Posted on 09/09/2003 11:44:02 AM PDT by truthandlife
President Bush officially declared combat over in Iraq in May. Since then there have been attacks on American soldiers and they seem to be growing in intensity with Major terrorist attacks on the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and a sacred mosque in Najaf. Terrorist expert Michael Ledeen recently appeared on The 700 Club to discuss the situation there and the rest of the Middle East. PAT ROBERTSON: Michael, it's always a pleasure to have you with us on The 700 Club.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Good morning, Pat. My pleasure, too.
ROBERTSON: You pinpointed a top Hezbollah official whom you believe masterminded these recent attacks. He was the man, I believe, who was responsible for blowing up the Marine Corp barracks in Lebanon. Is that right?
LEDEEN: Yes, and his name is Imad Mugniyah. And if you ask the American government -- FBI, CIA, Special Forces -- who is the most wanted man in the world, they will tell you it's Imad Mugniyah. He's killed a lot of Americans.
ROBERTSON: I understand Robert Baer had him in his sights. He could have taken him out but during the Clinton administration was somewhat restrained from doing so. I guess we had an anti-assassination program, and so he had to let him go. And then Baer wound up being investigated for his actions.
LEDEEN: Yes, Bob Baer's one of the great living examples of "no good deed will go unpunished," which is the motto by which Washington lives. And Bob was in some danger of going to jail, because he'd only done good things and was trying to advance our interests. But Mugniyah, in the meantime, has changed his physical appearance. He's had plastic surgery. He's apparently changed also his fingerprints and his eye color, and I'm not sure we know what he looks like nowadays. But we do have information that he went into Iraq from Iran several weeks ago and is busily organizing the terror network inside Iraq.
ROBERTSON: Well, I've read a couple of your recent columns. You're pointing to Iran as a terror master, but you're saying Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. But apparently our State Department doesn't want to really move against them.
LEDEEN: No, our State Department just really wants to make deals with all of those countries. Our State Department thinks that, "Now we've done Iraq. There's a presidential election coming up. Our troops are tired. Our resources are strained. Let's stop here for the time being, try to bring some order into Iraq. And then after the presidential election, if President Bush is re-elected, then we'll worry about what comes next." That's their current thinking.
ROBERTSON: If we pursue that, all the momentum we had after the Operation Iraqi Freedom is going to be lost. It looked like the mullahs were about ready to be overturned in Iran. What's the status now?
LEDEEN: Well, the mullahs have cracked-down on the opposition. There's now an iron fist at rule inside Iran, despite the fact that our Deputy Secretary of State insists on calling it a democracy and our Secretary of State insists on saying that the democratic revolution underway in Iran is a "family squabble" were his words. And we're losing more than momentum, Pat. We're losing momentum and lives, and we're going to keep on losing more and more lives. Hardly a day goes by now without some kind of major bombing or explosion or assassination inside Iraq, and most of that is coming from across the Iranian border. And you have endless reports telling of terrorists coming across, and I've information that all kinds of top terrorists are there: Enis Naqash, who's the person who assassinated former Iranian Prime Minister Bakhtiar in Paris, is there; Al-Zarqawi, who is the person Colin Powell names in his speech to the UN, is there; and, of course, Imad Mugniyah is there, too.
ROBERTSON: The President made a stirring speech after 9-11, that anybody who harbors a terrorist shall be considered a terrorist. And yet, it's been kid gloves with Saudi Arabia, kid gloves with Syria, kid gloves with Iran. When are we going to get tough?
LEDEEN: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it seems to me, too, that he's lost his bearings on this.
ROBERTSON: What are these people telling him? Presidents, I guess, get isolated. I don't guess it; I know that they get isolated. What is the prevailing thinking in the intelligence agencies. We've got the FBI. We've got the CIA. Of course we've got the State, and then we've got Defense intelligence. What are they sending into the president?
LEDEEN: They're telling him that they're doing a better job, which is true; they are doing a much better job than they were before 9-11. And they're telling him that the terrorists are ramping-up major terrorist operations against us in the near future, both in the Middle East and here in the United States. I mean, this recent event little noticed in Canada where 11 people were rounded up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, their FBI. These guys were training to fly aircraft and were doing surveillance of American nuclear power plants inside the United States. And it seems like what they were planning to do was to hijack another commercial airliner, this time in Canada, and crash it into these facilities in the U.S., some in the state of Washington, some in Massachusetts.
ROBERTSON: I read today an article, it's about a year old, but it was indicating that there was a Palestinian schoolboy in New York who looked out of the window at the World Trade Center, and he said, "Those things are not going to be there in about two days." And there apparently were a number of others who were warned not to go to downtown New York, that riots were being incited by the mosques. And yet, I'm told that the FBI, according to your report, was not even allowed to clip newspaper articles about those who might be unfriendly to us.
LEDEEN: Right. Couldn't clip newspaper articles, couldn't open files on radical mosques, couldn't even go into mosques to listen to the Friday sermons.
ROBERTSON: Well, is it true that a little school kid would have been tipped-off that this thing was going to happen, that those towers were going to come down? It just wasn't a lucky guess, was it?
LEDEEN: I don't know. I mean, it's plausible that he knew, I mean, if his father knew and his father may have told him, may have bragged about it in advance or warned him to stay away from that part of town. I mean, it's plausible.
ROBERTSON: What about the "road map?" You have indicated, and very wisely so, that this was a ploy by the Saudis to distract our attention away from going to Iraq and really dealing with terror. Does the "road map" have any hope now? Even Yasser Arafat said it's over.
LEDEEN: No, sir. There's never been any hope. Peace has never been made in this way in the history of the world. The only way I know that peace has ever been accomplished is two people fight a war; somebody wins, somebody loses. The winner imposes peace on the loser. Those terms of surrender are what are called "peace." And every peace conference in history has been about that. And I don't believe there's any hope of peace between Israel and the Palestinians until and unless the terror masters are destroyed. It's why I wrote The War Against the Terror Masters, is to try to put all this stuff in context. I mean, a lot of the terrorists who have been operating in Israel, a lot of the suicide terrorists from Hamas, are coming straight out of Iran. And even Arafat has said that publicly. So, it's all part of this broader war. And if we don't win this war, there's just going to be more terrorism everywhere, in Europe, in Israel and in the United States.
ROBERTSON: If you were sitting in the Oval Office and you're faced with Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis and the terrorists coming out of there, and the enormous amount of money funding terror, you were faced with the Iranians funding the Hezbollah, and then Syria, which is a conduit, at least, for that kind of money, what would you do?
LEDEEN: Well, the first thing I'd do is what I think we should have done and we should do even if there were no terrorism, which is support the democratic revolution in Iran, support the Iranian people against this regime. Look, even the annual State Department report on terrorism names Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And yet, the same Secretary of State who says that on the one hand, then turns around and says, "But we have to be nice to Iran, and Iran can cooperate with us in the war against terror." It's totally incoherent. And I think the president should just say, "Okay, we're going to try to free Iran the same way that we freed Yugoslavia under Milosevic or the Philippines under Marcos. Let's help those people. Get them some money so they can go out on strike. Get them some satellite telephones so they can communicate from city to city when these various jamming operations take place. Let's encourage the free radios of Iranian-Americans in southern California and western Europe to broadcast directly into Iran. And let's busily support these people and try to bring down that regime." That is the single greatest thing that could happen in the war against terrorism, and it is the single greatest thing that could happen in our efforts to democratize the Muslim world.
ROBERTSON: Michael Ledeen, thank you for your insight. It's always good to have you with us.
LEDEEN: Thank you, Pat..
1993, when Clinton was president . .
You Ain't Seen Nuthin! Yet!
This article starts with a lie. Will they ever get it right? He declared an end to major combat operations, not minor operations, not defensive operations not counter-guerilla operations yada...yada...yada
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.