Reinforcing U.S. Suspicion in Saudi Blast, Suspect Links Iranian to Anti-American Plot, The Washington Post, June 28 

A Saudi fugitive recently deported from Canada to the United States has implicated a senior Iranian intelligence officer in a 1995 conspiracy to attack American targets in Saudi Arabia, according to sources familiar with the case.

Hani Abdel Rahim Sayegh… has identified Brig. Ahmad Sherifi, a senior Iranian intelligence officer, as a key figure in a 1995 plot that never resulted in an attack but is believed by some U.S. officials to have evolved into a similar plot that resulted in the Khobar bombing, the sources added.

Sayegh's allegation of Iranian complicity is reinforced by other evidence obtained by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence personnel, the sources said, and it adds further weight to suspicions that Tehran organized the killing of Americans abroad...

A top official in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the country's main fighting force, Sherifi's duties include organizing terror cells in Arab countries around the Persian Gulf through Hezbollah, according to U.S. and Arab sources. Hezbollah, or Party of God, is an Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite movement with an underground action wing. With Iran's encouragement, several other Hezbollah movements have sprung up in Persian Gulf countries.

Sherifi is well-known to Saudi and Western officials because he was implicated during a 1996 trial in Bahrain of Shiite dissidents convicted of killing more than 20 people in a spree of hotel and restaurant bombings...

Sources familiar with the case said Sayegh also has described actions that Iran, through Hezbollah, planned to take against U.S. targets if the U.S. government took retaliatory action against Tehran. Further details about the alleged plans could not be learned.

Satan and Morons, The Washington Times, June 27 

We had to chuckle at the commentary that ran in an Iranian newspapers on Monday, headlined: "The Americans Are Still analyzing Like Morons."

…The unattributed clipping from the Tehran Jomhuri-ye Eslami dealt with a columnist here at The Washington Times, Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution…

"This Jewish analyst," opines the piece from Tehran, "does not know that Khatami too considers America to be the 'Great Satan'."

Commentary 

Foreign policy debates are constantly swinging between two poles: engagement and containment. Is it, the argument goes, in the interest of the United States to have an open strategy of dealing with a hostile foreign country, or is it in our best interest to stand back and try to isolate it?…

For instance, what about a country where the rule of law is fundamentalist religious view, where daily prayers refer to the U.S. as the "great Satan" and the countries main export, aside from oil, is terrorism. In fact, this country not only operates all over world killing people it deems enemies of the state, it has murdered Americans and the U.S. servicemen. It is hard to imagine that anyone in America would argue that the best way to deal with such a rogue nation would be to sit down and chat. And yet that is exactly what is going on in the debate over U.S. relations with Iran.

The argument in favor of engagement with Iran is not new. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution there have been members of the foreign-policy establishment who believed the only way to change Iran was to negotiate... Now, with the recent election of Iranian president Mohammad Khatami the argument in favor of talking to Iran has resurfaced…

But as Joshua Muravchik and Jeffrey Gedmin point out in the July issue of Commentary, Iran "is one of the most malign [regimes] in the world today, and a menace to American interests." According to the U.S. State Department, Iran is the leading exporter of terrorism in the world today. And as the authors point out, the list of countries in which Iranian backed terrorists operate is extensive, and it includes the United States.

So why the rush to try and make nice? According to Messrs. Muravchik and Gedmin, there shouldn't be. "We need not hold out until the Islamic Republic goes the way of the USSR," they write, "but we can insist on an end to Tehran's support for violence, not to mention terrorist activities carried out by its own hand; a halt to its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction; acceptance of Israel; and renunciation of hate-mongering toward the United States." Despite Mr. Khatami's election, there is no indication, not even a hint, that anything has changed in Iran. U.S. policy, therefore, should only change in the direction of getting tougher on Iran, not friendlier.

Back to Brief on Iran