By Lt. Cdr. Esmaeil Abnar
In going after ISIS, Obama shouldn’t ignore the threat posed by the regime in Iran.
On September 10, U.S. President Barack Obama laid out the U.S. strategy for confronting the emerging threat from ISIS, the terrorist extremist group that market itself as an “Islamic State” and is also known as ISIL. The objective was clear, to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.”
The outlined U.S. strategy consisted of four parts, but nowhere did it address the theocratic regime in Iran, the root cause of the current rise of extremist terrorist groups, like ISIS, in Syria, Iraq and Middle East. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reiterated this reality in a recent interview with NPR on September 6, saying, “Iran is a bigger problem than ISIS.”
The financial and material support the Iranian regime has provided for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s slaughtering of his people, as well as Tehran’s political backing and interference in Iraq in favor of former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian and authoritarian rule, created the conditions for the rapid rise of ISIS.
In 2010, U.S. General Ray Odierno warned that an Iranian-backed Shia terror group continued to remain a threat in Iraq. In 2011, then Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said with regard to leaving behind U.S. Forces in Iraq, “Iran is very directly supporting extremist Shia groups which are killing our troops …. And there’s no reason … for me to believe that they’re going to stop that as our numbers come down.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat