White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered a rather creative history of Iranian terrorism this week.
“Most importantly,” Psaki told the press corps on Wednesday, “none of the things we’re looking at now, Iran’s increased capability and capacity, their aggressive actions that they have taken through proxy wars around the world, would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal with no thought as to what would come next.”
As my Washington Examiner colleague Jerry Dunleavy observes, this assessment is just plain factually incorrect. We don’t even have to explore the counterfactual because Iran was already engaged in aggressive terrorist activity prior to President Donald Trump entering office. That’s just a fact.
In 2011, under the direct orders of its then-chief Qassem Soleimani (the United States has proof of Soleimani’s direct culpability), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force attempted to blow up a Washington, D.C., restaurant called Cafe Milano. The plot was only prevented when one of Iran’s agents unknowingly hired an informant from the Drug Enforcement Administration to carry it out. Said informant then contacted his DEA handlers, who arrested the Iranian agent.
The threat, however, was very real. The target of the attack was the Saudi ambassador and future foreign minister Adel al Jubeir.
When the Iranian control agent was warned by the DEA informant that the bomb might kill 100 people, he responded, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, f*** ’em.”
Considering Cafe Milano’s windowed design, any attack would likely have turned the restaurant into a literal shredder. Soleimani would have known this. But he didn’t care. He didn’t care about those people and the associated threat of war his plot constituted; he cared only about spilling the blood of his Saudi nemesis and hurting America.
When the Obama administration did next to nothing in response to the attack, Soleimani didn’t exactly take from it a message of deterrence.
This, of course, is just one of Iran’s many terrorist attacks on the U.S. prior to the Trump administration. Other notable incidents include the 1983 Beirut Marine barracks bombing, the 2007 kidnapping and execution of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and the explosively formed penetrator campaign against U.S. soldiers in Iraq. (Psaki ought to read David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers.) Indeed, Iran’s ideological hatred toward the U.S. is so defining that it has even provided logistical and lethal support to its ideological opposites: the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Psaki’s comments are poorly timed, given that Iran is now escalating its attack plots against former Trump administration officials in revenge for the 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani. As I was first to report at the end of 2020, these threats led to the extension of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Diplomatic Security Service protection detail. Consider how confident Iran must be that the Biden administration will bend to its nuclear negotiation demands that it is even willing to risk these assassination plots.
And Psaki’s words risk being understood in Iran as the Biden administration’s probable excuse for future Iranian attacks. “Well, this is bad,” she will say, “but we’re not going to retaliate because Trump is to blame.”
We can debate Psaki’s suggestion that Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear accord was a grievous error, but I would disagree that withdrawing from the accord was a mistake. The withdrawal allowed for the imposition of massive economic pressure and the prospect of a renegotiated nuclear accord on improved terms. It made it possible for a new deal that could have included more intrusive inspections protocols (necessary, in light of Iranian efforts to hide covert nuclear weaponization research) and restrictions on ballistic missile activity (necessary in light of Iran’s use of a civilian satellite program as a cover for increasingly long-range ballistic missile development).
Iran did not, ultimately, come to the negotiating table before Trump left office. But this was almost certainly because the regime was holding out for a more concession-minded Biden administration.
The economic pressure on the regime was critical by the end of 2020, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s vast economic network unable to fuel the patronage networks that sustained it. This situation is so serious that payments even to the most loyal and celebrated of the regime’s supporters, the families of martyrs, have been delayed. Had Trump been reelected, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would have had to choose between concessions for a new deal or the serious risk of regime implosion.
But Iran was right to bet on Biden. Because Biden is delivering.
As Iran now enriches uranium in amounts and purities that threaten near-term production of viable nuclear weapons-grade material, Saudi Arabia moves to build its own nuclear weapons program, and Israel readies for war, the Biden administration sits idle. Iran continues to demand more concessions in return for its restoration of the original 2015 agreement. Recall that Biden originally said he would reach a strengthened agreement with Iran — that hasn’t happened.
Rather than walk away from talks and impose strangling sanctions on Iran, Biden’s White House offers only vague warnings that the time for discussion is running short.
Put another way, Psaki’s assessment is short on the facts of Iranian terrorism and reflective of an administration that is completely willing to be played by Iran.
