It has become clear that the Multinational Force command is clear and confident of Iranian involvement in Iraq at the highest levels.  On July 2, 2007, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner had some words for the world concerning what we knew about Iranian meddling by special groups of Iranian combatants in Iraq.

“These Special Groups are militia extremists, funded, trained and armed by external sources…specifically by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force operatives,� said Bergner.

The special groups have evolved over the past three years into what are largely rogue elements that use a cellular structure to operate independently.  Their cellular structure and interactions create a complex web of relationships, which have increasingly been fueled by external influences, said Bergner.

Many of the terrorists that belong to these groups have played key roles in the planning and execution of bombings, kidnappings, extortion, sectarian murders, illegal arms trafficking and other attacks against Iraqi citizens, police, army and Coalition forces, said Bergner.

Since February of this year, 21 members of the Special Groups leadership have been captured or killed. One in particular, Azhar Dulaymi, a Special Groups commander, led the attack on the Provincial Joint Coordination Center Jan. 20 in Karbala that killed five U.S. Soldiers. Dulaymi was killed May 19 during Coalition force operations.

The goal of the Quds Force is to develop the Iraqi Special Groups into a network similar to the Lebanese Hezbollah, said Bergner.

“In addition to training, the Quds force also supplies the Special Groups with weapons and funding of 750,000 to three million U.S. dollars a month.   Without this support, these Special Groups would be hard pressed to conduct their operations in Iraq,� Bergner said.

This involvement extends to Iran’s army currently deployed in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

Iraqi Shiite militiamen are being trained by Iranian security forces in cooperation with Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement, offering the most specific accusations to date of Iranian involvement in specific attacks against U.S. forces.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, asserted that Iran’s elite al-Quds Force, a wing of the Revolutionary Guard, was providing armor-piercing weapons to extremist groups in Iraq, funneling them up to $3 million a month and training Iraqi militiamen at three camps near Tehran.

“The Iranian Quds Force is using Lebanese Hezbollah essentially as a proxy, as a surrogate in Iraq,” Bergner said. “Our intelligence reveals that senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity.”

In a well written piece entitled Understanding Current Operations in Iraq, Dave Kilcullen expands on the idea of working with the population to provide security, something I have argued for and advocated for nearly a year.  Then Kilcullen offers up the following prose, dripping, as it were, with sarcasm.

This is not some sort of kind-hearted, soft approach, as some fire-breathing polemicists have claimed (funnily enough, those who urge us to “just kill more bad guysâ€? usually do so from a safe distance). It is not about being “niceâ€? to the population and hoping they will somehow see us as the “good guysâ€? and stop supporting insurgents. On the contrary, it is based on a hard-headed recognition of certain basic facts …

I have not always argued for killing bad guys.  In Settling with the Enemy, with respect to the alliance with the Sunni tribal leaders to help rout al Qaeda from Anbar — a strategy which some commentators have called ‘risky’, as if we could not ascertain this prima facie — I said that “All wars must end.  The end of Operation Iraqi Freedom necessitates settling with the enemy, a high stakes strategy, absent which there is only loss of the counterinsurgency campaign.”  The enemy I advocated settling with in this case is not Iran, but erstwhile Sunni insurgents indigenous to Anbar.  This strategy is necessary because the single most important tenet of the campaign, i.e., turning terrain over to the Iraqi forces, has become unhinged because of some very entrenched characteristics of armies in the Middle East.

But in Proxy Wars and Incomplete Counterinsurgency Doctrine I also pointed out that:

To the extent to which there is an international war occurring, counterinsurgency doctrine, e.g., winning hearts and minds, proper governing (viz. David Galula), and even largesse, reconstruction, and reconciliation efforts, will be to no avail.  These tactics target a different element who fights for a different reason and in a different way.

Presumably Kilcullen is referring to the more hard line among us such as Ralph Peters when he discusses “fire-breathing polemicists.”  I am not sure if I fit into this category, but with respect to the Iranian forces inside Iraq, who will not be amenable to our efforts to win hearts and minds, I would like to go on record advocating the idea of “killing more bad guys.”