If we don’t respond forcefully to the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia, the Iranians will think they are in charge in the Middle East. Meanwhile, President Trump has appointed Robert O’Brien to replace John Bolton as national security adviser, where substantial personnel changes are expected in short order. Everyone is asking what should be done to punish the Iranians, and you can be sure this was topic No. 1 in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, where Secretary of State Mike Pompeo headed last week.
Once upon a time, when the United States said it was your friend, you could count on the Americans, the world’s mightiest country, to take decisive action if an enemy struck.
It was right out of the NATO treaty: An attack against any of us was an attack against us all, and since our NATO allies rarely had the wherewithal to do anything really effective, in practice “decisive action” was left up to us. Anyone who was in Washington at the time we were attacked on Sept. 11 will long remember our allies begging for a role in the inevitable reprisals.
Today, we have a president who doesn’t like to send our troops on foreign adventures. He’d rather try to talk it out, believing in his ability to convince our would-be attackers to make peace with us. He wants to make deals with them, let the neighbors do whatever fighting is required, and leave the outcome up to the locals.
That seems to leave the question of retaliation up to the Saudis. But they aren’t well placed to do the most forceful thing: support the Iranian people in their fight against their repressive regime, as we did with the Soviet peoples in ending General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed state. The Iranian people are in constant revolt against the regime, and the regime is clamping down with predictable ferocity.
Pompeo said he was on a peace mission, while Iran was threatening all-out war against the U.S., and recent developments inside the U.S. show the Iranians are preparing to unleash a massive attack against us. A naturalized American Shi’ite man from Lebanon was just indicted for surveillance of potential targets along the American East Coast, from Boston south to Washington. Alexei Saab went back and forth between the Middle East and the U.S., training in the Middle East and laying the ground work for attacks on American targets. His work was for Hezbollah and it replicates the pattern of Hezbollah activities throughout our hemisphere.
“Today’s announcement highlights the persistent efforts of a sophisticated international terrorist organization to scout targets at home and abroad, identifying vulnerabilities, and gathering essential details useful for a future attack,” said William Sweeney, of the FBI, in federal court.
So Iran is preparing to attack its enemies, above all the U.S., and the preparations run throughout our hemisphere. Trump apparently believes he can talk Tehran out of this scheme, but the Iranians (at least those at the top of the Shi’ite pyramid) believe that their efforts are blessed by the heirs of Muhammad and that they are destined to rule the world.
This should remind us of the old Soviet Union empire. When we began talking to Soviet dissidents about the possibilities of overthrowing the Gorbachev regime, most “experts” thought it was folly. Similar to Iran today, the Soviet regime disposed of an elaborate network of concentration camps and prisons. Unlike Iran, the Soviet Union had only a handful of dissidents, and, such as Iran, the Soviets did not hesitate to execute them when they got out of line. They had a powerful intelligence service (the KGB) that was very proficient at spying on the population. It was said at the time that one out of four Soviets was in their employ, and yet this awesome regime imploded, leaving a mass of baffled people in its wake.
If we were able to transform those dissidents into anti-Soviet revolutionaries, we should certainly be able to turn 80% to 90% of Iranians into a revolutionary force. If Trump really wants to defeat the Khamenei regime, he must make his deal with the Iranian people, not its rulers.
All the evidence suggests that the Iranian regime is not interested in making a deal with Trump. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen want to retain power in their own country, and expand it elsewhere, just as Gorbachev did at the end of the Soviet Union. They have concluded that Trump will not fight back even when the energy supplies of the West are attacked, and even though the regime cannot manage the sanctions.
It sounds as if Trump believes that, given enough time, and enough sanctions, the Iranian regime will collapse, as did the Soviet Union. But he needs to remember that Gorbachev did not fall by himself. He had a lot of pushing from a lot of brave people.
Michael Ledeen is freedom scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He has written 38 books.
