A Promised Land

by Barack Obama

Iraq’s attempted 1980 invasion of Iran and the bloody eight-year war that followed—a war in which the Gulf states provided Saddam Hussein with financing while the Soviets supplied Khomeini’s military with arms, including chemical weapons—accelerated Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism as a way to offset its enemies’ military advantages. (The United States, under Reagan, cynically tried to have it both ways, publicly backing Iraq while secretly selling arms to Iran.) Khomeini’s vow to wipe Israel off the map—manifest in the IRGC’s support for armed proxies like the Lebanon-based Shiite militia Hezbollah and the military wing of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas—made the Iranian regime Israel’s single greatest security threat and contributed to the general hardening of Israeli attitudes toward possible peace with its neighbors. More broadly, Khomeini’s rendering of the world as a Manichaean clash between the forces of Allah and those of “the Great Satan” (America) seeped like a toxin into the minds not just of future jihadists but of those in the West already inclined to view Muslims as objects of suspicion and fear.