Free Republic

The Wider War MICHAEL LEDEEN March 3, 2007 (excerpt) "We have decided to fight in one place at a time, secure that area, and then move on. That isn't good enough, because it gives our enemies the luxury of attacking us where, when and how they choose. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan will ever have decent security so long as we only play defense; we have to attack our enemies when we wish, not respond to their initiatives, and their most important operational bases are outside Iraq and Afghanistan." (excerpt) "It doesn't require more boots on the ground or bombing raids....

Beyond Balochistan By Michael Ledeen Among the many peoples who compose Iran, the Baloch are perhaps under the greatest threat, for their “homeland” occupies territory in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and they have long since mastered the arts of both political maneuver and asymmetric warfare against more powerful enemies. The Balochistan People’s Front of Iran, which has claimed credit for several recent attacks on the regime’s security forces in the area, has issued a fascinating and potentially important assessment of these activities. It’s a well written and well argued “lessons learned” from the point of view of an armed resistance...

Iranian Dissident Trapped in Moscow Airport Iranian dissident Zahra Kamalfar has been living with her children under unspeakable conditions in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport for 73 days. A one-time demonstrator against the extremist theocracy with a lengthy prison sentence, she escaped from an Iranian prison when on a two-day furlough to visit her children. BY Michael Ledeen This video documents an all-too common tragedy: Iranian opponents of the regime wandering the world in search of a country willing to let them live in safety. In many ways, it is reminiscent of the plight of the European Jews...

Cognitive Dissonance The Bush administration on Iran. By Michael Ledeen She’s a Renaissance woman, whose talents run from scholarship to music and sport. But in this interview Condoleezza Rice often seems oddly detached from the life-and-death quality of the war against the terror masters. Indeed, she doesn’t even call it a war, and the things she says about it are sometimes striking — headline quality remarks — but more often very peculiar. To begin with, she doesn’t expect us to win this “battle, if you will, or a struggle,” during the Bush presidency. Her mission for the next two years...

It’s notable, I think, that religion — not so long ago pronounced irrelevant by most everyone in proper society — now dominates the global debate. Even a Communist like Hugo Chavez used religious terms to denounce W., perhaps because he is now in a tag team with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who speaks for a theocracy. But despite the fundamental importance of religion, most of our sages and scribblers are poorly equipped to deal with it, as you can see from the awkward coverage of the pope’s speech at Regensberg. It was, as you’d expect from a pope, a religious text, but...

It’s notable, I think, that religion — not so long ago pronounced irrelevant by most everyone in proper society — now dominates the global debate. Even a Communist like Hugo Chavez used religious terms to denounce W., perhaps because he is now in a tag team with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who speaks for a theocracy. But despite the fundamental importance of religion, most of our sages and scribblers are poorly equipped to deal with it, as you can see from the awkward coverage of the pope’s speech at Regensberg. It was, as you’d expect from a pope, a religious text, but...

Michael Rubin The U.S. is losing in Iraq because American politicians and the general public have not decided they want or need to win. Many congressmen look at Iraq through the lens of the 2006 election: They care neither how their words embolden the enemy nor how their grandstanding impacts Iraq. Meanwhile, many commentators have cast accuracy aside to cater to, and cash in on, public ennui. Iraqis are now as pessimistic as they have ever been. Corruption and organized crime run rampant. True, some metrics are positive: Oil production is on the rebound, shops are opening, agricultural production is...

A Window of Opportunity July 20, 2006 National Review Online Michael Ledeen 9/11 happened when Osama bin Laden looked at us, and thought we were ready to be had. We were politically divided, and squabbling over everything. We clearly were not prepared to take casualties in direct combat. The newly elected president seemed unable to make a tough decision. And so Osama attacked, expecting to deliver a decisive blow to our national will, expecting we would turn tail and run, as we had in Somalia, and expecting he would then be free to concentrate his energies on the defeat of...

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...

This in from al-Reuters: Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi’ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday...Iraqi security officials said IRANIAN FIGHTERS HAD BEEN CAPTURED IN THE FIGHTING (emphasis added)...The U.S. military had no immediate comment. In recent days there have been several stories further documenting the Iranian role in the terror war in Iraq, especially in the south, where Tehran has been working assiduously for several years to create a regional Islamic republic. So the al-Reuters report should not be a surprise. But it gives us the opportunity to reflect on three serious questions, none of which...

http://corner.nationalreview.com/print/ Tell the Commandant [Michael Ledeen] I've just sent this letter to General Michael Hagee, the Commandant of the Marine Corps (comrel@hqmc.usmc.mil). You might want to pile on: Dear General Hagee, I'm dismayed by your recent behavior. It seems to me an outrage, and quite possibly illegal to boot, to put Marines in the brig and to shackle them, when no charges have been filed against them. It seems to me an outrage for you to brief the likes of Congressman Murtha before the investigation was complete, and even then you should have told him to wait, to let justice...

“So how exactly do you figure out when something is real, and when it’s a deception?” I was talking via my rickety ouija board with the spirit of James Jesus Angleton, the former chief of CIA counterintelligence, somewhere in the Great Beyond, concerning the much ballyhooed document found in Iraq and published with great gravitas all over the world. Angleton seemed much amused by the document, which he dismissed as a manifest phony. JJA: Well, the assumption about this piece of paper is that it reflects the thinking of at least one important terrorist leader, right? Otherwise it wouldn’t be...

<p>It didn’t take long to start pooh-poohing the significance of eliminating Zarqawi. MSNBC/al-Reuters headline: ‘Zarqawi more myth than Man.’ And of course, the hate-America crowd hinted the ‘timing’ was peculiar (Bush needed a boost in the polls). Zarqawi was a very important man in the terror network and welcomed by the radical Shiite regime in Tehran. he was more than a leader of one faction in a religious war; he promoted religious conflict as a tactic to destabilize Iraq and drive out the Coalition. He and his Iranian backers/masters promoted all kinds of internal Iraqi conflict: Kurds against Arabs, Turkamen against Kurds, anything that worked. The terror masters put aside their differences and made a war plan in which Sunni and Shia, Syrian and Saudi, Iranian and Iraqi cooperated against their common satanic enemy, the United States. Another important fact emerged from the accounts of the attack on Zarqawi: we killed two women in the same house. because they were his key intelligence officers in the jihadist terror organizations, despite endless citations from the Koran demanding their subservience. Theywere important components of the terror headquarters. And second, when our soldiers enter terrorists’ quarters and kill women in the ensuing firefight, it is highly probable the women may be terrorists also. Zarqawi played on a global scale. Reports from Canada recount contacts between the ‘home-grown’ terrorists arrested by the Mounties and Zarqawi: ‘Mississauga News,’ June 7: ‘The arrest of 17 suspects...is said to be the latest stage in dismantling a terrorist network that’s linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi...’).and seem linked to FBI arrests in Atlanta and others in Sarajevo, England, and Denmark. The public announcement a few months ago that Zarqawi was no longer the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, that henceforth the Iraqi Sunni ‘community’ would run the terror war there stated Zarqawi would devote his efforts to the international jihad.</p>

<p>It didn’t take long for the yackers and scribblers to start pooh-poohing the significance of the elimination of Zarqawi. The MSNBC/al-Reuters headline said it all: ‘Zarqawi more myth than Man.’ And of course, the hate-America crowd was hinting that the ‘timing’ was peculiar (Bush needed a boost in the polls), as if killing Zarqawi was just a matter of giving the order, rather than a difficult operation made possible by the great performance of our Special Forces and the active cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders in the Anbar Province, plus the Jordanians, plus the various party leaders in Baghdad.</p>

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...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version April 07, 2006, 5:21 a.m. Your Own Lying Eyes Why aren’t reporters embedded with new Iraqi forces? On March 26, an Iraqi special-forces unit attacked a building on the outskirts of northeast Baghdad, where they had tracked a group of terrorists. They had good reason to do so, because three members of the unit had been kidnapped by the terrorists, and were savagely tortured and killed. Their fingers and toes were cut off, their joints were penetrated with an electric drill, and they were eviscerated while still alive. It later...

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...

PREPARED TESTIMONY OF DR. MICHAEL A. LEDEEN, RESIDENT SCHOLAR IN THE FREEDOM CHAIR AT THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, TO THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS I am delighted and honored by your invitation to discuss American policy toward Iran, but before I do that, I hope I will be permitted a few personal words in appreciation of the welcome contribution that you, Chairman Hyde, have made to our country and to the tenor of life in Washington. Our national political debate has long been very fractious, and this moment is especially nasty. But you are a rare man, Mr. Chairman....

Michael Ledeem wrote: according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

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...

In response to Iran's call for the elimination of Israel, Wednesday evening in Rome, thousands, probably tens of thousands, will demonstrate in support of the Jewish state. The demonstration has been organized by Giuliano Ferrara, the larger-than-life editor of the feisty daily newspaper il Foglio, and the demonstrators will range from members of some Italian Islamic organizations to foreign minister Giancarlo Fini (long a bete noire of America's "leading" newspapers and networks), just back from a trip to the Middle East. It takes courage to stand up publicly for Israel against the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, especially in contemporary...

This is what we're up against. It is a frenetic network of fanatical terrorists, supported by a group of mad mullahs hell-bent on our destruction. Forget about the microanalysis of the Iraqi 'insurgency.' This is not primarily a war conducted by angry Baathist remnants of Saddam's bloody regime; it's much bigger than that, and the epicenter of the whole thing is in Tehran, and its ideology is brutally enunciated by Ahmadi Nezhad. Britain, France, and Italy are at least expelling some of the jihadis, along with some of the most fanatical religious leaders. We are not, so far as one...

Now that the president has (finally) conceded that (most of) our enemies in the Middle East are actually fanatical Muslims, he should realize that his initial intuition about the war on terrorism--that we are fighting tyrannical regimes and their murderous footsoldiers--was correct. And this, in turn, should encourage him to unleash our greatest weapon: the people who live there. The tyrannical Islamofascists obviously despise and dread their people; otherwise they wouldn’t be constantly seeking new ways to make sure there is no independent thought and certainly no independent action. All those madrasas, for example, are extended experiments in what used...

Our policymakers have thus far utterly failed to design anything worthy of the name of an Iran policy, even though it is arguably the single most important challenge we face. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley recently answered a question about Iran policy by saying that we did indeed have a policy, but we hadn’t yet written it down. This is reminiscent of the old riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it: can there be a policy if nobody can define it? Lacking any defined policy, we can only judge the...

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...

The big picture of our war.The al Qaeda watchers have a new chant: They tell us that the once-centralized terror organization is now largely decentralized, and that the separate cells have a great deal of autonomy. Osama bin Laden may still provide the ideology, but the locals do their own planning and operations. Thus, the Washington Post found that the expert consensus on the London attacks was that, yes, these people might be linked to al Qaeda in a broad, political/religious/ideological way, but the operation itself, like many in the recent past (Madrid, for example), was a local product.

It's symptomatic of the failure of strategic vision from which our chatterers and leaders currently suffer, that so many words and so much energy are being wasted on the immense charade that goes under the name of Iranian "elections." Any normal person familiar with the Islamic republic knows that these are not elections at all, and for extras have nothing to do with the future of the Iranian nation. They are a mise en scene, an entertainment, a comic opera staged for our benefit. The purpose of the charade, pure and simple, is to deter us from supporting the forces...

HUME: Now, in one recent such soccer match ... women were present. What's that all about? That's not permitted, correct? LEDEEN: Well, it hasn't been permitted, but they're now pretending to have elections. And they will pretend to have elected some kind of reformer. And so in the midst of this great pretense of elections — it's not an election at all. It's a beauty contest and a charade. HUME: Why is that so? LEDEEN: Because they pick the candidates. The supreme leader — over 1,000 people wanted to run for president. They picked six. HUME: And this is all...

The cheerless creatures who rule the Islamic republic of Iran have developed a particularly wicked use of torture. Not only do they use the full panoply of physical and psychological horrors on their captives, but they then send the victims back into their homes and neighborhoods for brief periods of "parole" or "medical leave," so that their friends and families can see with their own eyes the brutal effects of the torture. The clear intent of this practice is to intimidate the population at large, to break the will of would-be dissenters and opponents, and to maximize the effects of...

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...

A couple of years ago, before I learned better, I was on a BBC radio broadcast in which they had a reporter on the scene in Tehran reporting on big riots in Tehran following a soccer game. The BBC woman in London asked me what I thought about it all, and I said it was a sign of discontent with the regime. She commented, "But we have soccer hooligans in England, too, don't we?" And I said, "yes, but they aren't burning effigies of Tony Blair. The Iranians are burning pictures of Khamenei and Rafsanjani." It was a wasted effort,...

From al-Reuters, we have a masterpiece of disinformation: ISFAHAN — Iranian authorities beat up and tear gassed exuberant young revellers as they breathed new life into a pre-Islamic fire festival with a night of dancing, flirting and fireworks. The Islamic Republic, which has an awkward relationship with its ancient Zoroastrian religion, only gave guarded recognition to the "Chaharshanbe Souri" festival last year. The Islamic republic does not have "an awkward relationship" with Zoroastrianism. It forbids Zoroastrian practices, including the celebration of the Zoroastrian New Year, Norooz. Forget about "guarded recognition;" there is a ban. The mullahs know something that al-Reuters...

During the long months between the destruction of the Taliban's nightmare state in Afghanistan and the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, you had only to carefully read the newspapers to see what was coming, because the Middle East was suddenly full of "impossible" activities. My favorite example is the numerous airplanes flying back and forth between Baghdad and Tehran. For many years, the Baghdad-Tehran route had been reserved for warplanes planning to drop bombs. Following the liberation of Afghanistan, when the terror masters of Iran and Syria "knew" that we would henceforth focus our wrath on Saddam Hussein, the planes...

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 concluded that they all failed because the Iranian tyrants are not interested in...

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."...

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."...

Bit by bit, we are getting a fuller picture of our enemies on the ground in the Middle East, and the fanciful legend of a bunch of religiously inspired fanatics is eroding. If only someone could convince our so-called intelligence agencies to step away from their false assumptions (Porter Goss was on display last week, babbling about the "Sunni insurgency," as if that nonsense had not been exploded 30 years ago), we might make more progress. Iraqis, who are the primary victims of the terror war, know better. Listen to Iraq the Model last Friday: The (televised) confessions have shown...

Michael Ledeen has been described as "a Renaissance man... in the tradition of Machiavelli." Currently the holder the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael is one of the leading experts on intelligence, terrorism and international politics. Formerly the Italian correspondent for the "New Republic", advisor and consultant in the Reagan Administration, lecturer and historian, he is also a prolific author, most recently of the bestselling "The War Against the Terror Masters; How it Happened. Where We Are Now. How We Will Win". I decided to have a quick chat to him about Iraq, Iran and the democratic revolution...

Watersheds We live in a time of democratic revolution. Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one? The Middle East is boiling, as the failed tyrants scramble to come to terms with the political tsunami unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq. The power of democratic revolution can be seen in every country in the region. Even the Saudi royal family has had to stage a farcical "election." But this first halting step has fooled no one. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted, and only the Wahhabi establishment was permitted to organize. The results will not...

Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one? The Middle East is boiling, as the failed tyrants scramble to come to terms with the political tsunami unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq. The power of democratic revolution can be seen in every country in the region. Even the Saudi royal family has had to stage a farcical "election." But this first halting step has fooled no one. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted, and only the Wahhabi establishment was permitted to organize. The results will not satisfy any serious person. As Iraq constitutes a new,...

President Bush promised the Iranian people that we would support them in their struggle for freedom, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has reiterated that promise on her trip to Europe. Many of the chatterers — the same dismal theorists who didn't believe that the Iraqis really wanted to be free — are trying very hard to pretend it isn't so, but the president's words don't leave much wiggle room (although the State Department's spokesman tried; he trotted out one of Powell's favorite lines while Condi was away: "we don't have a policy of regime change in Iran." He should...

It's hard to imagine the MSM getting stupider, but there they go again...a raft of articles today on the "pro-Iranian Shi'ite list" in the Iraqi elections. It's totally wrong. The Iranians dread the Iraqi Shiites, because the Iraqis, from Sistani to Chalabi to Hakim and on down, all oppose the Iranian heresy of the "Supreme Leader," a cleric at the top of the state. The traditional Shiite view is that such an event can only take place when the "12th Imam" returns from his disappearance--more than a millennium ago--to claim rightful leadership of the entire Muslim world. Until then, people...

Tony Blankley thinks that Sy Hersh probably committed espionage with his latest article in The New Yorker, in which he breathlessly speaks of secret commando teams and joint American-Israeli efforts to target Iranian nuclear facilities. My pal Roger Simon rather suspects that Hersh was simply used by the Bush administration to make the mullahs even more nervous than usual. Hersh himself seems to think of himself as a seer, a prophet of upcoming military actions by the United States against a collection of terror-supporting enemies, starting with Iran. This is clear enough from his title, "The Coming Wars." I have...

A week or so back, I criticized the Washington Post for giving a lot of space to an article that basically "outed" a CIA aircraft, and only in passing raised what I took to be the main issue, namely the transportation of captured terrorist suspects to countries where they could be interrogated more vigorously than in the United States. The Post journalist had briefly quoted Michael Scheuer, the recently retired CIA officer who became a best-selling author writing under "Anonymous," to the effect that the philosophical subleties of this issue would not have disturbed his former employers. They would simply...

Porter Goss continues to liberate the CIA from the failures of the recent past, and this might be a good time to find out who's really good in the Intelligence Directorate. Goss might give them a quiz. Obviously, it has to be a serious, scientific kind of quiz. No leading questions, because that would be unworthy of the institution. So maybe the first question might be, "all right, the Sunni Zarqawi gets help from the Iranian Shi’ites. But you don’t really think that Sunnis and Shi’ites cooperate on other issues do you?" Anyone who says "no" should be shipped off...

Yushchenko seems to have won, big big bigtime, in the Ukraine. Big turnout--around 78%--and big margin, about 15 points. It's a dramatic and important moment, and the winning forces of the "orange revolution" are right to talk about democratic revolution. Here is yet another case where the forces of repression seemed to have all the advantages, including the reconstituted KGB and the full, cynical, support of a nasty Russian tyrant. Yet freedom won. For those of us who have long preached the power of democratic revolution, it's a happy day, and I hope that our leaders draw the appropriate lessons:...

The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate--the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy--portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision. For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their...

The notion that we are fighting an "insurgency" largely organized and staffed by former elements of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime is now fully enshrined as an integral piece of the conventional wisdom. Like earlier bits of the learned consensus — to which it is closely linked — it is factually wrong and strategically dangerous. That it is factually wrong is easily demonstrated, for the man invariably branded the most powerful leader of the terrorist assault against Iraq — Abu Musab al Zarqawi — is not a Baathist, and indeed is not even an Iraqi. He is a Palestinian Arab from...