After Iraq, you can bet we're going after Syria and Iran. Probably not through force, but subversion.
Britain's role is crucial in next stage of war on terror - Iran
portal.telegraph.co.uk
........As one of those thinkers, Michael Ledeen, of the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank closest to the Bush Administration, puts it: "Iran is the mother of modern Islamic terrorism. The mad vision that we now associate with Osama bin Laden was elaborated more than a decade ago by Ayatollah Khomeini and institutionalised in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both preach unbridled hatred of America, the Jews, and anything that represents the modern secular state."
Iran is, if you like, the Henry Ford of modern terror: it invented an assembly line, from the local mosque to the terrorist training camp, which is now copied everywhere. That assembly line is today global in scale, and takes in all types of Islam: Shi'ite, Sunni and Wahhabi, as well as Iraqi-promoted Salafism - even more hardline than Wahhabism, and closely tied to bin Laden. As Ledeen puts it: "The best way to think of the terror network is as a collection of mafia families. Sometimes they co-operate, sometimes they argue, sometimes they even kill one another. But they can always put aside their differences whenever there is a common enemy."
The interception early last year by the Israelis of the Karine A, a ship loaded with tons of explosives and Iranian weapons, en route from Dubai - a major Iranian operational base - to the Palestinian Authority is a typical example of such co-operation. The Iranians are Shi'ite, the Palestinians Sunni.
But it is proving difficult enough to get the UN to support action against Iraq. Mr Bush's most fundamental belief is that actions have consequences. If the UN behaves irresponsibly, it will pay the price. A phrase is doing the rounds: the US out of the UN, and the UN out of the US...... |
