Very soon after Election Day, the winner must figure out the toughest challenge on America’s national-security horizon. He may want to pick up Abraham Soafer’s new book,“Taking on Iran.”
Soafer, a Reagan administration veteran now at the Hoover Institution, argues that the mullahs will never take our threats seriously — and so won’t negotiate with us in earnest — as long as we don’t respond in kind to attacks by their proxy terrorists.
At a Manhattan event sponsored by the Middle East Forum last week, Soafer noted that for 32 years our presidents have failed to confront the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, even as that autonomous terror group has conducted one attack after another against Americans.
The Guard was behind the 1983 attack on the US Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (19 US servicemen slain, plus one Saudi). It struck in Paris, Buenos Aires and elsewhere — and, at best, we went to court.
An Iranian-American, Manssor Arbabsiar, pleaded guilty last week in a Manhattan courtroom to charges related to last August’s plan to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. The operation would’ve killed numerous DC restaurant-goers on their lunch break.
Arbabsiar fingered an Iranian citizen, Gholam Shakuri, as co-conspirator. Shakuri, a member of the Guard’s elite Quds force, escaped to Iran.
But why shouldn’t he suffer the same punishment we exact on al Qaeda terrorists?
Soafer recommends assassinating Shakuri and other Guard commanders known to be responsible for terrorist attacks against Americans. More, we should hit Quds camps in remote areas and attack Guard naval bases and ships as they’re loaded with illicit arms for Hezbollah, Hamas or the Syrian regime.
Employing “limited force” to target an organization that’s attacking us would be more palatable to the American public than a wholesale war against Iran’s nuclear program, Soafer argues. A former State Department legal adviser, he says it’d also be easier to justify in global institutions like the United Nations.
Plus, the Iranian people fear and loathe the Guard-affiliated basijis, the militias who kill political dissidents and enforce strict Islamic law in the streets. Iranians would be far more supportive of a US attack on the Guard than if we went after nationally-prized targets.
Most important, a campaign against the Guard would force Iran’s civilian leaders to take seriously our attempts to negotiate an end to their nuclear program.
“The most essential basis for successful diplomacy with an enemy is strength,” Soafer told me this week. “So long as the United States fails to respond with strength to Revolutionary Guard terror, the US will not be taken seriously and Iran will continue to take advantage of such talks to progress in its work on nuclear-weapons capabilities.”
This fresh approach is making the rounds in national-security circles. Former Secretary of State George Shultz wrote the forward to the booklet, and “Henry [Kissinger] grilled me for hours” before also endorsing it, Soafer says.
He has detractors. Aaron David Miller, a Mideast adviser to Presidents George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, says a “cold war” against Iran that risks retaliation without touching the nuclear program would “get us the worst of all worlds.”
Even some who like coupling limited war with tough diplomacy wonder if it’s not too late. Soafer himself says that, in the end, stopping Iran’s nuclear program may entail a more comprehensive assault on the nuclear facilities.
But if our off-and-on feckless diplomacy continues, backed merely by sanctions, the Guard — an Islamist terror organization — may well end up controlling Iran’s nukes. Soafer’s way would at least show Iran’s leaders what “all options are on the table” mean.
In this week’s debate, President Obama derided Mitt Romney: “The 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.” But 1980s policy defeated the foe of the day, the Soviet Union. If the next president gets a call from one of its architects, he may want to pick up the phone.
Twitter: @bennyavni