IN A NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED this past Sunday, former National Security Council staffers Richard Clarke and Steven Simon lamented the possibility of a military strike on Iran. They warned, "a conflict with Iran could be even more damaging to our interests than the current struggle in Iraq has been."

At the heart of their concern lies a simple cost-benefit analysis. Iran has not supported anti-American terrorism since the mid-1990s. But if provoked, the mullahs may unleash their terrorist network, which is "superior to anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field." In the war on terrorism, therefore, the potential benefits of a military strike on Iran are rather low, while the costs are prohibitively high.

Clarke and Simon tell us that Iran's last act of anti-American terrorism came in 1996 when the "the Qods Force, the covert-action arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, arranged" the Khobar Towers bombing. (It is worth noting that there is still some uncertainty surrounding the Khobar Towers bombing. For example, the 9-11 Commission concluded, "While the evidence of Iranian involvement is strong, there are also signs that al Qaeda played some role, as yet unknown." Eight years after the attack, therefore, the government still wasn't sure if this was a joint Iran-al Qaeda operation.)

While the Clinton administration ruled out a military strike against Iran, Clarke and Simon say that the U.S. intelligence community scared Iran out of the terrorist game. After some unspecified covert action, "Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased."

On its face,

Anti-American terrorism has been a central tenet of Iran's Islamic revolution for decades. That the U.S. intelligence community, with its less than stellar track record in fighting terrorism during the 1990s, managed to convince Iran to stop orchestrating or aiding terrorist attacks against American interests seems highly unlikely. How could the mullahs have a terrorist network "superior" to al Qaeda, poised to strike, and yet not have used it for the past decade? Are we really to believe, as Clarke and Simon would have it, that this network of terrorist operatives has lain dormant all this time?

The questionable nature of this claim becomes apparent when one considers what Richard Clarke himself thought less than two years ago. In Against All Enemies, Clarke makes it clear that Iran was a "priority" country "as important as the others," including the Taliban's Afghanistan, in the post-9/11 war on terrorism.

While dismissing the evidence of Iraq's ties to al Qaeda (a claim that is also inconsistent with Clarke's previous statements and a wealth of evidence), Clarke argued in 2004:

. . . al Qaeda regularly used Iranian territory for transit and sanctuary prior to September 11. Al Qaeda's Egyptian branch, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, operated openly in Tehran. It is no coincidence that many of the al Qaeda management team, or Shura Council, moved across the border into Iran after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan.

Moreover, Clarke explained that the threat posed by Iran's weapons of mass destruction programs, coupled with its ties to terrorism, posed a threat far greater than Saddam's Iraq. He wrote, "Any objective observer looking at the evidence in 2002 and 2003 would have said that the U.S. should spend more time and attention dealing with the security threats from Tehran than those from Baghdad."