April 15, 2016
By Michael Ledeen
Americans just can’t take the Iranian tyrants seriously. If you ask us what Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei means when he leads his weekend crowds in a chant of “Death to America,” most Americans will not say “he wants to destroy us all.” Yet that is precisely what he means, and if we had leaders worthy of the name, they would be designing a strategy to bring down the Tehran regime before Khamenei and his evil henchmen do terrible things to us. Here.
Instead, the president and the secretary of state keep showering largesse on the ayatollahs, who respond by telling us they are preparing our destruction.
Just last week, for example, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said Iran is preparing for all-out war with the U.S. and its allies, and has vowed Iran will continue advancing and testing its ballistic missile program.
Speaking at a gathering of senior IRGC commanders in Tehran Tuesday, Jafari declared that the U.S, “would not be able to do a damned thing” in the face of Iranian advances, according to the official Tasnim News Agency.
This echoed an earlier speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who, in response to Washington’s latest plea for new talks about the ongoing Iranian ballistic missile tests, coldly said: “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.” After all,
If the Islamic republic seeks negotiations but has no defensive power, it would have to back down against threats from any weak country.
You may recall that President Obama lamented that while Iran was respecting “the letter” of the nuclear deal, it was often violating “the spirit” of the agreement. To which the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, gave the U.S. president the back of his mailed fist:
We studied the details of the nuclear agreement and didn’t see anything but its text and don’t have any information about its spirit.
They have something different in mind.
And he bragged about Iran’s global military power, including naval forces in the Western Hemisphere. Those who laugh off Iranian braggadocio might wish to rethink their light-heartedness. All indications are that Tehran is deadly serious, and has been all along. They recently showed off a missile on which they’d written “Israel must be demolished,” and their missiles are plenty good. If they are indeed in Latin America, they could launch similar missiles from countries like Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, all of which serve as bases for Hezbollah, one of Iran’s two foreign legions (along with the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards Corps).
The Obama administration downplays the significance of Iranian words, ships, and missiles, describing them more in sadness than real concern, most recently offering new missile deals. and possible access to the dollar zone. This desperate scramble for ever-closer ties with Iran goes hand-in-hand with Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts at rapprochement with the Marxist terrorists of the Columbian FARC, a few years ago considered defeated by the national army, aided by American security agencies from the CIA to DEA. But we want to embrace them, not consign them to the archives of the recent unpleasant past.
The Iranians are in a hurry to cash in during the final months of the Obama presidency, and the White House will apparently pay most any price to be able to claim it “made peace” with Tehran.
So don’t be surprised when terrible things happen.
Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.