On the eve of the horrific World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001, the mullahs and their IRGC hooligans had been in power for nearly 22 years. Yet the record for that two decade interval subsequent to the founding of the Iranian Revolution does not even remotely establish that the regime in Tehran had been wantonly prosecuting a murderous war against Americans.
Thus, from the ballyhooed list of 1,050 Americans allegedly killed by the Iranian regime during the last 47 years about 29o of these deaths had occurred before 9/11. Yet more than 90% of these unfortunate fatalities occurred in Lebanon in the midst of the war between the indigenous Shiite/Hezbollah fighters and the Israeli occupiers, including 241 deaths of US servicemen at the Marine barracks.
So let us say it again. For crying out loud, US soldiers should never, ever have been in Lebanon. Moreover, by his subsequent action which amounted to “cutting and running” under the euphemism of repositioning these forces to a far away aircraft carrier, President Reagan himself admitted his mistake.
In a word, Israel’s long running battle with the PLO and other Palestinians, which had spilled over into Lebanon’s already fraught confessional fissures in the early 1980s, had no bearing on America’s homeland security. None whatsoever. Had Washington maintained the good sense to stay out of this fight, even the car bomb incidents at the US embassy during these years would surely not have occurred, either.
Again, this period also proves the hoary myth that Iranians or their proxies killed Americans because they hated our freedoms is just damn nonsense—casuistry confected by Israeli/neocon propagandists to fuel that Big Lie that Iran has been “attacking” America for nearly five decades. To the contrary, these deaths happened because Washington was meddling where it had no business intervening at all, thereby putting American servicemen and State department employees in harms’ way for no good reason.
During this 22-year period there were also a handful of incidents where Americans were killed in Israel or Gaza by Hamas operatives. Yet no one can argue with a straight face that without what was actually Iran’s limited, episodic and secondary support for Hamas (versus the much, much larger support from Sunni Gulf states) that Israel and Hamas would have laid down together in blissful harmony.
In fact, the perpetual war between Hamas and the Israeli govenrment would have been every bit as brutal and intense, and what were 7 American deaths attributed to Hamas during the 1990s would likely have happened anyway. Surely, the Iranian regime did not provide modest aid to Hamas in order to instruct it to go out and find visiting Americans to kill.
Indeed, even the 1996 killing of 19 American servicemen at Khobar Tower in Saudi Arabia by Shiite militants actually proves a wholly different point. As it happened, the Saudi’s were supremely embarrassed by the breakdown of security with respect to the American troops still domiciled there at a time about five years after the First Gulf War ended. So in short order they rounded up six Shiite militants who they claimed had been responsible for the attack.
The interesting point, however, is that the Saudi’s refused to extradite these admitted members of Saudi based Hezbollah al-Hajaz, but instead extracted “confessions” from them with respect to their alleged Iranian-backing while in Saudi prisons. The only time America officials were ever allowed to see them or question them was on a single occasion from behind a one-way mirror in response to be pre-submitted questions. None of them ever faced US officials, prosecutors or courts without Saudi chaperones.
Hellbound and Down 