As seemingly ineffectual trans-Atlantic efforts to halt Tehran’s nuclear weapons program are stepped up before the November 24 meeting of the UN nuclear watchdog, recruiting and training of suicide volunteers has been a thriving enterprise in Iran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the mullahs’ president last summer. And why not?

Two weeks have passed since Ahmadinejad stunned the world by his remarks at the “World Without Zionism” seminar. Some analysts have tried to calm the justified international concerns about a regime which is working to get the nuclear bomb while calling for destruction of a sovereign state and is threatening Muslim nations with terrorism. They have faulted Ahmadinejad’s inexperience and lack of statesmanship. Others have suggested that his words were just the rhetoric of a die-hard ideological populist. It is repulsive but harmless, they say. These views, echoed by Tehran’s traditional apologists, are naïve at best.

In the last two decades, Iran’s primary instrument of advancing its foreign policy objectives has been terrorism or the mere threat of using it. When all else fails, the dispatch of suicide bombers and hostage-takers ranks first in Tehran's foreign policy agenda.

Last month, Mohammad Ali Samadi, the spokesman for the notorious “Headquarters for Commemoration of Martyrs of Global Islamic Movement” (HCMGIM) said that his organization would hold a ceremony to honor volunteers for suicide bombing operations.

The HCMGIM was established in 1982, and grabbed headlines in spring of 2004 when introduced as an NGO in charge of recruiting “suicide volunteers” to combat “world arrogance.” Indeed, according to a more detailed translation of Ahmadinejad’s speech, he also put the “World Arrogance” United States at the cross hair of his regimes’ rogue rising.

As Tehran’s Mayor, Ahmadinejad played a key role in facilitating the activities of state-sponsored terror organization such as the HCMGIM and the Ansar-e Hezbollah, and placed the capital's key resources at their disposal.

For example, last year’s “First International Commemoration” of suicide bombers was held in a municipality-owned building in Tehran and Brig. Gen. Salami, a confidant of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Joint Chiefs of Staff Director of Operations, was the keynote speaker. The title of his speech was “Suicide operations: A security and military strategy perspective.”

Since last year, the HCMGIM has actively recruited Iranians and foreign nationals for terror operations. Boasting of its success, the group’s spokesman Samadi told Mehr News Agency that in this year’s ceremony, forms would be provided to attendees to volunteer for suicide operations. He added, “40,000 have already signed up for martyrdom-seeking operations and are organized into three battalions of volunteers with more to follow in due course.”

In spring of 2004, the IRGC’s top official, Hassan Abbassi, a confidant of Ahmadinejad and head of the “Center for the Doctrine of Security Without Borders," told a seminar that: “We have identified some 29 weak points for attacks in the U.S. and in the West. We intend to explode some 6,000 American atomic warheads. We have shared our intelligence with other guerilla groups and we shall utilize them as well…”

It would be dangerously naïve to take this as mere hollow terrorist saber-rattling. Early this month, another senior IRGC commander Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kossari, threatened the United States. “We know all of the enemies’ weak points and what to do against them. Today, we have martyrdom-seeking individuals who are ready to strike at these sensitive points,” he boasted.

Ahmadinejad is in fact the face and the voice of a radical military-security faction that forms the power base of the mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), with the backing of Khamenei, has been ascending through Iran’s halls of power since 2003, and was the engine which propelled Ahmadinejad to presidency.

Ahmadinejad and his backers are making preparations for a war for the survival of the theocratic state. This existential war is fought against the Iranian people and the free world. At home, it is fought with brute suppression of Iranians and dissidents. Abroad, it is fought through the export of terrorism and fundamentalism to Iraq, and the pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. And this is the untold and frightening story of Ahmadinejad’s presidency.

It is here and now that we must rise to the occasion and stop this aggression in its tracks. Appeasement is futile and disastrous; foreign military intervention is ineffectual. The only viable option is to support the democratic change in Iran by recognizing the Iranian people and the democratic opposition seeking to unseat the regime as the only engine for democratic change and an end to the terror rising from Tehran. Taking Iran’s breach of the NPT regulations to the UN Security Council, ending the blacklisting of Iran’s main organized opposition -- the staunchly anti-fundamentalist Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) -- and thwarting Tehran’s destabilizing campaign in Iraq should be in the cards while formulating such a policy.

The US Alliance for Democratic Iran is a US-based, non-profit, independent organization, which promotes informed policy debate, exchange of ideas, analysis, research and education to advance a US  policy on Iran which will benefit America’s interests, both at home and in the Middle East, through supporting Iranian people’s  aspirations for a democratic, secular, and peaceful government, free of tyranny, fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism.

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