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Jan. 14, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
05:51
Caroline Glick: Fragility of the Iranian Regime
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Time Text
Mm-hmm.
So...
That's right.
I read your article, your latest.
I read you regularly.
And your latest piece is of tremendous interest to Americans.
This president has undone the Iranian policies of 41 years.
That is since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Is that correct?
That's correct.
That's correct.
It's been a policy.
In fact, what I wrote about in my article, which I called Trump and the Mythmakers, I explained that Trump has really undone 40 years or 41 years of American foreign policy related to Iran and Israel.
And these were policies that were initiated by Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and 1978 and 1979. His successors, particularly Reagan and the Bushes, were highly critical of his policies, at least from a rhetorical perspective.
Substantively, they maintained them throughout their presidencies, as of course did Bill Clinton and Obama.
Right.
Right.
And so how would you characterize all of those presidents' Republican and Democratic attitudes and policies vis-a-vis Iran?
They were based on this fantasy.
You see, in November of 1979, as you know, the Iranian revolutionary regime committed an act of war against the United States when it took over the U.S. Embassy and took the Americans on the premises hostage and held them hostage for 444 days.
That's 52 Americans.
That was an act of war, and generally speaking, if the United States had acknowledged that it was, in fact, an act of war, which of course it was by any definition, they would have had to respond with force of some kind to make Iran stand down and perhaps overthrow the new revolutionary regime that had just declared war on the United States.
But Jimmy Carter didn't want to do that for a host of reasons.
I think he had some sort of an ideological affinity with the revolutionaries in the sense that he shared with his advisors a sense of guilt over American policies and thought that perhaps America had, in fact, been an imperialist power and therefore he was getting its comeuppance.
But whatever the case, he chose not to recognize what was happening.
So when the Iranians said, oh, no, no, It's not Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, that's behind us, but it's just a group of students, students, they called them, who were acting independently of the Ayatollah and his entire apparatus of power.
And they were really just helpless to take action to free the American hostages from these students.
And therefore, they were kept in central Tehran as hostages of the students, who are, of course, independent actors.
For nearly two years, for a year and a half.
And that was on its face insane.
Of course, Ayatollah Khomeini was in charge of them.
And of course, they weren't students.
They were soldiers of the Ayatollah.
But if America recognized this, then again, they were going to have to do something.
So from the very outset, the American policy was to pretend, along with the Iranians, that the Iranian regime was not responsible for its aggression and Acts of war against the United States that were carried out by proxies or by thinly disguised soldiers.
For instance, in 1983, Iran's Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, which was a creation of the regime, they bombed the American Embassy in Beirut in April of 83. And then in November of 83, they bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut.
And they killed 241 American Marines.
And again, the Reagan administration, which, you know, is considered to have been much stronger on Iran than Carter, actually wasn't.
Rather than recognizing that this, again, was an act of war against the United States with the embassy bombing and the Marine barracks bombing, the Americans pretended it away, pretended that it was carried out by independent actors inside of Lebanon that had no relationship to any state supporters.
And remove the Marines from Beirut.
Never took action against Iran for those two acts of war against Americans in Beirut, or subsequent kidnappings and tortures and killings of American embassy personnel, including the CIA station chief in Beirut.
So the Americans, Reagan, then Bush, both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, all of them pretended.
To believe the denials of the Iranian regime, while they knew full well that all of these terrorist attacks against America, against its allies, against other countries, were being carried out, directed, sponsored, paid for, and commanded by the Iranian regime, because they just didn't want to deal with it.
They never wanted to acknowledge what was happening.
And so for 41 years, America has based its policy on the fantasy.
That the Iranian regime wasn't responsible for its own actions.
Wow.
That's all I could say.
And now a president has said the emperor is naked.
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