Iran Bomb Plot Sinks Ron Paul's Credibility - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Iran Bomb Plot Sinks Ron Paul’s Credibility
by

So.

Doubtless if unsurprisingly he never saw it coming. But Iran just sent a torpedo amidships to the Ron Paul campaign.

Remember Congressman Paul back at that Fox debate in Iowa saying to Chris Wallace that the threat from Iran was “small”? That “Iran does not have an air force that can come here…. They can’t even make enough gasoline for themselves…” This was in addition to Paul’s attack on former president George W. Bush for signing an executive order designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist group.” All are of a piece in the consistent Ron Paul theme that many see as a McGovernite foreign policy. Not only far-left wing philosophically but with a startling — and dangerous — naïveté about the nature of America’s enemies.

Comes now the news that lo and behold Iran is being accused by the FBI — with the charge backed up by House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican — of plotting not one but two attacks on American soil. The targets being the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. and the Israeli Embassy.

The attack was stopped, the plot unraveled. And the plotters? That would be, reports Newsmax, two suspects arrested who are connected to “Iran’s Quds Force, an element within Iran’s elite Islamic Revolution Guards Corps that is known for carrying out operations beyond Iran’s borders.”

All of which is to say, Congressman Paul’s theories about Iran have just been blown to smithereens. 

Iran didn’t use an air force to get to America — it had an Iranian, American-naturalized citizen Manssor Arbabsiar — already here.

Suppose instead of a plot to blow up a Washington restaurant — among the charges — with a conventional bomb, Arbabsiar and his cohort had managed to smuggle in a nuclear weapon? What did Paul write in his book The Revolution in addition to scorning the idea that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was a danger?

I had said all along that Iran posed no imminent nuclear threat to us or to her neighbors.

This time around, luck was on America’s side. Iran didn’t — yet — have the capacity to smuggle in a nuclear weapon. But they were within a whisker of getting a conventional bomb and killing hundreds –on American soil.

An act which all by itself could easily be defined as an act of war.

But the real casualty here?

The Ron Paul movement.

The congressman has just been shown to be wrong about Iran — big time.

Fortunately for the intended targets, for conservatives and for America the only real casualty here is the Paul campaign — and the naïve ideas that drive its leftist foreign policy crusade.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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