Crosshairs on the Iranian Mullahs By Donnel Jones, May 28, 2003

The Bush Administration is finally confronting Iran for harboring terrorists.

After the terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, the focus is now on Iran, the mother lode of terrorist states. Robert W. Tracinski, of the Ann Rand Institute has this to say about Iran: 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.

In fact, Iran’s mullahs have plans for recently liberated Iraq. They dread an American victory that fosters democracy. The mullah’s are clever psychologists, though, and understand the decadent weakness that characterizes the West made effeminate by navel-gazing liberalism. There is much that our enemies correctly perceive as evil in our society. Ironically, and the irony is lost on them, these evils are largely the result of liberals who choose not to fight. Iran's theocracy correctly perceives appeasement as our culture's deadliest disease:

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.

As the above example of Syria demonstrates, that disease also infected the Reagan Administration when it withdrew from Beirut after the terrible slaughter of our Marines there. Yet appeasement of Islamists began under Carter when he abandoned the Shah. It can also be argued that Reagan was too busy fighting the Cold War, while the same liberals screamed about MAD in similar appeasement vein. There is no excuse for Reagan's blunder in Beirut, but it really wasn't about not being willing to fight. Reagan was a fighter and he was fighting a bigger enemy at the time.

Today that enemy is Islamism and its methods of terrorism. Even the terror-appeasing State Department includes Iran on its list of terrorist nations, which include Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and Sudan. It also includes Iraq since this report is almost two years old. We can only hope, and fight, that it will forever remain off the list.

The Bush Administration, as has been the pattern, appears ready to carry through with the principles laid out in the Bush Doctrine. In this respect, it will be interesting, if harrowing, to see how Bush's "road map" to peace will play out. On that topic, my colleague at WMD has interesting recent thoughts here. The White House seems primed to apply those principles again.

Administration officials said at the time that they had abandoned any hope of working with President Mohammad Khatami and his reformist allies in the Iranian government, and would turn their attention toward democracy supporters among the Iranian people.

The Pentagon is pushing for a destabilization of the mullocracy, already underway due to recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq where the ruling regimes were toppled by force. It has long been the urgent argument of Michael Ledeen to encourage Iran to implode from within, ideally without the U.S. firing a single shot. All the fodder and tinder are there for igniting. Let the Iranian youth take back their country!

Maybe what has happened to Khatami will happen to Abu Mazen. It's not cynicism to declare it will. As for the fruits of appeasement, when one chooses not to adhere to the Bush Doctrine, here is a sampling.

But the MEK is also listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department. Under pressure from State, the White House earlier this month ordered the Pentagon to disarm the MEK troops -- a decision that was secretly conveyed by U.S. officials to Iranian representatives at a meeting in Geneva on May 3.

Nine days later, the suicide bombers struck in Saudi Arabia.