Fox News:

A plan by the Bush administration to release detailed and possibly damning specific evidence linking the Iranian government to efforts to destabilize Iraq have been put on hold, U.S. officials told FOX News.

Officials had said a “dossier” against Iran compiled by the U.S. likely would be made public at a press conference this week in Baghdad, and that the evidence would contain specifics including shipping documents, serial numbers, maps and other evidence which officials say would irrefutably link Iran to weapons shipments to Iraq.

Now, U.S. military officials say the decision to go public with the findings has been put on hold for several reasons, including concerns over the reaction from Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as well as inevitable follow-up questions that would be raised over what the U.S. should do about it.

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez, the tin-horn dictator of Venezuela, has followed Adolph Hitler’s example, and gotten his rubber-stamp parliament to start passing legislation permitting him to rule by decree, and remain in power forever.

Venezuela’s National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months. President Hugo Chavez says he wants “revolutionary laws” to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes.

He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday.

Venezuela’s political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.

Chavez has been hosting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and is doubtless plotting ways and means to extend the reach of our enemies into this hemisphere. The Bush Administration will be guilty of criminal negligence every bit as bad as Clinton’s, if it fails to remove this revolting communist thug from power before he does further violence to the rights of his own people, and before he creates a functioning base for terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.

Charles Johnson links to an Israeli blogger who reports that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new blog set off a series of warnings from her Norton Internet Security program.

Apparently, Ahmadinejab’s site goes after Israeli visitors, but I seem to recall that he doesn’t like Americans much either, so….

****CAUTION*****
Users without good security software and all the latest Microsoft Security updates (Norton refers to “an attempt to exploit a vulnerability in Internet Explorer”) should avoid visiting this site.

The Personal Notes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

James Lewis reports that, with Mike Wallace playing sycophant, on Sunday night Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will threaten the president of the United States with death on national television if he fails to convert to Islam.

If CBS had a real American at that interview, he would have stood up and struck Ahmadinejad in the face for his insolence.

I have no trouble picturing how Andrew Jackson or Theodore Roosevelt would have responded to such a threat.

Bernard Lewis in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal points out that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent references to “final answers” on August 22 may have a rather sinister significance.

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time—Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as “by the end of August,” but Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement was more precise.

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to “the farthest mosque,” usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Richard Beeston of The London Times contemplates possible US military action against Iran and the Iranian response:

Experts agree that America has the military capability to destroy Iran’s dozen known atomic sites. US forces virtually surround Iran with military air bases to the west in Afghanistan, to the east in Iraq, Turkey and Qatar and the south in Oman and Diego Garcia. The US Navy also has a carrier group in the Gulf, armed with attack aircraft and Tomahawk cruise missiles. B2 stealth bombers flying from mainland America could also be used.

The air campaign would not be easy. The Iranians have been preparing for an attack. Key sites are ringed with air defences and buried underground. Sensitive parts of the Natanz facility are concealed 18 metres (60ft) underground and protected by reinforced concrete two meters thick. Similar protection has been built around the uranium conversion site at Esfahan.

“American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq centre in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq,” said the Global Security consultantcy.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former US Air Force officer, predicted that knocking out nuclear sites could be over in less than a week. But he gave warning that would only be the beginning.

Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked. It could use medium-range missiles to hit Israel or US military targets in Iraq and the region. It could also use its missiles and submarines to attack shipping in the Gulf, the main export route for much of the world’s energy needs. “Once you have dealt with the nuclear sites you would have to expand the targets,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Gardiner. “There are another 125 to deal with including chemical plants, missile launchers, airfields and submarines.”

While this huge US offensive is underway Iran would almost certainly deploy its most powerful weapon. It would unleash a counter-attack through proxies in the region. Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia, would attack Israel. Moqtadr al-Sadr, the militant Iraqi Shia religious leader, could order his Mahdi Army to rise up against American and British forces in Iraq. Iranian-backed groups could wreak havoc against Western targets across the world.

Beeston may have misidentified Iran’s most powerful possible weapon, when he fails to discuss the possibility of Iran attempting to use WMDs against US forces in Iraq.

The Iranian Islamofascist regime has always manifested an obsessive hostility toward the United States combined with a penchant for extreme violence. In 1979, using “student” surrogates to provide a thin veneer of separation from official responsibility, they violated International Law, invaded the US Embassy, and took US diplomatic personnel hostage. Iran is generally believed to have arranged the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed 241 US servicemen. In 1984, William Buckley, CIA Station Chief in Beirut, was kidnapped, and subsequently tortured to death by Iran. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is generally believed to have been contracted by Iran to Libya as retaliation for the accidental shooting down six months earlier of Iran Air Flight 655 by the US Vincennes.

It is impossible to imagine that Iran would fail to respond to a US or Israeli attack on its nuclear weapons production facilities with anything less than attacks on US military personnel (and/or civilian targets) by means featuring the greatest lethality within its power.

Assuming that the Iranian response were to be somehow thwarted, or proved unsuccessful in compelling this administration to withdraw from the Middle East, as (Osama frequently reminds us) the Beirut barracks bombing persuaded an earlier administration to withdraw from Lebanon, once the air campaign imagined by Richard Beeson is completed, the door will certainly be open to land invasion and regime replacement.

We just have to hope that the Ahmadinejad regime does not have a completed bomb ready to use on US forces at the time of the final Mullah-dammerung, or that US theatre defense is effective enough to preclude successful delivery.

Iran Deploys Human Shields to Protect Nuclear Bomb Facility

Isfahan – Iran on Sunday gave a fresh show of its determination to press on with its disputed nuclear programme, enrolling about 1 000 athletes to form a human shield in front of a key nuclear facility.

The demonstration, which took place in front of just a handful of journalists, was held under winter sunshine outside the main gate of a uranium conversion facility near the historic central city of Isfahan.

“Since we have reached this technology indigenously and with our own scientists, we will safeguard it at any cost,” the director of the facility, Behrouz Samani, said at the event.

Around him were about 1 000 sportsmen and women of all ages and from across Iran, who were wearing free T-shirts brandishing the slogan: “Nuclear Energy is our Legitimate Right.”

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IRNA, his official news agency reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus yesterday told a radical Palestinian group that Middle East has become “the locus of the final war” between Muslims and the West .

The Telegraph provides a report that reminds the reader of John Buchan’s classic Greenmantle (1916), a thriller on the theme of the threat to European civilization posed by a plot to rally the Muslim world to rise in Holy War on behalf of an Islamic messiah. The Telegraph story suggests that the Iranian regime’s quest to build nuclear weapons, and inclination to confront the West, are products of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s mystical belief in the return of the Twelfth Imam at the End of Days.