The Terrorist Next Door (26 page)

President Obama has to be fully aware of such activities. He no doubt receives briefings and intelligence reports on Afghanistan on a daily basis. So why would he willfully cover up Iran's jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and suggest that the Iranians could actually be a force for good there? Worse, he fed this misinformation to journalists, who then turned around and fed it to the American people.

The result is a continued misunderstanding among much of the American populace about the severe and multifaceted nature of the Iranian threat. For the Obamis, when it comes to Iran, it's
engagement uber alles
. Therefore, the deception over Iran's role in Afghanistan is worth it, since it glosses over the mullahs' skullduggery and doesn't ruffle any feathers in Tehran. In the Obama administration's eyes, this increases the chances of an ever-elusive “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran that would see the Iranians give up their nuclear weapons program and support for terrorism in exchange for normalized relations with the United States—as if that's something the ayatollahs even want. Hence, the spectacle of an Iranian delegation being invited by the Obama administration to take part in a NATO conference on the future of Afghanistan in October 2010—just two weeks after Afghan officials intercepted a large shipment of Iranian weapons meant for the Taliban.
¹⁹

We can guess what our troops in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, who are being killed by Iranian-supplied arms, think about this brilliant
outreach strategy hatched inside the Washington beltway. One person who isn't complaining about a stepped-up Iranian role in his country, however, is Afghan president Hamid Karzai. He brazenly admitted in October 2010 that his office has received “bags of money” from the Iranian regime.
²⁰
Once again, who says Sunni and Shia can't work together?

The Obama administration's quixotic quest to romance Iran's regime follows three decades of Iranian terrorism directed at U.S. interests. The mullahs' jihad against America began in earnest in November 1979, shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, when Islamic revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American citizens hostage. The hostages were released 444 days later, only after the United States, thanks to an overmatched Jimmy Carter, was made to look impotent before the eyes of the world.

A failed American rescue mission to free the hostages in the spring of 1980 resulted in the destruction of two aircraft and the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen in the Iranian desert. The incident only added to the mullahs' fanatical belief that Allah was on their side, with Khomeini later crediting divine intervention for the doomed American effort. To drive the point home, he had the dead soldiers' bodies paraded through the streets of Tehran.

Whether desecrating the corpses of American servicemen or humiliating U.S. hostages before the cameras, the Iranian regime's scornful view of the country it regards as
The Great Satan
was made abundantly clear from the outset of the Islamic Republic. The regime felt, as Khomeini was fond of saying, that
America can't do a damn thing
to stop the Allahordained advance of Iran's Islamic Revolution across the Middle East and beyond.

Carter's fecklessness during the hostage crisis only emboldened the Khomeinists to strike America again. In 1983, Iran supported and directed the Hezbollah truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in
Beirut, where U.S. forces formed part of a multinational peacekeeping mission. Two hundred forty-one U.S servicemen were killed in what was the deadliest terrorist attack against Americans until 9/11. Rather than strike back against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah—all of which, NSA transcripts later revealed, had a hand in the bombing
²¹
—President Reagan opted to withdraw from Lebanon.

It was a fateful decision, as Osama bin Laden witnessed the hasty American retreat, the first of many over the course of the '80s and '90s, and concluded that the United States was a paper tiger. Iran's mullahs also took note of how they literally got away with murder against American citizens—not once, but twice. Indeed, just seven months before the Beirut barracks bombing, Hezbollah operatives—also at the direction of Iran and Syria—had carried out a suicide bombing against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans.
²²
It was theretofore the deadliest attack against a U.S. diplomatic mission, but again President Reagan, who showed such boldness in confronting Soviet Communism and Libyan terrorism, refrained from ordering a retaliatory response against Iran, Syria, or Hezbollah. And so the Iranian reign of terror continued, usually directed through its proxy, Hezbollah.

The infamous terrorist behind much of the Iranian/Hezbollah-enacted carnage was Imad Mugniyeh, a senior Hezbollah commander who stayed in Iran frequently and worked closely with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. Mugniyeh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008 in an act that Hezbollah has blamed on Israel. His demise followed three decades of terrorist mayhem against U.S. interests that saw him mastermind the Marine barracks and Embassy bombings in 1983, as well as the taking of Western hostages in Lebanon throughout the 1980s, under orders from Iran. Some of the hostages, including the CIA's then-Beirut station chief William Buckley, were tortured and killed. The U.S indicted Mugniyeh for his part in the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847, during which one of the passengers, U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, was brutally murdered. Mugniyeh is also suspected of having had a role in the
1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen.
²³

Mugniyeh took his marching orders from the office of Iran's Supreme Leader and answered directly to the chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' al-Qods Force.
²⁴
In other words, Mugniyeh carried out his 25-year jihad against America with full Iranian direction and support. Considering that Iran, as we've seen in this chapter, has been waging war against the United States in numerous ways since 1979, this should come as no great shock. Nor should have the 9/11 Commission's call in 2004 for further investigation into whether Iran had any role in the attacks of September 11, 2001. The fact that up to ten of the 9/11 hijackers passed through Iran in late 2000 without having their passports stamped rightfully caught the commission's attention.
²⁵

Mugniyeh's targets in the Western Hemisphere weren't limited to the United States. The not-so-dearly-departed terrorist architect also engineered the 1992 Hezbollah bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina, which killed twenty-nine people, and the group's 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed another eighty-five. Hezbollah was able to carry out these attacks—with Iran's backing, of course—in part because it boasts a considerable network in Latin America, particularly in the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.

For the United States, that means Hezbollah members are literally the terrorists next door—and according to Joseph Myers, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and counterinsurgency expert, even closer. I sat down with Myers in January 2011, shortly after his retirement from active duty, which included lengthy stints in Latin America and Afghanistan, to discuss the Hezbollah threat in the West. Myers, who specialized in tackling armed insurgencies during his distinguished 30-year military career, told me he views Hezbollah as an even bigger threat to America than al-Qaeda:

Myers went on to say that Latin America has emerged as a Hezbollah stronghold—and that the group has cells in the United States as well:

Perhaps the most active hotbed of Iranian and Hezbollah activity in the Western Hemisphere is Venezuela. Over the past six years, Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have regularly traded public displays of affection, mugging and hugging for the cameras on numerous state visits to one another's capitals. But cooperation between Iran and Venezuela goes far deeper than the bro-mance between their
dictators. Prior to 2005, the amount of trade between Iran and Venezuela was zero. Nada. Nothing. Since then, the two countries have done over $40 billion in trade, and Iran has established a broad network of businesses and entities throughout Venezuela and the surrounding regions.

Why the sudden—and massive—Iranian investment in Chavez's socialist paradise? The answer seems obvious: Iran is putting itself in better position to attack the United States. Witness the revelation in November 2010 by the German daily
Die Welt
that Iran is planning to place medium-range missiles on Venezuelan soil. According to the article, Venezuela has agreed to the establishment of a jointly operated military base, manned in part by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which would house Iranian Shahab-3 and Scud missiles.
²⁶
Take a wild guess where those missiles would be aimed. It's not an exaggeration to say we could be seeing the beginning stages of a modern-day Cuban Missile Crisis taking shape in Venezuela—indeed, just imagine if those Iranian Scuds become nuclear-tipped.

Roger Noriega, a top State Department official under the George W. Bush administration and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, is a foremost authority on the Tehran/Caracas Axis with impeccable on-the-ground sources inside Venezuela. He told me during a taping of my CBN show,
Stakelbeck on Terror
, in late 2010 that he believes Iran is now helping Hugo Chavez develop a nuclear weapons program of his own. In addition, Noriega supplied exclusive aerial photos that showed the location of a Venezuelan “tractor factory” that produces weapons, not tractors, and is manned by Iranian guards. He also presented evidence that Iran is mining for uranium in Venezuela's Roraima Basin for use in its nuclear weapons program, in clear violation of UN sanctions. For good measure, Noriega provided never-before-seen photos of Venezuelan officials meeting with Hezbollah leaders in Beirut.

The extent of the relationship between Chavez and the mullahs, as laid out by Noriega, was shocking. Yet this gathering anti-American storm in our own backyard has been virtually ignored by the Obama administration as it doggedly pursues diplomacy with the likes of Chavez and the
Iranian regime. Similar moves by the Iranians to solidify ties with Chavez allies Bolivia and Nicaragua have likewise been overlooked. As a result, it looks like we can bid
adieu
to a long-running U.S. policy first laid out in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823: that America would let no hostile foreign power establish a beachhead in the Western Hemisphere.