The Redhunter

Every president from Reagan to Bush has negotiated with the Iranians, though not at the presidential level. Every single our attempt to find common ground has resulted in failure. Ledeen documents the whole sad story.

The negotiations were almost always based on a search, always futile, for an Iranian "reformer". President Reagan thought he had found Iranian leaders with whom we might be able to negotiate, and famously sent Oliver North and National Security Adviser Robert C. "Bud" McFarlane with bible and chocolate cake allegedly in the shape of a key. Nothing came of it. President Clinton was encouraged by the election of Mohammed Khatami as president in 1997, only to see those hopes dashed as well. The vote for Khatami was more a vote against the regime than a vote for him.

What makes all this so frustrating is that the human rights situation in Iran is much worse than is generally recognized, and no administration of either party has done anything about it. Ledeen spends a chapter detailing the abuses of women, minorities, non-Shiite Muslims, and anyone who disagrees with the regime.

The leaders of the Iranian revolution made clear from the beginning that there's was not a nationalist movement. The Ayatollah Khomeini said it best "We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah, for patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I saw let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." Their motivation is important to understand, because all too many Western leaders think that we can placate the Iranians leaders and they will be happy secure within their own country. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that they have quasi-religious/historical motivations which drive them to want to dominate the region, chasing out Western powers in the process.

For example, Muhammed started the practice of writing to infidel leaders, "inviting" them to accept Islam - or else. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini wrote a similar letter to Gorbachev, then still leader of the then still USSR. In 2006, Ahmadinejad wrote such a letter to President George W. Bush. As with the others, Ahmadinejad's letter asked Bush to convert to Islam. Muhammed's letters presaged war. We ignore the letters they send us to day at our own peril. They mean what they say.

The main forces used by the Iranians to carry out their policies of terror are the Quds force (the overseas arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or IRGC), and Hezbollah. They are not going to attack us with conventional military forces if they can help it. They are practitioners of asymmetrical warfare. They aim to wear us down, and to hit us in ways we can least defend against.

In another example of using proxies to further their cause, in the 1990s Iran supported the government of the Sudan, the latter a Muslim Brotherhood movement born out of Sunni Islam. In 1991 they "established a strategic alliance to wage war against their common enemies in the West". The alliance between Iran and Sudan extended to the former sending several thousand IRGC trainers to the Sudan in the 1990's. al Qaeda was in the mix too, as the 1998 U.S. Federal indictment of Osama bin Laden stated that

"Al Qaeda... forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hezbollah for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States."

The evidence is that Iran was behind the 1988 Khobar Towers attack. The al Qaeda terrorist who carried out the attack were in fact trained by Hezbollah, and the explosives came from Iran. "The entire operation was conceived, organized, and controlled by the Islamic Republic from beginning to end."

It took some doing, but finally in the spring of 1999 FBI interrogators got access to the terrorists the Saudis had captured, and what they heard confirmed Iranian involvement. Director Louis Freeh advised National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and President and Clinton that Iran was behind the Khobar Towers attack. There is some dispute as to what exactly happened within the Clinton Administration, but in the end there was no U.S. retaliation for the attack.

Unfortunately the Bush Administration has done any better than any previous one in dealing with Iran. Despite tough talk, the Bush Administration has no policy to permanently solve the problem. Regime change by whatever means seems off the table. Ledeen places most of the blame on Condolezza Rice, especially when she was National Security Adviser. In this role she was responsible for the formulation of policy, which in the case of Iran she absolutely failed to do.

Another factor contributing to the confusion is the intelligence community, which has been working against doing anything "muscular" with regards to Iran. They are quite happy to let the current negotiations regime take its course, believing that Iran will naturally flower into a democracy sometime in the next decade. Adding to that is that the CIA has very few true Iranian specialists and fewer Persian speakers. Most of the people assigned to the Iran desk are Arabists by trade.

Ledeen, like Richard Miniter, believes that bin Laden is most likely in Iran. This is hardly as unlikely as it may seem, once you get over the false notion that the Sunni-Shiite split precludes all cooperation. Ledeen takes this one more step; "...al Qaeda no longer exists as a separate entity, and that it has been integrated into the terrorist galaxy that revolves around Iran." This may be be going too far, but I don't have the information to make that judgement. I do know that al Qaeda is loosely organized, so that AQI can exist somewhat separately from the rest of the organization.

As with all totalitarians, the Iranians believe us to be weak, and unwilling to take casualties. Whether this is true or not is beside the point; what is important is that they believe it is so and act based on their beliefs.

Further, they believe themselves to be strong. Part of this is the cult of the return of the Mahdi, personified now in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a member (or reputed to be) of the Hojetiah sect. The Hojetiah believe that they can prompte the return of the Mahdi by creating bloodshed and chaos on earth, something which even the Ayatollah Khomeini thought so extreme that he banned them in 1983.

To be fair, they have not succeeded in their objectives in Iraq. They were not able to prompt the civil war they hoped for, and the "surge" is working.

It would be bad enough if the Iranian leaders simply thought themselves strong and us weak. This might lead to dangerously overstep, and then get plastered by a determined U.S. president in response. Here's Ledeen:

Some of the most thoughtful analysis of contemporary Iran believe that the Islamic Republic is currently in the throes of a second Islamic revolution, driven by Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards Corps from which he comes. As the label suggests, Iranian leaders seek a revitalization of Khomeini's original vision - above all, the export of the revolution - and fully embrace "such events as 'destruction, pestilence, and wars' which they see as the inevitable accompaniments of the Mahdi's return. Amir Taheri terms this "a deliberate clash of civilizations with the West."

They believe they can achieve their Jihadist goal of chasing the U.S. and other Western powers from the gulf region and creating a regional Imamate.

Ledeen doesn't just complain about our past and current failings, however, for he does offer concrete proposals about what to do about Iran, ones that are in line with what I have been saying here.

One thing that he does not believe is useful is engaging in a "War of Ideas" with the Mullahs. Although he does not mention Walid Phares by name, it is apparent that Ledeen has him and similar thinkers in mind. Ledeen has other ideas for dealing with Iran.

Ledeen's starting point is that only regime change will solve the problem. The current government is inherently anti-Western and expansionist and cannot be reformed.

His basic strategy for regime change is pretty straightforward:

...the same way we brought down the Soviet empire, by exporting the American democratic revolution, by adopting the methods that have successfully been used against dictators from Moscow and Belgrade to Beirut and the Philippines. the best strategy is to support the Iranian people against the mullahs they so hate.

A direct military attack would not achieve this purpose because we do not have the capability to take down Iran as we did Iraq. Bombing nuclear installations would set back their program but not get rid of the root problem, which is the government.

Rather, we should use our vast "soft power" to do things like support Iranian dissidents and democracy movements and start a human rights campaign. We can provide these dissidents with material and moral support. Broadcast messages ("propaganda" if you prefer) should be stepped up (our current efforts are abysmal). An information campaign to educate people on the mullahs and their regime should be launched taking advantage of all media including the Internet. Simply providing moral support to regime opponents would go a long way.

Of course this may not work. And there will be many who object to such a campaign, including, sadly, the American left who is stuck in a paradigm of endless negotiations.

Unlike many others, Ledeen sees Iran as the key to winning the War on Terror, or War on Jihadism (or whatever you want to call it).

My take is that Ledeen is mostly correct in this book, but that he takes it all a step too far. Yes Iran is a huge threat, larger than is commonly realized. Yes we should revise our strategy to one of regime change, and, and no, negotiations will not work. Administrations of both parties have kicked the can down the road, and it is time to deal with it before they get nuclear weapons.

The "War of Ideas" that thinkers like Phares advocate will work well against the Wahabbists and Muslim Brotherhood, but alone cannot work against Iran. That said, I think Ledeen criticizes it too much, since I find nothing in Phares' work to indicate such single-mindedness. A War of Ideas can certainly be part of the information or propaganda war that Ledeen advocates.

I also don't see al Qaeda being submerged into Iran as Ledeen thinks. I'm not the expert, but I don't see that theory being promoted elsewhere. Bin Laden may well be in Iran, but that doesn't mean his movement has been totally captured by them. al Qaeda is a pretty dispersed and loosely organized movement, and I never did buy the idea that it's controlled from the top like the Mafia (so "getting bin Laden" would, I think, have minimal effect).

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Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Don't miss it!