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The Way We Dealt with the Soviets Is the Way To Deal with Iran By Michael A. Ledeen Posted: Monday, March 12, 2007 ARTICLES Parliamentary Brief (March 2007) Publication Date: March 9, 2007 Of the many errors committed by Western governments and their intelligence services in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, none was so grave as a fundamental error of strategic vision: the failure to recognize we would automatically be involved in a regional war, not simply a battle against the regime of Saddam Hussein. We imagined that Afghanistan was secure and that we could deal with Iraq all...

The Baker/Hamilton Commission has a chance to dramatically reshape our thinking about American foreign policy, if only it will ask the right question. They should follow the guidance of one of the last century’s most brilliant thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks an apparently straightforward question: what do all games have in common? He ties himself in mental knots trying to get the answer, but nothing works. Finally he realizes that the question was posed wrongly. It should have been: Is there anything all games have in common? That’s the real question (and the real answer is...

No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted “insurgency” in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable. It is very good news that the White House immediately denounced...

Torture in Tehran May 20, 2006 National Review Online Michael Ledeen I am sorry to have to post this, a video of the leader of Tehran's bus drivers' organization (it is forbidden to call it a union) after a torture session in an Iranian prison. But it seems otherwise impossible to convince Western leaders that we are confronting a monstrous evil, that seeks to destroy or dominate us by all possible means. The sort of horror you see on this video is repeated every day, sometimes leading to execution, sometimes to further sadism. Secretary Rice: do you really believe...

February 17, 2006 A Mullah’s-Eye View of the World Iran is acting on its assessment of the West’s strength and resolve. Michael Ledeen Sometime in late November or early December, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gathered his top advisers for an overall strategic review. The atmosphere was highly charged, because Khamenei’s doctors have diagnosed a serious cancer, and do not expect the Supreme Leader to live much more than a year. A succession struggle is already under way, with the apparently unsinkable Hashemi Rafsanjani in the thick of it, even though Khamenei, and his increasingly powerful son Mushtaba, is opposed...

Fisk Vick, Again A warped view of Iran. March 14, 2006 As part of its relentless campaign to blame all of mankind’s misfortunes on George W. Bush, today the Washington Post unleashed Karl Vick (my candidate for the Walter Duranty Memorial Prize) and David Finkel on American efforts to help Iranians who dare to challenge the mullahs. “U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran,” screams the front-page headline, and the policy point of the article is nicely contained in the first paragraph: Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush’s plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote...

Michael Ledeen, the Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says pushing a democratic revolution within Iran is the wisest policy the United States can pursue to avert the threat posed by that country's pursuit of nuclear weapons. In fact, Ledeen believes Iran has already developed a nuclear weapon, which, in his view, they will not test until it is deployable on an intermediate-range missile. Ledeen, who holds a doctorate in history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, was a consultant to the National Security Council and the State and Defense Departments during the Reagan Administration. He is also...

“Who’s an Iraqi?” It’s a regional war. Of all the confusions surrounding the war in Iraq, perhaps none has clouded so many minds as the phony question, "are we fighting domestic insurgents or foreign terrorists?" The people who purport to answer this question with "data," should look again at the demographics of Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and they can start by asking themselves, "who's an Iraqi"? That question is surprisingly difficult to answer, above all because, during the Iran-Iraq war, millions (I say millions) of Iraqi Shiites took the Iranian side, and went to Iran, where they remained for the...

Why should anyone believe anything the CIA has to say about Iran? Like everyone else in Washington, I’ve been reading excerpts from James Risen’s new book, the one that "exposes" the "crimes" of the Bush administration with regard to the war on terrorism. The most recent excerpt deals with the CIA’s activities vis-à-vis Iran, and Risen says some very shocking things, things which a serious city would find far more troublesome than the legalities about NSA’s intercepts of conversations involving terrorists. Since I’m just an amateur at these arcane subjects, I thought it best to get some real expertise, and...

It used to be said that the best hope for an impoverished little country was to declare war on the United States, because the ILC would lose and then receive massive quantities of aid and assistance. Such bits of folk wisdom led to some great comic masterpieces, such as the memorable Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse that Roared, in which the ILC was unlucky enough to win...and then what? Nowadays the process from war to aid and assistance has grown much shorter, because it's no longer necessary to go through the unpleasant business of losing. And if you do have...

Engage! If you want to win the debate, win the war. November 23, 2005 More than three years ago, prior to the liberation of Iraq, I lamented that our great national debate on the war against terrorism was the wrong debate, because it was "about using our irresistible military might against a single country in order to bring down its leader, when we should be talking about using all our political, moral, and military genius to support a vast democratic revolution to liberate the peoples of the Middle East from their tyrannical rulers. That is our real mission, the essence...

Let’s start with al-Reuters’ thoughtful contribution to the well-being of the Western world. One of their star reporters finds a new way to bash the United States: We’re not paying off the crystal-ball operators. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Oct 6 (Reuters) — A Brazilian court will consider a psychic's claim that the U.S. government owes him a $25 million reward for information he says he provided on the hiding place of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Brazil's second-highest court, the Superior Court of Justice, decided on Thursday the Brazilian justice system could rule on the matter and told a court...

Iranian President Ahmadi Nezhad has been busy putting together a cabinet for the Islamic republic, and while all real power remains firmly in the clammy hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, it's worth taking a look at some of the new ministers, if only because it tells us two important things: (1) The face the regime wishes to show to the world at large, and (2) the policies the regime intends to unleash on the long-suffering Iranian people. Who's Who Let's start with the interior minister, Hojatoll-Islam Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi. He was formerly the number-two man in the ministry of intelligence and...

What would James Jesus Angleton think about “Able Danger”?At first I thought there was a short circuit in the ouija board, because there were sparks coming out of the thing, just when I thought I’d finally connected with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, former head of CIA counterintelligence. But then I realized that it was, indeed, Angleton, cursing and sputtering (his poetic side — the side that made him the editor of The Yale Literary Review when he was an undergraduate in New Haven — somehow got lost when he got angry). ML: Hey! That used to...

One of my favorite reporters called late last week, saying he had learned that Coalition forces in Iraq had captured an Iranian vehicle entering Iraq with large quantities of shaped explosives, obviously headed for the terrorists. "So what?" was my reply. It happens most every day. But he was baffled. Why would the Iranians be supporting terrorist actions against Shiites? After all, didn't they want the Shiites to prevail in Iraq, so that there could be an Islamic republic there? His question — and he's a good reporter — shows once again how totally false stereotypes distort our ability to...

One of the reasons I have been so concerned about Iran for such a long time is that I fear the mullahs’ cleverness, ruthlessness, and ability to mount brilliant deceptions. Moreover, while there have long been basic fault lines within the mullahcracy, I have long believed they would find ways to pull together at moments of crisis. The electoral fiasco of June 17 has shaken both of these convictions. They couldn’t even stage a phony election without appearing inept and thuggish, which is certainly not the image they wanted to send to the world. And the spectacle of intense internal...

The Hand of the Mullahs What we know, and what we don’t do. May 04, 2005, The State Department has once again awarded the blue ribbon to the mullahs of Tehran: Iran remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2004. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security were involved in the planning and support of terrorist acts and continued to exhort a variety of groups to use terrorism in pursuit of their goals. This is no small accomplishment, even for the leaders of the Islamic republic. As recent events in Iraq make all too...

Tehran's tyrants nervously eye their approaching rendezvous with the ash heap of history. As has so often happened in American history, we have a chance to be saved from our folly by our enemies, rather than by our own exertions. Our diplomatic corps have labored mightily, ever since the bloody seizure of power in Tehran by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, to reach a rapprochement with the tyrannical rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Kenneth Pollack wrote in his recent book, "The Persian Puzzle," we have tried every possible approach, and they have all failed. And he sadly...

Some ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students that one cannot understand an event simply by attempting to reconstruct a chain of causality leading up to it. Instead, one must immerse oneself in the context, to fully understand the moment in which the event took place. If you get the context right, you can understand what came before and what comes after. That sort of understanding is important both for historians and leaders. If that ancient wise man were alive today and were asked to summarize the unique characteristics of this historical moment, he would say "revolution."...

After years of baffling silence, George Will has finally written about Iran. His guide is the justly celebrated Azar Nafisi, but her one-liner Will used to portray contemporary Iran — "What differentiated this revolution from the other totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century was that it came in the name of the past" — demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the past (the Führer's movement was every bit as anti-modern as Khomeini's) and thus of the future (both forms of fascism being quite capable of asserting a terrible revolutionary claim on the destiny of all mankind and unleashing their murderous hatred...