A senior British official said there was evidence the Iranians were now in contact with Sunni Muslim insurgents fighting the coalition forces in Iraq.

... Sunni Muslims linked to al Qaeda have been blamed for trying to ignite a civil war with the majority Shias. The official said he still believed it could suit Iranian interests to work with the Sunni insurgents.

"There is some evidence that the Iranians are in contact with Sunni groups," he said.

"If part of the aim was to tie down the coalition in Iraq, it would be entirely consistent with supporting those groups."

... A British Foreign Office spokesman said: "Iranian links to militant groups are unacceptable and undermine Iran's long-term interest in a secure, stable and democratic Iraq."

This is by no means surprising for those of us who have argued, much to the chagrin of many experts, that the Shi'ite/Sunni sectarian barriers are not a barrier towards cooperation between Iranian cooperation with al-Qaeda and its allies, particularly given bin Laden's explicitly anti-sectarian views on the matter of said cooperation. Or, to use the words of the 9/11 Commission report:

In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that housed U.S. Air Force personnel. Nineteen Americans were killed, and 372 wounded ... While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown.

... In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support - even if only training - for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security.

... Intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin's return to Afghanistan ... Khallad and other detainees have described the willingness of Iranian officials to facilitate the travel of al Qaeda members through Iran, on their way to and from Afghanistan.

The "Iranian security officials" in question are almost certainly members of the Revolutionary Guards, which is one of the reasons why I regard Brigadier General Suleimani's activities as being so important to understanding what is going on here. European court documents, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism officials (such as the French individual quoted in the AFP story linked above) have also provided a wealth of evidence on collaboration between al-Qaeda, Zarqawi, and Ansar al-Islam and the IRGC. Indeed, given Zarqawi's emergence as the #1 figure in the Sunni insurgency, who exactly does one think the "Sunni groups" referenced by the British official above are? Some will argue that there is no way that such a thing could be possible given Zarqawi's unambiguous bigotry towards Shi'ites and the commonly held view that the new Iraqi government is made up of little more than Iranian pawns. To which I reply: whatever Zarqawi's personal views on Shi'ites (and he has had to temper his public statements to a degree since openly pledging himself to bin Laden), his immediate superior Saif al-Adel is currently based inside Iran. As to why Brigadier General Suleimani would ever back someone like Zarqawi, al-Sharq al-Awsat quoted him as saying that the former man's actions served what he believed to be the interests of Iran. As long as he and is subordinates in the IRGC hold to that opinion, there doesn't seem to be much interest in the Iranian hierarchy of dissuading them of it.

Now before the predictable allegations start floating to the surface, let me be clear: the UK has no desire, let alone capability, to initiate military action, let alone a war, with Iran. Neither do American neoconservatives in my opinion, though I suspect that I'll get a healthy storm of rebuttals to that statement. So given that none of these statements serve anyone's political interest at this time, I would urge observers to deal with them on surface value rather than questioning whether or not they're part of some elaborate design. Bringing up the issue error with respect to WMDs is also a logical fallacy on two points: it does not follow that just because the US and UK were wrong on WMDs that they are wrong on this and in the case of the WMDs they were not being actively deployed against coalition forces at the time the claims were made.

How these British allegations more specifically connect back to Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani is reasonably simple. Suleimani is the head of Qods Force, the elite Iranian military unit charged with carrying out extra-territorial operations. He is also a special advisor to Rahbar (Supreme Leader) Khamenei on Iraq, which means that if the Revolutionary Guards want to do something in Iraq, he is the one who approves it and oversees its execution. That makes him the most direct person responsible for the deaths of British servicemen in Iraq and, lest we forget, one of these IRGC- charges killed 14 US marines back in August.

The Guardian adds some additional information:

The explosives initially used by Iraq insurgents after the March 2003 invasion were crude and British forces were, for the most part, able to shrug them off. The bombs they face now are of a different order. They were designed by Hizbullah, the Lebanese-based Shia guerrilla group that fought the Israeli army for almost two decades and eventually forced it out of southern Lebanon.

A senior British official said yesterday that the bombs were imported by Iran -which, along with Syria, provides financial and logistical support to Hizbullah - and then passed on to insurgents in Iraq.

The disclosure that Iran is supplying such sophisticated weaponry for use against British forces marks a new low in relations between the two countries. For the first two years after the invasion of Iraq, British officials repeatedly made a point of saying that Iran had not been interfering in southern Iraq.

Since the spring, the tone has changed. In August, a British official described as unacceptable the smuggling of weapons from Iran into Iraq after a cache was intercepted at the border.

It also notes the failure of the European approach with respect to Iran to date:

The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna voted overwhelmingly last month to declare Iran in non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a first step towards possible punitive UN sanctions. Iran denounced the IAEA vote, calling it "illegal and illogical". Government spokesmen raised the prospect of reprisals, including withholding energy supplies to western European countries and withdrawal from the NPT.

Increasing the pressure on British forces in southern Iraq was not listed publicly among Tehran's possible reprisals. But that may have become an option now being exercised covertly, officials suggested. In other words, after the Vienna vote, the gloves are off.

"Iran's motives certainly don't seem that benign," the senior British official said. "If Iran wants to tie down the coalition in Iraq, then that's consistent with supplying insurgent groups."

Britain's decision to take a tougher line in public may also reflect a realisation that its policy of "critical engagement" with Iran, which was pioneered by the late Robin Cook and doggedly pursued by his successor as foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has run into a wall.

That belief was strengthened by the landslide triumph of Islamic hardliners in Iran's presidential election last June. The rise to power of their candidate, Mahmoud Amadinejad, a little known former mayor of Tehran, is the other key development that appears to have changed the Anglo-Iranian dynamic. His speech at the UN summit last month dismayed western governments because of what they called its "confrontational tone".

The deterioration of bilateral relations comes at a crucial juncture in Iraq; a referendum on its proposed constitution is due on October 15 and parliamentary elections are scheduled for December.

A couple of reality checks need to be added here, not the least of which being that the IRGC arms shipments appear to have predated the Vienna vote by more than a month and may well have been a contributing factor in its outcome, so blaming the vote on the IRGC's latest antics would seem to be a real-time exercise in alternate history. As to the fact that Iran doesn't appear to have benign motives, I don't see how anyone who has paid attention to the repeated and universally acknowledged Iranian interference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as described by either side can come away with the idea that they harbor benign intentions.

Another major point is that Ahmadinejad was not simply appearing "confrontational," he appeared to be a flaming lunatic whose conspiracy-ridden speech stopped just short of overt advocacy of what Abdul Qadeer Khan was doing.

As noted by Yael Shahar:

The Islamic regime’s determination to continue supporting terrorism has forced the Iranian Foreign Ministry to strive, under extreme international pressure, to offset the damage caused by this policy to Tehran’s economic and political ties. In recent years, Iran has made considerable efforts to cast off its negative image as a state sponsoring terrorism. This has been motivated mainly by the desire for the economic advantages that can be had by altering its appearance vis-a-vis the West. Iran does not deny its adherence to Khomeini’s “Islamic revolutionary ideology”, which supports all radical Islamic movements worldwide. However the regime insists that Iranian support for these movements does not go beyond cultural, moral and humanitarian aid. Tehran strongly denies any military and/or financial assistance to these movements. Upon hearing these denials, it is well to bear in mind the principle of taqiyya (concealing the faith), a concept deeply embedded in the Shi’ite tradition, and according to which untruth can be used as a means of protection against the persecutors of the Shi’ite faithful. ... The only change that did occur in the Iranian terrorism scene in recent years has been essentially a tactical one. Iran has been careful to adjust its terror policy to international circumstances, in the realization that such activity does not play well to a Western audience. Iran does everything possible to ensure that its own actions are not perceived to be part of international terrorism. Iranian agents rarely take an active part in terror attacks; instead, missions are “out-sourced” to proxy organizations, such as the Hizballah, a regular contractor and central player in Iran’s terror strategy. Often terrorist groups active in the target country are trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and commissioned to carry out terrorist acts against common enemies.

Once this truism is understood, much of the rest of Iranian foreign policy falls into place rather nicely. With the reformists crushed and the IRGC ascendant, the rather thin veneer of plausible deniability that Khatami and the Iranian foreign ministry worked so hard to construct over the last several years is finally starting to drop and the results are far from pretty.

And after the manner of my mentor Michael Ledeen, faster, please.