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Nothing to Lose But Their Chains (Ledeen)
Spectator ^ | 11/20/03 | Michael Ledeen

Posted on 11/20/2003 1:00:56 PM PST by freedom44

The most controversial part of George W. Bush’s vision of the war against terrorism is his insistence that this is a war against tyranny, and that we will not be able to win the war until we have helped democratic revolutions succeed in the key countries, those that provide the terrorists with much of their vital wherewithal. It’s controversial for varying reasons, depending on the critic. Some say that countries are marginal in the terror universe; it’s transnational organisations like al-Qa’eda which we must defeat. Others are upset because they think the President is declaring war on any country, anywhere, that helps the terrorists, and they ask where the money and the troops will come from. Still others are critical of Bush’s belief that the Middle East can be successfully democratised at all, and wish that the United States would either give up this crazy dream, or get serious about building an empire and find proper viceroys, etc.

A bit over a year ago I published a book that argued precisely this thesis (The War Against the Terror Masters), and my main complaint about the coalition’s performance thus far is that we have been too cautious, too slow, and, above all, that we have failed to support the democratic opposition forces which threaten the countries that sponsor terror and are primarily responsible for the terror war we now face in Iraq (and which I predicted many months before the liberation of Iraq).

Our enemies in Damascus, Tehran and Riyadh are all tyrants, which is their common denominator. Note that our enemies are not, as is commonly presumed, jihadists, since the Baathist regime in Syria, like its late brother in Iraq, came to power as a secular Arab socialist regime, not as a step along the road to a fundamentalist caliphate. This is not a clash of civilisations; it’s an old-fashioned war of freedom against tyranny. The President is entirely right on this point.

Our failures to date are primarily the result of bad intelligence and insufficient attention to the peoples of the region (which go hand in hand, you’ll notice). If we had supported the Iraqi democratic opposition (as was required by American law, and for which considerable sums were appropriated but never disbursed, because the state department didn’t think it was a good idea), we would be in a better position to find out what is really going on inside the country, instead of having one general tell us that we’re mostly under attack from foreigners, and another general say no, it’s mostly enraged Saddam followers.

The CIA and the state department have seemingly spent more energy on defeating the Iraqi National Congress — the umbrella opposition organisation led by Ahmad Chalabi — than on overthrowing Saddam and working with the opposition to plan for the postwar period. Iran has created at least a dozen radio and television stations to spread its poison throughout Iraq, while the United States only recently got its first national radio station on the air. If we were serious about enlisting the people, we’d have been prepared to talk to them from the outset. So when you think about the Dubya Doctrine of spreading democratic revolution, remember that he’s got the bureaucracy working against him.

It was a mistake to think about Iraq as a thing in itself, as if we could detach it from the regional context and ‘solve’ it alone. During the 14 or 15 months from Afghanistan to Iraq, the terror masters made a war plan that called for replicating the successes of Lebanon in the Eighties: kidnapping, assassination, suicide bombs and terrorist attacks — mostly from Hezbollah — eventually drove out both American and French armed forces. They made no secret of their intentions — Iranian and Syrian leaders openly announced them, but the war planners apparently either ignored them or laughed it off.

Iran has always been the most powerful and the most lethal of the terror masters (Hezbollah is an Iranian creation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Islamic Republic), but it also holds another record of sorts: it is the first example of a totally failed Shiite Islamist state. The crazed leaders of the Islamic Republic have wrecked and ransacked the country for their own personal profit, oppressed, enslaved, murdered and tortured the Iranian people, and supported the killers of thousands of innocent people all over the world. The Iranian people hate this regime. They have expressed their hatred in every imaginable way, from mass demonstrations to amazingly candid replies to pollsters, to sending heartbreaking faxes and emails to people in the West who seem to understand their plight and share their dreams of freedom.

If the mullahs were brought down, they would certainly be replaced by a democratic government that separated mosque and state and gave the Iranian people a major voice in the country’s policies. There are very few knowledgeable people who doubt this, and this has been a major theme of the Dubya Doctrine all along. But to our shame the words have not been accompanied by action, either in Washington or London or any other Western capital, even though all are agreed that Iran is the leading terror master, that many of our troubles in Iraq are the result of Iranian actions or the actions of Iranian proxies, and that the Iranian people are ready to take to the streets against the mullahcracy in the same way the Serbs organised to bring down Milosevic.

Iran is ready for democratic revolution, and it is the key to the terror network. Ergo we should be supporting democratic revolution in Iran, and we should get on with it quickly before they show us that they have finally built an atomic bomb. It is hard to argue that Iran is somehow incapable of democracy, or that the mullahcracy should be tolerated any longer, let alone supported. Yet European and UN ‘diplomatic missions’ regularly show up in Tehran, occasionally mutter a few critical remarks about human rights violations or suspicious uranium samples, and then go away. I think we would do a lot better to recite the known facts about Iran every day, and give the Iranian people the support they deserve: round-the-clock broadcasting to encourage them to be brave, money to support potential strikes in the country’s crucial oil and gas and textile industries, communications toys like satellite phones so that they can communicate with one another when the regime shuts down the cells, as was done last summer on the eve of an announced national strike. Instead, we have remained aloof and even made highly misleading remarks (take the deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who proclaimed Iran ‘a democracy’; and the secretary of state Colin Powell, who, on the verge of the planned uprising last summer, said the United States really didn’t want to get involved in the Iranians’ ‘family squabble’.) Many Iranians felt betrayed, since they had earlier heard the President’s numerous statements about the need to spread freedom in their region.

My guess is that if we show we are serious about supporting the democratic opposition in Iran, the mullahcracy will fall and the contagion will reach all areas of the Middle East. Indeed, some of that has happened already; for example, we have recently seen the first pro-democracy demonstrations in the history of Saudi Arabia. And it cannot be an accident that those demonstrations came shortly after the liberation of Iraq, and the Arabs saw more than 200 Iraqi newspapers spring up, along with countless magazines, new courses at the universities and other signs of intellectual creativity that hadn’t been seen for generations.

I do not believe that Arab or Muslim DNA is mysteriously lacking a democracy chromosome or a freedom gene. I don’t think that democratic revolution is all that difficult, or that it requires some key sociological component such as a middle class or a historical event such as a Reformation or an industrial revolution (Athenian democracy had none of the above). I believe that the advantages of a free society are pretty clear to almost the entire population of the planet, that most people would choose to be free if they were free to choose, and that, thereafter, some would do well and others not, just as in the past. There is no lack of evidence for this, in the Middle East or elsewhere.

For many years the same sorts of objection to the feasibility of democracy in the Middle East were raised against democracy in South America. The Latinos, it was said, just weren’t cut out for it; they liked caudillos too much. And yet during the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency democratic revolution swept the entire region. There were only two elected governments in South America at the beginning, and only two unelected ones in the whole region when he handed the keys to the White House to Bush the Elder.

I think we are on the verge of the same kind of revolutionary transformation in the Middle East today. The real question is not whether it can be done, but whether we have the will to do it. We haven’t been very good in Afghanistan, where American negotiators unaccountably agreed to the creation of an ‘Islamic Republic’ when we should have vetoed the very idea. We haven’t been nearly as active as we should have been in embracing the Iraqis, who have proved many of the pessimists totally wrong: there hasn’t been a religious or ethnic civil war, the Iraqi Shiites have not been manipulated by the Iranians, and there are plenty of talented and educated Iraqis who, given the chance, could do a thoroughly presentable job of managing their country. We’re getting better, but the people of the region are running ahead of us whenever they can. There was a brief ‘Prague Spring’ in Damascus after the death of the old tyrant, but it was crushed soon after. I don’t think it will be that difficult to find suitably democratic forces in Syria in the future, especially if we deal effectively with Iran.

The main thing is to see the situation plainly: we are at war with a group of tyrants who sponsor a network of terrorists. Our most potent weapon against them is their own people, who hate them and wish to be free. We don’t need to invade Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia, but we certainly need to support the calls for freedom coming from within those tyrannical countries.

And that’s the Dubya Doctrine.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: arabworld; bushdoctrine; michaelledeen; middleeast
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To: billbears
No,no, Syria is the key.

This message brought to you by the Axis of Weasels Web Ring.
61 posted on 11/21/2003 8:13:23 AM PST by tet68
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To: JohnGalt
he was right to break the law?

Oh, the law was broken all over the place during the Reagan administration. For instance the Voice of America was used to send signals to Solidarity in Poland, a strict violation of American federal law. CIA director William Casey arranged this, and he didn't give a flyin'. Neither did he back in '44 when, in possibly the single greatest feat in the history of spookdom, he built an intelligence network of two hundred agents in Nazi Germany proper, in the space of months, starting with zero agents. He used anti-Nazi POWs because there weren't enough allied agents fluent in German. This was a blatant violation of the Geneva Accords (even though the POWs were more than willing participants).

You would apparently have preferred that we were good little republicans, stayed in our box, never creatively bent (or broke) the rules, and certainly never violated the precious sovereignty of the Soviet Union or the governing bodies of its slave states.

Of course a plausible result of your preference would be that Soviet nuclear missles would still target your family, maybe from bases in Mexico.

62 posted on 11/21/2003 8:42:12 AM PST by Stultis
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To: billbears
I thought Iraq was the key to the terror network....

No. Certainly Iraq was part of the terror network. It was also the most brittle regime, and the case in which the legal basis for action was most abundant, and was therefore the best place to start. In Iran means other than war are available -- and vastly preferable -- if only we would pursue them with a (literal) vengance. But Iran has been the lead terrorist state for over twenty years. There's no doubt about that.

63 posted on 11/21/2003 8:51:33 AM PST by Stultis
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To: Stultis
You 'girly men' are something else; you take credit for the fact the sun came up this morning at the same moment you send teenage girls off to act as human bait for cave dwellers.


"were good little republicans" just as the father of our country hoped in his farewell address; that would be the equivalent of that skirt Leftwinger you have on your profile page.
64 posted on 11/21/2003 8:56:15 AM PST by JohnGalt ("How few were left who had seen the Republic!"- Tacitus)
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To: JohnGalt
Of course the UN is a joke, which is why Reagan wanted to run a clean ship here at home after the failure of the '70s to provide leadership.

You're a loon. Reagan was behaving just like a "neocon" (in many ways he was one of the first of the "neocons"), authorizing deep, pervasive and multiple interventions into or undermining of "sovereign" foreign governments, and just generally violating the dictums of Galtism right and left virtually from day one in office.

65 posted on 11/21/2003 8:59:40 AM PST by Stultis
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To: Stultis
I am going to save this post.

It is very revealing; you are willing to throw Reagan under the bus to protect the behavior of the current Cabal who so fear the cave dwellers. I mean, at least the Soviet Union was a large state.

You really are just a Marxist anti-patriot at heart; no love for the Constitution, or the time wasting process of Congress; always ready to trade liberty to search out a new foreign monster to destroy.

I suspected as much, but today you really confirmed it for me.

Reagan was the best of his times, a liberal, but a patriot who genuinely loved the libertarian rhetoric he employed. While the neocons like your (worthless self) try to argue that it was Reagan's bold, if illegal maneuvering that won the Cold War, I trust the Russians who said it was merely Reagan riding his horse on the ranch, demonstrating American confidence with aesthetics rather than intrigue.

Somethings, you folks will never understand.
66 posted on 11/21/2003 9:07:37 AM PST by JohnGalt ("How few were left who had seen the Republic!"- Tacitus)
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To: Stultis
No. Certainly Iraq was part of the terror network.

Well that's not what we were told. Of course we were told there were active WMDs and we all know about those too don't we? The administration's excuses have gone from the definitive (existing WMDs, terrorist groups) to the ethereal (freedom, liberation, etc). And frankly there's not a reason that has even come close to explaining or excusing what has happened so far

But Iran has been the lead terrorist state for over twenty years. There's no doubt about that.

Whatever, just ignore the Saudis. They are the ones sending terrorists to Israel, they are the ones that have the money, but they're an 'ally' so we can't go after them...

67 posted on 11/21/2003 9:09:41 AM PST by billbears (Deo Vindice)
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To: JohnGalt
Love that speech from the Hubert Humphrey broad; do you like any conservatives?

Yeah. The Barry Goldwater (of '64) for instance. BTW, the '84 speech of that "Humphrey broad" or "skirt Leftwinger," as you call her, is widely considered (among conservatives) the finest speech given at a Republican National Conventions since Goldwater's broadside in '64.

68 posted on 11/21/2003 9:11:36 AM PST by Stultis
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To: freedom44
Our enemies in Damascus, Tehran and Riyadh are all tyrants, which is their common denominator.


The common denominator is that these people use the state as thier preferred means of collective action.

69 posted on 11/21/2003 9:15:03 AM PST by society-by-contract
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To: billbears
Certainly Iraq was part of the terror network.

Well that's not what we were told.

Oh, I see. You're part of the "you can only have one reason" crowd, just like the hard left. But then you are factually wrong here. The adminstration repeatedly said there were ties between Iraq and global terrorism, and between Iraq and al-Qaeda specifically. I don't know what planet you were on at the time.

70 posted on 11/21/2003 9:15:21 AM PST by Stultis
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To: billbears
But Iran has been the lead terrorist state for over twenty years. There's no doubt about that.

Whatever, just ignore the Saudis.

Yeah, and you're also part of the "if you can't do everything, all at once, then do nothing" crowd. Again, just like the hard left.

71 posted on 11/21/2003 9:17:58 AM PST by Stultis
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To: Stultis
Amongst ex-liberal Democrats, current leftwing Republican turncoats, you mean, right?
72 posted on 11/21/2003 9:47:15 AM PST by JohnGalt ("How few were left who had seen the Republic!"- Tacitus)
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To: JohnGalt; Stultis
Now for something completely different; addressing what Leeden actually wrote in this article (Though his Mussolini loving backround is interesting):

and that the Iranian people are ready to take to the streets against the mullahcracy in the same way the Serbs organised to bring down Milosevic.

While some protests have occured of considerable size in the larger citities of Iran that is no more indicitive of "revolution" about to happen than were the large protests in our cities during the 60's. There is a large resovoir of support for this regime from the "heartland" of Iran. Leeden makes far too much of college kid protests. The fact that these protests even happen at all is an admission that the Iranian regime is hardly even comparable to the tyranny of Sadaam which never saw such protests of any sort large or small. And Mr. Leeden is just being laughable if he thinks Serbs took to the streets and "took down" Milosevic.

If the mullahs were brought down, they would certainly be replaced by a democratic government that separated mosque and state and gave the Iranian people a major voice in the country’s policies. There are very few knowledgeable people who doubt this, and this has been a major theme of the Dubya Doctrine all along

This is simply just frightening. There is zero evidence for this statement. How are Afghanistan and Iraq going right now as far as "demcoracy" is concerned? The Afghan "governemnt" controls little more than a few blocks of government buildings in Kabul and not much else while the rest of the country is in control of various warlords and factios whose loyalty is tenuous to non existent. We don't have to even point to Iraq. Does Mr. Leeden just think "Democracy" magically appears? By the way- Iran has semi free elections right now.

But to our shame the words have not been accompanied by action, either in Washington or London or any other Western capital, even though all are agreed that Iran is the leading terror master, that many of our troubles in Iraq are the result of Iranian actions or the actions of Iranian proxies,

I am at loss for this. Mr. Leeden is blaming Shiite Iran for the problems we face in Iraq mostly from the Sunni triangle. The Shiite south and Basra are not nearly as Dangerous as Baghdad.

So much more that I could address- but these are just the most obvious things that struck me.

73 posted on 11/21/2003 10:07:33 AM PST by Burkeman1 ((If you see ten troubles comin down the road, Nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.))
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To: Stultis
Oh, I see. You're part of the "you can only have one reason" crowd, just like the hard left. But then you are factually wrong here. The adminstration repeatedly said there were ties between Iraq and global terrorism, and between Iraq and al-Qaeda specifically. I don't know what planet you were on at the time.

Ah but see Iraq was the leader in terrorism. Now they're not. The administration needs to make up its mind before they start rambling. Secondly none of the new reasons given were hardly even broached until the facts presented themselves that this 'threat' Iraq would possibly one day be would have never come to fruition at the pace Hussein was going.

Yeah, and you're also part of the "if you can't do everything, all at once, then do nothing" crowd

No, I'm part of the 'don't call your enemies allies' crowd. Saudi Arabia presented more of a threat than Iraq ever did. Especially considering there were no WMDs to speak of. And please no pictures or links to third world labs. None of the materials listed by President Bush in his SOTU have been found

74 posted on 11/21/2003 10:33:14 AM PST by billbears (Deo Vindice)
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To: JohnGalt
you are willing to throw Reagan under the bus to protect the behavior of the current Cabal

Ah, so now you're willing to (effectively) paint Reagan, like you do Dubya, as an idiot duped by a clever and devious cabal, all in the service or your ludicrous, gratiutious and overwrought jihad against the "neocons".

While the neocons like your (worthless self) try to argue that it was Reagan's bold, if illegal maneuvering that won the Cold War,

Er, yeah. BECAUSE IT WAS.

I trust the Russians who said it was merely Reagan riding his horse on the ranch, demonstrating American confidence with aesthetics rather than intrigue.

Stunning, but I actually gave you too much credit!!!! in the first paragraph I wrote above. You really believe this?! Sorry for the misinterpretation, but such open and willful idiocy is difficult to credit.

Now, granted, that Reagan's campaign against the Soviet Union was waged on mutliple fronts, and symbolism and imagery was one. But in case you haven't noticed (and apparently, somehow, you haven't) empires don't collapse under the onerous weight of inferior photo ops, and ruthless slave masters dominating the lives of millions and hundreds of millions have never been terrified into submission by clever displays of "aesthetics".

The main foci of Reagan's assault on the Soviets were legitimacy and economics. Both efforts extensively employed, at Reagan's personal direction or with his personal approval -- in addition to above-board and overt efforts -- exactly the bold and often quasi- or illegal efforts you stupidly deny.

The economic factor was almost certainly the key in bringing down the U.S.S.R. There's no way in hell Gorby would have launched Glasnost and Peristroika (or been allowed to) if the Soviet Union had not been in severe economic straights. The main reason for this condition, in turn, was a hard currency crisis that the Reagan administration systematically identified and and then purposefully and effectively exacerbated.

I can't even begin to catalog the profound and multiple violations of Galtism that were involved in this campaign alone. Let's start with covert arm twisting, undermining and sabotage of contractual agreements between Western European governments and the Soviet Union regarding the construction of a massive natural gas pipeline between Siberia and Czechoslovakia. This single project alone would have nearly doubled Russia's crucial hard currency income. Had it been completed on schedule and on scope it is perfectly plausible that the Soviet Union might still exist today.

BTW, when Reagan entered office he was assured by the State Department and most economic experts that the pipeline deal was far too advanced to halt or delay. The fact is that Reagan's spooks and warmongers had to drop their drawers and spray great yellow streams over the "sovereignty" and proprietary interests of collaborationist states and corporations to effectively dowse this deal, but thank God they did.

But all that's only the bare tip of a huge iceberg. The following book should help you start rising above your clueless comicbook history:

Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Peter Schweizer

75 posted on 11/21/2003 10:36:38 AM PST by Stultis
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To: Stultis
LOL

Keep reading your comic books...
76 posted on 11/21/2003 10:39:39 AM PST by JohnGalt ("How few were left who had seen the Republic!"- Tacitus)
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To: billbears
Ah but see Iraq was the leader in terrorism. Now they're not. The administration needs to make up its mind before they start rambling.

Er, the adminstration never said, nor implied, anything of the sort. (That Iraq was "the" leader of international terrorism.) You, sir, are rambling, flailing, and flat out making stuff up. Again, just like the hard left.

At the same time I grant that the admin haven't been anywhere near forthright enough, as per Ledeen's criticisms, about nailing Iran, which really is terrorism's leading state sponsor, as such -- but that's a separate matter from this pure invention of yours regarding what they said about Iraq.

Secondly none of the new reasons given were hardly even broached until the facts presented themselves that this 'threat' Iraq would possibly one day be would have never come to fruition at the pace Hussein was going.

Another PURE INVENTION! What planet were you on the last two years? The administration was ALWAYS clear that their were MULTIPLE reasons for deposing Saddam, even if the formal legal basis was nocompliance by Saddam with terms of surrender and U.N. resolutions.

77 posted on 11/21/2003 10:48:27 AM PST by Stultis
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To: JohnGalt
I'm not the one making the accusation here. You are. If you have some proof, post it or shut the f*** up.

I said it before. I'm not here to do your heavy lifting.

Only in the Bizzaro World does the one questioning the accuser have to provide proof for the accuser.

L

78 posted on 11/21/2003 10:48:38 AM PST by Lurker (Some people say you shouldn't kick a man when he's down. I say there's no better time to do it.)
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To: Lurker
I am not trying to convince you of anything, and I did not accuse you of anything so I am not sure what point you are trying to make. Bragging about how you refuse to look up any information on your own is a rather bizarre stance. Anyone who lacks the interest even to type google.com into their web bar, is beyond me.

There are plenty of books and reports on Iran-Contra, including one Ledeen himself wrote. Though he leaves out the trouble he got into when he was in Italy; Al Haig had to bail him out of that one.

I take it you found the Starr/Ray Report to be a complete effort as well, BTW.
79 posted on 11/21/2003 10:56:00 AM PST by JohnGalt ("How few were left who had seen the Republic!"- Tacitus)
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To: Stultis
Er, the adminstration never said, nor implied, anything of the sort

Of course that's why Bush spent a full third of his SOTU address talking about Iraq. And of course you don't know how many times I've turned on the television to hear about Iran as the leader of terrorism around the world, as you implied in your first post. And in that same speech, Lord knows how much of his speech he spent talking about 'liberation'.... < /sarcasm>

At the same time I grant that the admin haven't been anywhere near forthright enough, as per Ledeen's criticisms, about nailing Iran, which really is terrorism's leading state sponsor, as such -- but that's a separate matter from this pure invention of yours regarding what they said about Iraq.

And of course you gather this belief from the same people that told us about WMDs and terrorists in Iraq do you? Funny how they somehow continue to miss the payoffs to terrorists from Saudis isn't it?

80 posted on 11/21/2003 11:17:11 AM PST by billbears (Deo Vindice)
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