IRGC: "We will 'Punch' U.S.

APNEWS:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - 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."

Update: Supreme Leader of Iran says the US is stuck "in a Whirlpool":

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Sunday launched a new attack on the United States, saying Iran's arch-enemy was "stuck in a whirlpool," and would sink deeper in the future. "America is weaker compared to 20 years ago, and it does not have its previous power and grandeur," Khamenei said in a speech to participants in a religious conference, state television said. "America and its followers are stuck in a whirlpool, and they sink deeper as time passes. A dangerous future is predicted for them," he added.

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IRGC Officially a Terrorist Group

The Arabic Part of the IRGC's logo (the picture on the right) is a verse from quoran (koran). It means "Be prepard to fight with the enemy in everyway you can" (financially, militarily, economically).

Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist'


WaPo :

The United States has decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist," according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group's business operations and finances.

The Bush administration has chosen to move against the Revolutionary Guard Corps because of what U.S. officials have described as its growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its support for extremists throughout the Middle East, the sources said.

[...]

It authorizes the United States to identify individuals, businesses, charities and extremist groups engaged in terrorist activities. The Revolutionary Guard would be the first national military branch included on the list, U.S. officials said -- a highly unusual move because it is part of a government, rather than a typical non-state terrorist organization.

The order allows the United States to block the assets of terrorists and to disrupt operations by foreign businesses that "provide support, services or assistance to, or otherwise associate with, terrorists."
The main goal of the new designation is to clamp down on the Revolutionary Guard's vast business network, as well as on foreign companies conducting business linked to the military unit and its personnel. The administration plans to list many of the Revolutionary Guard's financial operations.

"Anyone doing business with these people will have to reevaluate their actions immediately," said a U.S. official familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision has not been announced. "It increases the risks of people who have until now ignored the growing list of sanctions against the Iranians. It makes clear to everyone who the IRGC and their related businesses really are. It removes the excuses for doing business with these people." Read Further

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Terrorism: Bourgeoisie to Blame

Terrorism: Bourgeoisie to Blame
Posted by Marcus From Harry's place
It is still - regrettably - a commonplace argument on some parts of the left that terrorism is an understandable phenomenon caused by poverty and poor social conditions.
Harry's Place has long taken issue with this fashionable nonsense dressed up in radical clothing. The facts, as they come in, are bearing our analysis out.
Here's Andrew Pierce with exhibit A:

The roots of last week's attempted terrorist attacks in Britain lie not in poverty but in the thwarted aspirations of middle-class Muslims
The two doctors Bilal Abdulla, 27, and Kafeel Ahmed, 27, who allegedly were in the Jeep Cherokee loaded with a deadly cocktail of incendiary material into the frontage of Glasgow Airport, would make a classic textbook study for psychological profilers. They were trained in Baghdad where medicine is one of the most sought-after professions of the wealthy middle classes.

Ed Hussain - who certainly knows what he's talking about - doesn't demur from the view of terrorism as essentially a pastime indulged in by frustrated and unstable elements of the bourgeoisie:

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 bombers, was university educated. So was Omar Sheikh who masterminded the filmed beheading of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist who was captured in Iraq. Omar Khyam, a cell ringleader who was convicted this year of a 2004 plot to blow up a London nightclub and shopping mall with fertiliser bombs, was a computer sciences student. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned 9/11 and other attacks had a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University. Osama bin Laden was an engineer.
"Al-Qa'eda is filled with people who are graduates from medical and engineering colleges," Husain says. "They regard scripture like a textbook, manual or medical handbook. In their minds, there is no room for any humanity based nuance or even alternative arguments. They have the arrogance of their advanced education, consider themselves to be above the rest, and to be absolutely right."

So where does the idea that attemting to incinerate hundreds of working class Glaswegians off on their holidays is the understandable reaction to poor social conditions and inequality in the Arab world?

You can't do much better than Exhibit B - an article by Seumas Milne who used to be comments editor of the Guardian - printed in that newspaper on 13 September 2001. He's talking about the twin towers not Glasgow airport but the assumed linkage between "inequality", "social conditions" and premiditated acts of mass murder designed to kill large numbers of people in the West is clear:

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.

While one shouldn't hold anyone's class background against them it is instructive to bear in mind that those who attempt to argue that Islamist terrorism is an authentic voice of the downtrodden and oppressed - and who airily dismiss overwhelming evidence to the contrary - may do so from a background which, while admirably contrarian, can't really be said to have suffered much in the way of real injustice and inequality.
The fact of the matter is that working class attitudes to terrorism - as demonstrated by those who tackled the frustrated firestarters in Glasgow - are light years away from those who presume to pontificate on the 'root causes' of attempted and actual mass murder.
It is only "the arrogance of their advanced education" which prevents certain people from seeing things as they actually are: that terrorism - from Baader Meinhoff to Bin Laden - is an overwhelmingly middle-class phenomenon which has nothing to do with any real or meaningful radicalism; that it actually prevents social progress in any society in which it is allowed to flourish; that it is a political dead end romanticised by those who really should know better - and that people who understand these facts should not fail to challenge every utterance of those who argue otherwise until their verbiage is seen for what it actually is - confused, cockeyed, and massively counterproductive to the political progress of those in the world who need it most.

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A Jacksonian on Luttwak

Luttwak makes the common mistake of assuming that once the oil slows from the ME, the power will wane. Terrorism now uses multiple sources for funding: narcotrafficking, bank fraud, grey market goods sales, theft, kidnap for ransom, and the ever popular murder for hire.

Petrodollars make it worse, yes, but the present idea that free markets and cheap goods are making things safer and the world freer is misguided and no place more so than the Middle East. Trade does not get freedom. International insitutions do not get freedom.

If either of those were true then after 90 years of having it go on in the Middle East, it should be the freest place on the planet.

I do not see that for some very strange reason.This is primarily not a money flow question as that area has been a haven for tyrants, thugs and Empires for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Of freedom and liberty based upon the rights of man, there has been scant evidence of it.
In fact the drying up of money will make things more restive, more tense and those new sources, like Canada with the tar sands and the US with its oil shales, even more hated for 'taking such riches away'. That is, of course, irrational. Perhaps Mr. Luttwak has not noticed the lack of rational actors in the region?

Mussolini still managed to get a lot of folks killed, threaten the vital supply link of the Suez and had an outside chance, with Germany, of cutting off Gibraltar if Germany had held to its original War Plan. Thankfully that was not done.

This enemy has no Nation and wishes all Nations overturned. It can get cheap arms anywhere because we do not do a thing about going after trade with our enemies. There are a number of vital supply and transport links that can be targeted with some ease and if any non-conventional weapon is used possibly removed from the global economy on a long-term basis. I suggest that the economic argument is trivial compared to the long-term survival argument. If we do not put an end to terrorism and dreams of Empire we and our children *will live* to regret our effete attitudes towards civilization and how to hold it.

The fighting would have been bad, but manageable in 1917 and given basis for the US to help bring about more Nations aligned with their Peoples. We did not do that.

The US could have done a bit more after WW II beyond mere anti-colonial support and put in some actual help to the region in the way of schools and building a good base for decent jobs. We did not do that, either.

We could have stopped supporting tyrants or actually overthrown those not in the direct control of the USSR. We did not do that.

Now we pay for the inaction of parents and grand-parents who could have helped other Peoples find a route to freedom by expending blood and money to fight a hard, nasty war that had no good end because it was not fought to completion anywhere. That is still left undone in the Balkans and Middle East. And the price of that is held by a butcher that has decided we need to pay with our lives and freedom.

Time to put fancy ideas of economic reality away and start to deal with this other, actual, real sort of reality, where there are non-rational actors in the world.

Because if we do not put an end to them, then they shall do so to us.

A Jacksonian is brilliant, as always. I would also add a few lines from a recent interview with Amir Taheri by the JP:

There are three ways of dealing with this: You can surrender to Iran - by saying, "We'll give you the Middle East and then we'll go away." (Some Americans want to do this, because they don't have the stomach for anything else.) Or you can make a deal with it, like Clinton wanted to, by giving some zones of influence to Iran, and some zones of influence to the United States and then wait until Allah decides what happens (Highly likely that this is what we will get if the Democrats win the presidency in 2008) - like a mini-Cold War. Or you can resist it - by saying, "You want to create Khamenei's Middle East; we want to create Bush's Middle East" -

And NO, that doesn't mean War with Iran. Michael Rubin explains exactly how I feel:

The idea that there is a preventive war strategy to change the regime is at best a straw-man argument and at worst a conspiracy theory.Criticism regarding carrier group dispatch is misplaced. First, it is important that Arab states in the Persian Gulf recognize that the United States is going to defend its interests and protect our allies. Second, while Washington assumes events revolve around our decisions, the danger is Iranian overconfidence. Decision-makers in Iran, those in the office of the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard, may confuse democratic debate with weakness and inadvertently cross a red line. We know from their statements that they do not take U.S. diplomatic demarches seriously. That the United States is willing to demonstrate red lines aids transparency and reduces the risk of accidental conflict.

With regard to engagement, we need to abandon the notion that long-term strategies to encourage the accountability of the Iranian government to its citizenry and short-term diplomacy are mutually exclusive. Providing moral support for the Vahed transportation workers’ ongoing attempts to form the Islamic Republic’s first independent trade union will not bring instant change. That does not mean it is wise to ignore them or to collude with the regime that seeks to crush them.

Even as Iran’s nuclear program has developed, the Bush administration has lacked a cohesive policy toward Tehran. An artificial dichotomy between engagement and regime change has polarized debate. Too often, proponents of engagement construct a straw-man argument about regime change to equate it with military action.

No serious policymaker seeks military action against Iran. Iranians are nationalistic. Any military strike would enable the regime to rally Iranians around the flag. Nor would even targeted strikes against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities end its program; at best, military strikes would only delay it. Nothing would be more irresponsible than the White House using the military to buy time because policymakers have not had the discipline to formulate a strategy.

This does not mean unrestrained engagement is a better option. Between 2000 and 2005, the apex of both European engagement and the Khatami presidency, EU trade with Tehran almost tripled. During that same period, Iranian leaders pumped hard currency into their weapons program and, at the time, still-covert nuclear program. Either Khatami’s rhetoric was insincere or he, like the many diplomats under him, had no insight into or control over the actions of other power centers.

If engagement is to be successful, it must include the sincere involvement of the people who control those aspects of regime behavior which Washington finds most objectionable—this means the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards. This is an unlikely prospect.

Everyone who has been to Iran is aware of the sophistication of Iranian intellectuals and much of the public. Many Iranians resent the corruption and adventurism of their leadership. The reformers are largely discredited. They are new paint on a rotten house. No Iranian inside Iran wants regime change from abroad, but they do embrace the ideas of popular sovereignty and democracy. Here, interests converge. Should the Iranian leadership become more accountable to its citizenry, then they will emphasize what most Iranians want—better schools, medical care, and employment prospects rather than expensive adventurism.

What policymakers should support are Iranian efforts to democratize and force accountability upon their leadership. This is what independent unions inside Iran struggle for. Democracy is just peaceful regime change. I agree with Robert that we should rely on internal forces as the agents of change. Unfortunately, regime engagement will both undercut those forces and enable the Iranian leadership to run down the clock on its nuclear program.

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Book: Islamic Fundamentalism

Islamic Fundamentalism - The new Global Threat - Mohammad Mohaddessin

Foreword

[...]
The new nexus, it soon was learned, began in Tehran with approximately $100 million a year in expenditures; ideas, influence, and money then moved to Sudan, where that country's government transformed it into training camps and influence for fundamentalists from Algeria to Tunisia to Egypt and (again) the Gulf. The situation by 1993 had become so serious that Turkish President Turgut Ozal warned when he came to Washington that the world was now facing basically a "religious war" of extremist and radically politicized Islam against the West...

Preface

Introduction: In the eye of the Storm

I
Dogmatism Versus Democracy: A Brief History of Fundamentalism

The Fundamentalist Appeal

Fanaticism Versus Liberty

Kharajites: First Advocates of Dogmatism

Legitimizing the Status Quo

Democratic, Antireactionary Islamic Movements

Shi'ism in Safavid and Post-Safavid Iran

Iran's Constitutional Revolution of 1906

Sunnism and the New Era

Conclusion

II

The Pillars of the Mullahs' Rule

Two Pillars of Khomeini's Rule:

Terror

Export of Islamic Revolution

Velayat-e-faqih in the Constitution

III
The Post - Khomeini Regime
Constitution Revised
Moderation an Anathema

IV
Mother of All Islamic Lands": The Mullahs' Foreign Policy

V
Fertile Grounds for Fundamentalism

The Power of Islam
A Bastion of Islamic Culture
Decline of Nationalism
Role of Oil
Global Changes
Appeasement: An Ominous Policy
Fundamentalism and Islam's Great Schism
....

Read the entire book online here.

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International Gangsterism yet the Mullahs still Secure and more Emboldened than Ever!!

Yahoo News: Britain demands Iran free seized sailors

Iran's hardline Revolutionary Guards captured 15 British sailors and marines at gunpoint Friday in the Persian Gulf — a provocative move coming during heightened tensions between the West and Iran.
Iran's Foreign Ministry insisted the Britons were operating in Iranian waters and would be held "for further investigation," Iranian state television said.
A U.S. Navy official in Bahrain, Cmdr. Kevin Aandahl, said Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces were responsible and had broadcast a brief radio message saying the British party was not harmed...
The incident occurred as the U.N. Security Council debates expanding sanctions against Iran seeking to force Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment. The U.S. and other nations suspect Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. Iran denies that and insists it won't halt the program.
Iran's leaders also have denied allegations by the U.S., Britain and others that Iranians are arming Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq.
Hours before the seizure of the Royal Navy team, British Lt. Col. Justin Maciejewski told BBC Radio 4's "Today" program from the Iraqi city of Basra that Iranians provided weapons and money to militants who are attacking British troops in southern Iraq.
The U.S. military has leveled similar charges, saying Iranians send arms to Iraqi extremists, including sophisticated roadside bombs.

This week, two commanders of an Iraqi Shiite militia told The Associated Press in Baghdad that hundreds of Iraqi Shiites had crossed into Iran for training by the elite Quds force, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard thought to have trained Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

Why is Iran apparently less troubled vis-à-vis giving the US/UK Casus belli than the leftists/islamists/communists who accuse those who condemn Iran on egregious violation of human rights basis?

Whenever anyone displays the slightest of objection in regards to, a woman being stoned to death in Iran, a scholar jailed , a teacher or a worker tortured and has his tongue cut out (Ossanlou, the head of the Bus Workers Union) and summarily hanged or executed, people on the left censure those raising objections with the stale response that this is helping Neocons and “the Zionists” by providing them more red herring to go to war with Iran. The dispute is that this type of condemnation helps to "vilify" Iran in laying the groundwork for war.

Doesn't it seem that the "leader" and his errand boy,Ahmadinejad,want a war in order to maintain their increasing volatile and eroding hold on power. Either war or a long stand off with a humiliated US and Britain will strengthen their position and shore up more support at home. After all, the errand boy, Ahmadinejad, was one of the Revolutionary Guards who might have been involved (directly or indirectly) in holding the US Embassy staff hostage. He remembers how that incident was responsible for the jihadist (khomeinists junata) ascendany to grab the power and hijack the revolution.

If objecting the stoning to death of women and other horrendous human rights violations in Iran are "providing an excuse", what the hell is taking British sailors prisoner and training Iraqi militias then?

BREAKING: The Mighty Mouse Is not Coming to the UN after all.

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Islamic Republic's Counter-offesive Since The Surge

Since the surge:

1. Sadr's militia public protest in Sadr city against US forces

2. Attempted assassination of the Sadr city mayor who was leaning to the US side

3. Sudden stories of Mahdi militia splitting from Sadr and being trained in Iran so Sadr's hardcore could go after the US with plausible deniability and impunity

4. Fadilla party is attacked in Basra by Mahdi "rogues"

5. Iran taking 15 British troops hostage in what sounds like a blatant TRAP set by Iran

On Saturday the UNSC votes after the thug-in-cheif, Ahmadinejad gives his death-to america speech.

The Islamic Republic has crossed the line this time. They have openly engaged in an act of war against two sovereign nations. They really are pushing their luck this time. I wonder how the appeasers and apologists are going to rationalize and justify this blatant and provoctive act of aggression.

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Iran: Teacher and Journalist Brutally beaten up in Evin Prison

Teachers and Journalist in Evin Prison:

Potkin: Its the Iranian New Year, Nowrooz, and hundreds of Iranian teachers are in Evin prison. They should have spent Nowrooz with their families, around the Haft-Sin table waiting for the exact hour, minute and second when the Spring Equinox takes place. Their children should be thinking of nothing but their new clothes, and their new presents. Yet all they have on their mind is when will Mum or/and Dad come home?

What is the "crime" of Iranian teachers? Why are they in prison? According to the Islamic Republic, they have threatened the national security of the regime by peacefully demonstrating for a better standard of living!! What an insecure regime this Islamic Republic is that its security is so easily threatened. In fact all the teachers have asked for, is the enactment of a public sector pay bill passed by the parliament!

I wish I had time and could translate this article in this Iranian blog:
http://sajjadkhaksari.blogfa.com/
It is written by a reporter who got mixed up with the hundreds of teachers who were arrested. More than 50 plain clothes agents on motor bikes attack the teachers, and the reporter is taken along with the rest of the teachers to an abandoned house, where cleric judges decide who should go to Evin prison in summary trials that lasts a few minutes. He then describes how these ordinary decent people were treated. How men and women, old and young were beaten up and what kind of vulgar insults were hurled at the women teachers. How their headscarfs were pulled off and when the male teachers stood up for their female colleagues, how badly they were beaten up.

The army conscripts seem to be apologetic and sorry. One of them tells the inmates "Please forgive me for what they have made me do to you". But the plain clothes cavemen seem to be from another planet or another age! Everyone is asking "what kind of animals are they? Don't they have wives and kids themselves? Where are they from?"

And it wouldn't surprise me, if one day we find out these cavemen were imports from Iraq. May be Moqtada Sadr's followers who have escaped from Iraq recently.

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Iran 'Paying Iraqis 500 Dollars a Month' to Attack Coalition Forces

The Austrailian:

IRANIAN -- agents are paying local Iraqis around the southern city of Basra as much as 500 dollars a month to carry out attacks on coalition forces. British Lieutenant Colonel Justin Maciejewski said contact with locals suggested that the “vast majority” of violence against British troops stationed in the city came from outside Iraq.

“We haven't found any 'smoking gun' but certainly all the circumstantial evidence points to Iranian involvement in the bombings here in Basra, which is disrupting the city to a great extent,” he added.

Lt-Col Maciejewski, who is the commanding officer at the British base at Basra Palace, went on: “Local sheikhs and tribal leaders here in Basra - who are desperate to prevent this violence escalating - are telling us that Iranian agents are paying up to $500 a month for young Basrawi men to attack us.

“I have no direct proof that I can put my hand on, but I have no reason to disbelieve what we have been told by locals here, who are desperate for this interference in their internal affairs to stop.

“They want to rebuild their city and make it a thriving city here in southern Iraq.”

The officer's comments follow those by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has on a number of occasions accused Tehran of supplying Iraqis opposed to the coalition presence with weapons, via Iraq's loose eastern border with Iran.

“We have a lot of very modern and quite sophisticated weaponry being used against us - weaponry that could only really have been procured from a state,” Lt-Col Maciejewski said.

“These are not old munitions from the Iran-Iraq war. They are much more modern, some of them produced in 2006 and the locals are telling us that these are coming in from Iran.”

Mr Blair announced in February that the 7200-strong British contingent in and around Basra would be cut by 1600 in the coming months and drop to about 5000 by the end of the year as Iraqi security services assume more control.

Forces are expected to remain at Basra Palace until late summer with the bulk of British troops remaining at Basra Air Station to support the Iraqis.

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Iran Detains British Sailors in Iraq Waters and they Don't even have Nukes, yet!

The NY Times:

LONDON (AP) -- Iranian naval vessels seized 15 British sailors in Iraqi waters on Friday, the Ministry of Defense said.

The British Navy personnel were ''engaged in routine boarding operations of merchant shipping in Iraqi territorial waters,'' and had completed their inspection of a merchant ship when they were accosted by Iranian vessels, the ministry said.

''We are urgently pursuing this matter with the Iranian authorities at the highest level and ... the Iranian ambassador has been summoned to the Foreign Office,'' the ministry said.

A Pentagon official said the Britons were in two inflatable boats from the frigate H.M.S. Cornwall during a routine smuggling investigation, said the official, who spoke on condition on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the incident.

He said the confrontation happened as the British contingent was traveling along the boundary of territorial waters between Iran and Iraq. They were detained by the Revolutionary Guard's navy, he said.

A fisherman who said he was with a group of Iraqis from the southern city of Basra fishing in Iraqi waters in the northern area of the Gulf said he saw the Iranian seizure. The fisherman declined to be identified because of security concerns.

''Two boats, each with a crew of six to eight multinational forces, were searching Iraqi and Iranian boats Friday morning in Ras al-Beesha area in the northern entrance of the Arab Gulf, but big Iranian boats came and took the two boats with their crews to the Iranian waters.''

The Britain government said it had demanded ''the immediate and safe return of our people and equipment.''...more

If this doesn't constitute an act of war, I don't know what does?

Roxie, as always is on top of things and does what she can as a concerned grandmother and writes to the Islamic Republic and the UNSC to voice her alarm and trepedation about the kind of world her granddaughter has to live in faced with nuclear-armed natural-born killers ruling Iran:

Roxie's letter to UN and the Islamic Republic:

To: The Iranian Government and UNSC Members and the United States Government:

Iran has committed an act of war against the British. News: "Iranian forces seized 15 British Royal Navy personnel."

It should be crystal clear to world leaders that Iran is NOT a peaceful nation. It should be clear that Iran lies to the world about being a peaceful nation. Iran’s aggressive nature, its funding, training and arming terrorists in the world combined with Indicted government officials for acts of terrorism make a granite-solid case that Iran presents a danger to the world and Iran lies about the danger.

World leaders must stop bowing down to Iran and unite to end the Iranian threat, not continue to help Iran become a nuclear bully. World leaders must not permit an aggressive, Iranian bully to get within sight of nuclear technology that can be used to create weapons. Iran has made it clear that it is an aggressive nation, a nation unwilling to act civilized.

World leaders, my granddaughter deserves a world without Iranian terrorist bullies. Please help my granddaughter by uniting together and using whatever action may be necessary to destroy the aggressive, bullying Iranian government’s danger to civilized society.

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Iran role reported in schism of Iraq militia

Chicago Tribune reports that a group of shi'ite militia have broken allegiance with Moqtada and now are being trained in Iran. Are we going to have an 'Iraqi Hizballah' under the auspieces of Supreme Leader of Ignorance, Aytaollah Khameani? Are they going to fight their shi'ite brethern loyal to Moqtada Sadr? Excerpt below:


The Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army is breaking into splinter groups, with as many as 3,000 gunmen now financed directly by Iran and no longer loyal to the firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr, adding a potentially even more deadly element to Iraq's violent mix.

Two senior militia commanders told The Associated Press that hundreds of these fighters have crossed into Iran for training by the elite Quds Force, a branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard thought to have trained Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

The breakup is an ominous development at a time when U.S. and Iraqi forces are working to defeat religious-based militias and secure Iraq under government control. While Sadr's forces have fought the coalition repeatedly, including pitched battles in 2004, they have mostly stayed in the background during the latest offensive.

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60 Minutes: Jihad Online!

Afghanistan and Iraq are half a world away from the United States, but the most important front in the war on terror may just be a mouse click away. Correspondent Scott Pelly takes an in-depth look at the world of Jihad online, including how ordinary Americans are fighting back.

Watch the video produced by the News Program, 60 Minutes, by clicking here.

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Machiavelli and the Mullahs

Fascinating article by David J. Rusin in the American Thinker. Here are some highlights:

At the confluence of radical Islam, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction lies Tehran. The Islamic Republic is the first modern theocracy in the Muslim world, and its founding presaged an era of escalated conflict between Islam and the West. Iran also distinguishes itself as the most prolific state sponsor of terrorism, with Hezbollah and Hamas among its many acolytes. The mullahs are currently plying their terrorist trade in Iraq, where sectarian violence is being fueled by Iranian money and materiel. Shiite Iran has also provided support to the Sunni jihadists of Al Qaeda. Not only did a majority of the Saudi "muscle" hijackers pass through Iran prior to September 11, but the nation also welcomed prominent Al Qaeda figures fleeing Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. Security chief Saif al-Adel and Osama Bin Laden's son Saad head the list of Al Qaeda luminaries believed to enjoy refuge there.

Now imagine this regime armed with nuclear weapons. In just a few short years, imagination may no longer be necessary. Unmoved by half-hearted Security Council resolutions and never-ending dialogue with Europe, Iran continues to plow ahead with its uranium enrichment program. Tehran naturally seeks to assure a credulous international community that its nuclear ambitions are peaceful in nature. However, such claims ring hollow in light of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's persistent boasts that Israel will soon be "wiped off the map."

While its centrifuges still have quite a bit of spinning left to do, Tehran already possesses the delivery systems it needs to carry out threats against the Jewish state and project power throughout the Middle East. Iran's Shahab 3 missile can strike both Israel and Saudi Arabia, while future upgrades will extend its range to all of Europe and perhaps even the eastern United States. Moreover, the Washington Times recently noted that Tehran has augmented its arsenal by purchasing 18 North Korean-made derivatives of an old Soviet submarine-launched missile - a missile which was specifically designed to carry nuclear warheads.

In short, Iran's key role in the rise of radical Islam, its decades-long support for terror, and the genocidal taunts of its millenarian president lead to an inescapable conclusion: the Islamic Republic must not get the bomb. A nuclear-armed Tehran would jeopardize American security, menace its neighbors, and present an existential threat to Israel...

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