(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Forty years after the fact, the Iranian media let slip that the state played a substantial role in the infamous terror bombing that killed more than 240 American soldiers, Fox News reported.
The news was broken by Iran’s diplomat in Lebanon, Sayyed Issa Tabatabai, who is a representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Lebanon.
According to translations of Tabatabai’s interview, he said that he was a pro-terror informant leading up to the deadly Beirut attacks.
“I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were,” he said, adding that his contributions allowed the Iranian Revolution succeed.
“I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the Revolution’s victory.”
For Tabatabai, Iran has succeeded because of the revolutionary “willingness to become martyrs.”
The admission comes as Iran seems increasingly more confident in its ability to push back against America’s influence in the Middle East following the Biden administration’s disasterous withdrawal from Afghanistan and other foreign-policy fiascos.
Iran has recently strengthened its ties to foreign super-powere including Russia and China as part of the BRICS alliance, which is likely soon to have controle over roughly 85% of the global energy supply.
Nonetheless, the Biden State Department has seemed particularly overeager to negotiate with the rogue Islamic republic, even offering generous terms in a recent hostage negotiation, which allowe Iran to unfreeze billions of dollars in assets that it will likely put toward funding additional terrorism in the region.
According to Michael Rubin, an Iran expert for the American Enterprise Institute, leaders in Iran have been surprised by the softness of the American approach to diplomacy with them so far.
“Americans have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account,” he noted. “Now that the supreme leader’s representative has confessed, the questions are: (1) Will Americans who carried water for Iranian terrorism apologize? (2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror?”
Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian–American expert on the Iranian regime, argued that the interview was a sign of serious discord in the upper echelons of Iranian leadership.
For Tabatabai to take responsibility for the terrorism revealed that he was sure “that his superiors would not or could not punish him,” Zand added. “[O]therwise he would have self-censored and skipped over major details.”
