Why Aren’t We Asking Iran for More?
Last January, on a visit to Beirut, Lebanon, Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, laid a wreath of white flowers on the tomb of Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was a senior leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, and perhaps the most murderous terrorist leader in the world outside of Al Qaeda. In 2008, he was assassinated by agents from the C.I.A. and Mossad in a secret operation in Damascus.
Among the attacks that Mughniyeh helped execute were the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983, which killed three hundred and sixty-two people; the suicide bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, which killed a hundred and fourteen; and the truck bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, which killed nineteen pilots with the U.S. Air Force.
Why would Zarif, Iran’s point man in the nuclear negotiations with the United States, pay homage to a Hezbollah terrorist?