Everyone can agree that last week’s safe return of 15 British sailors held hostage by Iran was good news, at least in the sense that the uniformed men and women were not physically harmed.
But one of the most erroneous, and dangerous, conclusions that seems to be gaining currency amongst world leaders and journalists at the end of this whole spectacle is that the West’s policies toward Iran over the past few years are in any way to blame for stoking Iranian aggression.
The current regime in Iran was born in illegality, and international mischief-making has been its stock in trade ever since. After violently overthrowing the pro-American Shah in 1979, the Iranian revolutionaries seized the American Embassy in Tehran, whose staff they held hostage for 444 days.
Iran has not altered, at all, its disparaging attitude toward diplomatic norms of behavior in the subsequent 28 years. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa — a religious hit job — against acclaimed author Salman Rushdie because the British writer published a book that the mullah believed insulted Islam. Iran has repeatedly affirmed its call for Rushdie’s murder.
Iran is also a chief sponsor of Hezbollah. In 1992, the Lebanese-based terrorist organization, with Iranian backing, bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 30 and wounding 200.
Two years later, Hezbollah bombed a Jewish community center in the same city, killing 100 and wounding 250. The decision to hit the center was made by Khameni, then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Iran’s intelligence and foreign ministers.
The Iranian terror continues. As has become clear, Iran is training Iraqi insurgents within its borders to launch attacks against coalition troops in Iraq. This week, Iran also declared that the world must “accept the new reality” of its nuclear program, and in pursuing it has already defied three Chapter Seven resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.
This is the severest breach of a U.N. mandate that a member state can commit, as, like Iraq’s 16 violations since the end of the first Gulf War, it allows for legal enforcement via military action.
If there has been any provocation between Iran and the West, Iran’s ongoing support for international terrorists, its illegal nuclear program and its attempts to destroy the nascent Iraqi democracy are to blame.
Simply put, Iran is a state that needs no prodding from the great Satan to commit acts of terror and piracy. It is the existence of the infidel nations that motivates the regime’s hatred.
The assumption that it is the West in general and the United States in particular that is to blame for the aggressive actions of totalitarians is not a new one. In American political discourse, this belief dates back at least to the Cold War, when fellow-traveling leftists said that it was the United States, and not the Soviet Union, which was instigating global tensions all over the world.
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to argue that certain American policies may unwisely provoke nations into behavior that we don’t like. But this cannot be said of Iran, which has a demonstrated history of disregard for the way modern nations behave.
Neither the United States of the last century nor of the current one has sought hegemony by force for rapacious reasons. If we can boast of an empire today, it is an empire of liberty, a Pax Americana that stands in stark contrast to the totalitarian designs of international communism and jihad.
Forming an effective policy for dealing with Iran over the coming years will be as difficult as it is crucial to international security. But first, we must eliminate from our collective conscience the notion that we are somehow to blame for inspiring the Islamic Republic’s nasty behavior.
Examiner columnist James Kirchick is assistant to the editor in chief of The New Republic and can be reached at [email protected].
