It has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since we went into Afghanistan. The war in the Middle East — for it is a regional war, not merely a battle for Iraq — cannot be analyzed at the level of the individual terrorist groups, because the terrorists are part of a larger context. The organizing center is, as Spanish Magistrate Balthazar Garzon publicly put it, a "directorate" located in Iran, that works closely with Iranian intelligence organizations, including the Revolutionary Guards. Those organizations, in turn, work with their counterparts in other friendly countries.

In his final weeks in office, Secretary Powell has unfortunately continued to chant his mantra, "we are not working for regime change in Iran," as if he were proud of it. He, and his colleagues at State, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the CIA, should be ashamed. The mullahs are active supporters of terrorism all over the world, including Iraq, and we cannot expect to win this war so long as they remain in power.

The notion that we are fighting an "insurgency" largely organized and staffed by former elements of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime is now fully enshrined as an integral piece of the conventional wisdom. Like earlier bits of the learned consensus — to which it is closely linked — it is factually wrong and strategically dangerous.That it is factually wrong is easily demonstrated, for the man invariably branded the most powerful leader of the terrorist assault against Iraq — Abu Musab al Zarqawi — is not a Baathist, and indeed is not even an Iraqi... The clear strategic conclusion remains what it should have been long before Coalition troops entered Saddam's evil domain: No matter how strongly we wish it to be otherwise, we are engaged in a regional war, of which Iraq is but a single battlefield. The war cannot be won in Iraq alone, because the enemy is based throughout the region and his bases and headquarters are located beyond our current reach. His power is directly proportional to our unwillingness to see the true nature of the war, and our decision to limit the scope of our campaign.

The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate — the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy — portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision.

Mohammed B., the man accused of killing Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last week, was born and bred in the Netherlands. Known as a “relaxed, friendly and intelligent young man," a good student, a volunteer social worker, and a serious student of information technology, he came from a close family, and the death of his mother three years ago hit him very hard. He began to devote more time to religious studies, and in the last year became increasingly fanatic. He abandoned his social work because he refused to serve alcohol, and because the foundation where he volunteered organized events where both sexes were present. He was on welfare when he killed van Gogh.The Dutch — like every other Old European society I know — were unwilling to recognize that they had potentially lethal enemies within, and that it was necessary to impose the rules of civil behavior on everyone within their domain. The rules of political correctness made it impossible even to criticize the jihadists, never mind compel them to observe the rules of civil society. Just look at what happened the next day: An artist in Rotterdam improvised a wall fresco that consisted of an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill." The local imam protested, and local authorities removed the fresco.That's what happens when a culture is relativized to the point of suicide.

Months before the liberation of Iraq I wrote that we were about to have our great national debate on the war against the terror masters, and it was going to be the wrong debate. Wrong because it was going to focus obsessively on Iraq, thereby making it impossible to raise the fundamental strategic issues. Alas, that forecast was correct, and we're still stuck in the strategic quagmire we created. Up to our throats. So let's try again to get it right.Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is only one theater in a regional war. We were attacked by a network of terrorist organizations supported by several countries, of whom the most important were Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. President Bush's original analysis was correct, as was his strategy: We must not distinguish between the terrorists and their national supporters. Hence we need different strategies for different enemies, but we need to defeat all of them.

Must be something to do with the hurricanes and typhoons — or maybe it's the street demos in New York — but it took longer than usual for me to get in touch with my late friend, James Jesus Angleton. The ouija board kept giving me a "no service available" message, but finally I got through. There was a lot of static on the line.ML: Lots to talk about, huh?JJA: I'll say! I knew counterintelligence had been gutted, but I had no idea how bad it was.

The war in the Middle East — for it is a regional war, not merely a battle for Iraq — cannot be analyzed at the level of the individual terrorist groups, because the terrorists are part of a larger context. The organizing center is, as Spanish Magistrate Balthazar Garzon publicly put it, a "directorate" located in Iran, that works closely with Iranian intelligence organizations, including the Revolutinary Guards. Those organizations, in turn, work with their counterparts in other friendly countries.

The call for a new intelligence overseer in the executive branch is downright silly. Any CEO of a distressed firm who retained failed managers and simply added new personnel and new organizational boxes would face open rebellion from his board and shareholders. Yet that is what the commission wants to do. Its recommendations finesse or exacerbate the real problems. Without doubt, our two greatest failures are political, not structural. The first is relentless congressional tinkering with the CIA and FBI, reaching outright caricature on the eve of 9/11 — when the FBI could not even clip newspaper articles about advocates of jihad in America, and the CIA needed special permission to contact foreign officials whose human rights violations wouldn't pass muster at the ACLU.

The debate on "how to win the war of ideas" regarding terrorism is a trap, because it diverts our attention and our energies from the main thing, which is winning the war on terrorism. It's an intellectual amusement, and it gets in our way. As that great Machiavellian Vince Lombardi reminds us, winning is the only thing.That's why the public figure who has best understood the nature of the war, and has best defined our enemy, is George W. Bush. Of all people! He had it right from the start: We have been attacked by many terrorist groups and many countries that support the terrorists. It makes no sense to distinguish between them, and so we will not. We're going after them all.Yes, I know he seems to lose his bearings from time to time, especially when the deep thinkers and the sheikhs and the Europeans and Kofi Annan and John Paul II insist we can't win the hearts and minds of the Middle East unless we first solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he has repeatedly pulled himself out of that trap very nicely, and he invariably does so in terms that show he has a uniquely deep understanding of our enemies.George Bush says the way to win the war is to liberate the Middle East from the tyrants who now govern it and sponsor terrorism. And that's exactly right.

The organizers of the Council on Foreign Relations special task force to promote the appeasement of Iran must be cursing their uncommonly bad luck. They scheduled a meeting in Washington today to call for increasing normalization of relations between the United States and Iran. With a fine eye for dark comedy, the Council persuaded two relics of the catastrophic Carter years to appear: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert Gates. The principal advocate of the policy, however, is undoubtedly the president of the Council, Richard Haas, who has long seen rapprochement with the mullahs as an "historic opportunity" for the United States. Haas was the head of Colin Powell's Policy Planning Staff.Whatever chances they had of successfully advancing appeasement were shattered over the weekend.

Wow, more than 520 pages! As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?

Late on the night of June 24th-25th there was an "accident" in southeastern Iran, near Zahedan, in that fascinating area of "Iranian Baluchistan" down where Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan merge. According to Agence France Press, quoting local Red Crescent sources, a fuel truck "lost control and crashed into a police post, with the explosion engulfing other trucks, cars and buses."But the pictures of the incident are not those of a truck out of control. It all took place at a border crossing, at a customs inspection station. At the time of the explosion there were eleven trucks parked there, and several of them were carrying explosives for the construction of bombs. They were headed for Pakistan and Afghanistan, where they would be delivered to the forces of Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the terrorist chieftain who has long killed on behalf of the mullahs.

So the Iranians seized some British "warships" this week, and arrested eight British naval officers. That's what the Iranians announced in the morning, and that's all we've heard. The chatterers were agog. Why would the Iranians do such a crazy thing? Do they really want war (If that isn't a good old-fashioned causus belli, what is?)? Etc.Yes, they're crazy, no doubt. But they're not stupid. And if an Iranian action seems stupid, you're probably misinterpreting it. There's a perfectly straightforward explanation for the whole episode: The Brits were laying down a network of sensors to detect the movement of ships toward major Iraqi oil terminals. The Iranians considered that a bit of a threat. So they attacked.And why, you might ask, did the Iranians feel threatened?Because they were planning to attack (or have their surrogates attack) the oil terminals, silly.And why attack the oil terminals?Because they want to defeat President Bush in November, and they figure if they can get the price of oil up to around $60 a barrel, he'll lose to Kerry.

The Bush administration has clearly decided to try to "manage" Iraq and "finesse" Iran, hoping to muddle through until the election and then, if victorious, consider its options in the broader theater. The president and his top advisers evidently want to avoid "new adventures" between now and November.But this is a very dangerous strategy, because it leaves the initiative, in Iraq and elsewhere, entirely in the hands of people like Zarqawi and his longtime Iranian sponsors. Indeed, it seems to me that doing nothing is an open invitation to "new adventures" in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the United States.You don't need classified information to see this; it's right in front of our noses. Yet we refuse to see it. This is what intelligence failures are really about: denial of the most obvious facts about the world. And it's what policy failures are about as well: refusal to take the obvious steps to protect our citizens, our allies, and our national interests.

The Saudi royal family has prepared a detailed plan to run abroad if the situation gets much worse, and that knowledge of the royal family's intentions is a major component in the recent rise in the price of oil. Meanwhile, the Saudis are buying insurance by supporting the terrorists in Iraq.

Meet Hassan Abbasi, a well-known Iranian political scientist, longtime top official of the Revolutionary Guards, and currently "theoretician" in the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei (how does one get a job description like that, I wonder) and the head of the National Security and Strategic Research Center. Abbasi holds special responsibility for North American affairs.Speaking at the Technical College of Tehran last Sunday, May 23, he proclaimed:"We have identified some 29 weak points for attacks in the U.S. and in the West, we intend to explode some 6,000 American atomic warheads, we have shared our intelligence with other guerilla groups and we shall utilize them as well. We have set up a department to cover England and we have had discussions regarding them. We have contacted the Mexicans and the Argentineans and will work with anyone who has an axe to grind with America."

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been to Iran for a few days, and he's full of deep thoughts about it. But, in keeping with the ideology of his social set, they are his thoughts, not those of the Iranian people.

We should have prepared the political battleground before the fighting ever started, by creating a democratic Iraqi government-in-exile. But internal divisions within the Bush administration proved intractable, and future historians will no doubt marvel at the fact that more passion and more man hours were spent fighting Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress than combating the likes of Moqtada and the remnants of Saddam's security forces.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was, "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them." The Fascists and Nazis believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust races and nations would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.The Terrorists have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.

Much is being made about the irony of an Iranian envoy arriving in Iraq to help negotiate a solution to the U.S. standoff with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. How could we allow a charter member of President Bush's "Axis of Evil" to negotiate a "peace" with the thuggish Sadr and his band of fanatical militants?

Recent acts of barbarism against Coalition forces in Iraq have revived an old and enormously important debate: Are these terrorists the products of fanatic tyrannies, or are the tyrannies the logical expression of the true nature of the peoples of the region?

According to a usually reliable French investigator and author, Spanish authorities are now convinced that the Madrid massacre was organized by our old friend, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi has also been credited for being one of the major organizers of the terror war against the Coalition in Iraq, and was named by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his presentation to the Security Council prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom as a key al Qaeda leader, with ties to the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. A busy and very wicked man, in short.

If the terrorists are as cabalistic as it seems (the eerie fact that the terror attack in Madrid on March 11 arrived exactly 911 days after 9/11 has been noted, and should be underlined), then one possible target date is 6/11 — six being an inverted nine — which comes a couple of days before the Italian vote for the European parliament. Probably a good day to visit Baghdad -- or anywhere but Italy.

The Iranian regime is in open battle with its own people. Iran is now racing, literally hell-bent toward two dramatic confrontations: one within the country, between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and/or reform. The other rages outside the country, a desperate war against the United States, its Coalition allies, and the Iraqis who support us. Both derive from the fundamental weakness of the fundamentalist regime, which has lost the support of the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people, and is increasingly defining itself a pariah state because of its support for terror and its brazen pursuit of atomic weapons.

Unless you depend on CNN for information - CNN totally and stunningly transformed the story, as Instapundit informed us yesterday - by now you have heard of the New York Times story about the discovery of a 17-page letter from Abu Musab al Zarqawi, written from Iraq in the middle of last month to the leaders of al Qaeda. It's an extremely explosive story. According to the Times - whose correspondent, Dexter Filkins, saw both the Arabic original and a military translation, and "wrote down large parts of the translation" - the letter is a sort of jihadist primal scream.

Sorry to say, I haven't reread Dante's "Inferno" for some years, but I still remember his description of a very low and extremely unpleasant level of hell that houses traitors. Surely abject appeasers of evil qualify for the same treatment, and we must note grimly that three prime candidates have recently come forward to swell the ranks of that overheated realm: Senator Joe Biden of Delaware (D.), Senator Arlen Specter (R.), of Pennsylvania, and Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio (R.)

July 9 was the day the Iranian student movement designated for national demonstrations against the regime, and a general strike in favor of democracy. Shaken by weeks of recent protests, and worried about the mounting criticism from several Western countries, the regime took unprecedented steps to head off a potential showdown with its own people.