Deadly Persian Provocations.

Byline: Reuel Marc Gerecht

Two weeks ago, the Bush administration announced it may designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization--the first time a foreign military body has received that label. Days later, a top U.S. general in Iraq accused Tehran of training Shiite militants inside the country. The moves came at an already precarious time in U.S.-Iran relations, and have greatly worried Washington's European allies, who see the steps as a prelude to war and fear they will make ongoing nuclear diplomacy with Tehran much more difficult.

Such fears are unfounded, however, and rest on several basic misunderstandings. For one thing, the terrorist label is nothing new, and thus will do little to change the current state of play. For another, Iran represents a much greater threat than Europe typically recognizes. It is not a status quo state that favors stability, as most pundits and governments portray it. Iran is, instead, a radical revolutionary force determined to sow chaos beyond its borders. Assuming that normal negotiations can bring it around is, therefore, a grave mistake. The mullahs don't want peace in Iraq--just the opposite. War may come, but not because negotiations break down. The likely trigger is an Iranian provocation.

Iran's bloody role in Iraq has yet to be widely acknowledged. But the clerical regime is killing U.S. soldiers there. Sophisticated Iranian explosive devices wielded by Shiite insurgents are producing ever-larger numbers of U.S. casualties. The brutal Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr is probably now responsible for about half of all U.S. combat deaths. Sadr, who visits Iran regularly, has developed close ties to the mullahs. And Iranian Revolutionary Guards have started training his henchmen inside Iraq. Tehran also continues to back the Shiite Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This is increasing internecine violence in southern Iraq, where the feeble British presence has nearly collapsed. Bloody confrontations between the Mahdi and Badr gunmen are on the upswing.

As all this suggests, the widespread belief (shared by the Iraq Study Group, among many others) that Iran wants stability in Iraq is wrong. To understand Iran's true nature, remember Lebanon. During the civil war in the early 1980s, the clerics in Tehran backed a variety of Lebanese Shiites before settling on the ...