What do the following countries have in common? Argentina, Australia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The answer is that all have been on the receiving end of Iranian terrorism, either directly or through a Tehran-backed proxy, such as Hezbollah.
Think about that list. What possible interest could the ayatollahs have had in, say, Buenos Aires, which lies 8,500 miles from Tehran? In 1994, a militant drove an explosives-laden van into a Jewish community center, killing 85 people and injuring more than 300. Argentine prosecutors followed the trail back to Iranian state officials.
Why, for Heaven’s sake? I mean, why Argentina? Presumably, to show that they could strike anywhere they wanted. That charred horror was what “globalize the intifada” looks like.
You think that it is the U.S. picking a fight? That President Donald Trump is the man who has trashed international law? The mullas’ regime was literally founded in defiance of any concept of law among nations. Can you remember its opening act, the overture that announced all that was to follow? That’s right: The seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
It is difficult, after so many years, to recall quite how shocking it was to make hostages of embassy personnel. The sanctity of diplomatic missions is the cornerstone of the international order. If the U.S. declared war on Venezuela tomorrow, diplomats would be peacefully evacuated through third countries.
In rejecting that convention, the ayatollahs were sending out the strongest possible signal: “Your rules don’t apply to us. We don’t recognize international law. We answer to a higher power”.
That abuse should have told us everything we needed to know. It is in the nature of revolutionary regimes to pick fights. They buy stability at home with instability abroad, drinking order from their environment. These were not tinpot kleptocrats but millenarian fanatics who believed that their foreign adventurism would hasten the return of the Twelfth Imam and the end of the world.
When we think of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, we tend to emphasize the first word over the second. But the revolutionary nature of Khomeini’s regime — he abolished the monarchy, nationalized businesses, expropriated and exiled business leaders — is critical to understanding Iran.
We should bracket the Iranian Revolution with the French or Russian Revolutions. All three violently opposed the rule of law among nations. All three had networks of foreign sympathizers and imitators. Just as the French Directory inspired Jacobin Clubs around Europe, and just as the Bolsheviks had client communist parties, so the ayatollahs popularized the idea that a good Muslim could not be a loyal citizen of a secular state. They did not invent the idea, but they made it mainstream.
In the 1960s, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had made Persian translations of the chief works of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, hanged in 1966 after falling out with Nasser. The Iranian Revolution gave a new salience and immediacy to Qutb’s illiberal, antidemocratic, and antisemitic doctrines, introducing many Muslims to the notion that the only legitimate regime was a theocracy.
Toppling the ayatollahs will not completely kill that idea, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall completely killed communism. But it will alter the intellectual landscape, reviving the older idea that there is a duty of loyalty to any state that does not explicitly repress Islam.
I do not write as a neocon warmonger, by the way. I opposed the Iraq invasion. I was prepared to accept a quick strike in Afghanistan to topple the regime that was shielding the 9/11 bombers, but that goal was accomplished within six weeks, and I strongly criticized the prolongation and extension of the mission afterwards.
This is different. Iran has declared war on the world. Not just on Israel and not just recently. The ayatollahs have some support from Russia, which they supply with drones, and from China, which they supply with cheap oil. Almost every other country, especially neighboring Arab states, loathes them.
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The idea that removing Saddam would automatically democratize Iraq always struck me as naïve. But Iran has an altogether longer and richer history to fall back upon, and there is every chance that a new regime, whether a republic or a constitutional monarchy, would prompt hundreds of thousands of exiles, many now habituated to Western democratic norms, to return.
A lot of people who would otherwise be able to see this are blinded by their dislike of Trump. Well, as one who shares that dislike, he has called this one correctly.