July 11, 2011
Iran Is at
War with Us
Are we
at war with Iran?
Andrew McCarthy
‘You
can clearly see what they are doing in Iraq.” Sen. Lindsey Graham was
talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically the death
trade plied by the mullahs, their Revolutionary Guard Corps, their
Hezbollah operatives, and the assorted jihadists under their control. And while the plying is
being done “in Iraq,” it is being done against America.
Senator
Graham elaborated that Iran is setting the stage to frame the
long-scheduled withdrawal from Iraq as a case of the United States
being “driven out,” a cowardly retreat under fire. Nor is this
happening solely in Iraq. Iran’s fortification of the Afghan Taliban
also continues at a steady clip. It may even be spiking now as the
planned drawdown of American forces gets under way. Again, the mullahs
are determined to pose as Allah’s avengers, casting the infidels out of
Dar al-Islam.
They
are getting plenty of help from the Obama
administration. The U.S. withdrawal is being driven by the political
calendar, not conditions on the ground. Thus our enemies — and Iran has
always been our principal enemy — get to make it look like whatever
they want it to look like.
So,
as 33,000 U.S. troops begin making their quietus, the Taliban and its
jihadist allies are emboldened, not vanquished. In fact, Fox’s Jennifer
Griffin reports
that superior Iranian rockets enable our enemies to fire from 13 miles
away, twice the range of the Taliban’s former arsenal. With U.S. air
power paralyzed by the demagoguery of Iran’s new best friend, Hamid
Karzai — the Afghan president
minted by our government’s Islamic-democracy project — it gets awfully
difficult to defend against such attacks.
Defending
themselves is about all our troops will be able to do in the coming
months. Karzai and the mullahs have finalized a joint defense and security agreement — in the jihadi
pincer, Iran arms both the sharia “democracy” and its Taliban
opposition; it’s the American troops getting squeezed. Meanwhile, fresh
off the anti-American duet
Iraq’s Pres. Jalal Talabani crooned with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the
mullahs’ recent “anti-terrorism” summit, Iran’s vice president visited
Baghdad this week to call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another
democracy project success story. As they forged deeper economic,
security, and cultural ties, they also marked a month in which 15
Americans were killed in Iraq, making it the worst month for U.S.
forces in over two years.
You
may recall that time in 2009 as the fleeting period of euphoria after
President Bush’s troop surge transformed Iraq just as it was about to
become a humiliating American failure. According to received Washington
wisdom, the surge was a triumph — indeed, so spectacular a triumph that
even President Obama now claims
the Iraq mission as his own, as if we all share the Obamedia’s amnesia about their hero’s
prominence in Harry Reid’s anti-surge legion of “This war is lost”
Democrats.
To
be sure, Iraq is Obama’s kind of foreign-policy triumph. The strategy was not to defeat the enemy
but to stabilize a sharia democracy and protect a population that
remains rabidly anti-American. So we have built Baghdad into a
reasonably stable Iranian client state, pulled ever deeper into the
mullahs’ orbit.
Iran
has spent eight years killing Americans in Iraq. We responded by doing
nothing. Attacking the source of the problem might have jeopardized
Iraq’s fragile new government, whose leading factions are beholden to
Tehran, a complication we chose to paper over. In fact, even as
democracy-project enthusiasts crowed about Iraq’s purported evolution
into a key American ally against the jihad, the Bush administration
acceded to Maliki’s demand that Iraq not be used as a staging ground
for U.S. operations against other nations (translation: against Iran,
the kingpin of the jihad). It seems the only country we’d be permitted
to attack from Iraq is Israel. And that’s no joke: Obama adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski actually suggested
that the U.S. would shoot Israeli bombers down over Iraq if they dared
try to take out Iran’s ripening nuclear arsenal.
Of
course, the 15 Americans killed in Iraq last month are fewer than the
19 Americans that Iran killed in Saudi Arabia in 1996, in the Khobar
Towers bombing. And it is considerably less than the nearly 3,000
Americans killed on 9/11. Noting that the mullahs had been supporting
al-Qaeda since the early 1990s, the 9/11 Commission gingerly related sketchy evidence of
Iranian involvement in the suicide hijackings that
vaulted the U.S. to war: the provision of safe conduct into and out of
Afghanistan for al-Qaeda operatives, the “remarkable coincidence” (to
borrow the commission’s phrase) that Hezbollah leaders ended up on the
same Iranian transit flights as
the future hijackers, etc. Iran even harbored al-Qaeda leaders,
including two of Osama bin Laden’s sons, in the years after 9/11.
Yet,
these were dots the commission was content to leave unconnected. And no
one — not the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, and
not Congress — has shown much interest in revisiting them, despite the
hundreds of Americans Iran has since killed, and continues to kill.
Here
at home, a phony debate rages
over whether conservatives are becoming “isolationist” — whether we are
the Right’s version of George McGovern’s “Come Home America” Left. But
most of us have never been isolationist. We’ve been realists about the
enemy — specifically, about the need to defeat rather than court the
enemy.
In
the days after 9/11, President Bush outlined the only plan that had a
chance of achieving victory: Hunt terrorists down wherever they operate
and treat terror-abetting regimes as terrorists. That should have been
the mullahs’ death knell. Instead, we’ve tried to fight a war the enemy
prosecutes globally as if it were happening in only two countries,
neither of them Iran.
Putting
aside the merits of a Marshall Plan analogue for the Muslim Middle
East, the original Marshall Plan was undertaken only after total
victory was achieved over America’s enemies. There could be no free,
independent, pro-American Europe without Normandy and D-Day and
Hitler’s annihilation. If you leave the enemy undisturbed while
indulging in self-congratulation over democracy and the Arab Spring,
you’re choreographing a farce. I’d call it “Springtime for Khamenei,”
except the tragic joke is on us.
“Intervention”
in 2011 has become what “negotiation” was in the Obama hey-day of 2009
— something purportedly good for its own sake. The inconvenient reality
is that, if it is not based on a strategy designed to defeat America’s
enemies, it is inevitably counterproductive. It gives our enemies
countless opportunities to show, quite dramatically, that we lack both
resolve and a cogent plan.
It
is not isolationist to conclude that if we are not in it to win, we are
wasting time, billions of dollars that we don’t have, and precious
lives. I may be wrong to deem it highly unlikely that true democracy
will ever take in Islamic soil. I may be wrong in concluding that the
Arab Spring is diplo-lipstick on a pig better seen as the Islamist Ascendancy. But I do know
one thing for certain: Freedom has no chance of advancing in the Middle
East, any more than it would have advanced in Europe, unless we conquer
the enemy.
There
was a moment in time when we knew that. It was long ago, though, and
perhaps beyond recapturing by a war-weary, financially tapped-out
nation.
If
we’re not in it to win it — for victory, not for tilting at windmills —
we should come home. But regardless of what we do, what was true in
1983, when Hezbollah bombed our Marines, remains true today: Iran is at
war with us, whether we choose to engage or not. If we are not going to
win, we are going to lose. Happy talk about democracy and springtime
won’t obscure the fact that there is no middle ground.