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Iran Is at War with Us
Michael Ledeen,
March 28, 2006, 7:28 a.m.
Someone should tell the U.S. government.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dying of cancer. But he is
convinced that his legacy will be glorious. He believes that thousands of
his Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers effectively control
southern Iraq, and that the rest of the country is at his mercy, since we
present no challenge to them — even along the Iraq/Iran border, where they
operate with impunity. They calmly plan their next major assault without
having to worry about American retribution. The mullahs have thousands of
intelligence officers all over Iraq, as well as a hard core of Hezbollah
terrorists — including the infamous Imadh Mughniyah, arguably the region’s
most dangerous killer — and they control the major actors, from Zarqawi to
Sadr to the Badr Brigades.
Khamenei and his top cronies believe they
have effectively won. They think the U.S. is politically paralyzed, thanks
to the relentless attacks of President Bush’s opponents and the five-year
long internal debate about Iran policy, and thus there is no chance of an
armed attack, even one limited to nuclear sites. They think Israel is
similarly paralyzed by Sharon’s sudden departure and the triumph of their
surrogate force, Hamas, in the Palestinian elections. They despise the
Europeans, and hardly even bother to pretend to negotiate with them any
more. They believe they have a strong strategic alliance with the Russians
and they think they have the Chinese over a barrel, since the Chinese are
so heavily dependent on Iranian oil. Recent statements from Beijing and
Moscow regarding the chance of U.N. sanctions will have reinforced the
Supreme Leader’s convictions.
Hapless in the Beltway
Above all, Khamenei believes he has broken the American will, for which he
sees two pieces of evidence. The first is that there seems to be very
little American resolve to do anything about punishing Iran for the
enormous traffic of weapons, poisons, and terrorists into Iraq from Iran.
Khamenei must inclined to believe that the Bush administration has no
stomach for confrontation.
We have done nothing to make the mullahs’ lives more difficult, even
though there is abundant evidence for Iranian involvement in Iraq, most
including their relentless efforts to kill American soldiers. The evidence
consists of first-hand information, not intelligence reports. Scores of
Iranian intelligence officers have been arrested, and some have confessed.
Documentary evidence of intimate Iranian involvement with Iraqi terrorists
has been found all over Iraq, notably in Fallujah and Hilla. But the
"intelligence" folks at the Pentagon, led by the hapless Secretary Stephen
Cambone, seem to have no curiosity, as if they were afraid of following
the facts to their logical conclusion: Iran is at war with us.
In early March, to take one recent example, several vehicles crossed from
Iranian Kurdistan into Iraqi Kurdistan. The Iraqis stopped them. There was
a firefight. The leader of the intruding group was captured and is now in
prison, held by one of the Kurdish factions. The Kurds say that the
vehicles contained poison gas, which they have in their possession. They
say they informed the Turks, who said they did not want to know anything
about it (the Turks don’t want anything to do with the Kurds, period, and
they shrink from confrontation with the mullahs).
The Kurds holding this man say that he confessed to working for the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Apparently they have his confession. They
say they are willing to make him available to U.S. military personnel. But
the Pentagon, which has all this information, has not pursued the matter.
This is just one of many cases in which the Iranians believe they see the
Americans running away from confrontation.
The second encouraging sign for Khamenei is the barely concealed delight
in Washington, including Secretary Rice’s recent statement at a press
conference, that we will soon be negotiating with Iran about Iraq. This
mission has been entrusted to Ambassador Khalilzad, who previously worked
with the Iranians when he represented us in Kabul. It is a bad decision,
and it is very hard to explain. The best one can say is that Khalilzad
speaks Farsi, so he will know what they are saying, and it is probably
better to have public dealings than the secret contacts this
administration has been conducting all along. But those small bright spots
do not compensate for the terrible costs the very announcement of
negotiations produces for us, for the Iranian people, and for the region
as a whole.
Talk Does Not Thwart
Iran has been at war with us for 27 years, and we have discussed every
imaginable subject with them. We have gained nothing, because there is
nothing to be gained by talking with an enemy who thinks he is winning.
From Khamenei’s standpoint, the only thing to be negotiated is the terms
of the American surrender, and he is certainly not the only Middle Eastern
leader to take this view; most of the leaders in the region dread the
power of the mullahs — now on the doorstep of nuclear military weapons —
and they see the same picture as Khamenei: America does nothing to thwart
Iran, and is now publicly willing to talk. In like manner, many Iranians
will conclude that Bush is going to make a deal with Khamenei instead of
giving them the support they want and need to challenge the regime.
If this administration were true to its announced principles, we would be
actively supporting democratic revolution in Iran, but we do not seem to
be serious about doing that. Yes, Secretary Rice went to Congress to ask
for an extra $75 million to "support democracy" in Iran, but the small
print shows that the first $50 million will go to the toothless tigers at
the Voice of America and other official American broadcasters, which is to
say to State Department employees. The Foreign Service does not often
drive revolutionary movements; its business is negotiating with foreign
governments, not subverting them. There were whispers that we were
supporting trade unions in Iran, which would be very good news, but such
efforts should be handled by private-sector organizations, not by the
American government per se.
Yet this seems a particularly good moment to rally to the side of the
Iranian people, who are known to loathe the regime of Ayatollah Khamenei,
and who are showing their will to resist in very dramatic fashion. About
ten days ago, seventy-eight regime officials were killed or captured in
Baluchistan when a convoy (including the chief of the region’s
Revolutionary Guards Corps and the regional governor) was attacked. Some
of the captives have been shown on al-Jazeera, pleading for cooperation
from the regime, and supporting their captors’ demands that five Baluchi
prisoners be freed. The regime has responded by accusing the United States
and Britain of masterminding the operation, which is the second such
strike in the past six months. In addition to calling for the release of
Baluchi prisoners, the insurgents are calling for the toleration of
Baluchi Sunnis, the appointment of locals (instead of Persian Shiites) to
govern the region, and the use of local radio and television.
Caring about Carnage
The situation in Kurdistan is likewise extremely tense. The city of
Mahabad is now surrounded by the regime’s military and paramilitary
forces, following the eruption of anti-regime demonstrations on the
occasion of Persian New Year’s celebrations on March 20. It is impossible
to get precise figures — Western journalists don’t seem to be able to
cover such events — but dozens of Kurds were arrested and many more were
beaten up in the streets.
Worst of all is the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing directed against
the Ahwaz Arabs in Khuzestan, where up to three divisions of the army, the
Revolutionary Guards, and the infamous thugs of the Basij have been
deployed, following the sabotage of a major oil pipeline by anti-regime
dissidents. Radio Farda, our official Farsi-language station, quoted a
local journalist, Mr. Mojtaba Gehestani, who says that 28,000 Ahwazi Arabs
have been jailed in the past ten months, hundreds have been summarily
executed, and many corpses have been fished out of the Karoon River, with
telltale marks of torture.
Nonetheless, the regime’s interior minister recently announced that there
is no "ethnic problem or issue" in Iran today. But he has quite clearly
failed to convince President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that all is well. The
president cancelled trips to the region four times in the past few months.
He and his cronies have a lot to worry about, because the Iranian people,
in the face of a vicious wave of repression that recalls the worst moments
of this dreadful regime, are showing themselves prepared to stand against
it, and to move to remove it. Lacking a full picture, we should base our
judgment at least in part on the behavior of the mullahs, and their
dispatch of so many armed forces to three different regions suggests they
are profoundly worried. This is not a good time to throw the mullahs a
diplomatic lifeline. We should instead show them and their democratic
enemies that the tide of history is running against them.
It’s time to take action against Iran and its half-brother Syria, for the
carnage they have unleashed against us and the Iraqis. We know in detail
the location of terrorist training camps run by the Iranian and Syrian
terror masters; we should strike at them, and at the bases run by
Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards as staging points for terrorist
sorties into Iraq. No doubt the Iraqi armed forces would be delighted to
participate, instead of constantly playing defense in their own half of
the battlefield. And there are potent democratic forces among the Syrian
people as well, as worthy of our support as the Iranians.
Once the mullahs and their terrorist allies see that we have understood
the nature of this war, that we are determined to promote regime change in
Tehran and Damascus, and will not give them a pass on their murderous
activities in Iraq, then it might make sense to talk to Khamenei’s
representatives. We could even expand the agenda from Iraqi matters to the
real issue: we could negotiate their departure, and then turn to the
organization of national referenda on the form of free governments, and
elections to empower the former victims of a murderous and fanatical
tyranny that has deluded itself into believing that it is invincible.
Source: National Review Online
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