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Four and a half years after September 11—which was supposed to awaken us to the threat of devastating attacks by state-sponsored terrorists—America is finally beginning to confront the world's largest and most dangerous state sponsor of terrorism: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
For the past week, newspapers and magazines have been filled with discussion of possible military action against Iran. The debate, so far, is between those who merely want to "threaten" the use of force, and those who argue that the Iranian threat is illusory. No one is yet willing to face the fact that Iran is already at war with the United States—and that Iran is the central enemy we have to defeat if we are going to win the War on Terrorism.
In all of the obfuscation generated by the backward-looking debate over what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, it has been easy for some to claim that the Iranian threat is being blown out of proportion by the Bush administration. But grasping the case against Iran doesn't depend on secret dossiers and obscure intelligence reports. All it requires is that you open up your newspaper and read the pronouncements of Iran's own leaders.
In early April, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted a pep rally at which dancers in traditional Persian garb held aloft vials of refined uranium, while Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had succeeding in enriching uranium, the first step toward producing a nuclear bomb. Iran "has joined the club of nuclear countries," he boasted. An Iranian official followed up by announcing that Iran would immediately take the next step, expanding uranium enrichment to an industrial scale, allowing Iran to start building its nuclear arsenal as early as the end of this year.
Why does Iran want to enrich uranium? Ahmadinejad isn't interested so much in joining a nuclear club as he is in wielding a nuclear club. He has openly boasted that Iran wants to "wipe Israel off the map." Is Ahmadinejad just a wild-eyed "radical," out of touch with the rest of the Iranian regime? A few years ago, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man considered "moderate" by the standards of the Iranian regime—boasted that "a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel." In case you don't think they're serious, Iran's religious establishment recently released a fatwa sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons.
But the biggest threat posed by an Iranian nuclear weapon is not in Israel, but in Iraq—where Iran is already fighting a proxy war against America and its allies.
In the Iraqi conflict, Iran has been playing both ends against the middle—that is, against the United States. In Western Iraq, the Sunni insurgency is supported by a flow of terrorists, weapons, and money from Syria—a key Iranian ally. In Southern Iraq, Shiite insurgents have been using sophisticated Iranian-built shaped charges in their bomb attacks on American convoys. But this is the least of the Iranian threat. Violent Shiite militias that seek to impose an Islamist dictatorship are funded, organized, and take their ideological inspiration from Iran. The leader of the most pro-Iranian faction, Muqtada al-Sadr, has publicly pledged to fight on Iran's behalf if it is attacked by America.
There is no need to invoke the doctrine of pre-emption against Iran. Iran is already fighting a war against the United States. We just haven't been fighting back. We have held our fire as if Iran were protected by a shield of nuclear weapons. How much more aggressive will the Iranians become when they are actually protected by such a nuclear shield?
Iran's reach is not limited to Iraq. Late last year, when Bashar Assad's Syrian dictatorship was reeling from the loss of Lebanon, Ahmadinejad made a trip to Damascus in which he urged Assad to stand fast and pledged Iranian support. The Assad regime, which had been sending up trial balloons about political liberalization, instead threw hundreds of dissidents into prison. At the same time, Ahmadinejad met with leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist militia in Southern Lebanon, and representatives of two Palestinian terrorist groups: Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Now that Hamas has won the Palestinian elections, it is looking for diplomatic and financial support from—where else?—Iran.
Iran's tentacles even extend beyond the Middle East. Iran has been cultivating an alliance with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, including discussions about providing the anti-American firebrand and protégé of Fidel Castro with nuclear technology.
This expansionist pattern is no accident. The mullahs who rule Iran's system from behind the scenes maneuvered Ahmadinejad into power last year because they knew he had the fiery fanaticism to go on the offensive, pressing Iran's advantage in the face of American wavering on Iraq. Ahmadinejad has not disappointed them. Like the super-villain of a corny James Bond film—but one who commands actual armies and actual missiles—Ahmadinejad has a master plan for the domination of the world. In a document presented to Iran's parliament last year, he declared that the US is a fading "sunset power," while Iran is poised to become the "core power" of the Islamic world, the center of a totalitarian Islamic empire.
Everywhere you look in the Middle East, if you ask who is the biggest threat to America's interests, you will find the same answer—Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria, the Sunni terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq—directly or indirectly, Iran is supporting them all.
Iran's global ambitions are as grandiose as anything put forward by Osama bin Laden—but they are backed by control of a country of 70 million people with an army, navy, and air force, a vast network of terrorist organizations across the Middle East, and, very soon, nuclear weapons.
If America's failure to act against the comparatively minor threat from Bin Laden in the 1990s resulted in the horrors of September 11, we can expect far worse if we fail to act against Iran.
A war with Iran must begin with the destruction of its nuclear facilities, but it must not end there. Iran is likely to respond to any American attack by escalating, inciting an uprising in Southern Iraq, unleashing a wave of terrorist attacks, launching missiles against US targets in the Middle East, attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. And even if we neutralize all of these threats, Iran's theocrats will not drop their global ambitions. They will merely wait for our attention to wander and attempt to strike us again. The goal of a war against Iran must be to topple the Iranian regime—and to support the rise of a new government formed by the secularist dissidents who now languish in Iran's prisons.
The wars we have fought so far, against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime in Iraq—were necessary, but they left the largest, most dangerous Islamist regime untouched. The Iranians know it. Sensing American weakness, they are moving against us on all fronts—and any further delay in pushing them back will only make the task more difficult. We have to act—and we have to act now.
There can be no victory in the War on Terrorism until we confront—and defeat—the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is the real war, and it's time we started fighting it.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
The Road to Victory Goes Through Tehran - by Robert Tracinski
Below is the text of an op-ed Rob Tracinski wrote for the Ayn Rand Institute on May 14, 2003 (which was derived from "The Turning of the Tide," the cover article of the June 2003 print issue of TIA), making the case for a war against Iran.
President Bush has declared the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, but he has not declared victory in the War on Terrorism—and that's a good thing, because the largest and most important battle in that war still remains to be fought.
The road to victory goes through Tehran.
An end to the threat of Islamic terrorism requires, not just the toppling of one state sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, but the toppling of the regime that is the Middle East's most active promoter of terrorism—and the most virulent center of the ideology behind Islamic terrorism: the theocracy that rules Iran.
The most recent evidence for the urgent need to confront Iran is the simmering conflict in southern Iraq. Post-war Iraq has been touted by the administration as an attempt to create a free, peaceful, and prosperous society as a model to be followed by dissidents in neighboring countries like Iran. But Iran also wants to turn Iraq into a model—a model for American humiliation and the triumph of Islamic fanaticism.
The evidence of meticulous Iranian planning is everywhere. Note that Shiite demonstrators showed up just days after the fall of Baghdad carrying elaborate, professionally made banners proclaiming their theocratic agenda—with slogans printed in both Arabic and English, for the benefit of the Western media. This is not the work of poor, uneducated Iraqi peasants. It is the work of well-funded political operatives. Indeed, US forces have already begun to capture Iranian agents in Iraq and believe that thousands more Iranian-backed fighters have flooded over the border in the past month.
A peaceful Iraq that respects the rights of its citizens—and allows the presence of US troops or military bases—is a grave danger to Iran and to its co-conspirator in terrorism, Syria. So these two nations are trying to turn Iraq into "another Lebanon"—a quagmire of terrorist attacks and guerilla warfare. Their hope is that the United States will be so afraid of looking like a "bully" imposing an "occupation" that we will withdraw and abandon Iraq, letting Iran set up its own Khomeini-style regime there—in the same way that we abandoned Lebanon, allowing it to be colonized by Syria.
If we let this Iranian strategy work, we will have achieved "regime change" all right—we will have exchanged a fascist anti-American regime for a theocratic anti-American regime.
The nascent guerilla campaign in southern Iraq is a clear hostile act against the United States. Yet Iran is hoping that America will refuse to recognize this as an act of war. The mullahs hope we will once again put ourselves in the impossible situation of having to fight bands of guerillas among Iraq's civilian population, while refusing to confront the terror masters they serve.
What makes them think they can get away with it? Ultimately, Iran is counting on the administration's loudly proclaimed refusal to "impose our values" or our form of government on Iraq. But fighting for liberty is never an "imposition." No one has a right to violate the rights of others—and so it is no limitation on the "freedom" of Iraqi Shiites or Iranian agents if we deny their ambition to impose religious strictures by force.
The vow that we will not try to influence the new Iraq is a declaration of America's unilateral moral disarmament—our failure to fight for and protect the crucial values at stake in this war.
America needs to recognize that this war is inherently a conflict between two opposing value systems. Our enemies are driven by the theocratic philosophy shared, despite minor sectarian differences, by Osama bin Laden and by the mullahs who rule Iran. The destruction of the Iranian theocracy would do more than just eliminate the world's largest supporter of terrorism; it would do more than end a nuclear-weapons program that is far closer to completion than Iraq's ever was; it would do more than stop the Iranian-staged Shiite agitation in Iraq. The end of the Iranian regime would destroy the Middle East's laboratory of theocracy—the leading example and exporter of a system of religious dogma enforced by terror.
President Bush called the military victory in Iraq "the turning of the tide" in the War on Terrorism. That may be true, but the tide won't stay with us—or carry us to victory—until we are willing to take the war to Tehran and topple the most important material and ideological supporter of Islamic terrorism.
President Bush has declared the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, but he has not declared victory in the War on Terrorism—and that's a good thing, because the largest and most important battle in that war still remains to be fought.
The road to victory goes through Tehran.
An end to the threat of Islamic terrorism requires, not just the toppling of one state sponsor of terrorism in Iraq, but the toppling of the regime that is the Middle East's most active promoter of terrorism—and the most virulent center of the ideology behind Islamic terrorism: the theocracy that rules Iran.
The most recent evidence for the urgent need to confront Iran is the simmering conflict in southern Iraq. Post-war Iraq has been touted by the administration as an attempt to create a free, peaceful, and prosperous society as a model to be followed by dissidents in neighboring countries like Iran. But Iran also wants to turn Iraq into a model—a model for American humiliation and the triumph of Islamic fanaticism.
The evidence of meticulous Iranian planning is everywhere. Note that Shiite demonstrators showed up just days after the fall of Baghdad carrying elaborate, professionally made banners proclaiming their theocratic agenda—with slogans printed in both Arabic and English, for the benefit of the Western media. This is not the work of poor, uneducated Iraqi peasants. It is the work of well-funded political operatives. Indeed, US forces have already begun to capture Iranian agents in Iraq and believe that thousands more Iranian-backed fighters have flooded over the border in the past month.
A peaceful Iraq that respects the rights of its citizens—and allows the presence of US troops or military bases—is a grave danger to Iran and to its co-conspirator in terrorism, Syria. So these two nations are trying to turn Iraq into "another Lebanon"—a quagmire of terrorist attacks and guerilla warfare. Their hope is that the United States will be so afraid of looking like a "bully" imposing an "occupation" that we will withdraw and abandon Iraq, letting Iran set up its own Khomeini-style regime there—in the same way that we abandoned Lebanon, allowing it to be colonized by Syria.
If we let this Iranian strategy work, we will have achieved "regime change" all right—we will have exchanged a fascist anti-American regime for a theocratic anti-American regime.
The nascent guerilla campaign in southern Iraq is a clear hostile act against the United States. Yet Iran is hoping that America will refuse to recognize this as an act of war. The mullahs hope we will once again put ourselves in the impossible situation of having to fight bands of guerillas among Iraq's civilian population, while refusing to confront the terror masters they serve.
What makes them think they can get away with it? Ultimately, Iran is counting on the administration's loudly proclaimed refusal to "impose our values" or our form of government on Iraq. But fighting for liberty is never an "imposition." No one has a right to violate the rights of others—and so it is no limitation on the "freedom" of Iraqi Shiites or Iranian agents if we deny their ambition to impose religious strictures by force.
The vow that we will not try to influence the new Iraq is a declaration of America's unilateral moral disarmament—our failure to fight for and protect the crucial values at stake in this war.
America needs to recognize that this war is inherently a conflict between two opposing value systems. Our enemies are driven by the theocratic philosophy shared, despite minor sectarian differences, by Osama bin Laden and by the mullahs who rule Iran. The destruction of the Iranian theocracy would do more than just eliminate the world's largest supporter of terrorism; it would do more than end a nuclear-weapons program that is far closer to completion than Iraq's ever was; it would do more than stop the Iranian-staged Shiite agitation in Iraq. The end of the Iranian regime would destroy the Middle East's laboratory of theocracy—the leading example and exporter of a system of religious dogma enforced by terror.
President Bush called the military victory in Iraq "the turning of the tide" in the War on Terrorism. That may be true, but the tide won't stay with us—or carry us to victory—until we are willing to take the war to Tehran and topple the most important material and ideological supporter of Islamic terrorism.
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