Regarding the alleged attempt by Iranian agents to enlist a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, there are two significant parts to the story. But only one of them is getting much attention.
That's the part about how Iranian officials apparently
felt little compunction ordering up a terrorist attack on American soil. Some
commentators have noted that the plot does little credit to the supposedly
expert tradecraft of Iran's terrorist Qods Force, suggesting that unspecified
rogue agents may have played a role. Others have argued that Tehran's readiness
to conduct the attack suggests how little they think they have to fear from the
Obama administration.
The real shocker, however, is how shocked the
administration seems to be by the plot. "The idea that they would attempt
to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi
ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?" marvelled Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton. Information about the plot was initially met within the
government with a level of incredulity more appropriate for an invasion by,
say, alien midgets.
Yet policy analysts, military officials and even
a few columnists have been warning for years about Iran's infiltration
of Latin America. The story begins with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy
in Buenos Aires, an example of the way Tehran uses proxies such as Hezbollah to
carry out its aims while giving it plausible deniability. Iran later got a
boost when Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela and began seeding the top
ranks of his government with Iranian sympathizers. In October 2006, a group
called Hezbollah América Latina took responsibility for an attempted bombing of
the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005,
Iran has increased the number of its embassies in Latin America to 11 from six.
All this has served a variety of purposes. Powerful
evidence suggests that Iran has used Venezuelan banks, airliners and port
facilities to circumvent international sanctions. Good relations between Tehran
and various Latin American capitals—not just Caracas but also Managua, Quito,
La Paz and Brasilia—increase Tehran's diplomatic leverage. Hezbollah's ties to
Latin American drug traffickers serve as a major source of funding for its
operations world-wide. Hezbollah has sought and found recruits among Latin
America's estimated population of five million Muslims, as well as Hispanic
converts to Islam.
And then there is the detail that Latin America is the
soft underbelly of the United States.
In September 2010, the Tucson, Ariz., police department
issued an internal memo noting that "concerns have arisen concerning
Hezbollah's presence in Mexico and possible ties to Mexican drug trafficking organizations
(DTO's) operating along the U.S.-Mexico border. The potential partnership bares
alarming implications due to Hezbollah's long-established capabilities,
specifically their expertise in the making of vehicle-borne improvised
explosive devices (VBIED's)." The memo also noted the appearance of
Hezbollah insignia as tattoos on U.S. prison inmates.
The concerns that the Tucson police had immediately in
mind were twofold. First there was the arrest in New York of Jamal Yousef, a
former Syrian military officer caught in a 2009 Drug Enforcement Agency sting
trying to sell arms to Colombian terrorists in exchange for a ton of cocaine.
Then there was the July 2010 arrest by Mexican
authorities of a Mexican citizen named Jameel Nasr. According to a report in
the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyasah, Mr. Nasr was attempting to set up "a
logistics infrastructure of Mexican citizens of Shiite Lebanese descent that
will form a base in South America and the United States to carry out operations
against Israeli and Western targets." The paper added that Mr. Nasr
"traveled regularly to Lebanon to receive instructions and inform his
employers of developments," but that Mexican officials had been tipped off
by his "long visit to Venezuela in mid-2008 . . . during which he laid the
foundations for building a network for Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary
Guard."
Might Mr. Nasr have been connected to the Washington
plot? Probably not, since he was arrested before it was hatched, though it's
probably worth asking him directly. The larger problem, as Roger Noriega of the
American Enterprise Institute points out, is that until now the administration
hasn't been especially curious. "They don't want to mud wrestle with
Chávez and roil the waters in Latin America," he says. "The policy of
reticence and passivity sends the message that we don't know or care what's
going on."
It's time to wise up. Until now, the idea of terrorist
infiltration along our southern border has been the stuff of Tom Clancy novels.
Not anymore. And unless Tehran is made to understand that the consequences for
such infiltration will be harder than an Obama wrist slap, we can expect more,
and worse, to come.