OPINION:
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Last week, Iran marked the 45th anniversary of the end of its 1979 Islamic Revolution with a massive military parade, while crowds burned U.S. and Israeli flags and shouted retread slogans such as “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would love to destroy Israel and eliminate U.S. influence in the Middle East — but only if he can also avoid any risk to his brittle and corrupt regime.
The U.S. has scored significant tactical wins in the struggle against Tehran, including the 2020 strike at Baghdad International Airport that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, head of the Iraqi Shiite militia group Kata’ib Hezbollah. But Washington has never managed to fully deter Iran, most notably in Iraq, where Iran has provided lethal support to Shiite militia groups since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
Iran has never altered its strategy of avoiding a direct war with the U.S. (which it would lose), while creating strategic depth by funding and arming its proxy terrorist allies in the Gaza Strip, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
CIA Director William Burns recently warned that the latest Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has only emboldened the Iranian regime, which is “ready to fight to its last regional proxy while expanding its nuclear program and enabling Russian aggression.” Iran is also moving ever closer to obtaining its own nuclear bomb, with a large stockpile of enriched uranium and an extensive ballistic missile program.
Amid the war in Gaza, Iran has used its proxies to raise the cost of international trade and to pressure its Sunni adversaries in the Persian Gulf, whose populations are pro-Palestinian but whose governments covet good relations with Washington.
Iran is also winning the information war, propagating the false narrative that it is supporting the Palestinians, while Iran’s military and financial support for Hamas is the primary cause of the misery being endured by the civilians trapped in the Gaza fighting.
On Feb. 7, a U.S. drone killed Muhandis’ successor, Abu Bakr al-Saadi, in Baghdad, a strike ordered as retribution for Kata’ib Hezbollah’s lethal drone strike that killed three U.S. soldiers at their base in Jordan. But though the retaliation rates as a tactical success, the incident may ultimately serve Iran’s larger strategic interests. Under pressure from Iran, Iraq’s government has demanded talks with Washington to evict the roughly 2,500-strong U.S. military contingent based in the country as part of a mission to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group and other jihadi organizations.
Failure to deter Iran undermines America’s ability to conduct counterterrorism operations with our allies and ensure freedom of navigation in the Middle East’s strategic waterways. As my former CIA colleague Norm Roule, an expert on the region, recently remarked, Iran is an arsonist that “subcontracts to other arsonists it believes will be ideologically and energetically pursuing Iran’s goals.”
There is no appeasing a state sponsor of terrorism. Instead, the U.S. should aggressively target Iran’s economy, internal instability and regional allies in three ways.
First, the Justice Department’s recent seizure of 500,000 barrels of internationally sanctioned Iranian fuel is a good start, but the U.S. should work with our allies to deny Iran the financial resources, in particular through its illicit oil exports, to fund its terrorist operations. Iran is disrupting international commerce. Why not turn the tables on them?
Second, Iranians took to the streets in protest after the regime’s hated religious police in 2022 arrested and murdered 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for not wearing a hijab in accordance with regime standards.
Protesters who braved government repression have been heard shouting “no money to Hezbollah, no Palestine.” The U.S. should employ our considerable soft power to aid anti-regime forces and target the Iranian regime’s fear of liberty, freedom and democracy.
We should do more to inform ordinary Iranians about their corrupt regime, which spends its limited resources on terrorism abroad rather than on improving the lives of its people at home. And we should remind the world more vociferously about Iran’s human rights violations.
Third, the U.S. should not take anything off the table in this fight, including strikes on IRGC leadership and targets in Iran. In coordination with our allies, the U.S. should build on initial success in attacking Iran’s supply line to Yemen’s Houthis, while cutting IRGC logistical ties to other proxy groups as well. We also need to step up support to partners in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen who are desperate to degrade the power of Iran’s proxies.
The Biden administration has repeatedly emphasized its aversion to a “wider war” in the Middle East, even as the war in Gaza rages. And therein lies the conundrum: Having deterred the administration from bringing the full weight of its military, diplomatic and economic pressure to bear in the crisis, Iran has nothing to fear and everything to gain from its low-level proxy war against the U.S. and Israel as well as our other allies.
If we do not change course, our national security, including any hope for post-conflict reconstruction in Gaza, will suffer the gravest of consequences.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on X @DanielHoffmanDC.
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