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Iran's Unrequited War
(Wall Street Journal) Bret Stephens - When it comes to Iran, the mullahs started the war a long time ago. Here's a list of the American victims of Iranian aggression: The 17 Americans killed in April 1983 at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut by the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad Organization, later known as Hizbullah. The 241 U.S. servicemen killed by Islamic Jihad at the Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983. Master Chief Robert Dean Stethem, beaten to death in June 1985 by a Hizbullah terrorist in Beirut aboard TWA flight 847. William Francis Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, tortured to death by Hizbullah that same month. Marine Col. William Higgins, taken hostage in 1988 while serving with UN peacekeepers in Lebanon and hanged by Hizbullah sometime later. The 19 U.S. Air Force personnel killed in June 1996 in the Khobar Towers bombing, for which several members of Saudi Hizbullah were indicted in U.S. federal court. The thousands of U.S. troops killed by improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most lethal IEDs were manufactured in Iran for the purpose of killing Americans. 33 years of Iranian outrages have gone unavenged, and Iran now proceeds undeterred. Sensible policy on Iran begins not with the question of how to avoid a war - that war was foisted on us in 1979 - but how to win it. Anything less invites further terror and dishonors the memory of Iran's many American victims.