The regional war in which Iraq is a battlefield

Michael Ledeen:

At his press conference last week, President Bush — echoing the public assessments from his military underlings in Iraq — gave a clear picture of the war. Remarkably, not a single political leader or pundit saw fit to notice the dimensions of the war he described:

The fight in Iraq is part of a broader struggle that’s unfolding across the region...The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers.

The same Hezbollah terrorists who are waging war against the forces of democracy in Lebanon are training extremists to do the same against coalition forces in Iraq.

The same Syrian regime that provides support and sanctuary for Islamic jihad and Hamas has refused to close its airport in Damascus to suicide bombers headed to Iraq.

...the war against extremists and radicals is not only evident in Iraq, but it’s evident in Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and Afghanistan.

In short, the president sees that it is a regional war, as it has been from the beginning, just as our enemies in Damascus and Tehran publicly told us it would be, even before a single American soldier set foot in Iraq. The two biggest causes of casualties in Iraq are non-indigenous: suicide bombers and constantly improving explosive devices deployed in and alongside roads. Eighty to ninety percent of all suicide bombers are foreigners (mostly Saudis who are trained in Syria), not Iraqis, and the explosives have long been known to be of Iranian design to contain Iranian components, and often constructed in Iran (see the latest intelligence news about al Qaeda reconstituting in Iran).

Moreover, the spinal column of the terror army in Iraq is intimately linked to Iran and Syria. As U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner recently put it, our recent successes in Iraq have been accomplished despite ongoing resistance from al-Qaeda, proxy groups like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and their Lebanese Hezbollah surrogates. Bergner stressed that the activities of these Iranian forces, and joint instruments of Iran and Syria such as Hezbollah, are relentlessly increasing. “we’ve actually been very forthright in explaining the role that those groups are having and they are an increasing problem — one that’s having an increasingly destabilizing effect on both the government of Iraq and creating more problems for us to deal with.”

With all that, Bergner insisted “that there is no question that al Qaeda is the principle fueler of violence and sectarian attacks,” and is therefore our main target. But it is indisputable — and further information is emerging every day to confirm this — that al Qaeda itself is hardly an independent actor. Several years ago, Spanish judge Baltazar Garçon noted that the leaders of al Qaeda reconstituted their headquarters in Iran after being driven from Afghanistan. I wrote at the time that Osama bin Laden and key members of his family had gone to Iran, and other key figures, such as Zarqawi (the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, lest we forget), had created an international terror network from Tehran. I have no doubt that when we finally unravel the terror network, we will find that people like Zarqawi repeatedly went back and forth between Iraq, Syria, and Iran, as did — and does — arch terrorists like Imad Mughniyah of Hezbollah.

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Big wars require big strategies, and we do not have one. Yet. I believe the country would support one if the case were made clearly and honestly. Taking the war to our enemies in Damascus and Tehran does not require troops on the ground or bombs from the air, except in the limited cases of terrorist training camps and weapons factories. It requires, above all, two things: support for the democratic forces in Syria and Iran, and the will to confront our enemies. That will can be easily expressed, but no president has had the coherence and courage to do that. Iran has been at war with us for nearly thirty years, but no president has ever said we want an end to the terror regime in Tehran.

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I suspect he is over optimistic about the current political climate. I think the abandoning of the Bush doctrine on going after states that support terrorism in order to limit the battlefield to Iraq was a big mistake that has prolong the war and given our enemies an opportunity for victory on that battlefield. I have suggested on many occasions that control of Iraq's border with Syria should begin at the Damascus airport where the foreign fighters land. That is the choke point. We should also be attacking Iran's weapons manufacturing facilities. Now how many Democrats will support doing anything that effective?