[...]The urgency comes from the situation on the ground. Even the dreamers in the Department of State and the intelligence community could no longer shrug off (or blame on ourselves) the active involvement of the mullahs in the most recent terrorist attacks, their frantic and apparently increasingly successful race to develop an atomic bomb, and their commitment of thousands of men and millions of dollars to sabotage our efforts to bring an orderly and free society to Iraq. The operation in Riyadh was planned in Iran by al Qaeda leaders, notably Said bin Laden (Osama's son) and Mohammed Shoghi, whose nom de guerre is Abu Khalid Sayef al Adel (which means "the sword of justice"). Three days before the Riyadh attacks, 17 al Qaeda members were quietly moved to the Sistan and Baluchistan areas at the Pakistan border, hoping to conceal the Iranian connection, but it was uncovered anyway.

Inside Iraq, there are thousands of Iranian agents at work: radical Iraqi mullahs who were trained in Iranian mosques since the early 1980s, top officers of the Revolutionary Guards, various thugs and killers, and even the head of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, Ali Panahi, who was dispatched to Karbala to organize the anti-American demonstrations after the fall of Saddam, and then to Baghdad. The new American in charge of Iraq, Jerry Bremer, was so alarmed at what he saw in Iraq that he has been peppering the intelligence community for more information on Iranian operations ever since he arrived.[...]