The next president will be tested by these robed thugs. The mullahs nuclear quest continues and the next president must thwart that quest. The mullahs will make trouble in Lebanon and stir conflicts throughout the Middle East and Central Asia (e.g. Afghanistan and Pakistan).

However, Iraq will be the central battle front with Tehran, militarily, diplomatically and morally.

Iraqs emerging democracy presents the mullahs with a complex challenge. Democracy gives Iraq an ideological advantage in its struggle with Irans dictatorship. Disgust and discontent has become a way of life inside Iran. The Khomeinist revolution has failed and fossilized as a corrupt theocracy backed by secret police and Revolutionary Guards. The Iranian people look west and see Iraqi Arabs and Kurds seizing a historic opportunity to create their own open, democratic system -- and they know the mullahs are the gangsters denying them that opportunity.

Moreover, Iraqs Shia majority offers an alternative political vision (i.e., democracy) to Irans, and its Hezbollah puppets, Shia Islamist authoritarianism.

In 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah of Iran, the Khomeinists had a radical vision propelling them, with the U.S. damned as The Great Satan. Now the Ayatollahs heirs wage a strategic delaying action, relying on terror at home and abroad to remain in control.

The mullahs provide an example of Americas most common 21st century opponent -- a failed clique of violent ideologues with either petrodollar or narcotics income whose chief tools of foreign policy are assassination, terrorism and crime.

Its why the next American president must win his Iraq War.