Trump doesn’t know it, but Iranians are the Norwegians he’s been looking for

by Reuel Marc Gerecht, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, The Washington Post

The White House wants to keep Iranians out of the United States. Special circumstances will allow entrance to a lucky few, but standard non-immigrant and immigrant admission, if current practices stand judicial challenge, will essentially be over. The Trump administration justifies this ban, which includes five other majority-Muslim countries, on national security grounds — an odd argument, since such a concern ought to incline the administration to give more visas, not fewer, to Iranians.

When I was in the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s and 1990s, and operating under consular cover, I may have given more visas to Iranians than any other U.S. official since the Islamic Revolution. The Iranian terrorist threat then was considerably greater than it is now. During those years, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the clerical major-domo and the guiding force of the Islamic republic abroad, approved an array of overseas operations that killed scores of Americans, Europeans, and Iranian exiles.

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