Jim Lobe, a leftist, writing in Asia Times –Veteran neo-con adviser moves on Iran has a lot to say about Michael Ledeen, what he has done and what he is doing.
When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl Rove, President George W Bush’s closest advisor, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international affairs analyst.
[..] “We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network,” he wrote in Monday’s Post. “Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists.”
He was a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process. “I don’t know of a case in history where peace has been accomplished in any way other than one side winning a war [and] imposing terms on the other side,” he said two years ago.
He also has expressed little faith in traditional US allies, notably in “Old Europe”, which he spent much of the 1980s attacking for being insufficiently anti-Soviet. As Washington moved toward war in Iraq, for example, he even questioned whether France and Germany were in league with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
“The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States,”
he wrote, suggesting three weeks later, as the US offensive stalled on its way to Baghdad, that France and Germany be treated as “strategic enemies”.
For Ledeen, Iraq was only the beginning of the broader struggle against the “terror masters”. “As soon as we land in Iraq, we’re going to face the whole terrorist network,” he told an interviewer in March. “Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia are the big four, and then there’s Libya.” “You can’t solve all problems I grant that,” he told the BBC. “I mean, I wrote a book about Machiavelli, and I know the struggle against evil is going to go forever.”
Ledeen is so right. Let’s hope he prevails.
