Very soon after Election Day, the winner must figure out the toughest challenge on America’s national-security horizon. He may want to pick up Abraham Soafer’s new book,“Taking on Iran.”
Soafer, a Reagan administration veteran now at the Hoover Institution, argues that the mullahs will never take our threats seriously — and so won’t negotiate with us in earnest — as long as we don’t respond in kind to attacks by their proxy terrorists.
At a Manhattan event sponsored by the Middle East Forum last week, Soafer noted that for 32 years our presidents have failed to confront the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, even as that autonomous terror group has conducted one attack after another against Americans.
The Guard was behind the 1983 attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (19 US servicemen slain, plus one Saudi). It struck in Paris, Buenos Aires and elsewhere — and, at best, we went to court.
An Iranian-American, Manssor Arbabsiar, pleaded guilty last week in a Manhattan courtroom to charges related to last August’s plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The operation would’ve killed numerous DC restaurant-goers on their lunch break.
Arbabsiar fingered an Iranian citizen, Gholam Shakuri, as co-conspirator. Shakuri, a member of the Guard’s elite Quds force, escaped to Iran.
But why shouldn’t he suffer the same punishment we exact on al Qaeda terrorists?
Soafer recommends assassinating Shakuri and other Guard commanders known to be responsible for terrorist attacks against Americans. More, we should hit Quds camps in remote areas and attack Guard naval bases and ships as they’re loaded with illicit arms for Hezbollah, Hamas or the Syrian regime.
Employing “limited force” to target an organization that’s attacking us would be more palatable to the American public than a wholesale war against Iran’s nuclear program, Soafer argues. A former State Department legal adviser, he says it’d also be easier to justify in global institutions like the United Nations.
Plus, the Iranian people fear and loathe the Guard-affiliated basijis, the militias who kill political dissidents and enforce strict Islamic law in the streets. Iranians would be far more supportive of a US attack on the Guard than if we went after nationally-prized targets.
Most important, a campaign against the Guard would force Iran’s civilian leaders to take seriously our attempts to negotiate an end to their nuclear program.
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One of the real problems with US Iran policy over the past three decades is the pretensions that they are not at war with us. Taking out the Revolutionary guard and its proxies makes a lot of sense to me. It would be better done if the Congress authorized the use of force against those engaged in terrorist acts against the US and their state sponsors.
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