Threat to America from Iran

"Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none--for the moment--to the United States...unless we go ahead, attack it, and the mullahs unleash Hezbollah terrorists against us?" So writes Joe Klein over at Time's blog. (We'll leave unaddressed his intellectual flailing on Jews, Commentary magazine, the Iraqi government, 100 years, etc.) Iran is not a threat to the United States, he assures us. I wonder if Klein thought Iran was a threat on July 24, 1996. The next day Iran sponsored the attack at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The Clinton Justice Department later concluded: "the Iranian government inspired, supported, and supervised members of the Saudi Hizballah. In particular, … [Hezbollah] defendants reported their surveillance activities to Iranian officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials." As Andy McCarthy has pointed out, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 declared that his nation was leading a "war" against the "World of Arrogance." He said: "We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years." He continued: "In this very grave war, many people are trying to scatter grains of desperation and hopelessness regarding the struggle between the Islamic world and the front of the infidels, and in their hearts they want to empty the Islamic world. ... They [ask]: “Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?” But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved." McCarthy also reminds us that Yahya Safavi, head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, has spoken openly of his strategy for fighting the "enemy" -- American forces -- in Iraq. And that Ayatollah Khomeni recently embraced Iran's "Death to America" slogan. And that Hassan Abbassi, a Revolutionary Guard intelligence adviser said this in 2004. "We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization...[W]e must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already spied on these sites, and we know how we are going to attack them." Since the early 1990s, the Iranian regime (and it's terrorist arm) has had an alliance with al Qaeda that has included training in bombmaking, logistical assistance, and safe haven for al Qaeda leaders. And, as the 9/11 Commission noted: "[T]here is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and that some of these were future 9/11 hijackers. There also is circumstantial evidence that senior Hezbollah operatives were closely tracking the travel of some of these future muscle hijackers into Iran in November 2000." (For much more evidence of the threat Iran presents, see Tom Joscelyn's excellent study for the Claremont Institute.) Despite two decades of Iranian aggression, Klein worries about a "rush" to war with Iran. I certainly haven't seen much evidence of this. And nobody I know is "gleeful" about the prospect of using force on Iran. A war there shouldn't be anything but a last resort. But Klein is usually more sensible than most of the liberal pundit crowd, in part because his opinions are often informed by his own reporting. It would be interesting to know whether his military sources -- who have been targeted for the past five years by Iranian-supplied EFPs -- believe that such an application of force would be best understood as the U.S. starting a war or just starting to fight in the one we're already in.