(Wall Street Journal/AEI) Michael Rubin - Step-by-step, Iranian authorities are replicating in Iraq the strategy which allowed Hizballah to take over southern Lebanon in the 1980s. The playbook - military, economic, and information operation - is almost identical. As the Israeli army evicted the PLO from Lebanon in 1982, Ayatollah Khomeini dispatched his elite Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to arm and organize its Shiites. Hizballah was born. Just as the Revolutionary Guards helped hone Hizballah into a deadly force, so do they train the Badr Corps, the militia of the Tehran-backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution (SCIRI). The Badr Corps infiltrated Iraq even before U.S. forces reached Baghdad. The first Iranian charge-d'affaires in post-Saddam Iraq was Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the Revolutionary Guard's former liaison to Hizballah in Lebanon. In January 2004, a yellow Lebanese Hizballah flag flew from SCIRI's headquarters in the southern city of Basra. In November 2005 in Jordan, an Iraqi Sunni insurgent leader acknowledged to me the "possibility" that some Iraqi Sunni insurgents took Iranian money, albeit unknowingly.
2006-02-28 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive