IS IT TIME FOR THE UNITED STATES TO CRAFT A NEW IRANIAN &
MIDDLE EAST SECURITY STRATEGY?
Crafting a new Middle East security policy is a daunting task. However, despite the
war in Syria, the missile threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, the ongoing terrorist
violence in Iraq, and the conflict in Yemen, 2017 may be, ironically, a particularly
propitious time for US security policy to move in a different direction-- while also
preserving what is right about US policy and changing what is wrong.
Iran’s hostile behavior is of a long standing nature, having been initiated in 1979
and continued through this past decade. It is not new and is not a reaction to bad
American actions. It is rooted in the very nature of the Iranian regime. Unless we
face that reality, our efforts to eliminate Iran’s pursuit of both nuclear weapons and
a hegemonic role in the Middle East will be for naught.
We start with 1979, the fall of the Shah and the installation of the Iranian Islamic
Republic. This was just a year after the September 1978 Camp David accords
which brought relative normality between Egypt and Israel and which at the time
was thought to be a harbinger of future Middle East peace.
What we missed was that the Iranian mullahs were no “men of the cloth” as they
were characterized by the Carter administration. The mullahs were dedicated to a
revolutionary, conquering Islam.
Terrorism was one of their primary tools to achieve an Iranian dominance of not
only the Gulf States but the Islamic world. Their top goals: the destruction of Israel
and the United States, characterized repeatedly as the “Big” and “Little Satan”.
That is the central threat we face in the Middle East. The threat is not just a nuclear
armed Iran, deadly as that would be. But an Iranian Islamic revolutionary regime,
eventually armed with nuclear weapons, seeking control of the source of some
70% of the conventional reserves of oil and gas in the world.
Even should Iran not build nuclear weapons over the entire lifetime of the JPCOA,
Iran will in the meantime become more conventionally dangerous. Its offensive
missile capability, already the largest in the Gulf region, is markedly improving, as
is its ability to interdict shipping in the Gulf region, on top of its financial and
weaponry support for other terrorist groups and regimes.
