The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  Khomeini and his successors have been true to their words, seeking to export the Iranian Revolution, and attack their enemies—the Jews, the infidels, and (mostly Sunni) Muslims who do not accept their doctrine—all over the world. Shortly after the revolution, Iranian-supported “pilgrims” on the Hajj in Mecca occupied the Grand Mosque, took several hundred hostages, and called for the overthrow of the ruling Saudi royal family, and the end of all ties to the West. The Grand Mosque became a battleground, and it took two weeks of tough fighting—and some 250 dead, including scores of Saudi national guardsmen, and hundreds wounded—to reestablish order.

  The assault on the Grand Mosque had a significant footnote: the first appearance of the name bin Laden in conjunction with a terrorist attack. Osama bin Laden’s brother Mahrous was apparently involved in the operation, and was miraculously spared the executioner’s scimitar. He even gained early release from prison, abandoned political activism, and subsequently devoted all his energies to the family business.

  Ever since, Iran has sponsored terrorism all over the world, and has ceaselessly attacked the United States in word and deed. For many years, the State Department has declared the Islamic Republic the leading supporter of international, state-sponsored terrorism, and for good reason. The Iranians created the Islamic Jihad organization, and Hezbollah, the big terrorist army based in Lebanon and now Syria. Moreover, Iran has long supported al Qaeda, which baffles a lot of people because it is a Sunni organization. The explanation is quite simple: like Mafia families who fight and sometimes kill one another, when faced with a common enemy, the family heads sit down around the table and make a common war plan. The ties between the Iranian regime and al Qaeda have been a well-established fact ever since the autumn of 1998, when the American government indicted the organization and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The key section of the indictment states the case explicitly: “Al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group, Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.”

  By the time this indictment was issued, we knew that al Qaeda had attacked us directly, in 1993, in the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in New York City. Federal investigators had established working connections between al Qaeda and the commander of the operation, the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman. We also knew of close operational cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian jihadi organization that had been at the center of the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat.

  As a matter of fact, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which were originally created by Khomeini as his own personal praetorian guard, and subsequently used for crucial tasks of domestic repression and foreign terrorism, were trained and organized in the early 1970s by Yasser Arafat’s (Sunni) Fatah.

  The most dramatic example of Sunni-Shi’ite cooperation is Iran’s close relationship with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa—for which al Qaeda took credit—were in large part Iranian operations. Bin Laden had asked Hezbollah’s operational chief, Imad Mughniyah (one of the most dangerous terrorists to ever walk the earth), for help making al Qaeda as potent as Hezbollah, and the original concept for the simultaneous bombings in Kenya and Tanzania came directly from Mughniyah.

  The al Qaeda terrorists were trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the explosives were provided by Iran. After the attacks, one of the leaders of the operations, Saif al-Adel, took refuge in Iran, where he remains active in operations as of this writing.

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, which evolved into today’s Islamic State, created his first international terror network while based in Iran, as demonstrated by court documents in Germany and Italy from the late 1990s. The public record of the trials contains hundreds of intercepts of conversations between Zarqawi in Tehran and the terrorists in Europe.

  Anyone who believes that the Iranian regime was unaware of Zarqawi’s activities doesn’t understand the way Iran works.

  The principal instrument of Iranian terror is often Hezbollah, which was created in Lebanon (where the Syrians provided safe haven) shortly after the revolution. In the 1980s, Hezbollah—operating in tandem with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—organized suicide bombing attacks against the French and American Marine barracks, and the American embassy in Beirut, as well as the kidnappings of American missionaries and military and intelligence officers, who were then tortured to death. In the 1990s, Hezbollah conducted lethal attacks against Jewish targets in Argentina, for which leaders of the Iranian regime have been indicted. Of late, the Iranians have also used their “foreign legion” (Quds Force) of the Revolutionary Guards, especially in the bloody fighting in Syria.

  An American federal judge has ruled that Iran was responsible for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, in which nineteen American Air Force personnel were killed and 372 wounded. The ruling was based in large part on sworn testimony from former FBI director Louis Freeh, who had investigated the bombings at the time they took place. He found that two Iranian government security agencies and senior members of the Iranian government (including Khamenei and intelligence chief Ali Fallahian) provided funding, training, and explosives and logistical assistance to the terrorists (who referred to themselves as “Saudi Hezbollah,” thereby explicitly confirming their ties to the mullahs).

  Iranian cooperation with al Qaeda is not just a recent development, nor is it limited to the Middle East. In February 1996, British NATO forces in Bosnia found a manual for training terrorists that a British expert called “the mother of all training manuals.” It was uncovered during an operation against a terrorist training camp in Pogorelica, during which Bosnian police arrested four Iranian “diplomats” and eight Bosnian Muslims. The manual had been produced by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, and had been earlier used to train al Qaeda militants in Sudan. It was a thoroughly professional job, and included sections ranging from clandestine communications, to the creation of a secure terrorist cell (including recruitment and maintenance of good morale), to staging simultaneous attacks, kidnapping, evading surveillance, and discourses on the anti-Western jihad.

  The considerable sophistication of the training manual greatly surprised the British analysts, as it would the Americans with whom it was shared six years later, in 2002. The surprise was at a piece of equipment that subsequently astonished the Israelis during their war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. The Israel Defense Forces discovered that the terrorists were using highly advanced electronic surveillance devices, provided by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. During the conflict, Hezbollah used two new listening stations to monitor Israeli communications, one in the Golan Heights and the other at Baab al-Hawa, near the Turkish border. (www.jewishpolicycenter.org/20/the-iranian-time-bomb)

  When we found the Iranians on the Iraqi and Afghan battlefields, we told the policymakers, hoping to get the green light to go after them. Instead, two consecutive administrations didn’t want to hear about it. By the end of the Bush administration, our military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq had become very outspoken about the Iranian role.

  Referring to the new generation of roadside bombs (EFPs or explosively formed projectiles), and the discovery of substantial shipments of weapons, ammunition, and explosives, Army General Dan McNeill, who commanded 40,000 troops in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, the ISAF, said in the autumn of 2007, “this weapons convoy clearly, geographically, originated in Iran. It is difficult for me to conceive that this … could have originated in Iran and come to Afghanistan, without at least the knowledge of the Iranian military.” At the same time a British spokesman in Kabul said, “this confirms our view that elements within Iran are supporting the Sunni Taliban.”

  In Iraq, U.S. Major General William Caldwell said “it’s not all S
unni insurgents but … we do know is that there is a direct awareness by Iranian intelligence officials that they are providing support to some selective Sunni insurgent elements.” And General David Petraeus announced that the Iranians were “funding, over the last several years, certainly hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to different Shia militia groups, and we have found evidence very recently of assistance being provided to Sunni Arab groups as well. One of the Sunni insurgent leaders was just over in Tehran.”

  Our military leaders (including myself) stressed, as we would later on, that the proof of Iranian involvement sometimes came directly from the terrorists themselves. Here’s General Caldwell again: “Detainees in American custody have indicated that Iranian intelligence operatives have given support to Sunni insurgents, and then we’ve discovered some munitions in Baghdad neighborhoods which are largely Sunni that were manufactured in Iran.” In addition, General Caldwell told reporters that we knew of radical Iraqi Shi’ites being trained in Iran.

  The Iranians have few peers when it comes to killing—in 2015, Iran had the highest per capita execution rate in the world, and in total numbers was second only to the People’s Republic of China—and they excel at deception, as witness their secret nuclear program.

  They are a formidable enemy, and they have been at war with the United States, its friends, and its allies (notably Israel) for nearly forty years. Tehran’s war against the West is not based on a desire for territory, or on real or imagined grievances; it is rooted in the nature of the Islamic Republic, and it rests on ultimate issues. For the Iranians to negotiate a modus vivendi with us would be tantamount to abandoning the messianic vision of Khomeini and his successors.

  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which so many take as the starting point for their analysis of Iran’s behavior, is only one chapter in the story of the Iranian war against the West; Iraq is one more battlefield on which the Iranians have killed Western soldiers and civilians. Only the scale is new; the practice was already well established long before Operation Iraqi Freedom was even conceived. In many respects, the Iranian/Syrian strategy in Iraq after our invasion of 2004 was little more than a replay of the successful methods used against us in Lebanon in the 1980s: suicide terrorism, hostage taking, mass demonstrations, and manipulation of the media. This strategy was announced publicly by Bashar al-Assad in a published interview, before we ever set one boot in Iraq. Nonetheless, the violence of the Iranian response, in tandem with their Syrian allies, surprised most Western strategists. They should not have been surprised, since the pattern was established in 1979 and has been followed ever since.

  Once we bailed out of Iraq in 2011, the power of the Islamic Republic immediately expanded and rapidly filled the void left by our departure. The mullahs have already established strategic alliances in our own hemisphere with Cuba and Venezuela, and are working closely with Russia and China; a victory over the “Great Satan” in Iraq will compel the smaller Middle Eastern countries to come to terms with Tehran, and make the region much more inhospitable to us and our friends and allies. All of this can be accomplished without atomic bombs—the issue that dominates the policy debate over Iran throughout the West.

  To be sure, an Iranian bomb would be an existential threat to Israel, but so is a nonnuclear Iran, which is the mainstay of the anti-Israel terrorist groups, above all, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. To focus solely on the nuclear question is a serious failure of strategic vision; the issue is the regime in Tehran and their radical version of Islam, whatever its progress may be toward atomic bombs.

  Nor does Iran need atomic bombs to gravely threaten American security. Every day we see evidence of Iranian espionage in the United States—to take the most recent example, a man named Mohammed Alavi was arrested for providing Iran with the floor plan of America’s largest nuclear power plant—and numerous Iranian “diplomats” at the United Nations have been thrown out of New York City when they were found taking photographs of train and subway stations. It is hard to imagine that there are no Hezbollah terrorist groups inside this country. If they could blow up buildings in Buenos Aires, they can surely do the same here, and they have bragged that they have studied our weak points carefully, and are ready to attack when circumstances are more favorable.

  Unfortunately, for nearly forty years every American administration has permitted the Islamic Republic to build up its strength, and even organize assassinations in our capital. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan either directly sold weapons to Iran, or enabled others to do it, as in the case of the secret Gore-Chernomyrdin deal (in violation of then-Senator Al Gore’s own legislation). In all those years, no American president has initiated a serious challenge to post-revolutionary Iran, a pattern that now extends to our inconclusive response to the Islamic State. Indeed, the only time Iran paid a price for attacking American targets was when an American naval vessel hit an Iranian mine in the Persian Gulf during the Reagan presidency. When we responded by attacking Iranian targets in the area, the Iranian navy escalated the confrontation, and suffered the loss of about one third of their ships. But no American president has called for regime change in Tehran; no American administration has supported the many millions of Iranian dissidents, including workers, teachers, students, and others who have demonstrated a desire for democracy and the courage to fight for it. Indeed, our Persian-language radio and television broadcasting to Iran more often than not has been more critical of the United States than of the clerical fascists who threaten us. Our feeble response to the global war against us is reminiscent of the first years of Jimmy Carter.

  President Obama’s Cairo speech was in many ways a throwback to Carter’s famous “we have outgrown our inordinate fear of Communism” pronouncement that he delivered at Notre Dame. History reminds us that President Carter, in essence, said that the Soviet Union and international Communism were really nothing to worry about, that the Cold War was over, and that we would henceforth conduct a suitably modest foreign policy instead of the strident, aggressive, morally improper kind that his predecessors had waged. We would support human rights everywhere, but not in such a way as to threaten hostile tyrants.

  Thereafter, throughout what used to be known as the Third World, Carter not only abandoned several friendly tyrants (the most famous was the shah of Iran) to insurrections organized by our enemies, but piously acted as if we couldn’t do anything about it anyway, nor should we wish to do so. After all, we had sinned by supporting those tyrants, and it was only right for them to be overthrown.

  In like manner, in today’s Third World, Obama has shown great sympathy for anti-American “revolutionaries,” and abandoned friendly tyrannies such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and Zine Ben Ali’s Tunisia. And just as Carter was reluctant to challenge Communist control in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua, so Obama has been reluctant to support the domestic opponents of Islamist regimes in Damascus and Tehran. One of the best short summaries of the dangerous foolishness of Obama’s foreign policy goes like this:

  Inconsistencies are a familiar part of politics in most societies. Usually, however, governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest. What makes the inconsistencies of the Obama administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s “true interests.”

  I have made one change in the original text above. I inserted “Obama” in place of “Carter.” The paragraph comes from Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in Commentary magazine in November 1979. The name change demonstrates how the two worst presidents we’ve ever ele
cted act so similarly.

  Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s critique of Carter applies in equal measure to Obama. Like Carter, President Obama is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy (if it was right to intervene in Libya, why not in Syria and Iran, two regimes that kill Americans in addition to slaughtering their own?), and there is an additional convergence: both American presidents have instinctive sympathy, even enthusiasm, for self-proclaimed anti-American “revolutionaries.” Here’s Ambassador Kirkpatrick again:

  A posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-a-vis the Third World is neither morally necessary nor politically appropriate. No more is it necessary or appropriate to support vocal enemies of the United States because they invoke the rhetoric of popular liberation.… Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.

  Indeed, if you’re really interested in advancing freedom (which I fervently believe is in our American national interest), you should fight against our vocal enemies. They invariably turn out to be real enemies and will translate their words into terrorists, guns, and weapons of mass destruction as soon as they have a chance. Obama has done his damnedest to forge alliances with Hugo Chavez, before his death, the Castro brothers, and Ali Khamenei, but they and their cronies have all responded by redoubling their efforts to defeat us.

  Both presidents displayed a curious sympathy with our enemies. Carter told the dictator of Poland that he had not given up on bringing the Communist “back to Christianity,” and Obama has striven mightily to cut deals with the Iranians, Cubans, and other Latin American radicals who have joined the enemy alliance.

  As with twentieth-century Fascist and Communist totalitarian regimes, the current crop of Islamist and secular totalitarian regimes in the Middle East say what they mean, and act on it.