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The United States has decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist," according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group's business operations and finances.

The Bush administration has chosen to move against the Revolutionary Guard Corps because of what U.S. officials have described as its growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its support for extremists throughout the Middle East, the sources said. The decision follows congressional pressure on the administration to toughen its stance against Tehran, as well as U.S. frustration with the ineffectiveness of U.N. resolutions against Iran's nuclear program, officials said.

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These sort of actions underline the longstanding antagonism to the Taliban by the Iranian government. And that's gotta hurt propaganda efforts by the US against the Iranians to depict them as part of some "Axis" of evil, etc.

Last year the Iranian leader challenged the US President to a television debate on world issues. Spokepersons for the monkey in the White House grunted something about it being a diversion.

Like I said, the Americans are getting hosed. Just calling the Iranian government, or entire branches of it, terroristic may be one of the few coherent options left.

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"He provided himself to al-Qaida for training to learn to murder, kidnap and maim," said Brian Frazier, the assistant state prosecutor, said in closing arguments.

The Guardian

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Immediately after the jirga’s conclusion, Karzai turned his attention to another of Afghanistan’s contentious neighboring, Iran. On August 14, the Afghan president met with his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Kabul. Speaking at a news conference, Ahmadinejad rejected US assertions that Iran is supplying Islamic militants in Afghanistan with bombs and weapons. "Security in Afghanistan has a direct impact on Iran, and for us, a powerful and secure Afghanistan is very beneficial," Ahmadinejad said.

During an August 14 news conference, Karzai described Iran as a "close brother and friend to our nation." He also expressed a desire to act as a facilitator of a US-Iranian rapprochement. According to an official Afghan source, Afghan diplomats have already on several occasions passed messages from the US government to Iranian officials in Kabul. In each instance, Iran did not respond to the US feelers, the source added.

Afghan officials quietly express deep concern over escalating US-Iranian tension, underscored by recent reports that the US government is mulling whether to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. "If anything happened between Iran and the United States, Afghanistan would be caught in the middle," the Afghan source said. "Iran can destabilize Afghanistan easily."

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Chomsky: In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the majority Shi’ite population. In an August visit to Teheran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, President Ahmadinejad and other senior officials, and thanked Tehran for its “positive and constructive” role in improving security in Iraq, eliciting a sharp reprimand from President Bush, who “declares Teheran a regional peril and asserts the Iraqi leader must understand,” to quote the headline of the Los Angeles Times report on al-Maliki’s intellectual deficiencies. A few days before, also greatly to Bush’s discomfiture, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington’s favorite, described Iran as “a helper and a solution” in his country. Similar problems abound beyond Iran’s immediate neighbors. In Lebanon, according to polls, most Lebanese see Iranian-backed Hezbollah “as a legitimate force defending their country from Israel,” Wright reports. And in Palestine, Iranian-backed Hamas won a free election, eliciting savage punishment of the Palestinian population by the US and Israel for the crime of voting “the wrong way,” another episode in “democracy promotion.”

It is instructive that Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively accepted, apparently without notice, in US and other Western commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is called ‘the loony left.” What is considered “criticism” is skepticism as to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq are true.

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Chomsky speculates on a research assignment comparing today's "liberal press" in the US with the media in Nazi Germany or Stalin at his worst:

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Chomsky: The comparisons are of course unfair. Unlike German and Russian occupiers, American forces are in Iraq by right, on the principle, too obvious even to enunciate, that the US owns the world. Therefore, as a matter of elementary logic, the US cannot invade and occupy another country. The US can only defend and liberate others. No other category exists. Predecessors, including the most monstrous, have commonly sworn by the same principle, but again there is an obvious difference: they were Wrong, and we are Right. QED.

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"All options are on the table," say "responsible" public figures in the US, both Republicans and Democrats, in a non-partisan spirit of aggression.