He’s seen the blood. He’s felt the pain, the hollow pit in his gut, after losing men in battle. And he knows exactly who the enemy is.

Earlier this month, when the top military commander in Iraq came home for a visit, he couldn’t stop talking about that enemy.

“Iran has fueled the violence,” Gen. David Petraeus told Congress. The Islamic Republic supplies “lethal support” to militant groups that are killing U.S. forces—“funding, training, arming and directing” them in order to extend its influence in Iraq. And lately that violence is surging—along with the number of high-quality Iranian weapons turning up in Iraqi fighters’ hands—as well as the effectiveness of the military tactics that these fighters, straight out of Iranian training camps, are using.

Iran, Petraeus said, represents “the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.”

General Petraeus has seen it firsthand. He can identify the primary threat. Unless or until Iran is stopped, Iraq will remain a hive of violence—and when U.S. forces leave, it will become an Iranian-aligned Islamist state.

But this is hardly breaking news.

Scan back through the Trumpet archives: We’ve been saying this since the day Saddam Hussein’s statue fell face-first in Firdos Square. And we were warning of an Iranian takeover of Iraq for almost a decade before that.

But Iran’s designs on Iraq go even further back—to 1979, in fact: the year of the Iranian Revolution.

When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini cemented his power that year, he turned a very extreme version of Islam into state policy. Written into the Iranian constitution is the nation’s obligation to “constantly strive to bring about the political, economic, and cultural unity of the Islamic world.” In real terms, that means exporting its extremist religio-political rule to the rest of the Middle East and the world. Neighboring Iraq—with its majority Shiite population and its 900-mile border with Iran—is a natural starting point for enforcing this extremist unity. Author and analyst Alireza Jafarzadeh compares Iraq’s “geographic vulnerability” to Iran—which is quadruple the size and has triple the population—to the situation between Lebanon and Syria, which Syria has dominated for decades.

From the beginning, Khomeini saw Saddam Hussein as the number-one obstacle impeding the forward march of the Islamic revolution. He directly appealed to Iraqis to boot him, calling him a “puppet of Satan.” Saddam, feeling threatened, responded by invading Iran on Sept. 22, 1980. Khomeini viewed the resulting conflict as nothing less than a war over the future of his beloved religion. “It is not a question of a fight between one government and another,” the ayatollah said. “It is a question of an invasion by an Iraqi non-Muslim Baathist against an Islamic country, and this is a rebellion of blasphemy against Islam.”

The resulting war was brutal, devastating, and inconclusive—costing each side about a million people and half a trillion dollars and yielding no gains. When a UN ceasefire brought it to an end in 1988, Khomeini’s military was sapped of strength and morale, and his country lay in economic ruin.

Nevertheless, his regime never gave up its plans for Iraq.

It simply began working an alternative plan—a plan that involved what Jafarzadeh calls “a complex program of infiltration at every level.” Iran poured resources into trying to destabilize Iraq from within by infiltrating it economically, politically, religiously and socially, as well as through propaganda, intelligence gathering and terrorism. Saddam had single-handedly succeeded in turning Iraq into a blood enemy, and the Islamic Republic wanted nothing more than to see him gone.

The regime was given an important assist in 1991. When Saddam tried to replenish his depleted war chest by invading Kuwait, a U.S.-led coalition punished him. Not only did the Gulf War diminish Saddam’s resources, it also punctured the secular Arab nationalist movement Saddam had symbolized. The resulting ideological vacuum left plenty of room for Islamic extremism to flourish.

And flourish it did. Iran looked to seize the leadership of the burgeoning movement by stepping up its support for terrorist groups throughout the region. The trend caught the eye of Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry. “Much of the world is unaware of what a powerful and dangerous force the Islamic camp is becoming,” he wrote in the July 1992 issue. “Iran is a natural leader for many of them today. Iran also has a goal to lead this group.”

Mr. Flurry’s interest in the trend centered on the prophecy of Daniel 11:40—a prophecy to unfold “at the time of the end”—the time we currently live in. It describes a geopolitical power, “the king of the south,” involved in a critical sequence of end-time events, and Mr. Flurry began to believe Iran, leading the radical Islamist camp, would fulfill that role. In the Trumpet a year later he wrote, “I believe all indications point to radical Islam, headed by Iran as this king,” and suggested the possibility of Iran taking over “control [of] the oil of other Middle East oil producers” (July 1993).

By 1994, Secretary of State Warren Christopher was calling Iran “the world’s most significant state sponsor of terrorism.” Its tendrils were extending deeper and deeper into the hottest spots in the region.

In December of that year, Mr. Flurry wrote an article with this provocative headline: “Is Iraq About to Fall to Iran?” “The most powerful [Muslim] country in the Middle East is Iran,” he wrote. “Can you imagine the power they would have if they gained control of Iraq, the second-largest oil-producing country in the world?” He based this forecast on a prophecy in Psalm 83, which is explained in the booklet The King of the South, whose first edition was printed around that time.

As powerful as Iran was growing, however, nothing boosted its bid for leadership within the region more than what happened in 2003.

The “war on terror” that began after Sept. 11, 2001, led the White House to focus its attention more than ever on Iraq—or, more specifically, Saddam Hussein. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush labeled it—along with Iran—part of an “axis of evil” and began making the case to invade.

The leaders planning the attack were optimistic about how the situation would play out if they simply eliminated Saddam. “An explosion of joy will greet our soldiers,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. “There may be pockets of resistance, but very few Iraqis are going to fight to defend Saddam Hussein,” he said. The Pentagon was convinced that the long-repressed Iraqi people would rise up against the Baathists and bring the war to an end “in weeks or even days.”

This idea fantastically underestimated two critical realities. First was the importance of Saddam Hussein in holding together the patchwork of ethnic, national and religious groups that is Iraq. “Iraq has never been a real country,” wrote Yossef Bodansky. “[T]he assault on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime discredited and effectively destroyed the only mechanism holding these mutually hostile entities together” (The Secret History of the Iraq War).

Second was the Iran factor.

“Iran should be on notice: Efforts to try to remake Iraq in Iran’s image will be aggressively put down.” Thus said Donald Rumsfeld in May of 2003, just two months after the U.S. had chased Saddam Hussein into a spider hole.

The secretary of defense’s warning sounded resolute. It may have been sincere. But it was empty. By that time, the Iraqi landscape was already crawling with well over 25,000 Iran-sponsored Shiite armed forces.

As Jafarzadeh wrote, “Immediately after the coalition invasion of March 2003, Iran’s leaders exploited the situation and launched a no-holds-barred mission to control Iraq’s elections, militias, and power structure at every level. The leaders in Tehran had been waiting for such an opportunity since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in the late 1980s, and the upheaval of Operation Iraqi Freedom was a gift beyond their wildest dreams. The door to Iraq flung open, they leapt at their chance to fulfill their long-held goal of installing an Islamic Republic in Iraq that mirrored their own” (The Iran Threat).

Iran’s strategy was simply to underwrite enough terrorism—from virtually any group willing to cooperate—to destabilize Iraq and make it ungovernable. This would convince the Americans to make an ignominious retreat, leaving behind a Saddam-free Iraq ripe for transformation into something like an Iranian protectorate.

The strategy has been an enormous success. The five years since have been a slow, bloody but inevitable march toward Iraq falling under Iran’s influence.

Once Iran establishes that beachhead, it will proceed to try to export its revolution further afield.

Yes, Iran has fueled the violence—its latest tactic in a decades-long effort to control Iraq. This is no revelation. But if Washington is only now wanting to do something about it, be assured—it is far too little, far too late. It has already lost too much ground in Iraq to Iran, ground it definitely does not have enough will to reclaim.

It is all happening as the Bible said it would. Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s prophetically based forecast that Iraq would come under Iran’s influence, made back in December 1994, edges ever closer to fulfillment.