The terrorists in question are officers in the Iranian Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.  They were captured in Irbil, Iraq, in January,  2007, as the “surge” was getting under way.  A few weeks earlier, other Iranians had been  arrested in Baghdad.   For our military leaders, it was an open and shut case.  The Iranian military officers had been involved in several operations in which Americans had been killed, and, even though they claimed “diplomatic status,” the evidence against them was thoroughly convincing.  One American official who saw the documentation at the time told me “they are not just enemies;  they’re criminals.”

Nonetheless, from the very beginning, powerful American officials argued that the Iranian terrorists should be handled on an “arrest and release” basis, because to hold them for any significant length of time would enrage the mullahs.  As the New York Sun wrote editorially:

On one side are the Central Intelligence Agency, which has flubbed nearly every assignment it’s had in this war, and the State Department, whose very DNA seems to make it incapable of supporting a hard line. These agencies are arguing that the Iranians will escalate their war against us if the captives are not returned.

On the other side are the Marines, special operations forces, and the Army, all arguing that the risk is too great if these men are at large. This is apparently a decision — like the decision to conduct the raid that led to their arrest — that is going to have to be made by the commander in chief. It should be an easy call for a war president.

It was, in the event, an easy call:  the “Irbil Five” remained in American detention.  Every time somebody in the American government suggested it would be good to release them, the military leaders spat.  Until now.

American officials, eager to pretend that “their hands were tied,” will point you to the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, which in theory gives the Iraqi Government control over everything and everybody in the country, including detainees.  The language is typical legalese, but American military officers recognized that the Agreement would oblige us, on request, to turn over all the prisoners we had captured, from Day One.  For that reason, they fought a heated but ultimately unsuccessful battle against it.  Some of our highest ranking officers begged their civilian commanders to make special provision for the likes of the Irbil Five.  They didn’t want them back on the battlefield, either in Iraq or Afghanistan, areas where their lethal expertise would inevitably be used to kill more Americans and our coalition allies.

But the government’s excuses only go so far, for like the provisions that give the Iraqis total control of their air space, they are theoretically binding but practically impossible to carry out, at least in the short term.  Iraq does not have the facilities for all of our prisoners, any more than it can patrol and defend its air space, or provide air cover for ground operations.  So it was understood by both sides that Iraqi sovereignty would be extended gradually.  And our men and women on the ground intended to hold the Iranian terrorists–of whom there are more than thirty important agents and officers, and many hundred lower level operatives–as long as they could.

But then Roxana Saberi was thrown into Evin Prison in Tehran, and the Obama Administration started negotiations with the mullahs.  I have been told that the key office in the American Government was Vice President Joe Biden’s, and that the Swiss Government (our official liaison to Tehran) played an active role.  In early May, the deal was arranged:  more than thirty Iranian “VIP” detainees would be released (first to the Iraqis, then to the Iranians), and then, in the fullness of time, several hundred (repeat, several hundred) others of less importance.  Within days, Iraqi leader Maliki flew to Iran to work out the details.  Saberi was quickly released, and the triumphal return to Iran for the Five was scheduled for shortly after the Iranian elections.

If you look back over the last two months, I think you can see the pattern.  In early June, for example, the U.S. military released another high-profile terrorist who had worked closely with Iran:  Laith Qazali.  Bill Roggio gives us his profile:

Laith is the brother of Qais Qazali, the commander of the Qazali network, which is better known as the Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous. Qais Qazali was a spokesman and senior aide to Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al Sadr. The terror group, which was part of the Mahdi Army until the spring of 2008, has received extensive financial and military support from Iran’s Qods Force, the external division that backs Hezbollah and is tasked with supporting the Khomeinist Islamist revolution.

On the occasion of Qazali’s release, the United States government did not spread its arms and say “what could we do?  It’s part of the deal,” they described it  “as part of a reconciliation effort” as well as an attempt to secure the release of captive British hostages, according to a report in The New York Times,” as Roggio wrote.

The British hostages are yet another complicating factor.  The Iranians held five of them, civilian workers rounded up in Iraq.  The Iranians demanded the release of some of their terrorists in Guantanamo, and various other humiliating acts by the British Government, including, at last report, public endorsement of Ahmadinezhad’s “reelection.”  As the negotiations played out, the Brits made a series of gestures to Hezbollah, and asked us to release various Iranian prisoners, from Guantanamo to Iraq (Qazali apparently being one such).  Last time I checked, two of the unfortunate British souls turned up dead.  Perhaps the failure to accept Iranian conditions explains the recent vitriol against the British government.

But at least some powerful Iranians have found some nice words for the American government, although others continue the “Death to America!” chant so typical of the regime.  And what were those nice words?  A description of American surrender to Iran’s nuclear intentions:

“America accepts a nuclear Iran, but Britain and France cannot stand a nuclear Iran,” Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister, said in an interview on state television on Wednesday.

Why would Velayati, one of the nastiest characters in the cabal around Supreme Leader Khamenei, say such a thing?  My guess is that American acceptance was wigwagged to the Iranians during the Saberi negotiations by an authoritative administration personage.

All of these humiliating concessions have been made in the name of the need for serious talks between Washington and Tehran.  But if Velayati is telling the truth, we’ve already given away the whole store.  If there are going to be further talks, they will be of the sort we’ve seen in recent days with the Russians:  fluff and circumstance.

As I’ve often said, God has an exquisite sense of humor, and it would certainly be delicious, and perhaps even Divine, if the mullahcracy were to fall just as its vision of bringing America to her knees seemed about to be fulfilled.  In case you missed it, Iran’s highest-ranking clerical leader, the Ayatollah Montazeri, just issued a fatwa that declares the current regime illegitimate, and tells the Iranian people that they are entitled to remove it.

I am told by people who study these documents that the Montazeri fatwa is virtually identical to the one issued by his one-time mentor, the Ayatollah Khomeini, shortly before the overthrow of the shah.  They are words with teeth, and there are many Iranians who will act on them.

Hell, there’s millions of Iranians trying to overthrow the regime right now, they didn’t need the fatwa.

Faster, Please!  Please…

The silence of the demonstrations would be a counterpoint to the nightly chants from the rooftops and prisons of the nation.  Chants of “Allah is great,” along with “Death to the Dictator.”  If you believe the folks on Twitter, those chants have been louder with each passing night, despite the violence of the Basij and Revolutionary Guards, which ranges from snipers shooting from one rooftop to another, armed thugs breaking into homes to seize computers, cell phones and other communications devices, and arrest one or more family members.  Meanwhile, horribly maimed bodies have been showing up all over the country.  Some of the gouging of the bodies seems to have been done to remove all evidence of bullet holes, but whatever the “explanation,” the bloody savagery is well documented.

If you want some detail about the horrors inside Iranian hospitals, have a look at Le Figaro’s account.

Over the objections of medical staff, bodies from the demonstrations were quickly moved elsewhere. “We believe they were transferred to the Baqiatollah military hospital or some other undisclosed location”, notes the doctor. Then, under the pretext of “organ donation”, all traces of bullets were removed from the bodies. “The parents were force to accept this if they wanted to retrieve the body for burial”.

And yet, the protest goes on.  For the past three days, a general strike has been in effect, with significant results.  Indeed, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei preemptively admitted defeat when government offices and factories were shut down in the name of a religious observance.  But the strikers only expanded the range of their actions, notably by shutting down electrical grids in several cities, including parts of Tehran.  Great swathes of the nation were plunged into darkness.  This sort of thing is likely to continue, whatever happens on the 9th.

Most of the protesters fear the worst, warning of snipers preparing to shoot into the crowds, and a massive buildup of security forces in Tehran.  There are rumors about possible countermeasures from the demonstrators, but, like the stories about massive repression, these remain to be confirmed.

Meanwhile, there are continuous accounts of internal strife in the regime’s ranks.  The London Guardian, in a carefully worded account, tells us that the most powerful figure in the ongoing repression is Khamenei’s second son, Mojtaba.  He is said to be particularly enraged by the British Government’s seizure of more than a billion dollars in London accounts, at least some of which belongs to him.  No one would be surprised to find that the supreme leader was a very wealthy man, or that he had salted away some of his money outside Iran.  Others have been moving their funds to more secure lands of late.

His deadline:  July 11th.  He told his minions that if that were accomplished, the rest of the world would come crawling to him.

He may be right about most of the rest of the world, which has distinguished itself by its fecklessness, but he is certainly not right about his own people, who have sabotaged a major petroleum pipeline in Lurestan, and who are planning to go on strike in the next few days.  I don’t know the provenance of the people who hit the pipeline (perhaps the fact that the political desk of the Tehran Times reported it is significant), but calls for strikes, building towards a big demonstration on July 9th, come from Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami.

Mousavi got a big boost over the weekend from an important group of senior clerics in the holy city of Qom.  They branded the “elections” and the new government that will shortly be sworn in, as illegitimate.  This is a serious matter, leading Stanford’s Professor Abbas Milani to say “This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic.” They are also explicitly siding with Mousavi, who released a detailed critique/expose of the fraud that confirmed Ahmadinezhad in office.

So Khamenei is under pressure, and he is not well equipped to deal with it.  He has a serious cancer, and takes opiates to mitigate the pain.  People around him are whispering that his decisions are poorly reasoned and often impulsive, and some of those close to him, including his son, are apparently issuing orders in his name.  This sort of rumor is devastating for the sort of personal rule upon which the Islamic Republic rests.  We’ll see in the coming days if the Mousavi forces are able to maintain and increase the pressure, and how Khamenei and his henchmen respond.

At the moment, there is evidence of some panic, as Iranian leaders are exporting their wealth.

Meanwhile, the American Government was sending conflicting signals to Tehran.  On the one hand, it seems that Obama will be going to the upcoming G8 conference with a request that there be no new sanctions on Iran.  This comes at a time when the Europeans, for the first time, seem inclined to get at least a little bit tougher on the mullahs, and it effectively demolishes the myth that this administration intends to do anything to support the Iranian people in their life and death struggle for freedom (perhaps this should not surprise us;  after all, Obama’s 4th of July message did not contain the word “freedom,” but it did talk a lot about his own legislative proposals).  At the same time, Vice President Joe Biden three times said the United States would do nothing to prevent an Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear targets.

So apparently we’re prepared to let the Israelis do our dirty work.  A real standup sort of policy.

UPDATE:  A great video on the Iranian uprising.  Notice the many women with uncovered heads.

UPDATE II:  The 3-day strike.  Apparently the regime was so worried about the strike that they shut down most factories, businesses and offices.  This is another sign of regime insecurity.  And Mousavi today (Monday) received several distinguished visitors, including Khomeini’s grandson.

So I’ve always hated quotas.  When I was applying to college my high school guide told me to avoid certain universities because they had Jewish quotas, which for the most part were filled with legacies, and I was unlikely to get in.  I hated that.  I hated the “equal opportunity” quotas too, and still do.  And I hate the cunning forms of quotas that dominate much of our policy thinking and actions.

Roger wonders, with good reason, if Obama is “objectively pro- fascist.”  And certainly Obama’s foreign “policy” is strikingly favorably toward tyrants.  No one should be surprised, since much of his domestic program is tyrannical as well.   Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago.  What a pity!  No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville.  As Mark Steyn eloquently points out, he foresaw the sort of American tyranny with which we are threatened today.  A unique sort of tyranny, similar to that system under which most Europeans live.

But it isn’t fascism.

If Tocqueville were around, he would remind us that we are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.”  Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First World War.  Fascism hailed the men who fought and prevailed on the battlefield, and wrapped itself in the well-established rhetoric of European nationalism, which does not exist in America and never has.  Our liberties are indeed threatened, but by a tyranny of a very different sort.

Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as  a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection.  Tocqueville knows better.  He foresees a slow death of freedom.  The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a frog in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened.  The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it.

There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville’s scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht.  We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately.  It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.  Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.  He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it.  He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism, because it does not rule by terror or oppression.  There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture.  “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.”  The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced.  He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives.  His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

The metaphor of a parent maintaining perpetual control over his child is the language of contemporary American politics.  All manner of new governmental powers are justified in the name of “the children,” from enhanced regulation of communications to special punishments for “hate speech;” from the empowerment of social service institutions to crack down on parents who try to discipline their children, to the mammoth expansion of sexual quotas from university athletic programs to private businesses.   Tocqueville particularly abhors such new governmental powers because they are Federal, emanating from Washington, not from local governments.  He reminds us that when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities, a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind.  So long as local governments are strong, he says, even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate  enforcement at the local level, but once the central government takes control of the entire structure, our liberties are at grave risk.

Many smart people, including former VP Cheney,  are worried that it might be too soon.  Terrorists are still operating in Iraq.  Will the Iraqis be able to manage it?  To put the matter differently, we won the war in Iraq, might we now lose the peace by abandoning the battlefield prematurely?

The trouble with the debate is that, as usual, it ignores the real issue, which is the war itself.  The question about Iraq is the wrong question;  you can’t answer it without addressing the broad war, of which Iraq is just one piece.

The real question is, how are we doing in the broad war (the one that stretches from Afghanistan into Europe, with active battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Palestine and Lebanon)?

The answer must involve Syria and Iran–the two countries that are providing the bulk of the terrorists’ support–and Saudi Arabia, which funds the global indoctrination of would-be terrorists.  If we’re going to win the war, we have to thwart Tehran and Damascus, and, at a minimum, get the Saudis to stop paying for pre-terrorism radicalization all over the world.

The answer, then is:  we are doing very badly.  Indeed, we’re not doing at all.  Au contraire, we and our feckless Western allies are, for the most part, actively appeasing those whom we should be confronting.  We famously dithered as Iran crushed the incipient revolution (a revolution that would have enormously mitigated the threat Iran represents).  It’s obvious that Obama et. al. were annoyed and embarrassed by the outpouring of passion for freedom all over Iran, because it interrupted their efforts at lovemaking with the regime’s leaders.  Meanwhile, Obama announced he is sending an ambassador to Damascus, where Bashar Assad is Iran’s most faithful friend in the region.  And nothing at all is being done to restrain the Saudis’ multi-billion dollar funding of the global radical Wahabbi madrassas, from which radicalized young muslims emerge.

But nobody is asking the real question, not even Cheney, who behaves as if he just doesn’t want to talk about Iran.  Did he have anything to say about supporting the revolution?  If so, I missed it.  He could authoritatively provide the proper context for the debate, but he doesn’t.

Faster, please.  Sigh.

UPDATE:  From the AP, “The top U.S. military commander in Iraq on Tuesday accused Iran of continuing to support and train militants who are carrying out attacks, including most of the ones in Baghdad. Gen. Ray Odierno said the attacks have fallen in number but are still a problem. He made the comments just after the U.S. relinquished security for Baghdad and other urban areas to Iraqi forces, part of a security agreement that will see all American soldiers out of the country by the end of 2011. ‘Iran is still supporting, funding and training surrogates who operate inside of Iraq. They have not stopped and I don’t think they will stop,’ Odierno told reporters at the U.S. military headquarters outside Baghdad. ‘I think many of the attacks in Baghdad are from individuals that have been in fact funded or trained by the Iranians.’”

Foreign ministers of European states, gathered for a European Union conference in Greece, quickly condemned the arrests… France, Italy, Germany and Britain maintain robust diplomatic missions in Tehran.

“Harassment or intimidation of foreign or Iranian staff working in embassies will be met with a strong and collective EU response,” said a statement issued by the foreign ministers.

Just shows you what’s really important, eh?  Where was that “strong and collective EU response” when peacefully demonstrating Iranians were being butchered in the streets?

No wonder the Iranians feel abandoned by the West.  They are.

Some are asking whether the insurrection/revolution is losing steam.  It is a legitimate question, especially in a world of famously short attention spans.  It does not apply to the fighters in Iran, for whom life is no longer doled out in six-minute bytes.  For them, the big issue is winning, and the immediate issue is getting through the day.   And then the night.  They are looking for various ways of fighting, since direct confrontation, at least at the moment, has limited appeal.  Thus we see the hit-and-run attacks about which Eli Lake wrote this morning in the Washington Times, and which the Guardian links to.

There are many things we do not see, and which we would not see even if the regime weren’t trying to isolate Iran from the world.  We still don’t know whether, as widely rumored, Rafsanjani has obtained the signatures of many senior clerics, calling for either the replacement of Khamenei or the abolition of the position of supreme leader (which would be the end of the Islamic Republic).  If he has such a document, what will he do with it?  Hard to know or even to guess.

Mousavi:  instead of shrinking into the background he is becoming more aggressive and more outspoken.  And he is winning some important allies, such as Tehran mayor Qalibaf, who has come out for peaceful demonstrations.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot we should be doing to help the Iranian people.  The two big items are a)build a strike fund, and b) set up a communications system that enables Iranians to report news to an offshore location (whether on a ship, an island, in London or in Los Angeles doesn’t matter) and then relays that information to all Iranians.  They need to know what’s going on.  People in Isfahan need the news from Tabriz, Shiraz, and Tehran, etc.

Those are the main things.  There are others.  But that’s for next time.

–First, that a significant number of Iranians hate the regime and are prepared to die to bring it down;

–Second, that the fanatical religious zealots that hold the guns, chains, knives, tear gas cannisters, high-powered water hoses, sniper rifles and (perhaps) chemical weapons (said by some to have been deployed from helicopters), are prepared to order the killing of any number of Iranians in order to maintain their own power and preserve the Islamic Republic;

–Third, that women are playing a key role in the insurrection (a central element of any good analysis of events in Iran, which is invariably overlooked, even by some outstanding scholars).  This was already clear in the “election circus,” in which Mrs. Mousavi played a leading role, thereby threatening the Islamic Republic at its sexist and misogynistic core).  The regime knows this, as  was confirmed by the verbal attacks on Mrs. Mousavi by Ahmadinezhad during the televised presidential debate with her husband, and by the shooting of Neda by a sniper who had a choice of targets.  He picked a girl wearing a very loose scarf.

By the way, the celebrated writer Paolo Coelho reports on his blog that the doctor who tried so desperately to save Neda is a friend of Coelho’s.  That doctor’s revolutionary credentials are in good order;  he served on the battlefield during the Iran-Iraq War.  An interesting footnote to a terrible story.

Meanwhile, the Iranian Women’s Movement has issued a very strong statement:

Alongside civil and political rights activists, labor activists, students, journalists, and ethnic rights activists, a large spectrum of women’s rights activists from several campaigns and tendencies also participated in the election in order to say “no” to a government with a discriminatory orientation and to demand an end to gender discrimination…

We, the undersigned activists of the women’s rights movement, condemn the violence and humiliation that has continued to be perpetrated against Iranian women and men in recent years and which is aimed at repressing them. We emphasize our continued commitment to achieving the demands of the women’s rights movement, which has had a profound role in educating the public and in civil struggles in recent years, and we express our solidarity with those who protest the results of this election. We demand that those arrested in recent days be released without condition and we call for securing and protecting civil and political freedoms.

I have a day job, which takes me offline for hours on end.  I clear the comments as quickly as I can.  Bear with me.

Furthermore, I am getting a new hip in two weeks, so I probably will be sleeping for a bit, heh.  Bear with me.