Tehran’s ‘Iranophobia’ claim against US slammed
Trump and regional allies offered ‘strategic clarity,’ former US diplomat tells Arab News
Argentina in the late 1990s.”
Iran had had dealings with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda for decades, Khedery said, adding: “Iran has also maintained ties with the Taliban, and has facilitated various terrorist activities in Afghanistan that have resulted in the killing and wounding of our soldiers and Afghan civilians. They’ve done the same in Iraq since 2003, killing and wounding thousands of our soldiers, primarily through their Shiite militias. They also participated in the killing and wounding of thousands of Iraqi civilians.”
Iran, Hezbollah and Russia have been Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chief backers “as he committed a modern-day holocaust, killing some half a million Syrians, wounding a million more and displacing some 11 million,” Khedery said.
He expressed relief that “an American president has come along who recognized this fact and is finally willing to do something about it.”
Oubai Shahbandar, a SyrianAmerican analyst and fellow at the New America Foundation’s International Security Program, said Tehran seems to go to great lengths to complain when the US and the Arab Coalition take it to task “for its very real and dangerous malign activity.”
It is incumbent upon Iran’s recently re-elected President Hassan Rouhani to show he can rein in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Shiite militant forces they arm and fund to destabilize the region, Shahbandar added.
“This isn’t Iranophobia, it’s common sense,” he told Arab News. “It’s how normal states that seek normal relations with their neighbors are supposed to act. When ‘Death to America’ and a drive to spread extremism throughout the Muslim and Arab worlds are purged from Iran’s government policy and rhetoric, then and only then can it realistically hope to mend ties with America and Arab allies. Sadly, the Iranian regime to this day does a great disservice to its people by showing no signs that it’s willing or capable of moving past the extremist fervor of its 1979 revolutionary ethos.”