Published in The Hill, the US Congress magazine, written by Col. Thomas Cantwell – 03/09/15

In Herbert London’s Feb. 17 post on The Hill’s Contributors Blog (“Continuing our Iran policy: A mistake then, a mistake now”), he states “The faux dream about Iran is intoxicating.”
Intoxication is exactly the right word. Only a loss of rationality can explain the U.S. government’s persistent belief that the Iranian regime can be trusted as a negotiating partner in the face of 35 years of duplicity or somehow talked back into the community of responsible nations. We need to recognize instead the truth that Iran has been a highly predictable partner to organizations like Hezbollah in planning, resourcing and conducting lethal attacks upon the U.S. and our allies. We also need to recognize that as disturbing pieces of news about U.S.-Iranian negotiations leak out, the Iranian regime has been unrelenting in its pursuit of a major regional destabilizer: nuclear weapons capability.
Somehow, the thousands of U.S. military and diplomatic personnel who have paid with their lives for our ill-judged policies and regime malevolence are forgotten. So too, we have forgotten the other victims of the Iranian regime, the millions of Iranians who have to endure wretched poverty while the ruling religious and military leaders enrich themselves. One simply cannot watch the soaring drug addiction rates, the flourishing black market for human organs, the stoning of women as an alternative to divorce and the routine hanging of gays and somehow believe that this regime is a legitimate government. One cannot observe the mass disqualification of opposition candidates and active support of destabilization in neighboring countries without concluding that the Iranian regime will continue to use brute force and deception to control the Iranian people and to expand its power across the region.
Americans, Iranians and the citizens of many other countries have paid a blood price for the irrational self-deception that has characterized U.S. policy. It is time for responsible American leaders to act based upon the reality of Iranian actions and in concordance with our stated values. We can no longer ignore the fact that “our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” It is time for America to stand strongly against the Iranian regime and stand with the Iranian people that they may have the freedom that we take for granted.
The Iranian democracy movement pointed the way to genuine reform of Iran in 2009, but we failed to embrace it. Major opposition groups are active today inside and outside Iran. The people of Iran are waiting for us.

Cantwell commanded the 324th MP Battalion in Iraq, in charge of protection of Iranian dissidents at Camp Ashraf, in 2003, and directed the Afghan Detention and Corrections Advisory Team in Afghanistan under Task Force 435.