What Are We Prepared To Do?

The Untouchables is a highly fictionalized film about Eliot Ness and his “Untouchables” and their part in bringing down Al Capone. During the film there is a memorable scene in which a tough old Irish beat cop, Sean Connery, schools Ness, played by Kevin Costner, on what it will take to bring down Capone. During that scene, Connery famously asks Ness, “What are you prepared to do?” to bring down Capone and then adds, “If he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.”

It’s wonderful if historically inaccurate theater. It’s also great advice in dealing with the ayatollahs.

The men who run Iran do not care about public opinion. They do not care about world opinion. They have no interest in dialogue or negotiation other than as a delaying tactic. They are on the right side of history. The Mahdi is coming. The end is near, and on the other side of Armageddon, they will rule.

Unless we are willing to submit to their control, we have two options. We can do our best to isolate revolutionary Iran, limit the damage it can do, and hope it ultimately collapses of its own weight. Or, we can actively work to crush the regime and give Iran back to the Iranian people.

Which brings us back to Connery and his question. “What are you prepared to do?” If regime change is the goal, then how are we going to achieve it?

This is not a game. Hope is not a plan. If you want the ayatollahs gone, you need to get serious, formulate a strategy, and stay the course:

• We must have our own human intelligence. That does not mean we do not talk to our allies, the Israelis, the British, the Saudis, and others. It means we do not formulate American foreign policy based on what foreigners tell us. We base our decisions on intelligence we know to be accurate, because we collected it ourselves. We do not have the capacity to do that right now, because we have allowed the CIA to degrade into a paper-pushing self-licking ice cream cone whose product is on a par with that of every other mediocre think tank in DC. You want to take down the boys who run Tehran, you'd better sharpen the spear and get back to the real business of collecting intelligence inside a police state where anyone even suspected of espionage is arrested, tortured, and executed.

• We must put on our brass knuckles. Resolve is critical. The perception of our resolve is even more critical. For years, we made noises about taking down Saddam. Then we danced up to the line, lost our nerve, and danced away. All that came back to haunt us when we got serious in 2002. Time and again, I sat down with senior Iraqi officers and asked them to help us take down Saddam. Without exception, they all said they wanted him gone and would be happy to help as soon as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. They did not trust us anymore. They were not going to take a leap of faith.

• We just told the ayatollahs there would be dire consequences if they started shooting protesters. They responded by murdering somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 people. Every single man in Iran who was part of the kill chain that gave and executed the orders to massacre civilians should be dead right now, and the building from which he gave orders should be a smoking ruin. When you hit, you hit hard.

• We must be smart. We have tremendous advantages. We should utilize them. We are imposing a blockade on Venezuelan oil shipments right now. We can implement the same thing on Iran tomorrow. We can end the shipment of oil from Iran to anywhere on the globe. We can take their money out of every bank on the globe, either through legal sanctions or through the capabilities inherent in our Intelligence Community. We can hunt Iranian assets and proxy groups worldwide. We can interdict arms shipments and root out IRGC, MOIS, and Hezbollah operatives wherever they are and wherever they run. We can bankrupt the regime, dismantle its terror apparatus, and do it all on our terms, where we have the advantage and without putting troops anywhere near Iranian soil.

• We must choose our allies inside Iran carefully. What matters in choosing allies amongst Iranian dissidents is not how well regarded they are in Washington but how well regarded they are by the Iranian people. I spent close to a year inside Iraq before the 2003 invasion. My team and I met and worked with a lot of brave Iraqi opposition leaders. Ahmed Chalabi was not one of them. He was busy touring the capitals of Western Europe and chatting up Pentagon officials. He had no backing of any kind in Iraq, yet the boys in DC thought he was the next Charles de Gaulle. We can’t afford that kind of miscalculation regarding Tehran.

If we are not willing to do these things and get serious about regime change in Iran, then we should stop playing with the idea. Loose talk and pipe dreams only get people killed. The ayatollahs play for keeps. Do we? What are we prepared to do?