Iran in the Western Hemisphere

For John, BLUF:  Ignore Iran's Nucs for a second and focus on their "special forces".  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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At the new Blog, War on the Rocks, retired Army Colonel Robert Killebrew♠ writes about "Iran's Cartel Strategy:  The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the Western Hemisphere".  From the lede and subsequent paragraph:

On October 11, 2011, Iranian nationals Manssor Arbabsiar and Gholam Shakuri were indicted by the Southern District Court of New York for plotting to kill the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, by bombing a Washington D.C. restaurant.  The “Saudi Ambassador Plot,” which was initially disregarded by official Washington, was the first instance (that we know of) of Iranian use of Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) to attack targets in the United States.

That the Iranian security apparatus would stage such an attack in the nation’s capital in which scores of Americans would have been killed or wounded, and that they would attempt to use a TCO to make the hit, sounds audacious and irrational – like something out of a movie that ends very poorly for Iran.  But it should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with both the scope of Iran’s penetration of the Western hemisphere and its association with TCOs at every level.  Understanding both the nature of this new combination, and American weakness in dealing with it, requires some knowledge of TCOs, the security apparatus of the Iranian state, and their links.

Read the whole thing and consider that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not the current primary threat.  The exploitation of TCOs by Iran is the present problem.

Frankly, it is past time for the United States to focus a lot of attention on this Hemisphere.  Not that we should be a bull in the china shop, but that we should be doing a lot of intelligence collection and sharing and we should be providing support to various government in terms of police and military assistance.  We should not be trying to muscle other Governments, in that such action would be counter-productive, but we do need to be aware and awake.  One of the first things we could do it make US Southern Command the top priority Combatant Command in the Department of Defense.  Another thing is the US Congress could make funds available to help the Department of State upgrade our presence South of the Border.  We can't ignore the rest of the world, but we definitely need to be looking more to the South.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Colonel Killebrew writes and consults on national defense issues as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.