Iran’s denials that it was arming and training violent militias in Iraq have never been terribly convincing. But now, in the midst of threatening the United States, Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and its former national security adviser, seems to have given up any pretence of Iranian non-involvement. As reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency, this is what Larijani had to say last week :

The Americans had assumed that the occupation of Iraq would be an easy job and that the Iraqi nation would back them up… The US had assumed it could raise ten democracy towers in Iraq, whose shade would overshadow both Iran and Syria, but the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proper strategy in the region made the Americans wonder what they had better do in Iraq…. [T]hey had better know that another miscalculation would lead them to fall in another beys [sic] in which the more they would struggle for release the harder they would get entrapped.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran’s proper strategy”? Would that perhaps involve sending Explosively Formed Penetrators to blow up American soldiers?