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’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...

At about this stage in the Carter years, I began to worry: the president was getting a reputation for being a wimp, the economy was going to hell, and his poll numbers were headed steadily south. The main enemy — the Soviet Union — was flexing its muscles, invading Afghanistan in December of 1979. This came amidst the Iranian hostage crisis, which began early the previous month. We tend to forget that the U.S. military buildup, which ultimately played a big role in the successful outcome of the Cold War, was started by Carter in response to the Soviet move,...

Yes it is true, not exactly as any one source has been reporting, but the two top leaders of the Green Movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were kidnapped on Thursday night — when the streets of Tehran were full of armed men.  It was a typical Mafia-style snatch.  The two men — already under house arrest — were beaten and bloodied, and then were led out of their homes in blindfolds and handcuffs, stuffed in the trunks of their captors from the Revolutionary Guards and, along with their wives, taken to a location in Tehran, then, on Friday,...

Since our leaders evidently have no clue what to do in Libya, let’s give them a few ideas. The basic rules are easy: don’t do anything that is likely to make things worse, and you can forget about “negotiated settlements” once the bloodshed has reached the dimensions now engulfing Libya. Finally, forget the UN (see point 1). The first thing to do is deprive Gaddafi of as many instruments of mass murder as possible. The most obvious of these is the Libyan Air Force, which is a small and outdated collection of aircraft, many of which belong in a museum....

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...

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...

Roger L. Simon thinks Obama’s deranged, and Roger’s the son of a good psychiatrist, so he knows what he’s talking about. I don’t doubt that our president has his issues–just look at his nutty mother, consider the impact of being abandoned by dad–but I don’t think that just putting Obama on the couch is the best way to understand him. Put him in the classroom instead. Because he’s the stereotypical American undergrad at a stereotypical Ivy League college in the age of political correctness. He doesn’t much like America or Americans, or the “former colonial powers” like Britain. Like so...

Roger L. Simon thinks Obama’s deranged, [1] and Roger’s the son of a good psychiatrist, so he knows what he’s talking about.  I don’t doubt that our president has his issues–just look at his nutty mother, consider the impact of being abandoned by dad–but I don’t think that just putting Obama on the couch is the best way to understand him. Put him in the classroom instead.  Because he’s the stereotypical American undergrad at a stereotypical Ivy League college in the age of political correctness.He doesn’t much like America or Americans, or the “former colonial powers” like Britain.  Like so...

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. Surely there has been no shortage in...

In their desperate search for a way to quell the growing revolt of the Iranian people against the Islamic Republic, the regime’s storm troopers are arresting, beating and assassinating the families of the leaders of the Green Movement. Sunday, as millions of Iranians took the opportunity of the Ashura mourning day to take to the streets, a hit team gunned down the nephew of Mir Hossein Mousavi. Seyed Ali Moussavi Habibi was witnessing a 4WD Neissan Patrol car running over a few people in front of his house before being shot and killed with the same people in the car....

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.)

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)

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...

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...

The president’s response to the sentencing of Roxana Saberi—eight years in prison—is a testament to the power of Iranian blackmail and Obama’s own pigheaded refusal to understand the nature of our enemies. His “disappointment” in the mullahs’ action (echoed almost to the letter by Secretary of State Clinton) suggests that he hoped, maybe even expected, something better from them. And that, in turn, demonstrates a refusal to see Iran for what it is. If I were Saberi’s Iranian-American father, I would be furious, and I would be inclined to call a press conference to say that, while it may be...

When pundits and politicians talk about “negotiating with Iran,” it conjures up an image of well-dressed statesmen sitting in elegant rooms, talking about the niceties of international relations. But this is only a part of the picture; much of the process is conducted in little hotel rooms by secret intermediaries, and they talk about very unpleasant things, such as torture and blackmail. At least one recent “breakthrough” in relations with Iran was extorted from Great Britain and the United States by an Iranian proxy group in Iraq that kidnaped five British civilians two years ago, and, in the secret negotiations...

March 22nd, 2009 President Obama has devoted a lot of time to foreign policy this past week, focusing like a laser beam on three countries that begin with the letter “I.” He gave star billing in Washington to the prime minister of Ireland (who was treated a lot better than British Prime Minister Gordon Brown), during the course of which each read the other’s prepared text, perhaps a new departure in international diplomacy. He also sent a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano (a member of the now defunct Communist Party), expressing confidence that the United States and Italy would...

March 15, 2009 Winston Churchill: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” They like to call themselves “realists,” but their proper name is “appeasers.” They follow in the hollow footsteps of Neville Chamberlain, who signed an agreement with Hitler, believing it signalled “peace in our time.” But it only encouraged the Fuhrer to believe that there was no will in the West to resist the onslaught of Nazi terror, and thus hastened the onset of the Second World War. As Churchill darkly told Chamberlain upon his return to London, “You were given the...

So the Attorney General thinks we’re cowards because we don’t talk about race as much as he would like. Apparently he wants us to talk about it a lot. Maybe he does, although that is not his reputation here in Washington (he’s considered a consummate professional and a true expert on jurisprudence by his peers, including many who are Republicans). I was offended by Holder’s remarks. I think they’re obnoxious, ignorant, unhelpful and inappropriate. An awful lot of Americans fought very hard for many years to defeat those who wanted to talk about race a lot. I suggest he take...

Most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, about which I wrote a book (Tocqueville on American Character; from which most of the following is taken) a few years ago. What a pity! No one understood us so well, no one described our current crisis with such brutal accuracy, as Tocqueville. The economics of the current expansion of state power in America are, as I said, “fascist,” but the politics are not. We are not witnessing “American Fascism on the march.” Fascism was a war ideology and grew out of the terrible slaughter of the First...

Ever wonder where CIA gets its nutty ideas about the world? This story helps, maybe. There’s a genius with the colorful name of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, described by AFP (French reportage alert!) as an “advisor” to CIA and DoD, who boasts a 90 percent accuracy rate on predictions based on his “gaming and computer model.” Maybe AFP means “computerized gaming model,” but hey, I’m just telling you what they say. So Monsieur Bueno de Mesquita assures us that Iran won’t actually build any bombs, that religion (and therefore religious leaders) are on the decline, and that if you just...

By MICHAEL LEDEEN Last week Iran put its own telecommunications satellite into orbit. U.S. officials in the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon were certainly right to warn that this shows that the mullahs have now mastered the technology needed to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the terror masters in Tehran believe the satellite has an even greater significance -- another step toward the return of the Shiite messiah, or Mahdi, the long-vanished 12th Imam. Many Iranian leaders believe that the 12th Imam will return in the Last Days, which will be marked by global chaos and conflict,...

Iran’s always tyrannical and sometimes apocalyptic mullahs have certainly been busy of late. They’ve been spinning faster than a champion dervish, trying to convince the gullible, at home and abroad, that their Hamas proxies in Gaza won a signal victory against Israel, and that Iran was the reason for their success. Meanwhile, they’ve called for the assassination of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, and Israeli Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni, and organized mass rallies against President Obama, complete with ritual burning of his photo. Some of it shows the regime’s comedic skills at their highest pitch, such as...

Now he’s had his first real intelligence briefing, and it was probably an eye-opener, because it’s quite a scene out there. I hope he’s got someone close to him with the wit and the nerve to tell the president-elect that the intelligence community is also a mess, and that he can be morally certain the real world is even worse than the one he’s just been briefed about. The real world is so frightening that I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton will be foolish enough to accept the job of secretary of state; anyone who takes that job is almost certain...

This is the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the Nazis unleashed a wave of physical violence against German Jews and their enterprises. The name comes from the shattered glass that filled the streets of Jewish neighborhoods, and it made it crystal clear that Hitler fully intended to annihilate the Jews of Germany, and, eventually, everywhere else that he could reach. Even the New York Times, which had a very mixed record on reporting the events of the Holocaust, described it on their front page in terms that left no doubt what was going on: A wave of destruction,...