Imagine that your neighborhood is overrun by a gang. These brutes
are wielding crowbars, knives, and pistols in a frenzied spree
of home break-ins and mugging and murder. Now suppose the police
reveal that their grand strategy for dealing with this gang is
to block them from getting submachine guns—as if without
such weapons, the gang would no longer bother people.
Would you sleep soundly at night?
Or would you be outraged? Of course you would, because this gang—even
without more powerful weapons—is already a serious menace
that must be stopped.
Now, what would you say if this ridiculous what-if scenario resembled
our actual response to the very real threat from Iran?
Ever since taking U.S. embassy staff hostage in 1979, the Islamist
regime in Teheran has led an international spree of bombings,
hijackings, and other terrorist attacks on Americans and Westerners.
Now politicians and diplomats, who put up with Iranian aggression
for years, are loudly promising to block Iran’s pursuit
of nuclear weapons.
On the campaign trail, for instance, the candidates debate how
(i.e., with or without preconditions) they’d negotiate
to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuke—on the idea that
without such a weapon in Iranian hands, everything will be hunky-dory.
But the uncomfortable truth is that if the mullahs got a nuke,
Iran would not suddenly undergo a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation
from a friendly neighbor into a rabid enemy. Iran long ago proved
itself a threat that must be stopped; a nuclear arsenal would
only make it a far worse threat.
For three decades the ayatollahs of Iran have been using proxies—such
as Hezbollah—to carry out murderous attacks. Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard Corps helped create and train Hezbollah,
which hijacked a TWA airliner and which kidnapped and tortured
to death American citizens. Iran pulled the strings behind the
1983 bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon and later the
barracks of U.S. Marines, killing 241 Americans. Iran also orchestrated
the 1996 car bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, where
19 U.S. servicemen died.
There’s more: The 9/11 Commission found that “senior
al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive
training in explosives,” and that “8 to 10 of the
14 Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives traveled into or out
of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.” During
the Afghanistan war, Iran welcomed fleeing al Qaeda and Taliban
fighters. Today, according to the U.S. military, Iran is running
training camps near Teheran for Iraqi insurgents, who return
to Iraq to practice and train others in their bomb-making skills.
There’s also growing evidence that Iraqi insurgents get
bomb technology from Iran.
What’s going on here?
A rational assessment of Iran would have to recognize that the
mullahs in Teheran have been conducting a proxy war against America.
The inspiration for this war is Iran’s jihadist goal of
imposing Islamic totalitarianism globally. Iran is a leading
sponsor of jihadists and the self-identified role model for exporting
its Islamic revolution to other countries. It is the sworn enemy
of the West. We should take seriously its call to bring “Death
to America!”—because it has already done so.
But too many American diplomats and commentators refuse to judge
Iran. Instead, they regard its past hostility as a string of
disconnected crises, unrelated to Iran’s ideological agenda.
They avoid naming the nature of the regime and behave as if its
acquisition of a nuclear weapon would be the decisive event.
But that particular weapon—despite its power—cannot
be the whole story, since we don’t worry about other countries,
such as France and Britain, having nukes. The rarely admitted
difference is that the regime in Iran would eagerly press the
launch button.
This fear-the-weapon-not-the-killer mentality refuses to understand
the threat posed by Iran right now. This view holds that only
the concrete facts about Iran’s arsenal have any practical
significance, while its abstract, ideological goals and character
can be disregarded with impunity. But whether Iran uses one nuke,
or attacks with more conventional weapons, its victims are still
dead.
Our leaders’ narrow concern with Iran’s nuclear capability
cannot make the regime’s longstanding hostility to America
go away. Americans should face the real character and conduct
of the Iranian regime, before it is too late.
