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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/19/iran-needs-no-excuse-radicalism/
The Myth of an "Emboldened" Iran
(Washington Post) Katherine Ellison - On July 18, 1994, Argentine investigators say a suicide bomber in a van packed with explosives drove into the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 civilians. Hundreds more were wounded in the attack, which U.S. and Argentine officials allege was carried out by Hizbullah, with direction and support from Iran. A similar attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier killed 29. The AMIA bombing has haunted me ever since I covered it as the South America bureau chief for the Miami Herald. I've thought of the victims over the past several weeks, while pundits and officials have warned that Washington's war is emboldening the Islamic Republic. I can't help but wonder: How much bolder - and more dangerous - could a regime become than one willing to murder scores of innocents, during peacetime, 8,500 miles away? Last month, an Argentine prosecutor sought indictments for a trial in absentia of 10 Iranian and Lebanese suspects, including Ahmad Vahidi, the newly appointed commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Salman Raouf Salman, a senior member of Hizbullah, and Mohsen Rabbani, a high-ranking Iranian cleric and former cultural attache at Iran's embassy in Buenos Aires. A defector from the Iranian ministry of intelligence said that senior Iranian officials picked the AMIA building from a list of targets at a meeting in Mashhad, Iran, in August 1993. The AMIA bombing stands out. Civilians weren't collateral damage; they were the point. I'm no fan of war, yet in the absence of options to change the Islamic leadership's worldview, reducing its capacity to act on its intent seems like worthwhile progress - or the only progress possible. The writer won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.