WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom | Iran’s ‘moderate’ new government.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece is reprinted with permission and can be found on Abrams’ blog “Pressure Points” here.

The new Iranian government under President Hasan Rouhani is very often described as “moderate” these days. The Wall Street Journal’s story on his election was entitled “Moderate Cleric Hasan Rouhani Wins Iran Vote.” The Financial Times referred to his “moderate outlook.” One could cite a hundred more examples.

But this “moderate” chose as his defense minister a Revolutionary Guard leader who appears to have been partly responsible for the attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983. In this attack, 220 American Marine peacekeepers and 21 additional soldiers, airmen and sailors were killed.

Iran’s direct role in the Marine Barracks attack has long been known, because the U.S. intercepted a secret message from Tehran to Hezbollah in Lebanon telling it to strike.

Col. Timothy Geraghty, commander of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut (on a peacekeeping mission) wrote in 2008 that the intercepted order was received “unbeknownst to us at the time. The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack.”

The new Iranian defense minister is Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehghan. Dehghan was commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard unit in Lebanon at the time. A new Israeli analysis, from the Jerusalem Center on Public Affairs, continues:

“One of his first goals was to set up a central command for the Iranian force … At the beginning of September 1983, Hezbollah, with the help of the Revolutionary Guard headed by Dehghan, took over the Sheikh Abdullah barracks … It had been the main base of the Lebanese army in the Beqaa Valley and now became the Imam Ali barracks, the main headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard. It was from this headquarters that Iran controlled Hezbollah’s military force and planned, along with Hezbollah, the terror attacks on the Beirut-based Multinational Force and against IDF forces in Lebanon.

“The attacks were carried out by the Islamic Jihad organization, headed by Imad Mughniyah, which was actually a special operational arm that acted under the joint direction of Tehran and Hezbollah until it was dismantled in 1992. Instructions for the attack on the Multinational Forces were issued from Tehran to the Iranian ambassador to Damascus, who passed them on to the Revolutionary Guards forces in Lebanon and their Lebanese Shiite allies.

“According to the U.S. Marine commander, the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the Iranian orders to strike on Sept. 26, 1983. It is difficult to imagine that such a high-level directive to the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon would be transmitted without the knowledge of their commander, Hossein Dehghan.”

So that is the background of Iran’s new defense minister, who is part of Iran’s “moderate” government under its “moderate” new president. This history is worth recalling. Terrorism and close ties to Hezbollah remain at the heart of the regime — apparently no matter who is president and no matter how “moderate” Western journalists wish to believe Iran’s government is becoming.

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