Iranian Mullahs: Can We Talk? (Part 2)

That then is our dilemma. Though we rhetorically see Iran as a state sponsor of terror, and even officially say so in our annual State Department reports on the same subject, our actions to date, and from every administration since 1979, have revealed a general unwillingness to face an ugly reality. Iran is supporting terrorist attacks on our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are the prime sponsors of Hamas and Hezbollah, serving as both the exchequer and armory for both. They blew up the Pam Am flight over Lockerbie and our Marine barracks in Beirut. They are an outlaw regime. They are at war with Lebanon, Israel, and the United States and its allies. But we have generally chosen to deal with them anyway, despite their record.

But there is a reason for this. As long as we see “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” as our most serious terrorism threat, we will be in danger of playing once again a long-run diplomatic game of rope-a-dope with the mullahs and their thuggish friends in Iran. We went through this with Iraq from 1991-2003. If we had not liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s clutches in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, we would not have discovered Saddam’s nuclear weapons program that was some 6 months to one year away from bearing fruit. In short, if we do not see “states” as the “terror masters” they are, why should they be concerned that we will do anything but play along with the fiction that they are just ordinary members of the international community?

Our attention thus gets directed not to the puppet masters but to the puppets. It is very true that some number of mosques and madrasses around the world serve as recruiting ground for  terrorists, many who are in turn being used to attack US forces and our allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In them Imams preach a particularly virulent form of Islam, most notably Wahhabism and Khomeinism.

But the terror masters are not the mosques or the Imams, but the governments of Iran, Syria, elements within the ISI in Pakistan and the government of Saudi Arabia, as well as their accomplices in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China and Russia. From here come the weapons, the financing, the training grounds, intelligence and sanctuary. For example, recruits travel to Damascus, they are trained in weaponry and explosives, and then sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While securing another “deal” with Iran on its nuclear program may appear to be the next right move in US counter-proliferation policy, it neglects to answer the fundamental question our current efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are central to: to what extent are we willing to take down those regimes that are the terror masters of the 21^st century, not unlike their original sponsor and creator the Soviet Union, the very evil empire Presidents Reagan and Bush took down two decades ago.

For as the head of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, (earning him the nickname Lion of Panjshir), warned us years ago, “Al Qaeda…was just one element in a poisonous coalition that included Arab intelligence agencies; impoverished young students bused to their deaths as volunteer fighters from Pakistani religious schools; exiled Central Asian Islamic radicals; and wealthy sheikhs and preachers who jetted in from the Persian Gulf.”

Iran is part of just such a poisonous coalition. David Dastych, a former Polish intelligence agent, explains: “State-terrorist links are the most dangerous element of the present nuclear threat to the United States, its military forces and institutions abroad, and to Europe and other regions of the world.” Iran may indeed develop a nuclear weapon, and America may be able to deter its use. David Sanger of the New York Times warned recently, what is the deterrent to a terror group, created specifically by Iran to receive a nuclear device gift wrapped by the mullahs, detonating the weapon in an American city?