My Threatcon Column: Iran Pounded

Counterterrorism magazine posted my latest online Threatcon column. 

You can read the column below: 

Iran Pounded 

By Paul Davis

I was pleased to see that President Trump encouraged and supported Israel’s air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. I also applaud President Trump’s bold and decisive order to send in the U.S. B-2 bombers with their bunker-busting bombs.   

Trump described the strikes as a "spectacular military success." 

"A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan," President Trump said. "Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise. Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity, and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. 

"For 40 years, Iran has been saying, ‘Death to America. Death to Israel.’ They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs," President Trump continued. "That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate in particular."

We’ve pounded the Iranians before. In 1988, an Iranian mine nearly sank an American warship, and then-President Reagan ordered the U.S. Navy to respond. On 18 April 1988, the U.S. Navy launched “Operation Praying Mantis” against Iranian targets in the Arabian Gulf in retaliation for the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) four days earlier. The Iranian mine blew a large hole in the ship’s hull. Ten Sailors from the Samuel B. Roberts were injured severely. The ship’s captain, Commander Paul X. Rinn, was also injured. The ship might have sunk, but the well-trained crew’s damage control effort kept the Samuel B. Roberts ship afloat. 

The U.S. response was swift and fierce. “Operation Praying Mantis,” the largest of five major U.S. Navy surface actions since World War II, was the first time that the U.S. Navy exchanged surface-to-surface missile fire with an enemy. The action resulted in the largest warship sunk by the U.S. Navy since WWII. In just one day, the U.S. Navy destroyed two Iranian surveillance platforms, sank two of their ships, and severely damaged another ship.”

 

Iran was later pounded again on January 3, 2020 in the form of a drone attack that President Trump ordered against Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. President Trump accused the notorious terrorist-supporting general, whose hands were dripping wet with American blood, of plotting imminent and sinister attacks against America.

 

As a writer, I’ve interviewed many intelligence and military officers about the threat from Iran. I especially recall speaking to Gary Berntsen a good while back. Berntsen, a former CIA officer and author of Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander, predicted that the U.S. would eventually pound Iran. As a CIA operations officer and station chief, he often went up against the Iranians. He said it was like fighting the Nazis.

“What we call terrorism they call curriculum,” he said. “The Iranians assume that the United States won’t act even though they have provoked us by killing many of our people in Iraq and elsewhere. We are heading towards confrontation with Iran. When you look at some of the statements and some of the things they're doing, it looks like they're going out of their way to provoke Israel even more than the United States.”

 

Bernsten said the Iranians have a theocracy form of government, which they believe is divinely guided. He explained that they have a different framework from which they operate, and for the Iranians, it's not if you win or lose, it's that you show up to fight.

“I just think war is inevitable with Iran. Its either the United States or Israel against Iran. One of us, or both of us, against them,” Bernsten predicted correctly.

And if the Iranians and/or their proxies follow through on their threats of retaliation with acts of terrorism, what should President Trump do?

Pound the Iranians again. 

Paul Davis Threatcon column covers crime, espionage and terrorism.