Freedom Scholar  Michael A. Ledeen

As Matthew Levitt points out, we've been doing much better of late catching the Iranians, often in tandem with the Syrians, giving a lot of support to terrorists in Iraq. Better yet, we are slapping penalties on them, most recently on three terrorist supporters and leaders in Iran and one in Syria, where he runs the al-Zawra television station. Americans are henceforth forbidden to do business with these rogues, and if the USG-Iraq Reconstruction Task Force can get at any of their assets, we'll grab them.

That's excellent news, and the announcement is helpfully accompanied by considerable documentation of the terrorists and their supporters singled out by our Treasury Department. Undersecretary Stuart Levey, who has been one of the driving forces behind this program, puts it in a broad context: Iran and Syria are fueling violence and destruction in Iraq. Iran trains, funds, and provides weapons to violent Shia extremist groups, while Syria provides safe haven to Sunni insurgents and financiers.

If you stopped reading there, you'd say, well of course, it's the usual Sunni/Shiite divide. Iran supports the Shiites, not the Sunnis, who have to get their support elsewhere. Except that there's a bit more. If you read down to the small print, you will find that the most important Treasury target, Brigadier General Ahmed Foruzandeh of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards, also works with Sunnis.

In early April 2007, Foruzandeh provided ($25,000 USD) to two men claiming to be members of a Sunni terrorist organization in Iraq, promising . . . additional funds if they would deliver videos of attacks against Coalition Forces.

A very well informed person in the intelligence community tells me that the "Sunni terrorist organization in Iraq" is a big deal, is in many ways coextensive with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and clearly shows what I and others have been arguing for a long time: Iran supports al-Qaeda. To have discovered that the Revolutionary Guards are in cahoots with al-Qaeda in Iraq is enormously important, because it reminds us once again that we are engaged in a broad war in the Middle East, of which Iraq is simply one front. And it shows once again that the considerable efforts by many in Washington to gainsay Iranian support for the terror war against us are misplaced, and potentially very dangerous for our troops on the ground.

Senators Lieberman and McCain wrote an impassioned op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Thursday, pleading with the political class to be patient about events in Iraq, and above all not to pull our armed forces out prematurely. They are certainly right, but keeping fighters in Iraq is only part of what has to be our overall mission: winning the war against the terror masters. For that to happen, as the Treasury Department has just shown, we must defeat the headquarters of the insurgency, which are in Damascus and Tehran.

In the long run, there is no escape from this imperative, because the Iranians are not going to stop waging war against us. They've been doing it since 1979, they believe they are winning (although, in many ways, they are doing badly), and they will continue until they or we have won.

One is tempted to say "faster, please," but we're still in a pre-9/11 snooze, waiting for yet another wake-up call. Meanwhile we should be grateful for the people at Treasury and their colleagues elsewhere in our government, who are punishing the Iranian and Syrian terrorists, and informing us about the activities of the Axis of Evil.

Michael A. Ledeen is the freedom scholar at AEI.