Only a week after President Obama declared an end to the global war on terror, the State Department accused Iran of “a marked resurgence” in its global export of terrorism to “a tempo unseen since the 1990s.”
Separately, a prosecutor in Argentina indicted top Iranian officials, including the country’s defense minister and a presidential candidate, in the bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center that killed 85 people and injured hundreds.
The 502-page charging document named Iran as establishing terrorist networks in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname, among other countries.
Additionally, the prosecutor laid out how Iranian agents had participated in the 2007 plot to blow up a Kennedy Airport fuel line, taking training and direction from the Tehran mastermind of the Buenos Aires bombing.
At trial in Brooklyn, one participant admitted advising the conspirators to run the JFK plot by authorities in Iran; a second confessed that he regularly sent information to Tehran and felt bound to follow fatwas from the mullahs.
Still more this past week, Iranian-American citizen Manssor Arbabsiar pleaded guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to plotting to murder the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. He admitted acting “at the direction” of “officials in the Iranian military.”
Then, too, backed by Iran, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah committed his terror band to backing Syrian President Bashar Assad in the country’s two-year-old civil war.
“Both Iran and Hezbollah are providing a broad range of critical support to the Assad regime, as it continues its brutal crackdown against the Syrian people,” says the State Department .
Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is reported to be rigging Iran’s upcoming presidential election in favor of Saeed Jalili, a key hard-liner in Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weaponry.
Jalili is a man who, once upon a time, was a member of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran’s long war against Iraq, with a prosthetic leg to show for his sacrifice. His slogan translates to: “No compromise. No submission. Only Jalili.”
He opposes “detente 100%.” The opposite of detente is confrontation.
In his 2009 inaugural address, Obama famously said to the world’s dictators, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
Iran rebuffed good-faith engagement, refused to let UN watchdogs inspect nuclear facilities and agreed to sit down at the table to “negotiate” but then distracted and deflected.
Meantime, it spun ever more nuclear centrifuges, getting ever closer to the needed stockpile of weaponized uranium, getting ever closer to what Obama has repeatedly called “unacceptable.”
The President imposed tough sanctions on Iranian banking and oil sectors. Some describe them as crippling, but they’re not crippling enough. Because Iran’s leadership is charging ahead on multiple fronts, expanding its sway over the Middle East, drawing close to the capacity to wipe Israel off the map, as has been promised, and prosecuting the global terror war declared over by Obama.
Mr. President, push has come to shove.