January 09, 2007

Significant Move on Iran: Iran State Bank Named as a WMD Proliferator - Assets in U.S. Frozen

"U.S. names Iranian bank as weapons proliferator:"

The Treasury Department on Tuesday named Iran's state-owned Bank Sepah as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction, and banned all transactions between it and U.S. businesses.

"Bank Sepah is the financial linchpin of Iran's missile procurement network and has actively assisted Iran's pursuit of missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction," said Stuart Levey, Treasury's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.
In addition to prohibiting transactions with Bank Sepah, a major commercial Iranian bank, Treasury said any assets that it may have under U.S. jurisdiction are frozen.

Increasingly Iran is being seen as a center of the global war radical jihadists are waging against the West. In fact, it was recently reported that Iranian President Ahmadinejad has said that Iran, in opposition to the U.S. and Britain, will win World War III:

As later recounted to the New York Times by an Annan aide, Ahmadinezhad told Annan that though Britain and the United States had won the last world war, Iran would win the next. “It wasn’t the tone and the content that stunned us,” the aide told the Times. “It was the fact that he talked like he meant it and believed it.” After all, Annan and his colleagues hadn’t realized there would be a next world war.

In the eyes of the Ahmadinezhad and his supporters, however, that war has already begun. In their way of thinking, radical Islamists have already brought the collapse of one superpower (the Soviet Union, which they believe fell because of the Afghan war) and are on route to victory in Europe. America is next.

Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

"Iran smog 'kills 3,600 in month':"

Air pollution is estimated to have killed nearly 10,000 people in Tehran over a one-year period, including 3,600 in a month, Iranian officials say.

Good job, ABC! Glenn Beck, whose CNN TV special "The Extremist Agenda," opened the eyes of so many people to the expressed intentions of Muslim clerics in the Mid-East to destroy America, is joining ABC's "Good Morning America" as a regular contributor. He's also preparing a new CNN TV special on Islam in America.

Follow Up: It’s Not A ‘Civil War’ In Iraq, It’s The Wrap-Up Of The War to Establish Democracy There

U.S. and Iraqi forces hammer terrorists in Iraq:

U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, backed by American warplanes, battled suspected insurgents for hours Tuesday in central Baghdad, and 50 militant fighters were killed, the Defense Ministry said.

...Al-Dabbagh said Iraqi forces had decided to wipe out "terrorist hide-outs" in the area once and for all. "God willing, Haifa Street will never threaten the Iraqi people again," he said.

Al-Dabbagh also said followers of Saddam Hussein were to blame for the violence.

"This would never have happened were it not for some groups who provided safe havens for these terrorists. And as everyone knows, the former Baathists provided safe haven and logistics for them to destabilize Iraq," he said.

Haifa Street has long been Sunni insurgent territory and housed many senior Baath Party members and officials during Saddam's rule.

Last month I posted an article titled "It's Not A 'Civil War' In Iraq, It's The Wrap-Up Of The Same War We Initiated When We Toppled Saddam:"

The Sunnis wouldn't go along with the new Democratic government. They decided to keep fighting via suicide bombing of civilians and IEDs used against U.S. troops. And now they're getting clobbered. And Iraqis who back the Shia-led government are doing most of the clobbering, which is what the U.S. wants - i.e. to turn control of the country and responsibility for security over to Iraqi forces.

The mantra of the MSM - that Iraq is involved in a "civil war," both sides of which are against a Democratic government - is nonsense.

(Read the whole article for additional detail).

At the time I posted it, given the MSM mantra that there is a "civil war" going on in Iraq, the position I supported seemed unorthodox. But articles have appeared since then (and no doubt before as well) expressing views similar to those I posted. In yesterday's LA Times, an op-ed piece by Yitzhak Nakash, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Brandeis University, noted:

...unlike Sunni militants who have declared jihad against the United States and the West, Shiites in the Middle East since the 1990s have by and large been seeking to mend fences with the west.

Also, in an article for the Gaurdian, Qassim Lotfi of The Big Pharaoh weblog has written that:

When it comes to reacting towards events in Iraq it's always helpful to remember a simple rule: Kurds, Shia Muslims and Kuwaitis are from Mars, the rest of the Arab/Muslim world is from Venus.

This rule helps explain the difference in how both camps reacted to the execution of the former Iraqi dictator. The former had suffered a lot at the hands of Saddam; the latter is preoccupied with America and sees everything through the prism of anti-Americanism.

It was not surprising to see Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Shia Muslims, and Kuwaitis welcoming the execution of the man who caused so much agony to them. Iraqi Sunni Muslims however had no reason to celebrate.

Given that Iraq's new government is Shiite, this supports the position that the Shiites are fighting to support the new Democracy, and the Sunnis are fighting to destroy it.

Today's news, quoted at the top of this post, that U.S. and Iraqi forces are moving to wipe out another Sunni stronghold, shows that events continue to support this view:

• It's not a civil war in Iraq; it's the wrap-up of the fight to establish Democracy
• The Sunnis, who oppose Democracy, are continuing to lose.