During the cold war, the American public often recoiled from the possibility that the Soviet Union might be behind some outrage too horrific to ignore. A lot of people understandably didn’t want to know if the KGB was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the attempted assassination of the Pope. (Note to conspiracy-mongers: I am not saying that the Soviet secret service was responsible for either dastardly deed, but there was certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing that way, at least in the latter case.) After all, if the Soviets were to blame, what were we prepared to do about it? If the answer was nothing, perhaps ignorance was a rational choice.

That seems to be the dominant American attitude these days toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ever since 1979, the radical mullahs who control Tehran have been waging covert war on the United States and our allies, and we have scarcely responded. Especially now, when we are mired deep in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Americans and especially most of our politicians would seemingly prefer not to focus on actions that might embroil us with war on another front.

Yet that kind of ignorance becomes harder to preserve in light of fresh evidence of Iranian aggression. Just today, Brigadier General Kevin J. Bergner, the chief spokesman for U.S. military forces in Iraq, revealed new links between the Iranian government and the attack on an Iraqi government compound in the city of Karbala on January 20, an attack that resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers. As reported by Michael Gordon of the New York Times:

[Bergner] said that interrogations of Qais Khazali, a Shiite militant who oversaw Iranian-supported cells in Iraq and who was captured several months ago along with another militant, Laith Khazali, his brother, showed that Iran’s Quds force helped plan the operation.

Similar information was obtained following the capture of a senior Hezbollah operative, Ali Musa Daqduq, General Bergner said. The capture of Mr. Daqduq had remained secret until today.

Both Ali Musa Daqduq and Qais Khazali state that senior leadership within the Quds force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers, General Bergner said.

Documents seized from Qais Khazali, General Bergner said, showed that Iran’s Quds Force provided detailed information on the activities of American soldiers in Karbala, including shift changes and the defenses at the site.

More generally, General Bergner added, Iran’s Quds Force has been using Lebanese Hezbollah as a “proxy” or “surrogate” in training and equipping Shiite militants in Iraq.

When presented in the past with evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala raid—or in the far more frequent and deadly use of explosively-formed penetrators against American armored vehicles—apologists for the Iranian regime have questioned whether the mullahs were aware of what their own security forces were up to. This is a bit reminiscent of what Nazi apologists used to say—that surely Adolf Hitler could not have known what the SS and Gestapo were up to. That pretense becomes harder and harder to sustain in the case of Iran. The Times account concludes:

Our intelligence reveals that the senior leadership in Iran is aware of this activity, [Bergner] said. When he was asked if Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could be unaware of the activity, General Bergner said that would be hard to imagine.