The anti-US strategy of Iran’s Ayatollahs
The Congressional Research Service highlights SOUTHCOM Commander Admiral Kurt Tidd’s statement that “as a state sponsor of terrorism, Iran’s nefarious involvement in the Western Hemisphere is a matter for concern.” The Admiral noted that Iran expanded ties with Latin America.
Moreover, according to the Washington, DC-based Lawfare Institute: “…. U.S. authorities believed that Hezbollah [Iran’s proxy] helped the Sinaloa cartel build smuggling tunnels under the US-Mexican border, drawing on expertise from Hezbollah’s work digging tunnels under the Lebanese-Israeli border [and Hamas’ experience in building tunnels from the Sinai Peninsula to Gaza and from Gaza to Israel, smuggling weaponry and terrorists]….
Hezbollah has been suspected of partnering with Mexican drug cartels such as the Sinaloa cartel, the preeminent drug trafficking organization in that country for much of the 2000s…. Iran’s area of influence is not limited to its region. Over the past decade, it has launched operations, either through Hezbollah or its own agents, around the world—including in Latin America, Eastern Europe, East and South Asia, Western and Central Africa, and within the United States itself….”
*Notwithstanding their soothing diplomatic talk, the violent walk of Iran’s Ayatollahs – since the 1978/79 Islamic Revolution – attests that the worldview of this rogue Shiite regime is not amenable to Western values and institutions such as peaceful-coexistence, democracy and human rights, nor good-faith negotiation.
*Iran’s Ayatollahs have been preoccupied with guns rather than butter, since the February 1979 Islamic Revolution, which transformed Iran from “the American policeman of the Gulf” to the anti-US Islamic Republic of Iran.
*Iran’s Ayatollahs have not been driven by despair and frustration (supposedly triggered by global sanctions and non-recognition as a major regional power), but by their 1,400-year-old fanatic, imperialistic Shiite vision, which transcends the subjugation of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, extending all the way to the American continent.
*Iran’s Ayatollahs are determined to export the Islamic Revolution world-wide, and establish a global entity, ruled by Shiite Islam, vanquishing (peacefully or militarily) the “apostate” and “heretic” Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt, as well as the “infidel” West, and especially the US, “The Great Satan.”
*The attempt to induce moderation by showering the Ayatollahs with diplomatic and financial gestures and concessions ignores the Ayatollahs’ pernicious track record, including the tendency to bite the hand that feeds them (e.g., terrorizing the US as a follow up to President Carter’s 1978/79 critical assistance to the Islamic Revolution). The Western courting of the Ayatollahs is perceived by them as weakness, which whets their rogue appetite.
*Thus, the 2015 Iran nuclear accord (the JCPOA) provided Iran’s Ayatollahs with a diplomatic and financial bonanza, but– as expected – it did not moderate their conduct.
In fact, it was harnessed to bolster their subversive and terroristic ventures, accelerate the development, manufacturing and proliferation of military technologies, and expand the Ayatollahs’ global network of anti-US proxy forces through training, financing and supply of military systems and technologies (e.g., ballistic missiles, predator drones, improvised explosive devices and tunnel construction).
Image: Reuters