The Terrorist Next Door (24 page)

The news had the opposite effect in Washington, D.C. and European capitals, where panicked leaders had assumed they had at least two or three more years of diplomatic maneuvering to try and dissuade the mad mullahs from acquiring the bomb. After all, the “Stuxnet” computer worm that had attacked Iran's nuclear installations in 2010—and which was likely a joint cyber-creation of the United States and Israel—had, by many accounts, set back Iran's drive for nuclear weapons considerably. And U.S.-led economic sanctions were biting the average Iranian enough that some observers expected the eruption of another bout of massive civil unrest against the regime. It seemed everything was going the West's way, without a shot being fired. Then came the nuclear test, and the stunning revelation that Iran had weathered the Stuxnet-and-sanctions storm by plugging away at two secret nuclear installations, one carved into the side of a mountain in the deserts of central Iran and the other buried deep beneath the ground in a fortified bunker near the country's eastern border. The end result was that the Iranians, who are believed to have created the game of chess over 2,000 years ago, had outwitted the West and emerged victorious in the two sides' long-running nuclear chess match.

Now all of Israel was in an uproar, with talk of an impending second Holocaust saturating the Knesset and the airwaves. Indeed, Hezbollah,
Hamas, and Syria, emboldened by their Iranian patron's nuclear trump card, rattled their sabers toward Israel and boasted of the imminent demise of the “Zionist cancer.” Accordingly, each day brought an increased number of rockets launched out of Gaza and southern Lebanon targeting Israeli towns and cities.

In Sunni Arab countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, newly installed revolutionary governments and the old monarchies alike were offering conciliatory words to the Iranian regime in public, but behind the scenes they were in a state of complete chaos, petrified at the nuclear-armed, Shia hegemon in their midst and working feverishly to acquire their own nuclear deterrents. Although Iran's benefactors in China and Russia urged restraint and declared their confidence that Iran would wield its nuclear arsenal “responsibly,” rumors were circulating that the United States, Europe, and Israel were planning a joint operation to neutralize Iran's nuclear weapons stockpile, estimated to consist at that point of only three or four bombs.

However, anonymous sources within the Obama administration had leaked information to the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
that seemed to suggest otherwise. The message relayed by these insiders was that the administration was confident it could contain a nuclear Iran. “We'll provide a nuclear umbrella for the Sunnis and for Israel like we did for Europe for half a century with the Soviets,” one administration official told the
Times
. “Don't be fooled by the Iranians' bluster. At the end of the day, they're rational actors who won't jeopardize their regime by using a nuclear weapon. It's just an insurance policy for them, not a means to jump-start some sort of Islamic Apocalypse, like voices on the right would have us believe. That kind of paranoia is not helpful as we try to engage the Iranians and learn their intentions here.”

Despite the comforting leaks emanating from White House officials and their reassurances on the Sunday morning talk shows, the American public was fixated on the Iranian threat with an intensity unseen since the Iranian hostage crisis thirty years earlier. News clips aired daily of
Ahmadinejad promising “the coming end of the American aggressor” before mass rallies in Tehran. In one event, he was joined by his close ally, the Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez, who was rumored to be working on a nuclear program of his own in America's backyard, with Russian, Iranian, and North Korean help.

Meanwhile, commentators duked it out nightly on cable news shows over what should be done about nuclear Iran, with prominent voices on the Left urging a summit between Obama and Khameini, and denouncing Americans' outcry against Iranian nukes as “anti-Muslim bigotry.” American Islamist groups like CAIR took that memo and ran with it, appearing
ad nauseum
on cable news and in the mainstream press to complain of the naked “Islamophobia” being displayed toward an Iranian regime “that has not attacked anyone.” Their common refrain: “Why is Israel allowed to have nuclear weapons and Iran is not? Israel has attacked its neighbors. Iran has not. Who is the bigger threat?”

In short, the world seemed on the brink of war, and the American people—a majority of whom, polls showed, favored a preemptive strike against Iran—were demanding that Washington show some leadership and take a strong public stand against the Iranian regime. So, too, were the governments of Europe and Israel.

Yet there stood President Obama at the UN, sharing a cordial moment with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in front of the entire world. The Iranian tyrant smiled as he spoke a few words to the much taller Obama, who nodded as he leaned in to listen. Obama then stepped back and gave Ahmadinejad a few words in return, followed by a pat on the shoulder, just as he had done with Hugo Chavez during a similar encounter in 2009. And then it was over. Both sides went their own way, closely shielded by their security teams, as cameras continued to flash and reporters yelled out questions in vain.

The encounter lasted all of thirty seconds, but its aftershocks reverberated throughout the world, with Israel and the Sunni Arab states particularly disheartened. It was, in their eyes, and in the eyes of the
president's conservative critics stateside, a show of unforgiveable appeasement and weakness in the face of a bullying, genocidal dictatorship.

Some suggested the brief meeting wasn't a coincidence at all, and that Obama had planned to “accidentally” bump into Ahmadinejad in order to cool tensions and extend yet another olive branch to the Iranian regime. If that was indeed the strategy, it failed miserably. Just minutes after Ahmadinejad's brief chat with Obama, he took to the UN stage and delivered a blistering tirade against the United States and Israel that frequently invoked Islamic apocalyptic prophecies. He also offered to share nuclear technology and provide an “Islamic nuclear umbrella” to any Muslim nation that was interested.

Although White House spokesmen attempted to frame “The Shake,” as it became known, as a thawing out moment of Reagan/Gorbachev proportions, polls showed that 80 percent of Americans strongly disapproved of it. As for Ahmadinejad, he and Iran's Supreme Leader were maximizing the propaganda value of the encounter, boasting that the head of the world's most powerful nation had come crawling before the might of a nuclear Iran. “Now that we have the world's ultimate weapon,” Ahmadinejad proclaimed, “the Americans are our dogs, and we are their master. Islam, too, is their master, and it will soon be master of the whole world.”

The scenario I've just outlined is fictional—for now. Come 2012 or 2013, it may prove quite prescient. If so, it would signal that the global struggle against Islamic jihadists is lost—period. If Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, acquires the deadliest weapons known to mankind, the whole game changes. Think about it—the Iranian regime is the chief benefactor of the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It funds the Taliban in Afghanistan and Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen. In addition, Syria, and increasingly Sudan, are virtually Iranian client states. How will all these well-armed
jihadist (or in Syria's case, fascist) entities behave once they are covered by an Iranian nuclear umbrella?

Take Hezbollah, for instance—an Iranian-created paramilitary force that has global reach, including a presence on U.S. soil, as we'll see shortly. Suppose, God forbid, a group of Hezbollah operatives—at Iran's behest—blow up a few select buildings in New York City. The explosives used in the attack are later traced back to Iran. Does the United States hesitate to strike back for fear of an Iranian nuclear response? It's true that Iran does not yet possess an ICBM capability, as far as we know, that would enable it to reach the United States with a nuclear-tipped weapon of mass destruction. But U.S. officials estimate Iran will indeed have ICBMs by 2015,
¹
and in the meantime, Russia and China are no doubt glad to share such technology with their Iranian ally to help it get there even sooner.

U.S. officials are also well aware Iran has conducted missile tests in the Caspian Sea that mirror the technique used in an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, attack. In such a scenario, a nuclear weapon would be fired into the atmosphere and detonated above a country like the United States. The ensuing blast would give off powerful electromagnetic pulses that would fry America's entire electrical grid, sending the world's most powerful and technologically advanced nation back to the 1800s in one fell swoop. Congressional hearings have warned about the threat posed by an EMP attack, but little has been done to harden the nation's infrastructure to guard against such a catastrophe. It's not difficult to imagine an unmarked Iranian ship positioning itself a few hundred miles off America's Atlantic coast and firing a nuclear-tipped missile from its platform and into the atmosphere above New York City or Washington, D.C. The ship would then be immediately destroyed, and the Iranian jihadists aboard would “martyr” themselves, without a trace left behind—meaning plausible deniability.

Is the Obama administration even discussing such a doomsday possibility in its national security briefings and meetings? EMP may sound like science fiction, but it is, in fact, a very real threat, as any credible national security expert will attest. As discussions and debate over what to do about Iran's nuclear weapons program intensify, shouldn't Americans
be informed about the whole host of dangers, like EMP, that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose?

Rest assured, Israelis are having this conversation on a daily basis. Could Israel still retaliate against Hamas and Hezbollah missile attacks if Iran threatened to intervene with nuclear weapons to defend its proxies? Or perhaps Iran would simply share its nuclear arsenal with said terror groups and have them do the dirty work. Israel's Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, told me during an interview in May 2010 that it is “a working assumption of the state of Israel” that Iran may do just that.

Here's another question: would Iran be willing to share its nukes with al-Qaeda? Why not? Al-Qaeda has long been hungry to acquire nuclear weapons, and as the two sides have shown in the past, they can easily overcome the Sunni-Shia divide and work together toward their common goal of eliminating America and Israel from the map. When it comes to jihadi cooperation against Christians and Jews, the old adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is the order of the day.

As for that hypothetical handshake between Obama and Ahmadinejad, consider our president's list of photo-ops with repressive, anti-American dictators since assuming office in January 2009: