terrorist organization.

The State Department took Turkey’s insistence that PJAK was allied with the PKK seriously enough that it refused to meet earlier this month with visiting PJAK leader, Rahman Haj Ahmadi, despite his open support for the U.S. military presence in Iraq and his identification with U.S. goals in the region.

Both the PKK and PJAK have training camps in the Qanbil mountain range in northern Iraq. But because of the difficult geography, and their different needs, they inhabit “different sides of the mountains,” Rahman Ahmadi told me in Washington.

“The PKK doesn’t need us,” he said. “They have tens of thousands of fighters, and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers.”

But Ahmadi acknowledges that PJAK and the PKK cooperate to a certain degree, if only to prevent clashes between their own fighters.

“The president of the Iraqi Kurdish Regional government, Massoud Barzani, also has an agreement with the PKK,” he told me. “Does that make Barzani a supporter of the PKK?”

This is not the first time the Turks have played us in Iraq. In 2003, on a flimsy pretext of domestic opposition, they successfully prevented the 4th Infantry Division from crossing Turkey to join coalition forces that liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein.

We can sit by and allow Iran to violate Iraq’s sovereignty, defy the U.S. military, and smash a significant Iranian opposition group on the slim pretext that Iran is “merely” seeking to punish its own rebels, just as Turkey.

Or we can extend protection to the Iranian Kurds who have established training camps in the rugged mountains of northeastern Iraq, and inflict a double blow on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Clearly, the Iranians believe they can thumb their noses at the U.S. military. For more than a week, they have conducted intermittent shelling of Iraqi Kurdish villages in the general vicinity of suspected PJAK bases.

My Iranian sources tell me that the Iranians are hoping to expel PJAK from the area and replace them with Ansar al-Islam, the precursor group to al Qaeda in Iraq,

“They want to send Saad Bin Laden, who is currently in Iran under Iranian government protection, into a new base inside Iraq,” one source told me.

Saad Bin Laden is Osama Bin Laden’s eldest son, who is widely viewed as the heir to his terrorist empire, should his father die. He was given refuge in Iran shortly after al Qaeda evacuated its bases in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks.

PJAK is a natural ally of the United States. They seek to unite Iranians to overthrow the dictatorship of the clergy in Iran, and to work together to build a future secular democracy.

We don’t have to provide them weapons, or money, or training. But if we allow Iranian Revolutionary Guards troops to attack PJAK inside Iraq with impunity, we may as well pack up and leave – not just Iraq, but the entire region. Because we will have no credibility left.

If instead, if we seize this opportunity to smash an Iranian Revolutionary Guards offensive with massive force, we could send a message that will make Iran’s leaders think twice before messing with us again.

It’s about time we made Iran’s leaders pay a price for killing Americans and undermining America’s allies. Here is a terrific opportunity to get that job done.

 

I don't think so because there is a difference in being defensive and in being offensive...

Iran,... as usual is being offensive.