What a 1994 bombing in Argentina reveals about the myth of an 'emboldened' Iran - Katherine Ellison, WaPo

Just before 10 a.m. on July 18, 1994, Argentine investigators say a suicide bomber in a van packed with explosives drove into the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, where Malamud was supervising renovations. He was one of 85 civilians killed that day, including a 19-year-old woman on her way to enroll in college, a 73-year-old tailor looking for work, and a 5-year-old boy walking nearby with his mother.

Hundreds more were wounded in the attack, which U.S. and Argentine officials allege was carried out by the terrorist group Hezbollah, with direction and support from its sponsor, Iran. Most Americans are likely unfamiliar with the bombing at the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, which took place so long ago and so far away. The same goes for a similar attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29, two years earlier.

I’ve thought of the victims often over the past several weeks, while pundits and officials have warned that Washington’s undeclared war is emboldening the Islamic Republic. Iran’s rulers today are even more “militarized” than the hard-liners previously in charge, Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution recently told The Post, adding that many are “steeped in the culture of martyrdom, sacrifice and hostility to the international system.” I can’t help but wonder, however: How much bolder — and more dangerous — could a regime become than one willing to murder scores of innocents, during peacetime, 8,500 miles away?

(snip)

Iran’s strategy of plausible deniability, while encouraging, training and funding its murderous proxies, has been a constant, dating nearly to the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. It has characterized a long list of attacks, from the truck-bomb assault, linked to Hezbollah, that killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers in their barracks in Beirut in 1983, to the massacres of 603 U.S. troops in Iraq by grenades, snipers and roadside bombs planted by Iran-backed militias.

Still, the AMIA bombing stands out. Civilians — “soft targets” — weren’t collateral damage; they were the point. Before Oct. 7, 2023, when another Iran protégé, Hamas, slaughtered 1,200 mostly civilians in Israel, the attack in Buenos Aires was the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust.

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