axis of evil, con.

The agreement on the Iraqi interim constitution was overshadowed yesterday by a horrific series of bombings targeting Shia on the holiest day of their calendar.

There were contradictory death tolls from Tuesday's near simultaneous bombings at Baghdad's Kadhimiya shrine and holy sites in Karbala, 50 miles to the south.

U.S. administrators' death count was lowered from 143 to 117, a senior coalition official said Wednesday. Iraq's Health Ministry said 185 people died. Estimates of the wounded ranged from 300 to more than 400.

As authorities slowly identified the dead, relatives picked up their slain loved ones from Karbala's al-Hussein hospital Wednesday morning. Others wept as they scanned handwritten lists of names posted on the hospital walls. Iranian pilgrims, speaking in Farsi, struggled to communicate with the Iraqi hospital officials.

Some carried their relatives' bodies through the city's two main shrines, the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, for blessings, then took them to a nearby mosque to lay out before burial.

The confusion reflected the chaos of Tuesday's events, when the large blasts went off among thousands of pilgrims from Iraq and around the world marking the holiest day of the Shiite calendar, the mourning ceremony of Ashoura. Some of the explosions came from suicide attackers, others from explosives apparently brought in on wooden pushcarts.

U.S. and Iraqi officials pointed to an Al Qaeda-linked Jordanian militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a “prime suspect,” saying he aims to spark a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq.

It appeared other attacks had been planned. Iraqi officials said suicide bombers were arrested in Basra. In Kirkuk, where police found a bomb with 22 pounds of TNT alongside a road where Shiites had planned to march. The bomb was defused and the march canceled at police request, said Anwar Amin, the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps chief in Kirkuk.

In Najaf, police arrested two people carrying explosives near the Imam Ali shrine, police Col. Saeed al-Joubri said Wednesday.

The nature of the simultaneous attacks certainly fits the Zarqawi game plan. Here's David Warren from a month ago:

Since the liberal media will not tell you more about Zarqawi than that he has “alleged ties to Al Qaeda”, I will tell you about him (on the basis of intelligence sources that are mostly German). He is a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, who ran a terror training camp in Afghanistan, near Herat, that investigated chemical and biological weapons. His own personal branch of the jihadist international, Jund al-Shams, enjoys the material support of Iran's ayatollahs, and specialized briefly in providing Al Qaeda members escaping from Afghanistan with new identities and documentation. His foot soldiers are now trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards in camps in Persian Baluchistan, then forwarded through Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, and Syria, into Iraq, with logistical help from Hezbollah. Some may now be entering Iraq through Saudi Arabia.

Zarqawi also has a history of contacts with the former Ba'athist regime in Iraq, and was at one time the centre of a triangle whose points were Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyah, Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein's pet Palestinian terrorist, the late Abu Nidal. His lieutenants run the Ansar al-Islam operations in Iraq. He also recruits young jihadis from Germany, France, and Britain, through al-Tawhid and several other European-based terror networks. More than 100 of his operatives have been arrested over the last couple of years, many of them in Turkey and across Europe, but also as far afield as Latin America.

So, in sum: Zarqawi is known to have ties with al Qaeda, the former Ba'ath regime in Iraq, and Iran's unholy mullahs: Sunni extremists, fascist Arab secularists, and fanatical Shia revolutionaries, respectively. (More on Zarqawi here.)

The Fox News story quoted above notes that several of the people detained following yesterday's bombings are Farsi speakers—in other words, Iranian. But would Iran really send agents to kill and maim fellow Shia on a high holy day?

In a word, yes. Michael Ledeen, from late yesterday:

Monday night, following the gruesome massacres in Najaf and Baghdad at Shiite holy places, Iranians took to the streets all over the country: Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz above all. The demonstrations had a double-pronged message. First, that the people care more about freedom than about the celebration of Ashoura, the grave day of mourning for the murder of Hossein, the grandson of Mohammed, and dozens of his followers. And second, to accuse the regime of having orchestrated the slaughter in Najaf and Baghdad. The first reports even suggest that some of the security forces were fighting on the side of the demonstrators, although such reports are often wrong.

We and our policymakers should listen to these brave Iranian demonstrators, for they know more about their tyrants than our own experts. They know that the mullahs have organized massacres in the past in order to advance their own interests. This happened in the runup to the Revolution, when a movie theater was set on fire and then blamed on the shah's secret service, and then again a few years ago when a Shiite shrine was bombed and then blamed on opponents of the regime. So the idea that a Shiite regime would resort to the mass murder of other Shiites is not at all preposterous to the people of Iran, and we should take it seriously. As we know from recent intelligence in Iraq (and as some of us knew two years ago), the jihadists — enthusiastically supported by the mullahs-are desperate to drive us out of Iraq, and will resort to anything that demonstrates American weakness, and that fosters civil war within the country.

Iran's parliamentary elections last month were a farce, with voter turnout estimated at less than fifteen percent. The evidence that the regime is pursuing an agressive nuclear weapons program becomes clearer by the week. Yet John Kerry seems intent on a policy of engagement which should, more properly, be called appeasement. And IAEA chairman Mohammed ElBaradei—head of an agency that completely missed Libya's nuclear program—insists that “we should be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel.”

One hopes that the light in question won't be Tel Aviv disappearing in a mushroom cloud.

The Iranian government will do anything to undermine our efforts in Iraq, because a democracy next door would soon mean the end of the mullahs in Persia. The case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi demonstrates that extremists are none too choosy about their associates.

The war in Iraq is the war on terror militant Islamic fundamentalism, or at least is the largest front in the war. Those who deny it are either naive or are playing a very dangerous game for political advantage.

UPDATE: More on Iran's nuclear program—and the European determination to ignore it completely—here.