New York Post | Joe Lieberman | Feb. 2, 2024
Though many in Washington were slow to recognize it, it’s now clear to all Iran has launched a war in the Middle East against the United States and our closest allies in Israel and the Arab world. Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is directing the war being fought primarily by the Iranian military’s terrorist divisions: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.
America and some of our allies have launched a military counteroffensive against Iran and its terrorist troops who have brought so much suffering, death and deprivation to American troops in the region, the people of Israel and our Arab allies and international maritime commerce around the Red Sea. The counteroffensive was slow to start but must continue as long as the IRGC-led attacks continue.
With Iran crossing a red line by killing three American soldiers in Jordan and wounding several others seriously, we should extend the operation to military targets inside Iran, such as the headquarters and factories of the IRGC, or the Iranians will continue to attack.
The new front America and our allies can open is political.
We should give much more open and active backing to the millions of Iranian citizens already courageously protesting and fighting their government. The Reagan administration’s support of Communist Poland’s Solidarity movement during the Cold War helped bring down the Polish government and ultimately the Soviet Union. It offers an excellent example of what we can do to the Tehran regime.
From the Cold War’s start in the 1940s, allied leaders from Harry Truman and Winston Churchill to Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan understood it was not just a conflict over territory but more fundamentally a war of ideas between democracy and Communism, freedom and tyranny, individual economic opportunity and socialist state economic control.
President Reagan in the 1980s built a strong policy foundation for US support for Solidarity with his personal anti-Communist beliefs and the inspiring and direct way he advocated them, even when people in his own State Department tried to contain him. In his first press conference as president in 1981, Reagan denounced the leadership of the Soviet Union as still pursuing “world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist State.”
Years later in his autobiography, he wrote: “I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.” In 1982, Reagan declared Jan. 20 would be known as Solidarity Day in America.
In 1983, he famously called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
On June 12, 1987, ignoring his German hosts’ requests not to be provocative in a speech he was to give in Berlin, Reagan declared: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
From 1983 until the Polish Communist government fell to Solidarity in 1989, the Reagan administration gave inspirational support and independent trustworthy news to the Polish people over Radio Free Europe.
We also funneled millions of dollars to Solidarity through the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA, often with the help of His Holiness John Paul II.
Those were pre-Internet days, so a lot of the money was used to buy printing presses and copying machines.
But it worked to help defeat Communism in Poland and the rest of Eastern and Central Europe.
In Iran, several groups are in open, courageous revolt against the government of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — who is our implacable enemy.
One, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has been fighting the regime for decades.
Others were formed more recently and are at the heart of the growing opposition movement in Iran.
The September 2022 murder of Mahsa Amini, the young woman arrested by Iranian government thugs for violating their dress code for women, stirred millions of Iranian women and men to join in the Women Life Freedom Movement, which launched massive, nationwide protests that continue to this day.
Several non-Persian Iranian ethnic groups have also been opposing the regime with increasing strength.
A political offensive against our enemies in Iran’s government must begin with America’s leaders in the White House and Congress making clear to the American people that our conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran is as much a war of ideas as the Cold War with the Soviet Communists was.
It is again democracy vs. tyranny, human rights vs. oppression and individual economic freedom and opportunity vs. government economic control and exploitation.
To provide moral support and independent, trustworthy news to the people of Iran, we now have the Voice of America Persian News Network.
It needs more financial support from Congress and should not hesitate to use that support to side openly and fully with the Iranian resistance.
The VOAPNN must be much more than a news service in Iran. It must be an advocate for our national values for the people of Iran against their cruel government. VOA’s work needs to be augmented on social media by other US government agencies including those operating under the director of national intelligence.
We have left the age of printing presses and copy machines.
The Iranian resistance needs us to help them obtain the most effective telecommunications equipment to talk to each other and the Iranian people without being jammed or surveilled by their government.
There are also ways American and allied military and intelligence agencies can give support to the Iranian resistance without being directly involved in combat on the ground.
It is worth remembering that George Kennan, the leading American diplomat during the Cold War, argued that the Soviet Union would ultimately be defeated in a war of ideas and policies that would end with the collapse of Soviet rule.
And Margaret Thatcher in her eulogy to Reagan at his funeral said, “He won the Cold War without firing a shot.”
The Soviet Union’s fall to popular resistance scared totalitarian governments around the world just as the successful Arab spring uprisings against the governments of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya sent tremors through other ruling regimes in the Middle East, including the one in Tehran.
The Iranian tyrants and terrorists fear their people more than they fear our military attacks.
Iran is today’s “evil empire.”
It is past time for the United States to give much greater support to the people of Iran to enable them to tear down the walls of oppression and deprivation their government has built around them.
