Though the regime’s capabilities to conduct mayhem seem diminished, its efforts persist.
In Tehran back in the spring of 1992, I interviewed Ali Akbar Mohtashami, the hardline cleric who cofounded Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped carry out the devastating suicide car-bomb attacks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983. I recalled his pride in Iran’s attacks and his vow to continue them until Israel was destroyed, its Jews “sent back to the countries they came from,” and Iran had built its own nuclear bombs. As long as Israel existed and there were revolutionaries in Tehran, he told me, there would be “no Americans in Iran and no peace with America.”
Though Mohtashami died of Covid-19 in 2021, I will never forget his determination, and that of other senior Iranians I interviewed on my trips to Iran, to destroy Israel and humiliate America.
