Free Republic

Vice President Dick Cheney recently blasted the Russians for supporting state-sponsors of terrorism. "Russia has sold advanced weapons to the regimes in Syria and Iran,” Cheney said in remarks to the The Ambrosetti Forum, a European security conference in Cernobbio, Italy, on Sept. 6. “Some of the Russian weapons sold to Damascus have been channeled to terrorist fighters in Lebanon and Iraq." But we have to connect the dots from Russia and its ongoing arms sales (from assault rifles to air-defense systems) to both Syria and Iran; to the relationships between sometimes-unlikely allies like Syria, Iran, Lebanon-based Shia Hizballah even...

Iran's increasingly close ties with Venezuela are causing concern to western terror analysts, given that Iran has long been a sponsor of Hezbollah. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran in an embrace accompanied by increasingly strident anti-US rhetoric from the Latin strongman. That has increased scrutiny of Hezbollah’s activities in Latin America.

Iran and Bolivia will "stick by each other" said hardline Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tuesday, in comments sure to provoke concern in Washington. Ahmadinejad's statements came at a joint press conference with leftist Bolivian President Evo Morales in Tehran. He said the two government weren't interested in U.S. concerns about their close ties. "We will stick by each other's side and will be supportive of each other. (I) had extensive talks with Mr. Morales on this," he said. "The geographical distance between the two countries is long but our hearts, thoughts and wills are very close." Ahmadinejad also praised Morales...

Iran has blamed Georgia for its confrontation with Russia and in a reference to Israel and the U.S., urged regional countries to unite against foreign interference. Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Saturday Georgia caused the crisis because it miscalculated the reaction to its use of military power in South Ossetia. Speaking earlier on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the conflict would not have taken place had Georgia “not allowed countries from outside the region to interfere in their internal affairs.” Analysts say that wary of U.S. troop presence in...

MANILA, Philippines (Mindanao Examiner / August 27, 2008) – The Philippine Army on Wednesday confirmed government reports that Muslim rebels and have forged an alliance with communist insurgents in Mindanao, where security forces are battling the guerillas. Colonel Daniel Lucero, commander of the Army’s Civil-Military Operations, said the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the outlawed New People’s Army have forged a formal alliance as early as in 1999. “In fact, an informal agreement has been in existence since the late 1980’s. The formal link between the NDF, represented by the Mindanao Commission, and the MILF was forged in 1999. The...

India doesn’t let North Korea plane overfly to Iran Pranab Dhal Samanta Posted online: Friday, August 08, 2008 at 0145 hrs IST New Delhi, August 7 India this afternoon withdrew its permission for a North Korean plane to overfly Indian airspace on its way to Iran, just before it could take off from Mandalay in Myanmar where it had made a stopover. This, sources have told The Indian Express, was done after instructions from the Prime Minister’s Office this morning. It’s learnt that on August 4, Indian authorities had given permission to the North Korean plane — its call sign...

[This version includes some materials cut from the published National Review version.] "Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist," said socialist Hugo Chávez during a visit to Tehran last November, celebrating his alliance with Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Che Guevara's son Camilo, who also visited Tehran last year, declared that his father would have "supported the country in its current struggle against the United States." They followed in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, who in a 2001 visit told his hosts that "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees." For his...

June 22, 2008: A new battlefield for the war on terror has developed in Venezuela. There, leftist president Hugo Chavez has not only established close diplomatic relations with Iran (and Cuba, North Korea and radical groups throughout the region), but has allowed Iran to set up operations in South America. Regular commercial flights from Iran to Venezuela (via Syria, to accommodate Hizbollah) carry people, cash and whatever else Iran wants to move. No questions asked, no visas required. Several U.S. counter-terrorism operations have gone to work, trying to find out what Iran is up to, and how to block any...

“Iran is not going away,” said Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We need to be strong and really in the deterrent mode,” he explained, and that’s especially true here at home because Tehran which is killing Americans in Iraq and threatens to “wipe Israel off the map” is radically transforming America’s soft underbelly. Iran has recruited Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to its Islamic revolution. Tehran is working with Chavez to militarize that country, grow terrorist groups, Islamitize indigenous tribes, develop a nuclear program, spread corruption, and do whatever possible to hurt the US. “I feel I...

'A MAN of God and an enemy of the Great Satan": That's how Iran's official media described Fernando Lugo - the Paraguayan ex-priest who just won his country's presidency in a hotly contested election. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Lugo on his win - hopes that Paraguay will now become another link in what he calls "the counter lasso" - the chain of anti-US regimes he's supporting with the help of his "brother," Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Ahmadinejad's analysis is simple: America is trying to throw a lasso around Iran with the help...

Friday, May 2, 2008 At a press conference during his visit to New Delhi on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asked what he thought the result of the U.S. presidential election would be, replied, "We don't interfere in the other countries' affairs but we think that the American nation seek profound changes in their country." Ahmadinejad's answer was the second reported instance in which a high Iranian official, when asked about the U.S. presidential contest, has used the word "change" or "changes" in his answer.

  When a vicious dictator wants a fifth column of Congressmen to run interference, he knows to call the Party of Defeat.  Saddam's Salesmen   By Ben Johnson FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, March 27, 2008 “If being used means that we’re highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then yes, we don’t mind being used.” – Rep. James McDermott, D-WA, on his 2002 trip to Iraq, financed by Saddam Hussein. We’ve long contended the terrorists could not buy better representation than the Democratic Left gives them for free. We never knew how right we were. The media revealed last...

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chinese sales of assault rifles and other small arms to its ally Sudan have grown rapidly during the Darfur conflict despite a U.N. arms embargo, a human rights group said on Thursday. Human Rights First, a U.S.-based nonprofit group, said a detailed study of Sudanese and U.N. trade data showed that China was virtually the sole supplier of small arms to Sudan, which pays for the weapons with its growing oil revenues. "The people of Sudan's Darfur region will endure more death, disease and dislocation, and this will be due in no small part to China's callousness,"...

Saddam and the Third Reich Few people realize that the Baath party was actually formed upon the principles and organizational structure of the Nazi party. Iraq, because of its oil and hatred of Jews, was an important battleground between the Axis and Allied powers in World War II. Nazi propaganda was broadcast throughout Baghdad, and Iraqis often went on rampages against Jews throughout the war. One of the most ardent Nazi supporters during WWII was named Khairallah Talfah. Talfah was Saddam's uncle. After the war, many of the key Iraqi Nazi supporters, all of whom evaded prosecution, wound up involved...

Since 2001, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have indulged in a high-profile friendship. They bask in their cozy camaraderie, and they have openly invited other Latin American countries, including Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia, to join their anti-American fraternity. Ahmadinejad and Chavez have called themselves the "Axis of Unity." Some security experts call them something else: a potential threat to American security. "There are two things they have in common – one is their hatred of the United States, and the second is oil," says Roger Noriega, former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs for...

Radicals never say sorry By Jonah Goldberg "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon." This excerpt from William Ayers' memoir appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a few hours before Al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground -- the group that declared "war" on the U.S. government in 1970 -- told the Times, "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com...

<p>Russian bomber aircraft approached a US Aircraft carrier in the Pacific on Saturday and were intercepted by American fighter jets, a US Defense official said on Monday.</p>

MIAMI - At the end of Nicaragua's civil war, Juan Gregorio Rodriguez traded his life as a Contra rebel for that of auto mechanic in Florida. He kept in touch with other rebels and supported their political efforts, but mostly from afar. That changed in 2006, when the Contras' nemesis, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, was elected president, 16 years after his Soviet-backed government lost power in a vote that ended the guerrilla conflict in which some 30,000 people died.

MONKEY POINT, Nicaragua — If the ruling mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran were chafing enough about U.S. Navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz to send speedboats after them last month, they must take some comfort in having projected an equivalent threat in America's own backyard, in this unlikeliest of locales.