February 27, 2012 | The Wall Street Journal

Santorum Was Right About Iran—When It Was Unpopular

A grandfather who fled Mussolini taught him to prize freedom.
February 27, 2012 | The Wall Street Journal

Santorum Was Right About Iran—When It Was Unpopular

A grandfather who fled Mussolini taught him to prize freedom.

Rick Santorum doesn't fit any of the stereotypes of current foreign-policy ideologies. He's too idealistic to be a “realist,” too conservative and too religious to be a “neocon,” and too revolutionary to be a “paleocon.” He's an old-fashioned, feisty patriot, in the mold of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan.

Mr. Santorum's hatred of tyranny traces back to his grandfather Pietro, who took the family from Lake Garda in northern Italy to Pennsylvania's coal country to escape Mussolini's dictatorship in the 1920s. Pietro Santorum worked in the mines until he was 72 and, as Mr. Santorum often says, taught him “to treasure the gift of freedom [and] to have faith in God's grace.”

Mr. Santorum believes the United States must lead the struggle for freedom throughout the world, on grounds of morality and national security, which he believes go hand in hand. He does not like the drift away from leadership and engagement in that struggle, especially under President Obama. He often quotes Lech Walesa's recent lament: “The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations,” Poland's first post-communist president said. “There was the hope, whenever something was going wrong, one could count on the United States. Today, we have lost that hope.”

Mr. Santorum wants to restore the hope that America will rescue those for whom things have gone terribly wrong. In Congress, he supported aid programs to help Africans suffering from AIDS and other terrible diseases (laying the foundation for his friendship with U2 singer Bono). He also has sponsored legislation to support democratic opponents of the Syrian and Iranian tyrannies—because their leaders, the Assad dynasty in Syria and Iran's Ali Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, threaten American and Israeli security, and because he wants to support moderate Muslims living under such regimes.

After leaving the Senate in 2007, Mr. Santorum wrote about foreign policy frequently for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he was a fellow until June of 2011. In essays written for the center, he acknowledges that terrorists are indeed inspired by radical Islam—but he wants to work with Muslims who do not wage jihad, subjugate women or oppress minorities. He's specific about the radicals: They are evil men who have perverted the meaning of “martyrdom,” changing it from the act of dying for one's faith to killing others to advance the dominion of one's faith.

His opposition to tyranny abroad has been a constant in his political career. Even in the final days of his losing 2006 re-election campaign, Mr. Santorum never stopped calling for action against Iran and Syria. Apparently, Pennsylvanians weren't impressed by his Iran Freedom and Support Act, enacted in 2006, which imposed sanctions on the regime and authorized $100 million annually for the democratic opposition, or his 2003 Syria Accountability Act.

But today he looks prescient and gutsy. Back then, the Bush administration was trying to run away from such ideas. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at one point turned to a Democrat, then-Sen. Joe Biden, to block Mr. Santorum's Iran bill, before it finally passed. But Mr. Santorum's basic vision has prevailed.

He foresaw that we would eventually have to confront the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and he was one of the first to point out the intercontinental anti-American alliance involving Iran, Syria, Russia, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua. He calls this a “gathering storm,” as members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps enter our hemisphere through the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, accompanied by military equipment and components.

He is right to be concerned. Former supporters of the Hugo Chávez regime in Venezuela, worried at the direction of events in their country, have told American officials that there are Iranian missiles in Venezuela capable of hitting the U.S. More obvious are the Shiite mosques suddenly popping up in Venezuela and its near neighborhood.

If we keep leading from “behind,” as the president puts it, the lowest common denominator of Western resolve will define our policy. That's disastrous for people in other countries who are standing up to tyranny, and it emboldens America's enemies like Iran or the Taliban. Mr. Santorum believes things would be different if we were committed to defeating those enemies, and he is convinced that the region and the world would be far safer if there were regime change in Damascus and Tehran.

That's why he has long called for support for the Iranian opposition and favors arming and training the Free Syrian Army to bring down the Assad regime. He advocates zeroing in on the foreign scientists—from Russia, for instance—who work on the mullahs' nuclear-bomb program and declaring them enemy combatants.

Mr. Santorum hopes that American financial and moral support for the Iranian opposition will catalyze the simmering democratic revolution there, which in turn would likely tilt the balance of power in Syria once the regime in Tehran was no longer there to support Damascus. If that strategy fails, he said in Florida in January, he would go with the military option against Iran's nuclear weapons project, in close cooperation with Israel.

Unlike President Obama, Mr. Santorum believes that an explicit linkage of American and Israeli military and intelligence assets would greatly increase chances of success. And since we'd be blamed for any unilateral Israeli strike, he sees no point in separating from the Israelis on this most crucial issue.

Beyond the Middle East, Mr. Santorum believes that we should fully develop our missile-defense system—reversing Mr. Obama's abrupt cancellation or limitation of the systems destined for our Czech and Polish NATO allies. He supports the development of measures to protect our satellites and other facilities against electromagnetic-pulse weapons. He has written that if elected, he would reverse many of the Obama defense cuts.

Above all, the world would know that a President Santorum would be determined to revive the hope that Poland's Lech Walesa declares lost—the hope that America would be the last line of defense for freedom and virtue. Just as Grandpa Pietro taught.

Mr. Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is the author of “Virgil's Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles” (Transaction, 2011).

Issues:

Iran