L'IRAN OBTIENDRA CERTAINEMENT L'ARME NUCLEAIRE

Iran's Deadly Hand

Lt. Colonel James Zumwalt, USMC (ret)

In poker, “reading” an opponent is critical. Sensing when an opponent will hold or fold his cards empowers one to bluff and bully. When poker is a card game, losses suffered are financial. But, when the poker being played is international politics, the stakes are often measured in terms of human life.

Some international politics players prove very adept at playing an opponent for a fool. The adeptness with which the US has been played for a fool is underscored by two questions most Americans cannot answer correctly:

1. In how many major armed conflicts is the US currently engaged?

2. Which conflict has inflicted the most US casualties since the Vietnam war?

Most responses would suggest the US is involved in three armed conflicts: Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. But this ignores the fourth, launched against the US decades ago and qualifying as the longest war in which Americans have been continuously targeted. It has now claimed thousands of US casualties—the most inflicted by any one country since Vietnam. Yet it remains a war only fought on one side of the battlefield as no US president since Jimmy Carter has chosen to fight back. It is our war with Iran.

In 1979, a theocracy came to power in Tehran as President Jimmy Carter wrongly perceived its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to be a Mahatma Gandhi. But, after gaining power, Khomeini revealed himself to be an Atilla the Hun, launching a brutal inquisition against his own people that killed thousands. Simultaneously, Khomeini launched a war against the US.

In September 1979, by seizing the US Embassy in Tehran and taking its personnel hostage in violation of international law, Khomeini played a card based on his “read” of Jimmy Carter. He believed Carter lacked the backbone to initiate military action against Tehran. Only after Carter’s ineptness in handling the crisis diminished his re-election support did he finally act. But, just like his presidency, the attempted military rescue operation—Desert One—was a complete fiasco.

Khomeini made another read in January 1980 as a new US president took office. The Iranian leader, fearing Ronald Reagan had the backbone Carter lacked, released our hostages the day Reagan was sworn in. But not even Reagan’s presidency halted Iran’s aggression against the US. It was to be fought more discretely.

On October 23, 1983, in what was the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II, the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, collapsed, claiming the lives of 241 American servicemen. It was the bloodiest single day for the Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima. Secret communications, intercepted by Washington, between Tehran and a proxy terrorist group in Lebanon revealed Iran authorized the attack.

The Marines, sent to Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission, were ordered by Washington not to build defensive positions so as to avoid a “warlike” appearance. Tehran read this “velvet glove” rather than “iron fist” approach to deploying military forces as a sign of American weakness. Months after the attack, the only US response to the bombing was the withdrawal of those forces. Just like Carter, inaction by Reagan only encouraged Tehran to continue playing an aggressive hand due to a lack a lack of US resolve in confronting Iran.

On June 26, 1996, a truck bomb destroyed an apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, housing US military personnel, killing 23 Americans and seriously wounding 60 more. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who subsequently interviewed six suspects arrested by the Saudis, later stated they “implicated several Iranian officials in funding and planning the attack.” Despite promises by President Bill Clinton to hold the perpetrators responsible, no action was ever taken against Iran.

On January 20, 2007, in what was then called the “boldest and most sophisticated attack in four years of warfare (in Iraq),” infiltrators—dressed in US uniforms, brandishing US arms and posing as an American security team—entered the local governor’s compound in Karbala, Iraq, where US and Iraqi officials were meeting, launching an attack. One US soldier was killed; four taken captive. As the infiltrators raced for the Iranian border with their prisoners, Iraqi police were in hot pursuit. As police closed in, the infiltrators executed their captives and vanished. Later evidence, such as a mock set up of the compound, photographed in Iran, pointed to Iranian involvement. No action was ever taken against Iran by President George Bush.

To date, the majority of US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have come from IEDs. The majority of these IEDs have been supplied to militants by Iran. The US military has collected significant evidence of this—even to the point of risking the lives of its bomb technicians by requiring such devices, when discovered, to be defused and preserved rather than blown in place. But the evidence of Iran’s complicity in the deaths of thousands of Americans has simply been shelved by US administrations reluctant to address the problem at its source.

Meanwhile:

- As the US seeks to minimize deaths among the opposition in Libya, Iran’s leadership offers military support to Muammar Gaddafi to allow the killing to continue.

- As the US does nothing to minimize deaths among the opposition in Syria, Iran sends men and arms into the country to enable President Bashar Assad to add to his tally.

- As the US does nothing to protect the lives of Iranian opposition group members (MEK) held hostage at Camp Ashraf in Iraq—a group the US vowed to protect after disarming them in 2003—Iran uses its influence with the Iraqi government to conduct several brutal attacks against them.

- As almost a half century has passed since a US president successfully challenged the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, a US president ignores a missile base being built in Venezuela by Iran’s proxy terrorist group Hezbollah.

- As the US claims it is making progress against al-Qaeda (and in what the US Treasury Department has described as “yet another aspect of Iran’s unmatched support for terrorism),” Tehran concludes an agreement with the terrorist group to allow it to function freely within Iranian borders.

- As Iran now openly demonstrates it is a state sponsor of terrorism, it is stepping up its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon before the world awakens to the need to stop it.

Iran has proven itself brilliant in reading others playing international politics poker. Each hand adds to its sphere of Islamic extremist influence. It plays a high stakes game in which the ultimate hand sought is the one winning a nuclear weapons capability.

Unfortunately, only after being dealt that deadly hand will the world learn Tehran achieved it—not as a deterrent against those seeking finally to stop its aggression—but as a tool in allowing Iran to further it.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Lt. Colonel James G. Zumwalt, USMC (ret) is a retired Marine infantry officer who served in the Vietnam War, the U.S. invasion of Panama and the first Gulf war. He is the author of "Bare Feet, Iron Will--Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam's Battlefields" and frequently writes on foreign policy and defense issues.

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