The Enemy Late Acknowledged
NRO
By The Editors
Two reactions are appropriate to the Bush administration’s decision to place Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. First, one should cheer. Second, one should ask how much longer it will take the president to resolve the contradiction at the heart of his Iran policy.
One should cheer because the Revolutionary Guard is among the world’s most effective forces for barbarity and chaos. Separate from Iran’s regular military, it espouses the revolution-exporting ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei (the latter of whom possesses ultimate control of its actions). It has killed Americans gladly, as at the Khobar Towers. Its current specialty is killing American soldiers in Iraq, through Iraqi proxies, with armor-piercing bombs. These things alone do not make it a terrorist group in the precise sense of that term, but its arming and financing of Hezbollah certainly does. Likewise the massacres of civilians that its aid to Iraqi militants has made possible.
To designate the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist entity, then, is to acknowledge reality. Yet there is something decidedly unrealistic in the idea that the Revolutionary Guard can be separated from the Iranian government as a whole. (The distinctions got even more jesuitical when it emerged that the State Department might not designate the entire Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, but simply its Quds Force, composed of special covert units.) There is no getting around the fact that the Revolutionary Guard — including the Quds Force — expresses the will of Iran’s highest rulers. If what it does counts as terrorism, they count as terrorists.
Given their history of working mayhem in the Middle East and beyond (recall, for example, their handiwork in Argentina in 1994), this is an obvious enough fact, and the State Department designation will do little to make it more obvious. It will also do little to hurt Iran — the designation would freeze any assets the Revolutionary Guard had in the U.S., but, as you might imagine, it prefers to bank elsewhere.
What the designation does do is lay bare the contradiction in President Bush’s Iran policy. After September 11, in a moment of great strategic clarity, Bush said that the U.S. would not distinguish between terrorists and the governments that harbored them. Yet his administration has approached Iran — the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — as though it were a legitimate government, capable of being persuaded to adopt positions agreeable to liberal democracies.
On Iran’s nuclear program, Bush has deferred first to Europe and then to Condoleezza Rice’s State Department in allowing years of negotiating, followed by a few more years of negotiating, followed by (wait for it) more negotiating.
Worse than do nothing, this strategy created an illusion that the world was seriously confronting Iran when just the opposite was true. The two Security Council resolutions against the Islamic Republic were so weak as to be meaningless, except in distracting attention from alternative courses of action (e.g., effective sanctions or military force). Iran’s leaders have grown more brazen at every turn — kidnappings of foreign soldiers and proxy wars are now par for the course — yet the Bush administration has remained unable to forge a credible policy.
What one should hope now is that the administration, in its waning days, is making a course correction. The squeamishness with which much of Europe opposes the designation suggests that it fears just this. For a variety of reasons — economic interest, anti-Americanism, and reflexive pacifism chief among them — it would prefer to avoid any bad blood with the Islamic Republic. Most of the U.S. State Department feels likewise. But the simple truth is that, unless Iran’s regime gives up both its terrorist ideology and its weapons, we will never be safe. The president has taken an important — albeit partial and overdue — step toward facing that unpleasant reality.
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Unplesant it can turn out to be. I would like to see what the Presidential hopefuls have to say about this stuff.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:48 pmI agree Birdddog, just what do the “hopefuls” have to say about Iran?
I know if we continue to waive our strength we are going to get another sucker punch worse than 9/11/2001.
I think there will be a defining moment after the elections, especially if a Democrat wins(you choose the one).
If we are going to defeat this barbaric enemy we CANNOT continue to be so passive.
August 20th, 2007 at 3:11 pmLook at Ahmedinajacket kissing the hand that feeds him. You think he also wipes his ass when he shits?
In all seriousness, making this designation is a first step toward a declaration of war against the little Nazi Iraniacs.
I think only Fred Thompson has made remarks about Iran in some of his speeches. Everyone else is rather quiet on the subject.
I wonder what the smartest woman in the world has to say on the subject of Iran? Maybe she has a plan? You know like John Kerry had a plan back in 2004?
Or perhaps Barney Obomayoumomma has something to say on the subject. After all…he’s still trying to be a man? Or is it Hillary who’s trying to be a man? I keep forgetting…
August 20th, 2007 at 4:31 pmHillary is two-stepping again. Her latest words:
“New military tactics in Iraq are working but the best way to honor U.S. soldiers is “by beginning to bring them home,” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told war veterans Monday.”
She feels we need the rest of the world cheering us on if we are to do anything in the future.
The woman is out of her mind.
We all want our troops home but we also know what will happen if we leave.
With ahmadickwad and his latest movements she has to be blind.
She isn’t even thinking about Iran and what is next.
August 20th, 2007 at 7:57 pmThe State Department exhibits all the signs of insanity. The chief one being continuing to the same thing expecting different results.
August 20th, 2007 at 8:04 pmI don’t believe Pres. Bush will leave office with a nuclear Iran in place but he had better get it on post haste. I would begin with State. Ms. Rice is brilliant and too liberal to effect change , so too is nearly every current exec at State. So kick asses Mr.Bush. You are being blindsided by the very people you are so loyal to. Someone like John Bolton is prescribed. More Patton less patent leather.
the grim reality about all this, is our vitory in iraq will be short lived..the holy war will still be going on…when the ignorant bastards use weapons of mass destruction, then the gates of hell will open wide..when we do bomb iran and wipe out everything that china and russia has helped build, they want just set back on their heals and do nothing..after all, we are tying to dominate the world, in their eyes
August 21st, 2007 at 4:57 am