Caving to Iran

The British are surrendering to blackmail from Iranian proxies. The U.S. should not follow suit.

By Michael Ledeen
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The British government has been extraordinarily successful in convincing the United States to release terrorists in our custody. With one exception, every Guantanamo prisoner who ever resided in Great Britain has been sent back. For the second time in as many years, the British have asked that the remaining prisoner — Shaker Aamer — be turned over to them. Aamer isn’t the only one the Brits want sprung; they are also asking us to release several Iran-linked terrorists in American custody in Iraq, apparently as part of a swap for five British citizens kidnapped there a couple of years ago.

There are plenty of good reasons for these terrorists to be kept where they are. According to documents used in Aamer’s hearings at Guantanamo, he was “an advisor to Osama bin Laden,” his passport was found at Tora Bora, he worked with al-Qaeda in Kandahar and Kabul, was a member of an al-Qaeda cell in London, and told American interrogators that “he went to Afghanistan in 2000 specifically to be . . . on the front lines.” Thus far, we have quite rightly refused to extradite him.

The same goes for those in American custody in Iraq. The two big names among those the Brits want released are Ali Musa Daqduq and Qayis Khazali. Both were captured in Iraq in the spring of 2007, following the bloody attack in Karbala in which five American soldiers were murdered. U.S. military forces in Iraq discovered that both of them were operating in intimate contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. Indeed, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner called Daqduq “a surrogate for . . . Quds Force operatives,” and went on to observe that “both Ali Musa Daqduq and Qayis Khazali state that senior leadership within the Quds Force knew of and supported planning for the eventual Karbala attack that killed five coalition soldiers. Ali Musa Daqduq contends the Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Quds Force.”

Daqduq was an important Hezbollah officer, having served as bodyguard to the chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and led operations in Lebanon. He was sent to Iran for training in both 2005 and 2006, where he met with the top two Quds Force commanders. Khazali was similarly in cahoots with Iran, and he gave the orders for the deadly assault in Karbala.

These are two of the terrorists the Brits want us to release, so that their civilian hostages can gain their freedom. As I have noted at greater length, there are lots of hostages out there, including four Americans in Iran (in the linked article, I unfortunately omitted the famous blogger Hoder, who returned to Iran and thereby provided the mullahs with yet another victim) and two Americans in North Korea. Those hostages are used to blackmail their countries into doing things they might not otherwise do. When the Brits negotiated with the Iraqi hostage-takers, one of the “gestures” they agreed to was their outrageous and very public decision to talk to the “political wing of Hezbollah,” which is to say, they did a favor to the Iranians, who created and run Hezbollah.

Knowing all this about the Brits, one has to wonder to what extent we, too, are being blackmailed by the mullahs. The two journalists in the hands of the North Koreans work for Al Gore’s TV network. I have no doubt that he and his aides have spoken to the Obama administration about the fate of these two unfortunate women. And you can be sure that any conversations with the leaders of the Hermit Kingdom will involve American concessions. That’s the whole point of taking hostages, after all.

As the cases of Daqduq and Khazali show, most every time you turn around inside the terror universe, you trip over the Iranians — even as far away as North Korea, where an Iranian team attended the recent rocket/missile launch. And more often than not, Hezbollah, in tandem with the Quds Force, is Iran’s instrument of choice.

Take a look at a recent story out of Egypt, where 50 Egyptians, Palestinians, and Lebanese were rounded up on terror charges. Yediot Aharanot reported that at least some of the men were “suspected of belonging to Hezbollah and aiding Hamas.” No surprise there; as far back as 2006, the Israelis documented the extensive Iranian training of Hamas terrorists by their comrades in Hezbollah.

Indeed, Hezbollah is the model for Hamas in many ways, from the use of charity to swell its ranks, to the repeated seizure of hostages, to the rabidly anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideology both employ in their indoctrination of the faithful, and the hand-in-glove working relationship with Iran. No wonder, then, that a new umbrella organization has just been created by the mullahs to coordinate the next stage in the campaign against Israel. Once again, Hezbollah is the model, and it even provides the official name for the operation.

After the humiliation of Hamas by Israel earlier this year, the Iranian leaders summoned more than a dozen terrorist groups to Tehran for meetings with Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad. The meetings went on for several weeks, from mid-February to mid-March. According to usually reliable sources, the terrorists were informed that Iran had committed a billion dollars for the “liberation of Palestine,” and that actions would be coordinated by an umbrella organization to be called “Hezbollah of Palestine.” Participants included Egyptian and Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood leaders and top officials from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Reportedly, representatives of the Turkish government were also present. The Iranian regime was represented by officers from the Revolutionary Guards and the Quds Forces, and by Khamenei himself, a clear demonstration of the urgency with which the Iranians viewed the matter.

The use of Hezbollah members to aid Hamas in Egypt — from which attacks against Israeli targets were to be launched — is of a piece with that strategy.

A strategy as aggressive as this is not the sort that the mullahs are likely to drop simply because President Obama has offered to sit down and reason together. Rather like the Somali pirates, who refused to change their behavior even when confronted with overwhelmingly superior firepower, the Iranians as yet have no reason to think their methods are failing. On the contrary, they’ve blackmailed Her Majesty’s Government into dramatic policy changes, and we seem to have gone along with it.

The piracy episode provides a good metaphor for those willing to see it: To save American lives, mere talk will not be good enough. You have to bring them down. So it is with the Iranians. They will continue to target us and our allies until one side has been defeated and the other has declared victory. Which will it be?