The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn, Michael Ledeen Page B

shipments of weapons, ammunition, and explosives, Army General Dan McNeill, who commanded 40,000 troops in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the ISAF, said in the autumn of 2007, “this weapons convoy clearly, geographically, originated in Iran. It is difficult for me to conceive that this … could have originated in Iran and come to Afghanistan, without at least the knowledge of the Iranian military.” At the same time a British spokesman in Kabul said, “this confirms our view that elements within Iran are supporting the Sunni Taliban.”
    In Iraq, U.S. Major General William Caldwell said “it’s not all Sunni insurgents but … we do know is that there is a direct awareness by Iranian intelligence officials that they are providing support to some selective Sunni insurgent elements.” And General David Petraeus announced that the Iranians were “funding, over the last several years, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to different Shia militia groups, and we have found evidence very recently of assistance being provided to Sunni Arab groups as well. One of the Sunni insurgent leaders was just over in Tehran.”
    Our military leaders (including myself) stressed, as we would later on, that the proof of Iranian involvement sometimes came directly from the terrorists themselves. Here’s General Caldwell again: “Detainees in American custody have indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives have given support to Sunni insurgents, and then we’ve discovered some munitions in Baghdad neighborhoods which are largely Sunni that were manufactured in Iran.” In addition, General Caldwell told reporters that we knew of radical Iraqi Shi’ites being trained in Iran.
    The Iranians have few peers when it comes to killing—in 2015, Iran had the highest per capita execution rate in the world, and in total numbers was second only to the People’s Republic of China—and they excel at deception, as witness their secret nuclear program.
    They are a formidable enemy, and they have been at war with the United States, its friends, and its allies (notably Israel) for nearly forty years. Tehran’s war against the West is not based on a desire for territory, or on real or imagined grievances; it is rooted in the nature of the Islamic Republic, and it rests on ultimate issues. For the Iranians to negotiate a modus vivendi with us would be tantamount to abandoning the messianic vision of Khomeini and his successors.
    The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which so many take as the starting point for their analysis of Iran’s behavior, is only one chapter in the story of the Iranian war against the West; Iraq is one more battlefield on which the Iranians have killed Western soldiers and civilians. Only the scale is new; the practice was already well established long before Operation Iraqi Freedom was even conceived. In many respects, the Iranian/Syrian strategy in Iraq after our invasion of 2004 was little more than a replay of the successful methods used against us in Lebanon in the 1980s: suicide terrorism, hostage taking, mass demonstrations, and manipulation of the media. This strategy was announced publicly by Bashar al-Assad in a published interview, before we ever set one boot in Iraq. Nonetheless, the violence of the Iranian response, in tandem with their Syrian allies, surprised most Western strategists. They should not have been surprised, since the pattern was established in 1979 and has been followed ever since.
    Once we bailed out of Iraq in 2011, the power of the Islamic Republic immediately expanded and rapidly filled the void left by our departure. The mullahs have already established strategic alliances in our own hemisphere with Cuba and Venezuela, and are working closely with Russia and China; a victory over the “Great Satan” in Iraq will compel the smaller Middle Eastern countries to come to terms with Tehran, and make the region much more inhospitable to us and our