{"id":1090,"date":"2012-01-11T21:57:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T21:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2013-03-05T22:00:09","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T22:00:09","slug":"iran-on-the-brink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/iran-on-the-brink\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran on the Brink"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n

Defining Ideas<\/em><\/p>\n

Just in the last few months, events have hastened to a crisis in Iran\u2019s long confrontation with the West. The ongoing civil war in Syria looks more and more likely to end with the ouster of strongman Bashar al-Assad, one of Tehran\u2019s most stalwart regional allies and an important supporter of the Iranian proxy terrorist organization, Hezbollah in Lebanon. In November, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported evidence suggesting that Iran is carrying out \u201cundisclosed nuclear-related activities,\u201d including the \u201cdevelopment of a nuclear payload for a missile.\u201d According to Israeli intelligence, Iran now has enough material for four to five nuclear bombs.<\/p>\n

Since the IAEA report was made public, mysterious explosions have rocked Iran. On November 12, a huge blast completely destroyed a military base that housed Iran\u2019s long-range missile development facility, killing the founder of Iran\u2019s missile program and destroying 180 missiles. Another explosion on November 28 seriously damaged a nuclear conversion site. And in December, blasts have occurred at the Isfahan oil refinery, a military base in Kerman, and a steel factory making nose cones and other parts for missiles. These attacks have rattled further a regime that is on edge over the rumors of a possible Israeli military strike and the impact of international economic sanctions. Rioters, comprised of members of the brutal Basij militia, recently attacked and sacked the British embassy in Tehran, either because of British sanctions against Iran\u2019s banking sector, or internal power struggles among Iran\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n

All these signs of turmoil point to great instability in a region critical to American interests. The dangerous instability would only escalate if a regime ruled by clerics, who endorse an apocalyptic strain of Shia Islam, gained nuclear weapons capability. Yet the roots of this critical moment stretch back thirty years, when America\u2019s policy of serial appeasement of the Iranian mullahs and their aggression first began.<\/p>\n

The Islamic Republic of Iran was born in the 1979 attack on the US embassy in Tehran and the kidnapping of our citizens there, 52 of whom were held hostage for 444 days. This blatant violation of international law and challenge to US prestige was met with the whole repertoire of appeasing evasions evocative of the 1938 crisis in the Sudetenland: diplomatic \u201coutreach,\u201d a UN Security Council Resolution, a UN commission of inquiry into America\u2019s \u201ccrimes,\u201d secret third-party negotiations, and, of course, economic sanctions and a trade embargo rendered toothless by the Iranian threat to cut Europe off from Iranian oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
In the end, this policy of appeasement failed and the West lost Iran.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In the end, this appeasement failed and the West lost Iran. What arose was an oil-rich, jihadist state that immediately began to make good on one ayatollah\u2019s promise that \u201can Islamic and divine government, much like Iran\u201d would be created in other Muslim nations.<\/p>\n

As part of that expansion, in 1982 Iran\u2019s Quds force \u2014 the unit of the Revolutionary Guards tasked with exporting the Islamic Revolution \u2014 turned Lebanon\u2019s Bekaa Valley into a training facility for a number of terrorist outfits, most importantly Hezbollah. One of these groups, Islamic Jihad, struck America in 1983 with two suicide truck-bomb attacks in Beirut. The first targeted our embassy, killing 17. A few months later, the more devastating attack destroyed the US Marine barracks, killing 241 Marines and other military personnel sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers. A high Iranian official would later say that the Iranians had trained the bombers, and that \u201cwe were happy\u201d when they heard of the attack.<\/p>\n

Though the Reagan administration planned a retaliatory strike on the Bekaa training camps, it was never carried out. Instead, the Marines were pulled out \u201cin a rush,\u201d Secretary of State George Shultz wrote later, \u201camid ridicule from the French and utter disappointment and despair from the Lebanese.\u201d Osama bin Laden would later refer to this retreat as further evidence that America had \u201cfoundations of straw\u201d and could be toppled with attacks that sent troops home in body bags.<\/p>\n

This unpunished aggression was followed by other murders and kidnappings of Americans, including CIA station chief William Buckley, who was beaten and tortured to death in 1985 by Imad Fayez Mugniyah, the architect of the Marine barracks bombing. In response, the Reagan administration undertook the disastrous arms-for-hostages operation that unfolded from 1985 to 1986. What came to be known as \u201cIran-Contra\u201d involved ransoming American hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon by selling Iran several thousand anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in violation of an arms embargo. Three hostages were released \u2014 but then were immediately replaced by three other kidnapped Americans. The only message sent to the Iranians was that the United States would provide advanced weaponry to a regime that had declared war on it and murdered its troops and citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Iran continues to support terrorist groups that attack US interests.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Throughout the nineties, Iran continued with impunity to provide support and training to terrorist organizations attacking US interests, including al Qaeda. One attack, a joint project of Hezbollah, Iran, and al Qaeda, was the 1996 truck bombing of the Khobar Towers, a residential complex for US Air Force personnel near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans. A few years later, according to the\u00a09\/11 Commission Report<\/em>, Iran helped al Qaeda members, including future 9\/11 hijackers, cross into and out of Afghanistan. More recently, Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard forces have continued to support the terrorists killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, supplying insurgents with anti-aircraft missiles and roadside bombs designed to penetrate protective armor on vehicles. And let\u2019s not forget other unpunished assaults on the United States, such as the kidnapping and detention of three US citizens on the false charge of spying, and the uncovered plot to murder the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC in a public restaurant. Meanwhile, Iran moves ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

For thirty years, this aggression has been answered with ineffective economic sanctions, or rewarded with diplomatic \u201coutreach\u201d and \u201cmeaningful engagement,\u201d the latter from President Obama. Over the years, America has failed to punish the Iranian regime for many reasons, ranging from Cold War geopolitical calculations to Iran\u2019s importance as a major oil exporter. But the most important failure is the lack of understanding of the religious motives of Iranian behavior.<\/p>\n

This misunderstanding was evident in how in 1979 the West portrayed the architect of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, as a fringe \u201cfanatic,\u201d in the words of\u00a0Time<\/em>\u00a0magazine. Our foreign policy establishment understood the revolution itself as essentially secular, an anti-colonial overthrow of an American puppet who oppressed his people and stymied their aspirations for democratic self-determination.<\/p>\n

Yet the roots of Khomeini\u2019s revolution were mainly religious, a reaction against the Shah\u2019s modernization and secularization programs. To the clerical establishment, these were evidence that the Shah was \u201cfundamentally opposed to Islam itself and the existence of a religious class,\u201d as Khomeini preached. To President Carter\u2019s foreign policy team, however, the religious dimension of the revolt against the Shah was secondary, as an Assistant Secretary of State put it, to the \u201cvery substantial improvements . . . in living standards and economic and social opportunities\u201d made under the Shah but vitiated by his refusal to give his people the democratic freedom they presumably were now demanding. But as Khomeini would say later, \u201cWe did not create a revolution to lower the price of melons.\u201d The point, rather, was to create an Islamic government consistent with Sharia law, like the regime still ruling Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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It is critical for us to understand the religious motives of Iran’s behavior.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

That misapprehension of the Iranian regime has continued today. Obama\u2019s diplomatic outreach to the mullahs \u201cwithout preconditions,\u201d like his personal letter to the Ayatollah Khamenei calling for \u201cco-operation in regional and bilateral relations,\u201d assumes that Iran\u2019s clerical leadership is motivated by the desire to live in peace with its neighbors and the international community, while providing economic opportunity and social order to its citizens. But everything Iran\u2019s leaders have said and done for thirty years suggests that the mullahs are driven by an Islamic vision of a Muslim nation at war with infidels whose mere existence challenges the ability of believers everywhere to live according to the precepts of Islam. As Khomeini once said, \u201cIslam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the IAEA report, Western governments have apparently shed their illusions about the Iranian regime as amenable to persuasion and change, though so far no credible response to the nuclear threat beyond more sanctions has appeared, at least publicly.<\/p>\n

As the costs of our misreading the Iranian revolution have become obvious, the same failure of imagination conditions our response to events in the rest of today\u2019s Middle East \u2014 namely, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. Despite the Muslim Brothers\u2019 long record of jihadist theory and violence aimed at creating Islamist regimes founded on illiberal Sharia law, for months we have heard of the \u201cliberal\u201d or \u201cmoderate\u201d Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, after the Muslim Brothers and the more radical Salafists won 61 percent of the vote in a recent election \u2014 and those votes were cast in urban areas presumably more liberal and secular than country villages \u2014 the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0editorialized, \u201cAs long as they [the Muslim Brothers and Salafists] are willing to play by the rules, those parties should not be treated as a specter to be feared.\u201d And despite evidence to the contrary, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0claimed, \u201cMost Egyptians have no interest in swapping Mubarak\u2019s secular dictatorship for a religious one.\u201d<\/p>\n

That judgment is based not on what Egyptians say and do, but on what we uncritically assume are the normal aspirations and good intentions of all people regardless of their culture and faith. This is the same error made thirty years ago, when the conventional wisdom thought that the secular nationalists and liberals in Iran would prevail over the clerics and the religious parties. Three decades later, we still have not learned to heed the simple wisdom of Sun Tzu: \u201cIf ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92012 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton Defining Ideas Just in the last few months, events have hastened to a crisis in Iran\u2019s long confrontation with the West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[124,59,22,393],"tags":[1051,503,249,501,317,502,1039,286,1017,1061,489,1043,169,1060,1041,162,1037,232],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-hA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":984,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-final-countdown-israel-vs-iran\/","url_meta":{"origin":1090,"position":0},"title":"The Final Countdown: Israel vs. Iran","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The 33-year farce of Western appeasement of Iran may be reaching its denouement. For the last few months, the pace of events have quickened as the West sanctions and threatens, and Iran blusters about closing the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil to Europe,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Israel"","block_context":{"text":"Israel","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/israel\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9862,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-three-headed-hydra-of-the-middle-east\/","url_meta":{"origin":1090,"position":1},"title":"The Three-Headed Hydra of the Middle East","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Trump has inherited a matrix of problems that primarily stem from Iran, Russia, and ISIS. 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The Iranians also get crippling economic sanctions lifted.\u00a0 The agreement\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iran"","block_context":{"text":"Iran","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iran\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6079,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/john-mccains-syria-delusions\/","url_meta":{"origin":1090,"position":3},"title":"John McCain’s Syria Delusions","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Following the president\u2019s announcement that we will provide small arms and ammunition to the rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Senator John McCain has intensified his drumbeat for war and demanded even more extensive U.S. involvement, particularly a no-fly zone. 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In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/pic_giant_091114_hanson-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6074,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/intervention-in-syria-is-a-very-bad-idea\/","url_meta":{"origin":1090,"position":5},"title":"Intervention in Syria Is a Very Bad Idea","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Syria is turning out to be a sort of Spanish Civil War of our age, with Hezbollah and Iran playing the role of fascist Italy and Germany, and the Islamic nations and jihadists that of Stalin\u2019s Russia, as the moderates disappear and the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}