Free Republic

The Western political Left famously began its political existence two hundred twenty years ago in the halls of the French Revolutionary Parliament. It proudly declared itself the Party of Liberty. It is now the Party of State control, Liberty’s ancient enemy. Its founders were men and women of great passion. Its heirs, from Europe to America, are so bloodless one sometimes wonders if they are really androids. Once revolutionary progressives, they are now either reactionary oppressors, or apologists for a stultifying status quo. The Left turned into its opposite. Instead of withering away, thereby ushering in an era of radical...

We must overcome our self-delusions about the enemy. When tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets last spring and braved the most brutal repression the regime could inflict, Michael Ledeen was the least surprised man in Washington. In season and out, Ledeen has chronicled the profound weakness of the mullahocracy and its deep unpopularity with the Iranian people. Impatiently, year after year, he has identified opportunities for the United States to help the people of Iran replace their sinister and menacing rulers. After each new post on the subject, Ledeen signed off with, “Faster please.” In Accomplice to...

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.)

This story has been floating around the net for the past day or so, but this report comes from a person who is in a position to know such things. As I know very well (having been gulled into wrongly announcing Khamenei’s death a while back), it is easy to be misled, and Khamenei has had previous medical emergencies in the past, and recovered, but the source is excellent. Nonetheless, it’s always smart to apply the Reagan Caution: Trust, but verify. I’m doing my best. Here is what he/she says: Yesterday afternoon at 2.15PM local time, Khamenei collapsed and was...

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)

By now, most people know that the Iranian regime treats its dissidents with unrestrained barbarity. Even the leading dead tree media have reported anecdotally on the torture of prisoners and the bashing, beating, axing and stabbing of protestors in the streets of the major cities. But it is not easy to get a clear picture of the dimensions of the savagery. It’s hard to get the real numbers on the bloody repression the mullahs have unleashed on their people, and one reason–perhaps the most important one–is that the regime is doing everything in its power to conceal the facts, typically...

Washington, 21 July (WashingtonTV)—The hardline principle-ist Kayhan daily, published in Tehran today, attacked former president, Mohammad Khatami, saying that when he spoke of “the need for a referendum”, he was “carrying out the instructions” of Michael Ledeen, prominent member of the American Enterprise Institute and special aide to former US defense secretary, Ronald Rumsfeld, and to former deputy president, Dick Cheney. On Sunday 28 Tir [19 July], Khatami said at a meeting held in the office of the Combatant Clerics Society in Tehran with the families of a number of detainees, that the way to overcome the current crisis was...

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the bottom line is that we are turning loose Iranian terrorists in exchange for the release of Roxana Saberi, plus, probably, three British hostages. The first payment arrived today in Tehran, to a triumphant reception. Ugh. The terrorists in question are officers in the Iranian Quds Force, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards Corps. They were captured in Irbil, Iraq, in January, 2007, as the “surge” was getting under way. A few weeks earlier, other Iranians had been arrested in Baghdad. For our military leaders, it was an open and shut...

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...

Let’s review the bidding, shall we? The “election circus” took place a week ago Friday, and demonstrations began that night, June 12th. Ten days have passed. What have we learned? –First, that a significant number of Iranians hate the regime and are prepared to die to bring it down; –Second, that the fanatical religious zealots that hold the guns, chains, knives, tear gas cannisters, high-powered water hoses, sniper rifles and (perhaps) chemical weapons (said by some to have been deployed from helicopters), are prepared to order the killing of any number of Iranians in order to maintain their own power...

I’ve received what purports to be a statement from Mousavi’s Office in Tehran.  Like everyone else covering the revolution, I get a lot of material that can’t be authenticated, and one must always take such material with a healthy dose of skepticism.  That said, the person who sent this to me is undoubtedly in touch with the Mousavi people on the ground, that much is certain.  His information has been proven reliable throughout this period.  So while the following open letter carefully puts distance between the author(s) and Mousavi himself, I am quite sure that at a minimum it accurately...

Mousavi Accuses Obama of 'Misleading the World' Sunday, June 21, 2009 1:38 PM Author and foreign policy expert Michael Ledeen has published a letter reportedly from the office of Mir Hossein Mousavi, in which the Iranian opposition leader criticizes President Barack Obama for saying Mousavi and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad are "two of a kind." The letter, addressed to Obama, takes the president to task for the remark, calling it "a grave and deep insult, not just to Mr. Mousavi but especially against the judgment of the Iranian people, against our moral conviction and intelligence, especially those of the young...

Everything is always about HIM. America before HIM was deeply flawed, requiring worldwide apologies to everyone who will listen. Given the hatred that failure has for success, that is always a way to draw crowds and admiration. With he possibility of a second Iranian revolution, Obama can't help but make it about HIM, HIS speech, HIS Hamlet act with regard to Iranian leadership. Who should HE anoint; who should he hallow with his words? Outside of HIS narcissistic orbit, Michael Ledeen notes ... He probably thinks he’s in a bind (he isn’t, actually). He probably thinks that if he condemns...

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...

No president in modern times has managed to conceal so much of his biography as this one. The journalists assigned to the Obama beat seem to have lost their traditional avidity for digging out the missing details. We do not have a medical report, or a college transcript from Columbia, or a notion of how well he did in Harvard Law School. These things are not automatically significant, but they can be. Nobody thinks the president has some basic medical problem. He shows every sign of being in excellent physical condition. But so did John F. Kennedy, who turned out...

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...

Sgt Ryan Weemer, accused of killing an unarmed man during the battle of Fallujah. Acquitted by a jury of eight officers who had been in combat. Good thing Jack Murtha wasn't on the jury; he would have likely voted for conviction before the first witness was sworn. Tell me again how he keeps winning elections. And then fix it, please.

Richard Beeston, of the London Times, is old enough to remember what happened back in 1981, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor. First, an Israeli went around to all the allied countries, warning that somebody had better do something soon. Nobody did. So the Israelis did it by themselves. Beeston retells that story in the process of warning us that the Israelis have been doing the same thing of late, this time with regard to the Iranian nuclear project. He thinks that the new Israeli government has at least three men who are experienced in dangerous operations. He notes...

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...

Story #4: Ledeen: Alexis de Tocqueville on the End of America March 6, 2009 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I had been meaning all week to share with you something that Michael Ledeen posted at his pajamas blog called Faster, Please!Michael Ledeen is a genuinely brilliant conservative, and he doesn't go in for dividing the movement. He used to write a lot of National Review Online, now has his own blog. He's been reading de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville who came to the United States in our early years and tried to figure out what made us work, and he did....

We came to Washington in 1977, and Jimmy Carter had just been inaugurated. So I well remember the years of malaise and humiliation, the stagflation, chilly offices in the winter, the rapidly expanding power of the Soviet Union, the appeasement campaign from Europe and from a clear majority of American intellectuals, the hostage seizure in Tehran, the awful realization that we might lose the Cold War after all. And in the midst of it all, the emergence of Ronald Reagan, his surprising electoral victory, and the amazing recovery of American will and American energy. There was a lot to worry...

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...

Newsweek magazine, which has given us many of the most damaging deceptions about America in recent years (remember the “Koran-Down-the-Toilet” hoax?), now weighs in with a pretentious and embarrassingly ignorant cover story, “We Are All Socialists Now.” To be sure, the basic theme–that the huge “stimulus” and the big big big TARP is leading once-capitalist America down the dangerous road to socialism–is not limited to the skinny weekly. You hear it all over the place, from Right to Left, from talk radio to the evening news (or so I am told; personally, I haven’t watched an evening news broadcast since...

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...

After years of refusing to see Iran’s aggressive intentions, most sensible observers of things Middle Eastern now recognize that the most important terrorist organizations, from Islamic Jihad to Hezbollah and Hamas, are essentially Iranian proxies. Figaro this weekend carries [1] a story bluntly headlined “Iran Behind Hamas’ Grad Missiles,” and flatly states that Hamas military commanders have been trained in Iran and Syria to use the deadliest missiles in their inventory. The battle of Gaza is therefore the second between Israel and Iran in two and half years, the first being the 2006 conflict with Hezbollah (which, lest we forget,...

Normally, Michael Ledeen wouldn’t qualify as an optimist, especially on Iran.  That’s what makes his column today on the mullahcracy’s fortunes interesting reading, as Ledeen sees the regime teetering after its proxies have lost ground.  But is Ledeen a little too hopeful? First of all, the dramatic drop in oil prices is devastating to the mullahs, who had planned to be able to fund terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.  Suddenly their bottom line is tinged with red, and this carries over onto their domestic balance sheets, which were already demonstrably shaky (they were forced to...

Here is one of the biggest stories to come out of the Middle East in quite some time. You probably can’t find it in the New York Slimes or the Washington Compost (copyright, Mark Levin), but rather on the exceptionally useful web site of our military Voila’: "TIKRIT, Iraq – Eighteen females in northern Iraq who were associated with Al-Qaeda in Iraq suicide bombing cells turned themselves into Coalition forces on Nov. 26. The females were persuaded by their mullahs and fathers to cease their training in suicide operations and reconcile. Today, these women took the first step in reconciliation...

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...

November 14, 2008, 0:00 p.m. Know Thy EnemyInside the Mind. By Michael Ledeen Laurent Murawiec’s The Mind of Jihad is, at last, a book on radical Islam that does it all. Unlike many engaged in the heated debate over the nature of our enemies, Murawiec does not believe that ancient texts tell us all we need to know. He insists that all ideas change over time, even those believed to have been dictated by God’s angel. He has therefore immersed himself not only in the sacred texts of Islam but also in the richly variegated speeches, writings, and actions...

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,...

There's one thing that has my dander flying: the snooty treatment of Palin. It’s as if that old New Yorker cover–the one that shows Manhattan occupying most of the map of the United States, then the Mississippi River and fly-over country in a small strip, then San Francisco and Los Angeles in a larger area–has now become the template for all proper thinkers. I’m sure lots of folks in fly-over country are enraged by this, but many others want to have a seat at the table, want to join the celebrities, want to be thought of as serious thinkers. And...

Trends October 16th, 2008 It seems to me that nobody in the MSM has pointed out the clear shift to the right throughout the West in recent months. France (Sarkozy), Italy (Berlusconi), Austria, and now Canada. Australia’s a bit of an outlier, but the new leftist government has proven centrist, a clear recognition that the Australian electorate was just tired of Howard and wanted to play with a new kid. I think the repeated failure of referenda on Europe is part of this trend. A lot of this has to do with a slow, reluctant recognition of the threat of...

Dear Mahmoud I wrote a letter to President Ahmadinejad, posted on NRO on Monday. I thought you’d want to see it: I’m writing to you about death, one of your favorite themes. Your adult life has revolved around it. You’re from the Revolutionary Guards, the military organization that was created in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970s. The then-incipient Revolutionary Guards were trained there by the expert terrorists of al Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s gang of killers (Sunnis, by the way, as you well know). One day, the camp was bombed by the Israelis, and a considerable number of...

In Tocqueville on American Character, I recounted a fascinating trip that the great Frenchman took in 1831 to the then-frontier, a bit north of Buffalo. He walked across the border with Canada, reminded himself that the settlers on both sides were culturally and ethnically identical, and then remarked on the dramatic difference in character between the Americans and the Canadians. You couldn’t miss it. On the Canadian side, the roads were good, the streets were laid out in an orderly fashion, and the houses were built to last. On the American side, everything was temporary; the houses were thrown together...

Over and over again, in tones ranging from annoyance to paternalistic, the pundits tell us that “there is no military option” with regard to the Russian invasion of Georgia. And in case you missed the point, they will tell you that we’re not going to war with Russia over this particular crisis. Not for little Georgia, so unimportant, so far away. It’s very hard to find any of the leading commentators who thinks otherwise. It’s an odd way to formulate the issue, since Russia has gone to war with us. Georgia is our ally. As of the time of the...