Tablet Magazine President Barack Obama thinks that the deal
with Russia over Syria’s chemical weapons was possible only because of
his credible threat of force. The way he sees it, Iran’s gotten the
message, too. As the president
told George
Stephanopoulos over the weekend, “My suspicion is that the Iranians
recognize they shouldn’t draw a lesson that we haven’t struck [Syria],
to think we won’t strike Iran.”
However, the essential feature of a credible threat of force is to
have previously employed actual force against the adversary you’re
threatening. Shortly before Obama announced he would seek congressional
authorization for the use of military force against Syria, the White
House briefed House and Senate staffers on the possible ramifications of
U.S. action. Perhaps unintentionally, the briefings seemed only to have
dampened congressional appetite for attacking Iran’s man in Damascus.
“They showed them Iran retaliation scenarios,” a senior official at a
Washington, D.C.-based pro-Israel organization told me. “They
highlighted the fact that Hezbollah has a global reach. The staffers
left those briefings with the blood drained from their faces.”
Iran and its allies have proven their willingness to use force
against America—as witnessed by the April 1983 bombing of the American
Embassy in Beirut; the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in
Beirut; the 1998 bombing of Khobar Towers, which housed U.S. servicemen
in Saudi Arabia; and Iran’s war against American troops in Iraq, which
lasted until Obama’s 2011 withdrawal.[...]
It is easy to frame some of Iran’s recent
terror plots as evidence that they are the gang who couldn’t shoot
straight. For every operation that, say, kills five Israeli tourists in a
Bulgarian resort town, there are a dozen botched plots, like the
operation in Thailand where an Iranian agent blew off his own legs with a
hand grenade.
But from another perspective, it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of Iranian projects come up empty, like the plan to
assassinate
the Saudi ambassador to the United States, which might also have killed
hundreds of Americans in the nation’s capital if it had succeeded.
Taken together, what these operations show is an obvious, and alarming,
inclination to employ violence against America—even in the absence of
any direct American military action against Iran. Carried out by
second-string operatives, yet backed by arms of the Iranian government
and the global terror infrastructure it has put in place, these attempts
are generally interpreted by policymakers as warning shots—a reminder
of what will happen if America really gets the Iranians mad.[...]