Free Republic

Can we agree that Iran and Syria now constitute a single strategic problem? Surely Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, thinks so. Otherwise he would not have ordered the Revolutionary Guards to conduct a policy of all-out military, financial, and intelligence support for the Assad regime, combined with the usual deception (various public statements urging Assad to be reasonable and settle his differences with the protesters, a ridiculous fantasy). Khamenei knows that if Assad falls to anything remotely resembling a free, representative government, the consequences for Iran range from severely damaging to fatal. The Syrian crisis is only one very...

According to several recent reports, the Obama administration is now considering more forceful action against Iran in Iraq. This is as understandable as it was inevitable; as I wrote many months before the invasion of Iraq, it is folly to expect to maintain decent security there so long as the current regime remains in power in Tehran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchmen cannot tolerate the existence of a free, stable democratic society in its Shi’ite neighbor to the West, nor in Afghanistan to the East. The Iranian tyrant is threatened by an ongoing mass uprising by his own...

I was amazed when I read the Pawlenty speech on the Middle East. I hadn’t expected that a former Middle Western governor, from a blue state, would have had the passion and vision to deliver one of the most impressive analyses and tough-minded policy ideas within memory. And I love the title, “No Retreat from Freedom’s Rise.” Here are the key graphs: We have a clear interest in seeing an end to Assad’s murderous regime. By sticking to Bashar al Assad so long, the Obama Administration has not only frustrated Syrians who are fighting for freedom—it has demonstrated strategic blindness....

“I’m sorry, you know I can’t disclose my location.” It was the spirit of my long-deceased friend, James Jesus Angleton, whom I’d reached via ouija board for what I hoped would be a highly informative conversation, but the way he spat out that phrase suggested I may have asked the wrong question. I wanted to know if he’d had the chance to talk to Osama bin Laden’s ghost, and yes, I knew that if Angleton said “yes” it would finally tell me where he was residing. ML: “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way, but you know there are lots...

Syrians Gunned Down, International Community Yawns Assad’s not going quietly. This from the Reform Party of Syria: Dara’a. An eyewitness on BBC Arabic said that armed units speaking only Farsi descended upon Dara’a. They have smothered the walls of the al-Omari Mosque with their graffiti but several of them were captured. Another witness, Omar al-Masri, said that snipers took positions on rooftops and started shooting. He said Syrians converged in large numbers upon the rooftops and five snipers were captured. Al-Masri, confirmed the other eyewitness, and said that non-Syrians wearing all black were captured in al-Omari Mosque. They spoke only...

The Iranian regime is attacking on all fronts, thrilled at the downfall of the hated Mubarak, and buoyed by the paralysis of the West.  The failure to support democratic revolutions in the Middle East has convinced the mullahs in Tehran that they have no effective opposition, and they are trying to run up the score as fast as they can, on both regional and domestic playing fields.Last Tuesday, lots of would-be demonstrators turned out in the streets of  many Iranian cities, only to find themselves outnumbered by security thugs, both the usual collection of Revolutionary Guards, Basiji, plaincothesmen and women, ...

As I’ve remarked in the past–but you can’t say the truth too often, right? — nobody knows what a revolution looks like. And in fact that last clause may be very misleading, because there is no one thing that a revolution looks like. Some revolutions happen very quietly, like the Information Revolution. On the other hand, some very revolutionary-looking events, like lots of people in the streets calling for the downfall of a government or a regime, are just street theater. Ask the “revolutionaries” who filled the streets of Paris calling for the end of de Gaulle. Or the crowd...

There are some eery similarities between Egypt 2011 and Iran 1979, and some of them are unfortunately about American leadership. There are some big differences, too, but for the moment let’s just look at some parallels and try to draw some necessarily tentative conclusions. After all, everything is up for grabs right now and things will probably change a lot in the next few hours and days. First of all is prostate cancer. The shah was dying of it and Mubarak is afflicted with it. We know Mubarak’s got it. We didn’t know the shah had it. One of the...

The New York Times has been amusing itself — for the second time in as many years — at the expense of Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a retired CIA Operations Officer who has organized a team of investigators to provide up-to-date intel on Afghanistan and Pakistan. So far there’s been a very very long article by a Mr. Mazzetti and an editorial by the usual suspects at Slimes Central. I know Dewey pretty well, and although I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, I like him fine. He’s great company, and the sort you want on your side in...

I sometimes wonder where some of our smartest people get their ideas. Take Defense Secretary Bob Gates, for example. Discussing the possibility of military action against Iranian nuclear weapons facilities, he said: “And if it’s a military solution, as far as I’m concerned, it will bring together a divided nation, it will make them absolutely committed to attaining nuclear weapons and they will just go deeper and more covert.” I don’t get it. Is there some sort of evidence? What could it possibly be, aside from the sort I get from my Ouija board? So I try to imagine one...

The Islamic Republic looks more and more like a Marx Brothers creation. The leaders proclaim themselves invincible, but just offstage, we can hear the sounds of breaking crockery. For starters, the currency is crashing — Iran may well be the only country in the world in which the dollar is not only gaining strength but is the object of unbridled passion. In the past couple of days some money changers have refused to sell dollars because the market is just too volatile. As RFE/RL tells us: the rial declined 13 percent against the dollar last week as demand for the...

The chimpanzee has returned to Tehran, where he is unlikely to have as much fun as he did in New York. Thanks to the New York Post, we now know that in between blaming America for the 9/11 terrorist attack, Ahmadinejad had an unannounced dinner with Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan. Wouldn’t you love to have a transcript of their conversation? One will get you ten that there were other unannounced meetings as well. One of the supreme leader’s favorite newspapers has announced the arrival in Tehran of a delegation from Oman to facilitate the release of the remaining two...

The Iranian regime loves to boast of its military strength, international clout and hold on domestic power. Much of this is accepted by outside experts, but in fact the regime is in trouble. Iran's leaders have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people, are unable to manage the country's many problems, face a growing opposition, .... A few weeks ago, according to official and private reports, the Iranian air force shot down three drones near the southwestern city of Bushehr, where a Russian-supplied nuclear reactor has just started up. When the Revolutionary Guards inspected the debris, they expected to...

Last week the president spoke out on behalf of the three American hikers who have been held in Iran for nearly a year. During that time, they have been able to make only one telephone call — to their families back in the U.S. — and write no letter at all. Sarah, Shane, and Josh are in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, and Sarah is locked in solitary confinement save for once a day when she goes to the prison yard and sees the others. “I want to be perfectly clear,” the president said.  And then he lapsed into incoherence.  “Sarah,...

I’ll bet you haven’t seen very much news about Iran during the past week or 10 days, have you? And yet there’s lots of news: –first of all, there is still no end to the bazaar strike, even though the regime has taken very violent action against the strikers. A large part of the beautiful bazaar in Kerman has been torched ( for that matter, regime thugs have taken to setting ablaze large sections of forest land in the region. Nor will the bazaar strikes end soon, since this week marks religious celebrations that traditionally close the bazaars all over...

As I told you a while back, they’re not going to take on Israel by sending ships — with or without the Revolutionary Guards — to challenge the Gaza blockade. The details are delicious. Iran Cancels “Aid” Ship to Gaza (AFP) Iran has cancelled sending an aid ship to the Gaza Strip which had been scheduled to set sail for the Palestinian territory on Sunday, state news agency IRNA reported. Skip related content “The trip is not going to happen,” Hossein Sheikholeslam, secretary general of the International Conference for the Support of the “Palestinian” Intifada, an Iranian body set up...

The shrinking number of loyalists around the Ayatollah Khamenei are shaken by their failure to break the will of the opposition.Today is the first anniversary of the fraudulent election ... Having failed to recognize the intensity and dimensions of the opposition, many Iran observers performed a neat about-face, concluding that the regime was doomed and would be brought down in the near future. Yet while there have been many demonstrations this past year, the regime has brutally fought back, killing or arresting hundreds if not thousands of real or suspected critics.... So is the new Iranian revolution fizzling? Has the...

TONIGHT on The Andrea Shea King Show9pm EDThttp://www.blogtalkradio.com/askshow/2010/05/01/the-andrea-shea-king-showYou've seen him on Fox News, PBS' News Hour, and CNN's Larry King Live. Tonight he's with us -- Dr. Michael Ledeen. We'll talk about Iran, Ahmadinejad, and the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and for the Navy–Marine Corps Relief Society, two of the most worthy groups in this country. Ledeen is a contributing editor at National Review Online and regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal and has a blog on Pajamasmedia.com. Dr. Ledeen also is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Previously, he served as a consultant...

This afternoon I spoke to a rally in New York organized by Beth Gilinsky’s Action Alliance. The big crowd, despite miserable weather, filled the sidewalk on Second Avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets. Lots of terrific speakers spoke passionately about the need to support Israel against the shocking treatment from American leaders. Here are my prepared remarks: We are at war. It’s a global war. It extends from Pakistan and Afghanistan to India, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and from there towards Israel and then down to Egypt, Sudan and Somalia, and west to Europe and ultimately to America. It targets...

I wrote this a year ago, and it seems worth repeating. Tonight we Jews read the Book of Esther, and we celebrate the battle our ancestors won against the antisemites in Persia more than two thousand years ago. It could not come at a more appropriate time, as Benjamin Netanyahu organizes an Israeli Government whose main task is the protection of the Jews against antisemites in Persia. Again. Anyone who wants to learn more about the Book of Esther–and its signal importance in the history of political thought–should read Yoram Hazony’s The Dawn. It is one of those stories that...

I think the first time I grappled with this question was in an undergraduate philosophy course. The professor was a Yaley, very very smart, and loved to provoke us. His job, after all. So one day, when a famous person had died, he said in his flippant way, “obviously this man was much more important than Joe Schmoe down the block, and the society should value him more, and try harder to protect him and tend to him if he’s sick, etc etc.” And so we debated, in the way of young students. Who is to say that one man’s...

There has been a lot of ‘expert analysis’ in the past ten days saying that the Green Movement in Iran is all washed up, and that the regime is firmly in control of events there. This follows two earlier periods of ‘consensus,’ the first claiming that there was no chance of a revolution in Iran—this was the conventional wisdom even after the explosion of anti-regime passion following the fraudulent election results announced on June 12, 2009—and then a shorter, more recent, period when the success of the revolution was taken to be inevitable. The first was decisively shattered by the...

Secretary of State Clinton is quite right to say that Iran is now a military dictatorship. A note on Twitter last week put it succinctly and accurately: [The Revolutionary Guards, [aka “Sepah”] & its Commander in chief have taken over & have no intention of letting go. [Next year’s regular Army] budget is not even quarter of Sepah’s budget. - Basij is totally integrated in Sepah now. - From National police to Central command, all Sepahi & Basijis. - The Ministry of Intelligence is run by Sepah Intelligence. - [State broadcasting] & most print media are run by Sepah. -...

Khamenei, whose public statements should be taken seriously, is promising some sort of devastating “punch” against the West on Thursday the 11th, the same day as the Green Movement is calling for a monster protest against his regime. What might he have in mind? I don’t know; they say a lot of things just for effect, but threats/promises from the supreme leader have a certain standing. If I were an Israeli official, I’d recheck my information on Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Some think he’s preparing some kind of attack against Israel. .....

Khamenei, whose public statements should be taken seriously, is promising some sort of devastating “punch” against the West on Thursday the 11th, the same day as the Green Movement is calling for a monster protest against his regime. What might he have in mind? I don’t know; they say a lot of things just for effect, but threats/promises from the supreme leader have a certain standing. If I were an Israeli official, I’d recheck my information on Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. Some think he’s preparing some kind of attack against Israel. Surely there has been no shortage in...

The Western political Left famously began its political existence two hundred twenty years ago in the halls of the French Revolutionary Parliament. It proudly declared itself the Party of Liberty. It is now the Party of State control, Liberty’s ancient enemy. Its founders were men and women of great passion. Its heirs, from Europe to America, are so bloodless one sometimes wonders if they are really androids. Once revolutionary progressives, they are now either reactionary oppressors, or apologists for a stultifying status quo. The Left turned into its opposite. Instead of withering away, thereby ushering in an era of radical...

We must overcome our self-delusions about the enemy. When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets last spring and braved the most brutal repression the regime could inflict, Michael Ledeen was the least surprised man in Washington. In season and out, Ledeen has chronicled the profound weakness of the mullahocracy and its deep unpopularity with the Iranian people. Impatiently, year after year, he has identified opportunities for the United States to help the people of Iran replace their sinister and menacing rulers. After each new post on the subject, Ledeen signed off with, “Faster please.” In Accomplice to...

The secretary of defense let off some steam on his airplane, warning of the terrible consequences of leaking information about internal government policy debates. He’s “appalled.” Navy Times tells us that Gates said that “disclosures of sensitive information on any ‘options under consideration’ does not serve the nation well. Nor are they in the military’s strategic interests..” When I first came to Washington, and for many years thereafter, I thought leaks were just awful. How dare they? Among other things, I thought–and this I still think–that it has a chilling effect on internal debate. Because if you’re afraid that your...

Turkish prime minister Erdogan has flown back home after a 2-day visit to Tehran. It was a big deal in all senses of the term. He went to Iran with a large delegation, including three ministers, many businessmen, leaders of Parliament, scads of reporters, and television crews. He met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki, “President” Ahmadinejad, and other ministers. According to Iranians who were involved in the meetings, the two countries reached agreement on many issues, the upshot of which is a considerable tightening of the working alliance between them: –The creation of a joint airline; –The creation of a...

Speaking publicly about the role of Iran in Afghanistan--which is substantial, and about which we have considerable information--seems to be taboo for our current leaders. This is neither new nor surprising. Iranians, and Iranian-trained terrorists from organizations such as Hezbollah, have been killing Americans for years. The Bush administration, for example, had similar information about Iran's role in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and top officials did their best to suppress it. According to reporter Bob Woodward, a top State Department official knew that Iran had committed "acts of war" against our troops in Iraq and kept that information from the...

Perhaps it will help put things in context by looking at the supreme leader’s recent movements. On October 5th he went from Tehran to Now Shar, where he visited a naval base and academy. Later that day he went to the city of Chaloos, preached a sermon, delivered a speech and returned to Now Shar. On the 6th he traveled by automobile to Ramsar, a very beautiful resort city, and which is graced by a palace of the late shah. Khamenei was supposed to spend three days there, but he wasn’t feeling well, and complained of difficulty in breathing. He...

Friday evening, Mark Levin spoke with Michael Ledeen about Iran and his new book 'Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West.' Ledeen says of the situation in Iran, "The Supreme Leader is in a coma ... When an evil man dies, it is never bad." (Audio interview plus links and evidence of Iran's involvement in 9/11 after the jump.)

This story has been floating around the net for the past day or so, but this report comes from a person who is in a position to know such things. As I know very well (having been gulled into wrongly announcing Khamenei’s death a while back), it is easy to be misled, and Khamenei has had previous medical emergencies in the past, and recovered, but the source is excellent. Nonetheless, it’s always smart to apply the Reagan Caution: Trust, but verify. I’m doing my best. Here is what he/she says: Yesterday afternoon at 2.15PM local time, Khamenei collapsed and was...

I suppose it’s a tribute to the president’s tenacity, or perhaps his inability to think outside the box of conventional wisdom, but he seems to be totally unwilling to accept a Divine gift. He’s facing some terrible foreign policy decisions, decisions he doesn’t want to make, and he’s right to want to avoid them, because whichever way he tilts, it’s going to be bad for him. Take Afghanistan. McChrystal and Petreus have told him that if he doesn’t go all in, to the tune of forty thousand or so additional American fighters, he’s likely to see the war there go...

The Obama administration's talks with Iran—set to take place tomorrow in Geneva—are accompanied by an almost universally accepted misconception: that previous American administrations refused to negotiate with Iranian leaders. The truth, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last October at the National Defense University, is that "every administration since 1979 has reached out to the Iranians in one way or another and all have failed." After the fall of the shah in February 1979, the Carter administration attempted to establish good relations with the revolutionary regime. We offered aid, arms and understanding. The Iranians demanded that the United States...

Somehow NRO is having some trouble posting my full reply to my friend Andy McCarthy. I’m sure it will be fixed soon, but in the meantime, here it is: Nothing is better than getting honest criticism from a serious person. It’s almost impossible to find it nowadays, and I’m very grateful to Brother Andy for his kind words and trenchant comments. Ditto to Mark. How did these lawyers learn to write so well? I thought they beat that out of you in Law School… Bush Doctrine: As I remember it, we declared war on terrorist groups and on the countries...

In the middle of the night, at 1:30 in the morning of Friday, August 14th, there was a large explosion at the monster petrochemical facility of the Iranian Pars Petrochemical Company in Bandar Assaluyeh. It is the biggest such plant in Iran, and the second largest in the whole Middle East (second only to one in Saudi Arabia). The explosion, which took place in pipes carrying Liquid Petroleum Gas (which is mostly propane), caused fires throughout the facility. It took at least three hours before the fires were brought under control. At least two persons died (fortunately, at that hour...

Michael Ledeen on Iranian regime and their belief that he is apparently the main influence behind the Iranian opposition and recent protests. (about 4 mins)

By now, most people know that the Iranian regime treats its dissidents with unrestrained barbarity. Even the leading dead tree media have reported anecdotally on the torture of prisoners and the bashing, beating, axing and stabbing of protestors in the streets of the major cities. But it is not easy to get a clear picture of the dimensions of the savagery. It’s hard to get the real numbers on the bloody repression the mullahs have unleashed on their people, and one reason–perhaps the most important one–is that the regime is doing everything in its power to conceal the facts, typically...

Washington, 21 July (WashingtonTV)—The hardline principle-ist Kayhan daily, published in Tehran today, attacked former president, Mohammad Khatami, saying that when he spoke of “the need for a referendum”, he was “carrying out the instructions” of Michael Ledeen, prominent member of the American Enterprise Institute and special aide to former US defense secretary, Ronald Rumsfeld, and to former deputy president, Dick Cheney. On Sunday 28 Tir [19 July], Khatami said at a meeting held in the office of the Combatant Clerics Society in Tehran with the families of a number of detainees, that the way to overcome the current crisis was...

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the bottom line is that we are turning loose Iranian terrorists in exchange for the release of Roxana Saberi, plus, probably, three British hostages. The first payment arrived today in Tehran, to a triumphant reception. Ugh. The terrorists in question are officers in the Iranian Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. They were captured in Irbil, Iraq, in January, 2007, as the “surge” was getting under way. A few weeks earlier, other Iranians had been arrested in Baghdad. For our military leaders, it was an open and shut...

For those who wish to think clearly about Iran, there are two fundamental facts: * the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been at war with us ever since the overthrow of the shah in early 1979; * the savagery they have unleashed on the people of Iran is precisely what they want to do to us. The Iranian leaders and their terror instruments, from Hezbollah to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been killing Americans for 30 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment, where...

Let’s review the bidding, shall we? The “election circus” took place a week ago Friday, and demonstrations began that night, June 12th. Ten days have passed. What have we learned? –First, that a significant number of Iranians hate the regime and are prepared to die to bring it down; –Second, that the fanatical religious zealots that hold the guns, chains, knives, tear gas cannisters, high-powered water hoses, sniper rifles and (perhaps) chemical weapons (said by some to have been deployed from helicopters), are prepared to order the killing of any number of Iranians in order to maintain their own power...

I’ve received what purports to be a statement from Mousavi’s Office in Tehran.  Like everyone else covering the revolution, I get a lot of material that can’t be authenticated, and one must always take such material with a healthy dose of skepticism.  That said, the person who sent this to me is undoubtedly in touch with the Mousavi people on the ground, that much is certain.  His information has been proven reliable throughout this period.  So while the following open letter carefully puts distance between the author(s) and Mousavi himself, I am quite sure that at a minimum it accurately...

Mousavi Accuses Obama of 'Misleading the World' Sunday, June 21, 2009 1:38 PM Author and foreign policy expert Michael Ledeen has published a letter reportedly from the office of Mir Hossein Mousavi, in which the Iranian opposition leader criticizes President Barack Obama for saying Mousavi and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad are "two of a kind." The letter, addressed to Obama, takes the president to task for the remark, calling it "a grave and deep insult, not just to Mr. Mousavi but especially against the judgment of the Iranian people, against our moral conviction and intelligence, especially those of the young...

Everything is always about HIM. America before HIM was deeply flawed, requiring worldwide apologies to everyone who will listen. Given the hatred that failure has for success, that is always a way to draw crowds and admiration. With he possibility of a second Iranian revolution, Obama can't help but make it about HIM, HIS speech, HIS Hamlet act with regard to Iranian leadership. Who should HE anoint; who should he hallow with his words? Outside of HIS narcissistic orbit, Michael Ledeen notes ... He probably thinks he’s in a bind (he isn’t, actually). He probably thinks that if he condemns...

Iran doesn’t have elections, it has circuses, and this was proven once again on Friday, when the regime announced that Ahmadinezhad had been retained–call him “landslide Mahmoud” please–as president of the Islamic Republic. So much for the remarks of various pundits claiming that Iran was some sort of “democracy.” There isn’t a single educated Iranian who thinks that the official numbers represent anything more than a brazen insult to the opponents of the regime. Supreme Leader Khamenei rubbed it in when he called the outcome “divine,” but the subtlety was no doubt lost on American commentators, who were mostly concerned...

Just doing what he’s told, I suppose. After all, he came into the Bush Administration expecting to supervise the retreat from Iraq and the Grand Bargain with Iran, only to find that the president wanted to up the ante in Iraq and challenge the mullahs on the ground. So Gates duly supported the surge, and perforce cracked down on Iranian activities in Iraq. Now comes Obama, who is all about smashing al Qaeda, and making the Grand Bargain with Iran. So Gates duly blames the upsurge in violence in Iraq on al Qaeda–thoughtfully leaving Iran out of it, although they...

“A fine mess down there, I must say. Nobody learns, ever, so far as I can tell…” It was hard to disagree, especially with one of the great experts on intelligence, the late James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of CIA Counterintelligence. I wanted his take on the latest Chinese fire drill over the abridged “torture memos” that the Obama people had made public, and all the subsequent smoke and fire about possible prosecutions and/or investigations of the “guilty parties.” I’d had some repairs made to my ouija board, and had tracked him down in the great...

No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one. The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details. We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School. These things are not automatically significant, but they can be. Nobody thinks the president has some basic medical problem. He shows every sign of being in excellent physical condition. But so did John F. Kennedy, who turned out...