Iran revisited

What did the Obama administration have in mind when it chose to empower and enrich the murderously anti-American and viciously genocidal regime Iran? Michael Doran explained all in the Mosaic 2015 essay “Obama’s secret Iran strategy.”

Doran’s analysis is still worth reading and still hard to believe. Why was the strategy secret? Perhaps the Obama administration promulgated some counterpart to the Truman administration’s NSC-68, the top secret strategic assessment adopted to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union in 1950.

Yet Doran deduces Obama’s Iran strategy in part from public statements by Obama himself and Obama mouthpiece Ben Rhodes. Their assessment of Iran is so stupid that the administration’s Iran strategy might have been classified to save administration officials from embarrassment.

The murderous and imperialist nature of the Iranian regime has been in view since it came to power in 1979. Lest we forget, interested readers might want to review Avi Weiss’s Mosaic essay recounting the 1994 terrorist attack on the the largest Jewish community center and social-service agency in Buenos Aires (AMIA) — Weiss’s essay “The Shameful Cover-Up of the Worst Attack on Diaspora Jews Since the Holocaust” — and Matthew Levitt’s elaboration in the Mosaic essay “The Men Responsible for the AMIA Bombing Are Known—and Still at Large.”

Iran’s war on the Jewish people continues. Today’s news brings word of an Israeli attack on Iranian forces near Damascus that had been planning to launch “killer drones” at targets in Israel. Reuters reports in “Israel hits Iranian force in Syria to stop ‘killer drones’ – military.” Iran, however, asserts that all is well because “Israel and the United States do not have the power to attack Iran’s various centers, and our [military] advisory centers have not been harmed,” according to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s aptly named Expediency Council.

Israel is of course only the Little Satan in the eyes of Iranian regime. The Great Satan — that’s us, of course. Most recently, Iran has threatened our friends at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. FOX News reports: “A statement from Tehran’s foreign ministry published in Iranian media, including the semi-official Fars news agency, accused the FDD and its CEO Mark Dubowitz of ‘economic terrorism … including spreading lies, lobbyism, propaganda against Iran,’ because of the group’s mission to expose human rights violations by the Tehran regime and advocate for harsher sanctions by the U.S. against the Middle Eastern nation.”

The Iranian statement added: “Accordingly, taking any actions by the judicial and security apparatuses against the FDD and their Iranian and non-Iranian accomplices will be considered legitimate as their actions are against the Iran’s national security and the interests of Iranian people and government.” Anyone familiar with Jay Solomon’s reporting on Hezbollah operatives in the United States would be inclined to take this threat seriously. See, for example, my post “Times tips to America’s Iran network.”

Everybody knows that in the eyes of the Iranian regime we are the Great Satan, except perhaps Barack Obama and his acolytes. It would be charitable to infer that Obama didn’t know what he was doing. I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just saying it would be charitable not to question his motives.

UPDATE: Following this post, Mosaic published a third essay on the AMIA bombing, this one by Noga Tarnopolsky: “In the AMIA Case There Was an Unconscionable Miscarriage of Justice, But No Cover-Up.”

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses