Two reactions are appropriate to the Bush administration’s decision to place Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. First, one should cheer. Second, one should ask how much longer it will take the president to resolve the contradiction at the heart of his Iran policy.
One should cheer because the Revolutionary Guard is among the world’s most effective forces for barbarity and chaos. Separate from Iran’s regular military, it espouses the revolution-exporting ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei (the latter of whom possesses ultimate control of its actions). It has killed Americans gladly, as at the Khobar Towers. Its current specialty is killing American soldiers in Iraq, through Iraqi proxies, with armor-piercing bombs. These things alone do not make it a terrorist group in the precise sense of that term, but its arming and financing of Hezbollah certainly does. Likewise the massacres of civilians that its aid to Iraqi militants has made possible.
... What the designation does do is lay bare the contradiction in President Bush’s Iran policy. After September 11, in a moment of great strategic clarity, Bush said that the U.S. would not distinguish between terrorists and the governments that harbored them. Yet his administration has approached Iran — the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism — as though it were a legitimate government, capable of being persuaded to adopt positions agreeable to liberal democracies.
On Iran’s nuclear program, Bush has deferred first to Europe and then to Condoleezza Rice’s State Department in allowing years of negotiating, followed by a few more years of negotiating, followed by (wait for it) more negotiating.
Worse than do nothing, this strategy created an illusion that the world was seriously confronting Iran when just the opposite was true.
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