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On September 11, 2007 the Claremont Institute published Iran's Proxy War Against America, by Thomas Joscelyn, detailing the deep Iranian connections with terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and others. One of the main characters in the Iranian-terrorism connection was Imad Mugniyah, the arch-terrorist and Hezbollah leader behind numerous attacks against Americans over the past twenty-five years.
Earlier this week, Imad Mugniyah was apparently killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria. Details remain few, but it would appear that an enemy of the United States and otherwise very bad human being no longer walks the earth today. Today, Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow Tom Joscelyn summarizes the case against Mugniyah. Andrew McCarthy provides a similar account at National Review Online.
Among many other attacks, Imad Mugniyah was the mastermind behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Those attacks drove U.S. forces out of Lebanon and emboldened future terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, who sought to model his al Qaeda organization, in part, after Hezbollah. Indeed, Mugniyah met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan in the early 1990s and agreed to provide assistance for bin Laden's endeavors. As a result of this agreement, future high-level al Qaeda terrorists were trained by Hezbollah and Iranian terrorist experts in Sudan, Iran and Lebanon. Some of these al Qaeda trainees went on to execute the August 7, 1998, embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. The embassy bombings were directly modeled upon Mugniyah's and Hezbollah's attacks in 1983. Mugniyah's cooperation with al Qaeda did not end there. There is a long history of evidence tying Mugniyah, Hezbollah and Iran to al Qaeda's terror. The most disturbing body of evidence concerns their possible involvement in the September 11 attacks.
Thomas Joscelyn, an economist, terrorism analyst, and 2006 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute, is the author of Iran's Proxy War Against America, detailing Tehran's long-standing sponsorship of terrorist attacks against the United States and the failure of the elite policy establishment to acknowledge it.
