On Monday, President Trump designated the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of Iran’s armed forces, as a “terrorist organization.” CIA and Pentagon officials told The New York Times the decision would threaten U.S. military personnel in the region. Iraqi observers told Al-Monitor’s Laura Rozen the designation might alienate Iraq, where Iran has many allies in an unstable government. And the move was an obvious escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing pressure on Iran.

But this coverage oddly avoided a central question: What exactly is the Iranian terrorist threat? What danger does Iranian terrorism pose to American civilians and U.S. interests? Misrepresenting the complexity of Islamic terrorism has long seemed key to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton’s mad dream of provoking another war in the Middle East. With a long-passive U.S. Congress and public finally tiring of the post-9/11 endless wars, is the Iran terror pivot propaganda, or fact-based?

The complex truth is that the threat of Iranian terrorism is real. It is also small.

For the past twenty years or so, the annual reports of the National Counterterrorism Center have attributed the vast majority of the Islamic terrorist attacks around the world since 2001 to “Sunni extremists”—jihadists inspired by the anti-imperialist Salafist theology of Saudi Arabia. ISIS and other fundamentalist militias fall under this category of Sunni extremism, often funded by wealthy Persian Gulf Arabs. They hate the heretical—as they see them—Shia Muslims of Iran almost as much as they hate the “Crusaders and Jews” of Washington and Tel Aviv. The fanatics behind the attacks of 9/11, Madrid, London, Paris, and San Bernardino were all Sunni extremists. None of the terrorists involved in those bloody attacks was Iranian.

This is an uncomfortable fact for the Zionist-Saudi intersection of interests in Washington right now—a group including Mike Pompeo, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Israeli allies as well. All have reason to want to confront and destroy Iranian power, which represents a threat to Israel and a rival to Saudi Arabia. So the party of war in Washington (and Tel Aviv and Riyadh) needs to change the subject. They need to divert U.S. news media coverage from Saudi-funded Sunni terrorism (as well as the state-backed assassination of Jamal Khashoggi) to Shiite terrorism.