(Updated) Liar, Liar Pajamas on Fire
By Mona
Riiiiight.
We can only win the war—the real war, the regional-or-maybe-even-global war—if we stop playing defense in Iraq and go after regime change in Damascus and Tehran. Everyone in the region, above all, the Iraqis, knows this. And everyone in the region is looking for evidence that we might be able to muster the will to win this thing.
But dumping responsibility for dealing with Iran in the quivering laps of the Iraqi leaders is precisely the wrong thing to do. We have to lead this war, we have to go after the Iranians. Otherwise, surge or no surge, fifty or a hundred thousand troops more or less, we’re gonna lose. Because the peoples of the Mideast, who have seen many armies come and go over the centuries, are going to throw in with the likely winners. And we can’t win if we refuse to engage the main enemy, which is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And Ledeen’s profound anti-war convictions also explain why on February 1 he wrote, my emphasis:
My heart fell while reading the president’s interview in today’s Wall Street Journal. At a certain point he seems to preen himself, to brag that he’s wimping out on Iran:
There is a temptation for people to take my comments and say, ‘Really what he wants to do is escalate the conflict.’ The answer to that is that we can solve this peacefully and we’re going to need other partners to help us solve it peacefully. Anyway, that’s where we are.
Those are not the words of a Texan who understands the nature of the war we’re in, and have been in, for nearly three decades. Those are the words of a man who has been lobotomized by the dips and spooks who have never wanted to deal with the Iranian threat, the same sorts who rewarded Yasser Arafat’s murder of an American ambassador with the intel version of an insurance policy.
Ledeen is a documented liar, and he posts bullshit about “opposing military action against Iran,” notwithstanding that virtually everything else he says and does is directed toward… fomenting war with Iran. Hence his lamentations about a “wimpy” president who thinks Iran can be dealt with peacefully. The foul creature states an absolute opposition to war on Iran — which he does not begin to mean — only for purposes of (im)plausible deiniability for the carnage that will ensue when his war takes place; Michael Ledeen craves a war with Iran above all else in the world and has explicitly demanded that the Middle East be, in his depraved word, “cauldronized.”
The war happy Dr. Ledeen advocated invading Iraq prior to our doing so — and then subsequently and notoriously lied about it and claimed he had opposed it, only to be exposed as the mendacious snake he is. (Google is not the neocons’ friend.) This time, having learned how important a record of deniability is, he is contriving a faux one of explicit but bogus disavowals of “military invasion” of Iran (which as the slippery wretch parses things, would allow him to say he didn’t mean to exclude bombing campaigns, only invading ground troops) he can point to down the road, when there exists only one reasonable reading of much else he speaks and writes at present, namely, that we should go to war with Iran.
Shameless, virtually of the neocons. Liars and warmongers nearly to a person, but Ledeen is one of the most egregious, dishonest and odious of them all.
[Note: Because Inactivist's archives remain unretrieved and thus my posts unavailable, I linked to Greenwald's old blogger site where he quotes my original documentation of Ledeen's pre-Iraq war, pro-invasion views, and his recent lies about those pre-invasion views.]
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Update: Thanks to American Footprints blogger Eric Martin for pointing out in comments that in October of ‘04 ‘06 he documented how very, very opposed Michael Ledeen is/was to invading Iran as well as Syria.
Comment by Matt S —
February 17, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
Don’t forget the “Ledeen Doctrine” as relayed by an admiring Jonah Goldberg:
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
So I’d say we should all take Ledeen’s anti-war rhetoric with a massive grain of salt.
Comment by PC —
February 17, 2007 @ 6:32 pm
I’m surprised that Ledeen hasn’t facilitated an arms deal with Iran and then used that as justification for starting a war with them. It would be like the 80s, but with a twist.
Comment by Barry —
February 17, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
As I said, the liars and BS-ers about the war with Iraq will continue to do so. It’s good to point that out, lest they scrub off some of the filth they deserve.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 17, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
Mona-
Prior to reading your blog posts, I had never heard of Ledeen. I get that he’s a bad guy, that he’s totally wrong about all sorts of things, and all that, but I have to ask: Why single him out? Why, of all the hawks out there, is he such a persistent target of yours?
Mind you, I have no doubt that he richly deserves all of the criticism that he gets, but why is he so significant among all the hawks out there?
As for me and my pet neocon peeve, I recently became greatly distressed that Douglas Feith is actually on the faculty of a major university. See, I’m just a lowly adjunct (i.e. part time) faculty member at a major university. But I’m in the job market for a full time position. And, well, seeing as how I haven’t lied my ass off to start any wars, it sort of stings to learn that a dude who did lie his ass off to start a war is actually allowed to teach at a major university. What, fabricating lab data is grounds for expulsion but fabricating intelligence reports is no big deal? And don’t Catholic schools have some sort of rule about not getting people killed?
The world is all upside down, I tell you!
Comment by sean —
February 17, 2007 @ 9:20 pm
As I have said before, it’s curious to me that people who cannot engage in civil discussion with their fellow citizens think that the Israelis and the Palestinians–people from wildly different cultures who hate each other–could be making peace in a day or two if they would just sit down and talk it out. Mona is to me a living, breathing example of how pointless it is to talk to people who are beyond reason.
Comment by Mona —
February 17, 2007 @ 9:35 pm
Thoreau –
I’ve been aware of Michael Ledeen for years, and when I read his post at The Corner last fall saying he had opposed the invasion of Iraq before it took place I damn near had an aneurysm. For a fact, I knew that was false and it took me all of 20 seconds on google to find the 2002 National Review article of his slamming Brent Scowcroft for opposing the invasion that had offended me when I had read it long before I ever wrote one word about Michael Ledeen. So, reason 1 for my particular loathing of him is that he brazenly and nakedly lied, and I knew it.
Reason 2 is that Michael Ledeen, of all the neocons, has always had an obsession with Iran — and he is a influential fellow which is why he was included in the Vanity Fair piece profiling powerful neocons on the subject of Iraq. He wanted Iran dealt with before Iraq, but was quite willing to see the latter invaded first after it became clear that was what Leader was going to do. But he has never stopped beating the drum for regime change in Iran, and it is his constant fixation. And right now he is doing all he can to realize his dream, which brings me to point 3.
Reason 3 is that as foul a liar and war-monger as he is, Pajamas Media just saw fit to give him a platform at their site. That really outrages me, tho it is not surprising. Read his posts – almost every one of them is about Iran and how imperative it is that we “deal” with that nation. And he doesn’t mean by cooling the bellicose rhetoric and trying some diplomacy — he wants war.
Comment by Mona —
February 17, 2007 @ 9:52 pm
This is Michael Ledeen, Thoreau; he’s not some obscure nobody I fixated on because he sits in his mom’s basement doing not much of anything:
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 17, 2007 @ 11:05 pm
I have no problem believing that Michael Ledeen opposes military action against Iran. I doubt there can be more than a few people working for Iranian intelligence who favor it, and they would be the really hard cases.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:32 am
OK, Mona, I see your point.
Jim-
I think a US attack on Iran would be just the thing to rally the Iranian public behind the regime. As long as it was restricted to bombings but no ground invasion that could displace the regime, the result would be to galvanize nationalist sentiment and postpone liberalization in Iran for another 30 years. And given that we are in no position for a ground invasion, well, war may be just what the mullahs ordered.
What Americans don’t realize is that many Iranians probably voted for Ahmadinejad as a big “Fuck you” to the Ayatollahs. The genuine liberals were never allowed to seriously compete (the Ayatollahs didn’t want a repeat of the Khatami years, even though he was powerless), and the other candidate in the runoff election was a good old boy close to the regime. Ahmadinejad was talking about rocking all sorts of boats with big plans for how he’d spend the new influx of oil revenue on domestic projects. So the public was basically saying to the Ayatollahs “Screw you, you can spend the next 4 years putting up with the crazy guy!”
Comment by Thoreau —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:35 am
By analogy, suppose Cheney were to declare himself Supreme Leader and give us a choice of figurehead Presidential candidates: Either a former Halliburton executive who will keep things running nice and smooth, or some crazy sonofabitch who will cause all sorts of headaches for Cheney.
I’d cast my absentee vote for the crazy sonofabitch, and mail it from a post office in Maine right before crossing the border into Canada.
Comment by Glaivester —
February 18, 2007 @ 1:03 am
Ledeen’s position, as I recall, is that we don’t need to take overt military action against Iran because we can undermine it from within by funding Iranian opposition groups and dissidents.
Of course, this is crazy and I suspect that Ledeen wants to do this mainly so that Iran will crack down enough that he rope us into a military action for humanitarian reasons (ie. to prevent “our guys” from all being executed).
Comment by Grant Gould —
February 18, 2007 @ 6:22 am
The “Ledeen Doctrine” is the only marginally sensible thing the man has ever said, and he cribbed it from Schelling.
Ledeen isn’t a non-entity, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why.
Comment by Mona —
February 18, 2007 @ 7:30 am
Jim, talking about moral people who believe in staightforward discussion. That is not Michael Ledeen. Read the entire Xmas column I linked to and tell me how that means anything but endorsement of war with Iran — James Wolcott linked to it as evidence that Ledeen feels “military muscle can’t be applied against Iran fast enough.”
Then there is this from Ledeen, titled The Time May Have Come — time for what?, and my emphasis:
I do not care what the man has mumbled about opposing military invasion & etc., when at the same time he writes other stuff like that. He announces we are already at war with Iran and have been for three decades and disses those who refuse to accept that we are in, and I quote “total war.”
The man is a slippery fuck who knows how to spread mendacious CYA bullshit, but he is a total and utter war-monger. The sooner everyone realizes that about him and virtually all neocons, the better.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 18, 2007 @ 9:59 am
Mona, it’s entirely possible that Michael Ledeen has NOT been an asset of Iranian intelligence since at least the early 1980s, in which case, the simple assumption is that he really wants war with Iran and that’s why he writes those things. It’s entirely possible that Ahmad Chalabi has not been his handler for 20-odd years, in which case the smart thing to do is take Ledeen’s bellicosity at face value. It’s even possible – at least conceptually – that Ahmad Chalabi himself has not been working for Iranian intelligence since the time his sister was arrested and then conveniently released by the authorities in the early days of the Islamic Republic, in which case the chain of suspicion that would tend to establish Michael Ledeen as an Iranian agent comes up a link short. In which case, the safe thing to do is to read Ledeen’s hostility to the Islamic Republic as genuine.
That’s the world in which one comes out of “Breach,” which does a fantastic job of showing how Robert Hanssen was driven by egotism and scorn for the intelligence bureaucracy, and doesn’t find oneself struck by the thought that, “Gee, that’s Michael Ledeen all over!”
In the world in which none of the preceding is true, though, Michael Ledeen has spent a career writing hostile things about the Mullahs and sounding winky-winky about using force against the regime so that an Iranian agent of influence can ingratiate himself with the most anti-Iranian elements of the American power structure, report on it, and try in his small way to channel it in the most convenient directions for Iran. In THAT world, I completely believe that Michael Ledeen does not REALLY want the US to overthrow the Iranian government by force.
Comment by Mona —
February 18, 2007 @ 10:06 am
Well Jim,if he is that masterful a double agent, he is a past master. And the “winky-winky” is rather brazen and transparent, lending support to an actual invasion of Iran.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 18, 2007 @ 10:39 am
By their fruits ye shall know them . . .
Comment by Eric Martin —
February 18, 2007 @ 10:49 am
FWIW, I collected some of my favorite quotes from Ledeen advocating military confrontation with Iran here.
One of the related posts here.
Comment by Eric Martin —
February 18, 2007 @ 11:26 am
Just to clear something up:
Actually, I created that page on my personal blog as an archive to refer to – and so I backdated it to keep it off the front page at the time. So the date may read October ‘04, but it’s really from October 2006.
Seeing as some of the quotes are more recent than ‘04, I didn’t want to create the impression that I was pretending to be some oracle.
I’m going to change the date on the post too to prevent any confusion.
Comment by ahem —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:14 pm
Ledeen is filth. He has his dirty fingers over pretty much every bit of rotten Republican foreign policy since Reagan. He played a murky role in the Niger forgeries. He’s a fan of Mussolini. He is a bona fide fascist, upon whom I would not piss to extinguish the flames from his sulfurous excuse for a heart.
Never mind that he’s never been to Iran and doesn’t speak Persian — that’s what translators are for, he says.
Most of all, he’s unelected. He’s never had to justify his malevolent role in US politics to anyone other than his paymasters.
Comment by Happy Jack —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:16 pm
FWIW, I collected some of my favorite quotes from Ledeen advocating military confrontation with Iran here.
Why not AmFoot? I didn’t realize until today that you had a neocon superstar posting over there.
Comment by Pat —
February 18, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
In addition to regular fomenter and liar, Ledeen is a rube. The hot scoops from “my reliable Iranian sources,” each broadcast with genuine confidence despite every previous one having proven utterly false, have made this plain to me. Does this mean he’s on someone else’s payroll? No, and I doubt that he is. But he’s a sucker – fabulously ironic given his hatred of the intel community, about which he indicates little real knowledge.
Seymour Hersh at least is conscious of the fact that much of what he conveys at any given time from various sources is false. Ledeen is not.
Bad penny and rube. That sums it up for me.
Comment by Eric Martin —
February 18, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
Why not AmFoot?
The archive was posted to my personal blog, but the posts that cited the archived material were posted on both AmFoot and TIA. For example. Which tended to spark arguments between myself and said resident neocon.
I didn’t realize until today that you had a neocon superstar posting over there.
For the record, a little over two years ago, I was invited to post at AmFoot by Nadezhda and praktike (aka Blake Hounshell who is now the web editor of Foreign Policy magazine’s blog, Passport). When Blake left, I sort of took over as Editor of AmFoot with Nadezhda.
Paleoprog was invited on by Blake to try to cultivate some diversity of opinion. I supported the move then, and am comfortable with the current state of affairs.
Paleoprog is an endless fount of inspiration – even if in the negative. The mini-market place of ideas accrues to the benefit of sanity in this instance. At least that’s my take.
Comment by Nell —
February 19, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
Eric, I think AmFoot would benefit from the participation of someone located in the large informational and ideological gap between you and the notable neocon.
I guess Brian Ulrich is that, but boy, there’s still quite a gulf from there to the Paleo border.