The man has been desperate in his desire for a US-Iran war”
Actually, just the opposite. Ledeen is very much against our attacking Iran.
Anyway, the point is, alQaeda has been for yrs & is currently in Iran & working with Iranian regime. There is no question about it. You can find dozens of sources going back a dozen yrs.
BTW: You need to check your scorecard....Vali Nasr, is NOT one of the good guys and has been a source of bad information & bad advice (intentionally) for yrs, though Hillary seems to like him a lot.
I’m well aware of him...Nasr is a proponent of “regime-lite”. That’s why his conclusion & views are so different from Ledeen’s and others. He sang the praises of Khatami during his presidency, trying to convince the U.S. (indeed the West) that Khatami was a good guy & would be a force for change (again, regime-lite, not the end of the regime).
Unfortunately, many bought into it, until some finally realized that Khatami like all of the IRI’s presidents, was just a puppet of Khamenei’s.
But Nasr was suceessful in fooling important people who counted, and still does.
Sorry to butt in, but Ledeen was also supporting Moussavi and Karoubi (aka ‘regime-lite’) post-elections & throughout the 2009 protests in Iran. Moussavi & Karoubi are no different to Khatami. Frankly, Ledeen’s support at the time totally surprised me.
Actually, I’d say ‘regime-lite’ in Islamic Iran equates with ‘islam-lite’ and islam-lite gave us ‘radical-islam’ aka Khomeini.
‘Course many of those who supported islam and Khomeini’s leadership in ‘79, now claim they didn’t know what Khomeini had in mind, or the revolution was hijacked! When people gather on rooftops and shout “allah akbar, death to the Shah”, it should be obvious that the same would support an Islamic gov’t. And, a few others who are either idealists, or simply follow like sheep, hope it’ll give them ‘democracy’ & all the good stuff, which apparently the late-Shah denied them!