Somebody in the Iranian government backed a planned terrorist attack in America’s back yard? No surprise there. Tehran didn’t earn a reputation as the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism for nothing.
Nor is it terribly shocking to hear that the plot was intended to be carried out on US soil. America these days must appear an open target for the likes of Iran.
This summer, President Obama revealed his new and improved strategy for combating terrorism. Pop quiz: What did it say about Iran? Almost nothing. Despite its record, Tehran merited just one mention in 19 pages.
This wasn’t an oversight. The White House didn’t forget to say something substantial about state-sponsored terrorism. It’s just that talking about states that foster and fund the slaughter of innocents is much too inconvenient a truth for the administration.
The president came into office with a plan to make nice with evil regimes (which won him the Nobel Peace Prize after just months in the White House). The Obama Doctrine called for engaging with America’s enemies. Little foibles — bankrolling terrorists, or trampling the human rights of their own citizens — would just have to be overlooked.
To many, this seems like Jimmy Carter-redux. Our 39th president, after all, wanted to play nice. America’s enemies sized him up as a patsy. Once they thought that they really understood what kind of man was in the White House, no snub or humiliation was too small. They spent the second half of his term making Carter’s life miserable, from Iranians’ seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran to the Soviets invading Afghanistan.
Yet the only reasonable outcome of the Obama Doctrine is to make Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy look reasonably adept by comparison. Even before yesterday’s indictment, there was plenty of evidence that adversarial capitals around the world don’t take this administration seriously.
This summer, in fact, the Iranians got a clear lesson in how the United States responds to state-sponsored terrorism. It happened when press reports revealed that American intelligence had concluded in a classified report late last year that Russia’s military intelligence was responsible for a bomb blast just outside the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia.
The bombing inconveniently occurred while the White House was pressing for approval of the New START nuclear agreement with Moscow and trumpeting the successes of “resetting” relations with Russians. The White House just told the Georgians to keep quiet about the whole affair and slapped some Russian wrists in private. What our president didn’t do was express an ounce of outrage.
No surprise the Iranians might think that even if their fingerprints turned up all over this plot, they could worm their way out of it.
After all, they’ve spit on every outreach effort the White House has made. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made jokes about Obama’s name. Tehran has moved full speed ahead with its nuclear program despite Western protests.
It even threatened to send its ships through American waters, and the White House said: So what?
So let’s be honest. Is this assassination plot really a surprise?
The Iranian intelligence service has long had a presence in the United States. Hamas and Hezbollah, both sponsored by Iran, have networks running throughout the Western Hemisphere. Is it really such a reach to think that some in Tehran might want to inflict the ultimate insult on Obama and stage a strike inside America?
US successes against transnational terrorism, unfortunately, won’t serve as much of a deterrent. After all, the president declared in his counterterrorism strategy that he wants to start treating terrorists as if they’re criminals. So if the plot got uncovered, what’s the worst that could happen? A few low-level, cannon-fodder terrorist figures might go down.
Even a foiled plot raises Ahmadinejad’s stature — to violate American sovereignty and pay little.
And Tehran could well have succeeded where 41 other post-9/11 plots against the United States have failed.
There is absolutely no excuse for Iran’s behavior here. But we can’t pretend that we’ve been making it harder for them to attempt such an attack.
James Jay Carafano is a national-security expert at the Heritage Foundation.