In 2007, my combat platoon in Afghanistan was charged with surveying a site where hundreds of Taliban insurgents had been killed in U.S. air attacks. Sifting among the bodies, we collected weapons, documents and other evidence to send to intelligence experts for analysis. The analysts discovered that many of the weapons bore serial numbers that traced to factories in Iran.

It wasn’t the first evidence that Iran was providing aid to extremist groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda; the record of charges against the Islamic Republic is lengthy and well documented. The nation’s new president is hailed as a moderate, but Iran remains in the grip of a fanatical theocratic dictatorship which, 35 years after the Iranian revolution, continues to be implacably anti-American.