By JEFF EMANUEL
August 23, 2007

BALAD, IRAQ -- Attempts by Iran's totalitarian government, via its Revolutionary Guard Corps, to destroy a Kurdish organization fighting for women's rights and other civil liberties has begun to affect the ethnic population in northern Iraq. According to a deputy minister in Kurdistan's regional government, attempts to destroy the Iranian Kurdish fighters has resulted in several Iraqi border towns being hit with indirect fire, wounding many women, killing livestock, destroying property and causing nearly 1,000 people to flee their homes.

While the fighting in extreme northwestern Iran does not, at this point, represent a mass border crossing into sovereign Iraqi territory, the fighting between the Kurdish freedom fighters (whose stated goal is a "free federal democratic and secular Iran," and who are "considered close to," but not a part of, the Kurdish Workers Party, which the US considers a "foreign terrorist organization") and the large numbers of Revolutionary Guardsmen who are massed on the Iran/Iraq border, combined with the massing of Turkish soldiers on Iraq's northern border, is creating an extremely tense environment for residents of "The other Iraq," as Iraqi Kurdistan - perhaps the most stable and autonomous region of the country - refers to itself.

Almost entirely devoid of American troops (and of terrorism) to this point, Iraqi Kurdistan’s residents largely go about their daily lives as though the entire nation was not in a war for its survival. It has now been hit twice in recent days, first by an al Qaeda suicide car bomber, who detonated his vehicle in a market, killing hundreds, and now by the Iranian shelling.

The killing of Iraqis by Iran's Revolutionary Guard should not surprise any who have followed the course of the Iraq war (and postwar) to this point. While Tehran is raising the outcry that the Kurdish freedom fighters (known as the PJAK) they are trying to exterminate along the Iraqi border are "a terrorist outfit being sponsored and armed by the US to increase pressure on Iran" - a statement which, as the UK Guardian reported from its own eyewitness accounts of the equipment the PJAK are using, is patently false, despite claims by Dennis Kucinich and Seymour Hersh to the contrary - the Islamic Republic is denying its proven-beyond-dispute interference and involvement within Iraq itself.

From establishing training and base camps for both Shi'a and Sunni fighters, to funding and equipping insurgents within Iraq, Iran's involvement in the fight against Iraq and against the coalition has been very real and very pronounced for quite some time now. That involvement includes the supplying of terrorists in Iraq with the materials necessary to assemble EFPs, (explosively-formed penetrators -- an improvised explosive device which, in the past two years , has become the number one killer of American troops in Iraq).

Major General Rick Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division (whose 3rd Brigade is one of the 'Surge' Brigades), which is responsible for the area from Baghdad down to the area south of the Tigris and of Salman Pak, publicly stated that his soldiers are currently "tracking about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in [their] area," saying that, while none have been captured at this point, they "are being targeted" like any other insurgent fighters.

Only weeks ago, a Public Affairs officer within Multinational Force-Iraq privately expressed his concern to me that the media were spiking or deliberately misrepresenting reports made by the military about Iranian involvement and the capture of Persian fighters within Iraq. "We would arrest three members of the al Quds force (part of the Revolutionary Guard), and the story that would come out in the papers the next day would be, 'Three Iranian diplomats arrested from embassy.' I'd call the folks at the papers and say, 'Look, these folks weren't diplomats, and they weren't at an embassy. They're Iranian soldiers and they were taken while fighting against the coalition in Iraq.' I'd say to them, 'We have evidence -- from weapons to ID cards to uniforms - that proves beyond a doubt who and what they are,' and I'd offer to bring them in and walk through each piece of evidence with them.

"They'd never take me up on it, and would never correct their stories."

Tehran has chosen this course for itself, independent of American action. No foreign policy of America's has forced them to work round the clock -- illegally -- to develop offensive nuclear weapons. No foreign policy of ours has caused Tehran to kidnap soldiers, diplomats, and tourists for use as a bargaining chip in a most dangerous game. No policy of the civilized world has caused the Iranian government -- a United Nations member state -- to make the total destruction of Israel -- another UN member -- not only a policy position, but a priority. No coalition action in Iraq has forced Iran to send its money and materiel across its western border in hopes of killing as many American soldiers as possible.

Iran has made every one of these choices on its own. How long will it be before America decides to wake up, and chooses to realize what Tehran has done -- and chooses to accept the indisputable fact that, whether we like it or not, Iran really is at war not only with the sovereign state of Iraq, but with America as well?

Despite the existence of an American media apparatus which still openly regrets "not doing more to stop the Iraq war" -- and which apparently hopes to make amends by ensuring that Iran is safe from US attack regardless of Iran’s actions, every moment that we delay -- or deny -- the realization that, whether we like it or not, Iran really is at war with us, the danger increases. Ignoring it, most unfortunately, will not make it go away.

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a columnist and a director of conservative weblog RedState.com. He is currently embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq.