It would be surprising to find that there were no Iranians inside Iraq training forces that were friendly to Iran. The Iranians ran covert operations inside Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and throughout the 1990s, when they worked with intensely organized Shia in the south. The Iranians have a deep interest in Iraq, and the probability that they would not be involved in training militias is low. Therefore there are two interesting things in Lynch's statement. The first is the assertion that this is the first unit of its type that has been found. The second, that Lynch has chosen to make a major statement about it now.

Both information and logic tell us that the Iranians have been in Iraq and, given the weapons that have flowed into Iraq from Iran, it is obvious that there is a covert system operating to get them there. It also is unlikely that the Iranians would be sending in weapons without also providing training. Therefore, Lynch's statement could be true only in the technical sense that the United States has intelligence on some special type of training group, perhaps larger than usual. To say that this is the first time U.S. intelligence has spotted Iranians training militias is a little hard to accept.

Which brings us to why he made the claim at this time. Major generals do not get to make statements that are not cleared by higher command. The United States has been playing psychological warfare games with the Iranians, as we pointed out last week, threatening to have the IRGC placed on the list of terrorist organizations. If it can be demonstrated that the IRGC, as opposed to Iranian intelligence, is doing the training, and it can be shown that the militias it is training have engaged in terrorist activities (not hard, given that this is Iraq), the United States now has proof that the IRGC is a terrorist organization. Lynch's statement comes across as justification for this very conclusion.

It is still not clear where the United States is going with this. One reader wrote in saying that the United States is a boa constrictor slowly strangling Iran with these measures. That is an interesting analogy, save that a boa constrictor is incredibly powerful and it crushes small creatures. The United States is not all that powerful right now, and Iran is not a small creature in this context.

Still, what we regarded as an interesting scheme out of Washington without much significance got more interesting. Lynch's statement, which we assume was cleared with Gen. David Petraeus, indicates that this particular maneuver had a broader buy-in than just the National Security Council. Now, what Washington intends to do once it designates the IRGC a terrorist group is not clear. We are still of the firm opinion that a nation losing a war in Iraq and barely holding on in Afghanistan really does not want to start a third war. But the shocking discovery that Iranians are training Shiite militia may well portend unexpected activity.