(Wall Street Journal) Amir Taheri - Hassan Abbasi has a dream - a helicopter with the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and the principal foreign policy voice in President Ahmadinejad's new radical administration. For the past several weeks Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies. However, almost all of the American leadership elite realized that the 9/11 attacks have changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, and Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American because he was sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America is now facing, however, are dedicated to the destruction of the U.S.
2006-03-31 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive