October 10, 2004

Ledeen Profile

The Boston Globe has a great piece on Michael Ledeen, NRO contributor, author/journalist and Wizblog regular.
I had not been aware of his earlier professional career as a historian of modern Italy. Ledeen's "faster, please" approach to Iran is neatly summed up in his latest article. He says that Bush and his administration had a "failure of vision":

Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the ally of al Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime sponsor of Fatah, and the backbone of Hamas. So clear was Iran's major role in the terror universe that the Department of State, along with the CIA one of the most conflict-averse agencies of the American government, branded the Islamic Republic the world's number one terror sponsor. As it still does.

I'm not sure exactly what Ledeen had in mind to bring about the end of the mullahs' regime in Iran, without "a single bomb or a single bullet", since he spoke only vaguely of providing "support". The regime rounds up and kills democratic dissidents now, as they did immediately after Afghanistan, when Ledeen says the time was right. I do believe, however, that he is absolutely right about this first point:

There will be no peace in Iraq so long as the terror masters rule in Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran...

...The main problem remains the failure of vision, never more evident than in the first presidential debate. The president dismissed the question about Iran by talking only about the nuclear "issue," while Senator Kerry, incredibly, restated his belief that the same policy that failed to deter North Korea would somehow work with the Iranians. The president knows who the Iranians are, while the senator is an active appeaser. But neither was inclined to deal with the central issue, which is that the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis are killing our men and women in Iraq, and we are playing defense, which is a sucker's game.

In the past week, the Iranian people have again taken to the streets in every major city in the country. The chatterers pay no heed, because there is only one zero-sum game that interests them, which is the election, and the election is about Iraq, or so they say.

Except that it isn't, really. It's about the war. The real war, the regional war, the war they are waging against us even if we refuse to acknowledge it.

Faster, damnit.

Posted by dan at October 10, 2004 4:50 PM