The Terrorist Next Door

The president of the United States shook the terrorist’s hand.

Cameras flashed. Onlookers gasped. Security contingents for both sides pressed in tightly, seemingly as shocked as everyone else standing in the lobby of the United Nations building that U.S. president Barack Obama and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were clasping hands. Although both men had been invited to address the UN General Assembly only two hours apart, no one expected they would actually come face to face. Ever since Ahmadinejad had assumed power in 2005, handlers for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama had taken great pains during the General Assembly to avoid any random meetings between the leader of the free world and the Holocaust-denying public face of the world’s most dangerous rogue regime.

No U.S. president had spoken in person with an Iranian leader since Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution deposed the Shah in 1979. And the effects of Iran’s recent, successful nuclear test—an act that completely blindsided U.S. intelligence agencies, which predicted the Iranians would not have such a capability until 2015 at least—were still reverberating throughout the world. So was Ahmadinejad’s pronouncement that Iran’s newfound status as a nuclear power meant that the destruction of Israel and America, and the return of the Shiite Twelfth Imam, or Mahdi, would occur “in the next eighteen months.” Each day, large rallies in Tehran featured speakers trumpeting that Allah had granted the forces of Islam a mighty victory over the West, with Supreme Leader Khamenei publicly giving his blessing to the Iranian bomb in order to dispel any doubt as to whether nuclear weapons were “Islamically correct.” Even secular Iranians who detested the regime were caught up in the spectacle, seeing Iran’s membership in the exclusive nuclear club as a source of pride—finally, the great Persian nation that ruled much of the known world under Cyrus and Xerxes had reassumed its rightful position as a global force.

The news had the opposite effect in Washington, D.C. and European capitals, where panicked leaders had assumed they had at least two or three more years of diplomatic maneuvering to try and dissuade the mad mullahs from acquiring the bomb. After all, the “Stuxnet” computer worm that had attacked Iran’s nuclear installations in 2010—and which was likely a joint cyber-creation of the United States and Israel—had, by many accounts, set back Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons considerably. And U.S.-led economic sanctions were biting the average Iranian enough that some observers expected the eruption of another bout of massive civil unrest against the regime. It seemed everything was going the West’s way, without a shot being fired. Then came the nuclear test, and the stunning revelation that Iran had weathered the Stuxnet-and-sanctions storm by plugging away at two secret nuclear installations, one carved into the side of a mountain in the deserts of central Iran and the other buried deep beneath the ground in a fortified bunker near the country’s eastern border. The end result was that the Iranians, who are believed to have created the game of chess over 2,000 years ago, had outwitted the West and emerged victorious in the two sides’ long-running nuclear chess match.

Now all of Israel was in an uproar, with talk of an impending second Holocaust saturating the Knesset and the airwaves. Indeed, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria, emboldened by their Iranian patron’s nuclear trump card, rattled their sabers toward Israel and boasted of the imminent demise of the “Zionist cancer.” Accordingly, each day brought an increased number of rockets launched out of Gaza and southern Lebanon targeting Israeli towns and cities.

In Sunni Arab countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, newly installed revolutionary governments and the old monarchies alike were offering conciliatory words to the Iranian regime in public, but behind the scenes they were in a state of complete chaos, petrified at the nuclear-armed, Shia hegemon in their midst and working feverishly to acquire their own nuclear deterrents. Although Iran’s benefactors in China and Russia urged restraint and declared their confidence that Iran would wield its nuclear arsenal “responsibly,” rumors were circulating that the United States, Europe, and Israel were planning a joint operation to neutralize Iran’s nuclear weapons stockpile, estimated to consist at that point of only three or four bombs.

However, anonymous sources within the Obama administration had leaked information to the New York Times and Washington Post that seemed to suggest otherwise. The message relayed by these insiders was that the administration was confident it could contain a nuclear Iran. “We’ll provide a nuclear umbrella for the Sunnis and for Israel like we did for Europe for half a century with the Soviets,” one administration official told the Times. “Don’t be fooled by the Iranians’ bluster. At the end of the day, they’re rational actors who won’t jeopardize their regime by using a nuclear weapon. It’s just an insurance policy for them, not a means to jump-start some sort of Islamic Apocalypse, like voices on the right would have us believe. That kind of paranoia is not helpful as we try to engage the Iranians and learn their intentions here.”

Despite the comforting leaks emanating from White House officials and their reassurances on the Sunday morning talk shows, the American public was fixated on the Iranian threat with an intensity unseen since the Iranian hostage crisis thirty years earlier. News clips aired daily of Ahmadinejad promising “the coming end of the American aggressor” before mass rallies in Tehran. In one event, he was joined by his close ally, the Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez, who was rumored to be working on a nuclear program of his own in America’s backyard, with Russian, Iranian, and North Korean help.

Meanwhile, commentators duked it out nightly on cable news shows over what should be done about nuclear Iran, with prominent voices on the Left urging a summit between Obama and Khameini, and denouncing Americans’ outcry against Iranian nukes as “anti-Muslim bigotry.” American Islamist groups like CAIR took that memo and ran with it, appearing ad nauseum on cable news and in the mainstream press to complain of the naked “Islamophobia” being displayed toward an Iranian regime “that has not attacked anyone.” Their common refrain: “Why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons and Iran is not? Israel has attacked its neighbors. Iran has not. Who is the bigger threat?”

In short, the world seemed on the brink of war, and the American people—a majority of whom, polls showed, favored a preemptive strike against Iran—were demanding that Washington show some leadership and take a strong public stand against the Iranian regime. So, too, were the governments of Europe and Israel.

Yet there stood President Obama at the UN, sharing a cordial moment with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in front of the entire world. The Iranian tyrant smiled as he spoke a few words to the much taller Obama, who nodded as he leaned in to listen. Obama then stepped back and gave Ahmadinejad a few words in return, followed by a pat on the shoulder, just as he had done with Hugo Chavez during a similar encounter in 2009. And then it was over. Both sides went their own way, closely shielded by their security teams, as cameras continued to flash and reporters yelled out questions in vain.

The encounter lasted all of thirty seconds, but its aftershocks reverberated throughout the world, with Israel and the Sunni Arab states particularly disheartened. It was, in their eyes, and in the eyes of the president’s conservative critics stateside, a show of unforgiveable appeasement and weakness in the face of a bullying, genocidal dictatorship.

Although White House spokesmen attempted to frame “The Shake,” as it became known, as a thawing out moment of Reagan/Gorbachev proportions, polls showed that 80 percent of Americans strongly disapproved of it. As for Ahmadinejad, he and Iran’s Supreme Leader were maximizing the propaganda value of the encounter, boasting that the head of the world’s most powerful nation had come crawling before the might of a nuclear Iran. “Now that we have the world’s ultimate weapon,” Ahmadinejad proclaimed, “the Americans are our dogs, and we are their master. Islam, too, is their master, and it will soon be master of the whole world.”

The scenario I’ve just outlined is fictional—for now. Come 2012 or 2013, it may prove quite prescient. If so, it would signal that the global struggle against Islamic jihadists is lost—period. If Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, acquires the deadliest weapons known to mankind, the whole game changes. Think about it—the Iranian regime is the chief benefactor of the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It funds the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen. In addition, Syria, and increasingly Sudan, are virtually Iranian client states. How will all these well-armed jihadist (or in Syria’s case, fascist) entities behave once they are covered by an Iranian nuclear umbrella?

Take Hezbollah, for instance—an Iranian-created paramilitary force that has global reach, including a presence on U.S. soil, as we’ll see shortly. Suppose, God forbid, a group of Hezbollah operatives—at Iran’s behest—blow up a few select buildings in New York City. The explosives used in the attack are later traced back to Iran. Does the United States hesitate to strike back for fear of an Iranian nuclear response? It’s true that Iran does not yet possess an ICBM capability, as far as we know, that would enable it to reach the United States with a nuclear-tipped weapon of mass destruction. But U.S. officials estimate Iran will indeed have ICBMs by 2015,¹ and in the meantime, Russia and China are no doubt glad to share such technology with their Iranian ally to help it get there even sooner.

U.S. officials are also well aware Iran has conducted missile tests in the Caspian Sea that mirror the technique used in an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack. In such a scenario, a nuclear weapon would be fired into the atmosphere and detonated above a country like the United States. The ensuing blast would give off powerful electromagnetic pulses that would fry America’s entire electrical grid, sending the world’s most powerful and technologically advanced nation back to the 1800s in one fell swoop. Congressional hearings have warned about the threat posed by an EMP attack, but little has been done to harden the nation’s infrastructure to guard against such a catastrophe. It’s not difficult to imagine an unmarked Iranian ship positioning itself a few hundred miles off America’s Atlantic coast and firing a nuclear-tipped missile from its platform and into the atmosphere above New York City or Washington, D.C. The ship would then be immediately destroyed, and the Iranian jihadists aboard would “martyr” themselves, without a trace left behind—meaning plausible deniability.

Is the Obama administration even discussing such a doomsday possibility in its national security briefings and meetings? EMP may sound like science fiction, but it is, in fact, a very real threat, as any credible national security expert will attest. As discussions and debate over what to do about Iran’s nuclear weapons program intensify, shouldn’t Americans be informed about the whole host of dangers, like EMP, that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose?

Rest assured, Israelis are having this conversation on a daily basis. Could Israel still retaliate against Hamas and Hezbollah missile attacks if Iran threatened to intervene with nuclear weapons to defend its proxies? Or perhaps Iran would simply share its nuclear arsenal with said terror groups and have them do the dirty work. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, told me during an interview in May 2010 that it is “a working assumption of the state of Israel” that Iran may do just that.

Here’s another question: would Iran be willing to share its nukes with al-Qaeda? Why not? Al-Qaeda has long been hungry to acquire nuclear weapons, and as the two sides have shown in the past, they can easily overcome the Sunni-Shia divide and work together toward their common goal of eliminating America and Israel from the map. When it comes to jihadi cooperation against Christians and Jews, the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the order of the day.

As for that hypothetical handshake between Obama and Ahmadinejad, consider our president’s list of photo-ops with repressive, anti-American dictators since assuming office in January 2009:

• During the 2009 G8 Summit in Italy, Obama became the first U.S. president to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with Libyan dictator Moammar Ghaddafi.² Ghaddafi, who was once the target of airstrikes during the Reagan administration, was responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 190 Americans. He also orchestrated the 1986 bombing of a Berlin discotheque that killed an American soldier and wounded 63 more. Having presided over the 1996 massacre of 1,200 Libyan prisoners who had protested their living conditions, Ghaddafi is, at the time of this writing, occupying himself slaughtering his own people who have risen in revolt against his 40-plus-year tyranny.

• At the 2009 Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, Obama engaged in a grip-and-grin with Venezuela’s socialist demagogue, Hugo Chavez. For a guy who has systematically destroyed Venezuelan democracy and who once called America “the most savage, cruel, and murderous empire that has existed in the history of the world,”³ Chavez was treated awfully warmly when he ran into Obama. Obama approached Chavez—not the other way around—shook his hand, was photographed sharing a laugh, and later, engaged in private conversation with the staunch Iranian ally.⁴ He also accepted a “gift” from Chavez in the form of a notoriously anti-American book, an act Obama later called “a nice gesture.”

Obama glibly dismissed criticism of his meeting with Chavez, remarking, “It’s unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.”⁵ As we’ll see shortly, that assumption is dangerously wrong.

• Obama bowed not only to the King of Saudi Arabia, but also broke out a weird, half-bow in April 2010 for Chinese dictator Hu Jintao as they met at a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington.⁶ I’d also mention Obama’s full-on, he-must-have-dropped-a-contact-lens bow to the Emperor of Japan in November 2009, but hey, Japan is only a former enemy, not a current one.⁷

“C’mon Stakelbeck,” you might say, “Chavez is just a clown. As for Ghaddafi, he’s washed up, and it was the Bush administration, not Obama, that normalized relations with him. Oh, and the bows were just signs of inexperience early on. Ahmadinejad is a whole different story. There’s not a snowball’s chance that Obama would be caught dead in the same room with that Holocaust-denying madman, let alone shake his hand.”

My reply? How soon you forget. As far back as July 2007, during the Democratic primaries, then-Senator Obama declared that, if elected president, he would indeed meet with Ahmadinejad—without preconditions. He did not back down from that stance when pressed in the ensuing months—convinced, no doubt, that by the sheer force of his own dazzling charisma, he could talk the Iranians out of their genocidal pretentions.⁸

Eventually it became apparent that Obama was going to win the Democratic nomination, and the mainstream press decided it would no longer be prudent to ask their man difficult questions about pesky distractions like national security. So the president-to-be was no longer pressed about a potential tête-à-tête with Ahmadinejad. Turns out it wasn’t necessary. The Obama administration’s repeated, cringe-worthy attempts to engage in dialogue with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism have told us all we need to know.

• In March 2009, on the occasion of Iran’s annual New Year’s celebration known as Nowruz, Obama sent a video greeting called “A New Year, A New Beginning” to the “people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”⁹ By referring to Iran as an Islamic Republic, which he did twice during his stunningly naïve, 600-word ode to engagement, Obama sent a clear signal that the United States, under his watch, was fully prepared to co-exist with the current regime. Any threat of regime change, any promotion of Iranian democracy, was now officially off the table. In other words, “Rest easy, mullahs—continue to develop nuclear weapons, sponsor terrorism, menace Israel, jail non-Muslims, and crack the skulls of democratic activists. We will not stand in your way.”

After some years of nervousness during the presidency of George W. Bush, when regime change was an option at least being considered in Washington, the Iranian terror masters viewed Obama’s use of the term “Islamic Republic” as a sign they were now safe. America, under the Obama administration, respected the Iranian regime and would accept Ahmadinejad and the mullahs as the legitimate government of Iran. A new beginning, indeed—at least for the United States. Following Obama’s deferential video address, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly rejected The Great Healer’s plea for dialogue, declaring he’d seen no evidence of a positive change in U.S. policy toward Iran.¹⁰ Undaunted, Obama once again sent Nowruz greetings to the “Islamic Republic of Iran” in March 2010, reminding the regime that his “offer of comprehensive diplomatic contacts and dialogue stands.” And once again, he ended up with egg on his face when his outreach efforts were denounced by Khamenei, who accused the United States of plotting to attack Iran.¹¹

• In June 2009, as mass protests raged in cities across Iran following the fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency, it seemed that the Islamic regime’s 30-year reign of terror may be coming to an end. The protests, which became known as the Green Revolution, saw millions of Iranians take to the streets over a period of several weeks in a show of civil unrest the likes of which had not been seen in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Many demanded a recount that would see opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was widely viewed as the real winner in the tainted election, unseat Ahmadinejad as president.

The mullahs reacted to the protests in typically brutal fashion, sending their plainclothes Basij goon squads to beat, arrest, and murder protestors in horrifying scenes that were broadcast throughout the world. The Iranian people were literally dying in the streets for a chance at democracy. This was not the Egyptian uprising of 2011, when the most likely candidate to replace the strongman Hosni Mubarak was a much worse alternative, the Muslim Brotherhood. In the case of Iran, nothing could be worse than the mullahs.

As events unfolded and the Iranian regime’s atrocities grew worse, I received daily reports from Iranian dissidents and pro-democracy activists in Tehran. At some point during the course of every conversation, my Iranian contacts all asked the same question, in a tone of utter desperation: “Where is Obama?” They were expecting the so-called leader of the free world to make a strong and unequivocal public statement in support of the protestors and to condemn the Iranian regime for its bloody crackdown. In essence, what they wanted—and fully anticipated—from a sitting American president as they stood up to tyranny was something along the lines of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” or “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Instead, from President Obama, they got this:

It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling ... in Iranian elections. ... [W]hen I see violence directed at peaceful protesters, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed ... it is of concern to me and it is of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people, and it is my hope the Iranian people will make the right steps in order for them to be able to express their voices.¹²

The world’s most dangerous regime, an avowed enemy of the United States, was teetering on the brink of collapse—and we didn’t want to meddle? Mind you, no one was expecting American boots on the ground in Tehran. There are many ways a U.S. administration can back a courageous, fledgling democracy movement, both publicly and behind the scenes: think of Ronald Reagan’s support for Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Communist Poland during the 1980s. That was the kind of “meddling” that won the Cold War.

A few emphatic statements by Obama in support of the Iranian people early on in the protests, an influx of funds to Iranian pro-democracy leaders on the ground, stepped up activities by U.S. agents inside the country: all of these could have possibly helped tip the scales decisively against the regime—or perhaps they wouldn’t have. You can never know in such situations unless you act boldly, like a true leader should, and give it a try. What about a joint statement released by Obama along with the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, and France presenting a united front in support of the Iranian people? Something. Anything.

On June 18, 2009, some 1 million Iranians took to the streets of Tehran to protest the Islamic regime.¹³ In a brutally repressive country with one of the most fearsome intelligence apparatuses in the world, it was an earthshattering moment. But we didn’t want to meddle, and so a potentially historic opportunity for a free Iran was lost. The Iranian regime eventually restored order, tightened its grip, and returned to its familiar pattern of developing nuclear weapons and threatening Israel and the West.

Compare Obama’s deafening silence during the Iranian uprising to his loud praise for the Egyptian revolution in February 2011, in which a staunch opponent of Islamic jihadism, Hosni Mubarak, was forced to resign as Egyptian president. It was universally acknowledged at the time that the group with the most to gain from Mubarak’s ouster was the powerful, well-organized Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet Obama helped push Mubarak—a longtime U.S. ally, albeit an unsavory one—out the door anyway, setting up a situation where Egypt, the most populous and influential Arab nation, may very well fall into the Brotherhood’s radical hands in the not-too-distant future. In short, the Obama administration had no qualms about “meddling” in the affairs of Egypt, bolstering Islamists in the process. But the Obamis just couldn’t bring themselves to do the same with an arch-enemy like Iran.

Then-White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added insult to injury shortly after the Iranian protests died down by referring to Ahmadinejad as “the elected leader of Iran.”¹⁴ Gibbs later tried to backtrack, but his comment was logical enough in light of his boss’s reference to Iran as an “Islamic Republic.” A few years ago, a statue of Ronald Reagan was erected in Warsaw to honor his unyielding support for Poland in its fight against Communism. It’s safe to say that when Iran’s regime finally does fall, busts of Barack Obama won’t be coming to Tehran.

• In December 2009, at a security conference in Bahrain, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was snubbed not once, but twice, when she attempted to speak to Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. Clinton apparently chased after Motakki both inside and outside a gala dinner held during the conference in a futile attempt to get him to acknowledge her. That’s right: an American secretary of state pursued an official from Iran, an illegitimate, terrorist regime, and was rebuffed. Twice. In front of other world leaders and diplomats. Apparently, the “new beginning” in U.S.-Iranian relations envisioned by the Obama administration includes lots of groveling and public embarrassment for U.S. officials. Clinton’s Mottaki debacle was later recounted in Foreign Policy magazine:

Clinton’s first attempt came just as the dinner ended. All the leaders sitting at the head table were shaking each other’s hands. Mottaki was shaking hands with Jordan’s King Abdullah II when Clinton called out to him.

“As I was leaving and they were telling me, ‘Hurry up, you have to get to the plane,’ I got up to leave and he was sitting several seats down from me and he was shaking people’s hands, and he saw me and he stopped and began to turn away,” Clinton told reporters on the plane ride home.

“And I said, ‘Hello, minister!’ And he just turned away,” said Clinton, adding that Mottaki seemed to mutter something in Farsi but was clearly trying to avoid her.

...The next attempt by Clinton came outside the conference space, in the driveway while both leaders were waiting for their motorcades to pull up. Again, Clinton called out to Mottaki with a greeting and again, Mottaki refused to respond.¹⁵

If Clinton’s experience was any indicator, an encounter between Obama and Ahmadinejad at the UN may not consist of a handshake, but rather the president of the United States playing a game of pinthe-tail-on-the-tyrant.

• Although Iran is directly assisting in the murder of U.S. troops in Afghanistan (not to mention Iraq), President Obama told a gathering of journalists in August 2010 that the Iranians “could be a constructive partner” in creating a stable Afghan nation, and as such, should be involved in any regional talks on the matter. He added that the United

States and Iran have a “mutual interest” in fighting the Taliban.¹⁶ As noted by Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard, on the very same day that Obama argued for an Iranian role in Afghanistan’s future, “in the Farah province, which shares a border with Iran, Afghan and Coalition forces killed two Taliban facilitators of foreign fighters—each carrying automatic weapons and large amounts of Iranian money. Colonel Rafael Torres, a Coalition spokesman, noted that ongoing external support for the Taliban ‘only brings instability and peril to the Afghan people.’”¹⁷

A hint about which “external” force Colonel Torres was referring to: it starts with an “I” and ends with an “N.” As Hayes and Joscelyn described in their piece, the incident in Farah province provided just a small glimpse of what Iran is up to in Afghanistan—not opposing the Taliban, as Obama suggested, but directly assisting them:

Documents released as part of the Wikileaks dump show that U.S. commanders receive regular reports of collusion between the Iranians, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) Islamist group. The Iranians arm, train, shelter, and fund the jihadists.

A February 7, 2005, threat report describes how the “Iranian Intelligence agencies brought 10 million Afghanis (approximately $212,800)” into Afghanistan to fund jihadists. A February 18, 2005, report says that a group of Taliban leaders living in Iran are orchestrating attacks against Coalition forces: “The Iranian government has offered each member of the group 100,000 Rupees ($1,740) for any [Afghan] soldier killed and 200,000 Rupees ($3,481) for any [government] official.” A June 3, 2006, threat report says that two Iranian agents “are helping HIG and [Taliban] members in carrying out terrorist attacks against the AFG governmental authorities and the [coalition force] members, especially against the American forces.”

... A September 2008 threat report says that a group of Arabs tied to one of Osama bin Laden’s deputies was planning “to carry out suicide attacks against U.S. and Italian troops” or any foreign personnel in the area. The suicide bomber cell received assistance from “four Iranians” who work for Iran’s intelligence service and “are supporting [the cell] ...through intelligence” and “coordinating the activities.”¹⁸

President Obama has to be fully aware of such activities. He no doubt receives briefings and intelligence reports on Afghanistan on a daily basis. So why would he willfully cover up Iran’s jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and suggest that the Iranians could actually be a force for good there? Worse, he fed this misinformation to journalists, who then turned around and fed it to the American people.

The result is a continued misunderstanding among much of the American populace about the severe and multifaceted nature of the Iranian threat. For the Obamis, when it comes to Iran, it’s engagement uber alles. Therefore, the deception over Iran’s role in Afghanistan is worth it, since it glosses over the mullahs’ skullduggery and doesn’t ruffle any feathers in Tehran. In the Obama administration’s eyes, this increases the chances of an ever-elusive “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran that would see the Iranians give up their nuclear weapons program and support for terrorism in exchange for normalized relations with the United States—as if that’s something the ayatollahs even want. Hence, the spectacle of an Iranian delegation being invited by the Obama administration to take part in a NATO conference on the future of Afghanistan in October 2010—just two weeks after Afghan officials intercepted a large shipment of Iranian weapons meant for the Taliban.¹⁹

We can guess what our troops in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, who are being killed by Iranian-supplied arms, think about this brilliant outreach strategy hatched inside the Washington beltway. One person who isn’t complaining about a stepped-up Iranian role in his country, however, is Afghan president Hamid Karzai. He brazenly admitted in October 2010 that his office has received “bags of money” from the Iranian regime.²⁰ Once again, who says Sunni and Shia can’t work together?

The Obama administration’s quixotic quest to romance Iran’s regime follows three decades of Iranian terrorism directed at U.S. interests. The mullahs’ jihad against America began in earnest in November 1979, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, when Islamic revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American citizens hostage. The hostages were released 444 days later, only after the United States, thanks to an overmatched Jimmy Carter, was made to look impotent before the eyes of the world.

A failed American rescue mission to free the hostages in the spring of 1980 resulted in the destruction of two aircraft and the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen in the Iranian desert. The incident only added to the mullahs’ fanatical belief that Allah was on their side, with Khomeini later crediting divine intervention for the doomed American effort. To drive the point home, he had the dead soldiers’ bodies paraded through the streets of Tehran.

Whether desecrating the corpses of American servicemen or humiliating U.S. hostages before the cameras, the Iranian regime’s scornful view of the country it regards as The Great Satan was made abundantly clear from the outset of the Islamic Republic. The regime felt, as Khomeini was fond of saying, that America can’t do a damn thing to stop the Allahordained advance of Iran’s Islamic Revolution across the Middle East and beyond.

Carter’s fecklessness during the hostage crisis only emboldened the Khomeinists to strike America again. In 1983, Iran supported and directed the Hezbollah truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, where U.S. forces formed part of a multinational peacekeeping mission. Two hundred forty-one U.S servicemen were killed in what was the deadliest terrorist attack against Americans until 9/11. Rather than strike back against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah—all of which, NSA transcripts later revealed, had a hand in the bombing²¹—President Reagan opted to withdraw from Lebanon.

It was a fateful decision, as Osama bin Laden witnessed the hasty American retreat, the first of many over the course of the ’80s and ’90s, and concluded that the United States was a paper tiger. Iran’s mullahs also took note of how they literally got away with murder against American citizens—not once, but twice. Indeed, just seven months before the Beirut barracks bombing, Hezbollah operatives—also at the direction of Iran and Syria—had carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans.²² It was theretofore the deadliest attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission, but again President Reagan, who showed such boldness in confronting Soviet Communism and Libyan terrorism, refrained from ordering a retaliatory response against Iran, Syria, or Hezbollah. And so the Iranian reign of terror continued, usually directed through its proxy, Hezbollah.

The infamous terrorist behind much of the Iranian/Hezbollah-enacted carnage was Imad Mugniyeh, a senior Hezbollah commander who stayed in Iran frequently and worked closely with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Mugniyeh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008 in an act that Hezbollah has blamed on Israel. His demise followed three decades of terrorist mayhem against U.S. interests that saw him mastermind the Marine barracks and Embassy bombings in 1983, as well as the taking of Western hostages in Lebanon throughout the 1980s, under orders from Iran. Some of the hostages, including the CIA’s then-Beirut station chief William Buckley, were tortured and killed. The U.S indicted Mugniyeh for his part in the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which one of the passengers, U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, was brutally murdered. Mugniyeh is also suspected of having had a role in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen.²³

Mugniyeh took his marching orders from the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader and answered directly to the chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ al-Qods Force.²⁴ In other words, Mugniyeh carried out his 25-year jihad against America with full Iranian direction and support. Considering that Iran, as we’ve seen in this chapter, has been waging war against the United States in numerous ways since 1979, this should come as no great shock. Nor should have the 9/11 Commission’s call in 2004 for further investigation into whether Iran had any role in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The fact that up to ten of the 9/11 hijackers passed through Iran in late 2000 without having their passports stamped rightfully caught the commission’s attention.²⁵

Mugniyeh’s targets in the Western Hemisphere weren’t limited to the United States. The not-so-dearly-departed terrorist architect also engineered the 1992 Hezbollah bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, which killed twenty-nine people, and the group’s 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed another eighty-five. Hezbollah was able to carry out these attacks—with Iran’s backing, of course—in part because it boasts a considerable network in Latin America, particularly in the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

For the United States, that means Hezbollah members are literally the terrorists next door—and according to Joseph Myers, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and counterinsurgency expert, even closer. I sat down with Myers in January 2011, shortly after his retirement from active duty, which included lengthy stints in Latin America and Afghanistan, to discuss the Hezbollah threat in the West. Myers, who specialized in tackling armed insurgencies during his distinguished 30-year military career, told me he views Hezbollah as an even bigger threat to America than al-Qaeda:

While our national security agencies focus mainly on Al Qaeda, I believe that Hezbollah is the most potent and powerful terrorist insurgent threat in the world today, in terms of a potential threat to America. They are a terrorist organization that, one, has global reach. Two, they’re state supported by Iran and they have state intelligence services that support them. That gives them the capabilities—the unique capabilities—that Al Qaeda might not necessarily have. ... We know that they have conducted attacks against American interests and that they routinely surveil American interests around the world.

Myers went on to say that Latin America has emerged as a Hezbollah stronghold—and that the group has cells in the United States as well:

We know that we have a Hezbollah threat in Latin America: it’s there. It’s latent. ... Hezbollah is located in the tri-border region, they’re located on Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela, they’re located in Panama ... they’re really all over the place. ... Hezbollah uses Latin America and the Western Hemisphere predominantly for fundraising purposes. But it’s the latent military capability, the latent military threat that they represent in the United States, that concerns me. Because that is a card they could play if the United States ever decided to engage in any kind of military action or subversive action against the Iranian military program. To the point where the Iranians could use their surrogates in Hezbollah to attack American interests in America. They could activate cells and operatives right here.

Perhaps the most active hotbed of Iranian and Hezbollah activity in the Western Hemisphere is Venezuela. Over the past six years, Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have regularly traded public displays of affection, mugging and hugging for the cameras on numerous state visits to one another’s capitals. But cooperation between Iran and Venezuela goes far deeper than the bro-mance between their dictators. Prior to 2005, the amount of trade between Iran and Venezuela was zero. Nada. Nothing. Since then, the two countries have done over $40 billion in trade, and Iran has established a broad network of businesses and entities throughout Venezuela and the surrounding regions.

Why the sudden—and massive—Iranian investment in Chavez’s socialist paradise? The answer seems obvious: Iran is putting itself in better position to attack the United States. Witness the revelation in November 2010 by the German daily Die Welt that Iran is planning to place medium-range missiles on Venezuelan soil. According to the article, Venezuela has agreed to the establishment of a jointly operated military base, manned in part by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which would house Iranian Shahab-3 and Scud missiles.²⁶ Take a wild guess where those missiles would be aimed. It’s not an exaggeration to say we could be seeing the beginning stages of a modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis taking shape in Venezuela—indeed, just imagine if those Iranian Scuds become nuclear-tipped.

Roger Noriega, a top State Department official under the George W. Bush administration and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, is a foremost authority on the Tehran/Caracas Axis with impeccable on-the-ground sources inside Venezuela. He told me during a taping of my CBN show, Stakelbeck on Terror, in late 2010 that he believes Iran is now helping Hugo Chavez develop a nuclear weapons program of his own. In addition, Noriega supplied exclusive aerial photos that showed the location of a Venezuelan “tractor factory” that produces weapons, not tractors, and is manned by Iranian guards. He also presented evidence that Iran is mining for uranium in Venezuela’s Roraima Basin for use in its nuclear weapons program, in clear violation of UN sanctions. For good measure, Noriega provided never-before-seen photos of Venezuelan officials meeting with Hezbollah leaders in Beirut.

The extent of the relationship between Chavez and the mullahs, as laid out by Noriega, was shocking. Yet this gathering anti-American storm in our own backyard has been virtually ignored by the Obama administration as it doggedly pursues diplomacy with the likes of Chavez and the Iranian regime. Similar moves by the Iranians to solidify ties with Chavez allies Bolivia and Nicaragua have likewise been overlooked. As a result, it looks like we can bid adieu to a long-running U.S. policy first laid out in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823: that America would let no hostile foreign power establish a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere.

The Iranian regime is indisputably committed to the destruction of the United States and Israel. It has made its intentions in that regard abundantly clear for thirty-two years, through both words and deeds. Why, then, would the Obama administration persist in attempting to woo the mullahs, for whom anti-Americanism forms the bedrock of their regime? The short answer is that the U.S. government is plagued by the same blind spot in its dealings with messianic, Shia Iran that it has shown in its approach to Sunni jihadist groups from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood: a complete misunderstanding of the ideology that drives the enemy.

In chapter one I introduced you to “Reza Kahlili,” who worked as an undercover agent for America inside the Iranian regime. Kahlili told me the Iranians are driven by an apocalyptic ideology that pines for the return of the mythical Shiite “twelfth imam,” also known as the Mahdi. According to legend, the twelfth imam disappeared when he was a young boy, purposely hidden by Allah sometime in the late ninth century. Many Shia, including Ahmadinejad, believe this Islamic messiah figure is currently hiding at the bottom of a well in the Iranian city of Jamkaran, awaiting the end of days. It’s then that he will supposedly reemerge, accompanied, ironically enough, by Jesus Christ, to lead Muslims to victory over the hated Christians and Jews and subjugate the world to Islam.

To review, a little boy who has been hiding at the bottom of a well in Iran for ten centuries will appear one day soon, Jesus in tow, to establish global Islamic rule. Although this scenario sounds like sheer madness, Kahlili, who became intimately familiar with the regime’s end times propaganda through his espionage activities inside the Revolutionary Guards, told me that “Twelver” ideology is an animating force behind Iran’s policymaking:

I was there so I know the ideology. This is a messianic regime. They go from the centuries old hadiths, which has predicted this day. This day for them, is the ultimate day in Islam. It’s the day of justice in their view. And in that day, ⅓ of the world population has to die due to nuclear wars, another 1/3 due to hunger and chaos and havoc. And then Imam Mahdi the Shiites’ 12th imam will reappear, kill the rest of the infidels and raise the flag of Islam in all corners of the world. ... They deeply believe this. Government organizations are analyzing current events and comparing them to hadiths. ... Everything is in place. And the only part missing is for them to become a nuclear powered state. Then they are going to attack Israel, they are going to attack oil fields in the Persian Gulf and European capitals. Millions are going to die, there’s going to be a total breakdown in the global economy. There’s going to be havoc, lawlessness and hunger. We are going to witness the most destruction humanity has witnessed and the biggest depression they have experienced. And this is exactly what they are after.

How seriously does the Iranian regime take its “Twelver” dogma? Each year, before he begins his rambling address to the UN General Assembly in New York, Ahmadinejad publicly calls for the swift return of the Mahdi. Both he and Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei have gone on record as saying they believe the Mahdi’s reappearance will happen very soon, amid a time of great global chaos. Despite these pronouncements, not once when discussing the Iranian nuclear threat have President Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush, referenced the apocalyptic belief system of Iran’s leadership. Yet it’s fair to say that a regime that believes its messiah will return only when the world is gripped by violent upheaval would seek to create just that sort of condition by, say, attacking America or Israel with nuclear weapons—particularly when martyrdom, or dying for the sake of Allah, is elevated above all. Here’s more on that, from Kahlili:

The sermons were every day. And the ideology of martyrdom and ending up in heaven next to Imam Ali and prophet Mohammed was the main focus of the clerics. Khomeini preached the ultimate sacrifice. ... You have to die for the glorification of Allah: this is the ultimate prize for a Muslim. ...The reason for the failure of every American administration [in dealing with Iran] is that they do not understand the ideology.

The Iranian regime showed just how willing it is to sacrifice its citizens during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when it sent thousands of brainwashed teenagers and young boys to clear minefields while wearing plastic “keys to paradise” around their necks. The wide-eyed recruits were assured they would receive eternal rewards in heaven.

The fatalistic mindset of the Iranian regime ensures that we could throw the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, out the window if Iran acquires nuclear weapons. The atheistic Soviets were living for this world; the Iranians are living for the next. As a result, the Iranian regime has no qualms about sacrificing millions of Iranians for—in their view—the greater good of wiping Israel off the map. This means that nuking Tel Aviv is worth weathering what would surely be a devastating Israeli retaliation against Iranian cities. Iran’s leaders believe their 70-million-strong population can survive such an exchange, but that tiny Israel’s population cannot. As former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani put it back in 2001:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.²⁷

Obama administration officials hear such threats against Israel and America and conclude that the Iranians are just blowing smoke, that no one can be that crazy. “The Iranians are like anyone—they have a price,” they say. “We can negotiate with them. At the end of the day, they’re reasonable people and they want to remain in power. They would never be so foolish as to actually use a nuclear weapon. And all that talk about the Mahdi and wiping Israel off the map is just gibberish for domestic consumption.”

Indeed, it seems the Obama White House has resigned itself to the fact that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. As far back as July 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the United States would protect its allies in the Middle East with a nuclear defense umbrella that would dissuade Iran from using its own nukes.²⁸ Iran didn’t even have the bomb, and already a top Obama administration official was referring to a day when it would, as if it were inevitable. Containment is a term that is back in vogue in Washington.

The message from Jerusalem, however, is quite different. Based on my conversations with Israeli officials, both on and off the record, since 2005, I believe Israel will use every means at its disposal, including a military strike, to prevent the existential threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. This means Israel will have to do America’s dirty work and deal as best it can not only with the likely retaliatory onslaught by Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, but also with the thunderous condemnation of most of the world, possibly including the Obama administration. Welcome to the not-so-brave new world of American “soft power,” where allies are abandoned and terrorists are emboldened.