Michael Ledeen's Bizarro World

Kevin Drum wrote the following today:

The Bush/Cheney team is plainly doing its best to provoke a causus belli that will justify a military response against Iran -- an undertaking that the Iranian regime itself seems happy to help along. Democrats are mostly either playing along as well, or else sitting on their hands hoping that nothing will happen.

That's a bad idea. Pretty speeches about how you regret voting for the Iraq war are all very fine, but the real test is how you react to the next big marketing campaign for war. It's coming, it's going to seem plausible, and it's going to whip a lot of people into the usual frenzy. Any Democratic politician who hasn't thought about how they're going to deal with this is being willfully delusional.

Sadly, I think Drum is right. The Bush administration really does seem to be setting the stage for an armed conflict with Iran. Over at the National Review, Michael Ledeen is already loudly beating the war drums, much as he did in the lead up to the Iraq invasion. If rational voices are to prevail this time around, it's imperative that the Ledeens of the world be confronted, that their unfounded claims and alarmist rhetoric be batted down before they become conventional wisdom.

So here's an attempt to take Ledeen to task, line by line. He begins:

Things are never the way we expect they will be, and so it is today, as we stagger and blither our way toward the inevitable decision about Iran. I had imagined that we would finally face up to the necessity of confronting the terror masters of Tehran after some dreadful event that would compel the president to pound the table and say “enough!”

Instead, it has been more like Chinese water torture, or maybe straws piling up on our national back. Never has a country strained so hard to avoid a conflict as the United States concerning Iran. They have waged war against us for 28 years, and we are only now beginning to contemplate the possibility of a response.

First of all, we seem to be going out of our way to provoke the very "event" that Ledeen laments has not yet occurred. He may just get his wish. Second, and relatedly, Ledeen's assertion that no country has ever "strained so hard to avoid a conflict as the United States concerning Iran" is so laugh-out-loud ludicrous that I scarcely know what say. What planet has Ledeen been living on for the past 5 years? The Bush administration went out of its way to label the (pre-Ahmedinejad) Iranian government as a member of the "axis of evil" shortly after 9/11, thereby setting back diplomatic efforts significantly, giving a boost to Iran's hardliners, and needlessly alienating a potential ally in the fight against al Qaeda. In 2003, the Bush administration, summarily rebuffed an offer by Iran to open a dialogue. As the Washington Post reported recently:

It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.

If that's "straining hard to avoid conflict," I'd hate to see what a weaker effort would have looked like. And over the last month or so, the Bush administration has gone from a strategy of intentional neglect to a strategy of active provocation, ratcheting up both its rhetoric and its actions. Just a few weeks ago, U.S. soldiers raided an Iranian embassy in Iraq and detained five Iranian nationals. If Ledeen wants to defend these actions, that's one thing, but to characterize our current policy as "straining to avoid a conflict" is insulting to everyone's intelligence. Ledeen continues:

That is about the most one can say on behalf of our feckless national-security team, whose leaders are trying to be a little bit pregnant instead of trying to win this thing. Indeed, even in the face of a torrent of information showing Iranian support for the terror war against us, some diplomats and spooks are trying, in their usual too-clever-by-half ways, to relive one of my favorite jokes, the one about the woman accused of stealing her neighbor’s pot. She says to the judge “I never took the pot. And it was a very old pot. And it was in better shape when I returned it.” Our heroes deny that there is such information, and it isn’t really convincing information, and even if it is convincing we shouldn’t be mean to the mullahs.

This is the pattern that led us straight to 9/11. For that matter, it got us to Pearl Harbor and to Khobar Towers, and to the Beirut bombings of our embassy and the Marine barracks.

Wrong. This kind of cavalier attitude toward intelligence and blindness to the consequences of war is what led us to invade Iraq. Ledeen cites every historical analogy he can think except the most relevant one, the one he's at least partially responsible for: our disastrous decision to invade Iraq. Just what is this "torrent of information" showing Iran's involvement in terror activity against the U.S.? Ledeen's own personal intelligence agency must be feeding him information to which the rest of us are not privy. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, the Bush administration has provided virtually no evidence of Iranian involvement in insurgent activity and reporters embedded with the troops have seen scant signs of such involvement. And just today, the Times reported that "[t]he Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence."

Moreover, to the extent Iran is playing a role in Iraq, it is almost certainly limited to providing support for Shiite militias, not the Sunni insurgency. Virtually all "terror activity" against U.S. forces is being perpetrated by Sunni insurgents. Ledeen's absolute certainly regarding Iran's role in Iraq is totally unfounded and dishonest. It's eerily reminiscent of the statements made prior to the Iraq invasion regarding Saddam's supposed WMD stockpiles and nuclear weapons program. Ledeen continues:

It is a pattern of denial and self-deception, driven by an absolute conviction that the truth must not be passed on to people whose view of the world differs from your own. And so our kids get blown up in Iraq, while the Bushes, Rices, Rumsfelds, Cambones, Tenets, Negropontes, and their cohorts deny that we know who’s doing it. Deputy Secretary of State Burns, the architect of our failed Middle East mission, goes to Israel to thump his chest and talk about getting tough with Iran, meaning tough talk and a few symbolic gestures, certainly not regime change. Such people talk about “insurgency” as if the shattered remnants of Saddam’s ruined state were capable of mounting the terror war we face, when common sense points in the direction of professional intelligence services in Tehran and Damascus.

Ledeen's capacity for hypocrisy is apparently limitless. He complains about those who are "driven by an absolute conviction that the truth must not be passed on." Is there any better description of Ledeen himself, a man who has been so catastrophically and embarrassingly wrong about everything he's said for the last four years? Ledeen thinks it's preposterous that the Iraqis themselves could be behind the "terror war we face" in Iraq. But why exactly? Isn't it possible that attacks have become increasingly sophisticated because the insurgents have learned from experience over the last three years? And why would Iran's regime be training and supplying Sunni insurgents? Even the President hasn't made this claim.

The bottomline is that our guys are being blown up because we rushed unthinkingly into an ill-advised war on the advice of people like Michael Ledeen, who were equally certain then of things which later turned out to be completely untrue. The "denial and self-deception" Ledeen refers to is described by sane people as "weighing the evidence" and "thinking," things which did not happen in the lead up to the Iraq invasion and which Ledeen seems intent on not allowing to happen this time around either. More Ledeen:

We are not alone in this suicidal self-deception. Our friends across the water, those tough-minded Englishmen who have recently decided to abolish the Royal Navy for all intents and purposes, have been frenetically seducing us into one diplomat failure after another with regard to Iran for many years now. It is no surprise, then, that the London Times yesterday quoted British officials are denying there is a “smoking gun” to show Iranian support for terrorists in Iraq. I think the unnamed officials who are saying that are either out of the intelligence loop or lying. American intelligence has known for at least a year and a half that the frightful shaped charges that have killed and maimed so many American soldiers were manufactured in Iran — they traced the serial numbers back to the Iranian manufacturer — and it is inconceivable that we would have failed to share that fact with our British allies.

Again, those who question the intelligence are "either out of the intelligence loop or lying." Sound familiar? This is exactly the sort of reflexive idiocy that stifled all debate prior to the Iraq invasion. Ledeen is so sure of himself that he's willing to disregard the findings of British intelligence agencies as well as our own. Indeed, as the Washington Post reports today, though Iran is mentioned in the recently completed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, it is not the central focus. So much for it being obvious that Iran was behind everything.

Ledeen points to the supposed presence of Iranian weapons in Iraq, but reads WAY too much into such evidence. First, it's not at all clear that such weapons are present in Iraq in large numbers. Second, even if they are, it's not necessarily proof that the Iranian government is actively meddling in Iraq. Weapons and fighters are known to be flowing into Iraq from Saudi Arabia, but no one is suggesting that the Saudi government is behind it or that we should attack Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the IRA was largely funded and armed by Americans, but that didn't mean the U.S. government supported the IRA. Given that there is an active market for weapons in Iraq, it would hardly be surprising if enterprising Iranians, particularly those who sympathize with Iraqi Shiite militants, tried to meet that demand and make some money in the process.

Leeden ends his column with this:

I can well imagine the debates now raging inside the Bush administration over what is apparently a substantial trove of devastating information about Iranian activities in Iraq, and perhaps also Afghanistan. American officials long opposed to any serious challenge to Iran pronounced the information “a bombshell,” and some of them now say they have changed their minds about going after the mullahs. So those who still want to take the diplomatic route, and continue to appease Tehran, must set up a series of obstacles: first try to keep the intelligence bottled up; if that fails, discredit it; and if all else fails join the “war is not the answer” crowd, whose credibility rests on the hope that nobody in America has read any history.

This debate has its drama, to be sure. But it is not the dramatic event I had imagined, and its outcome is still in doubt. We are not there yet; if we were, we’d have a national commitment to regime change in Damascus and Tehran. We are in the bowels of the bureaucracy, not on the high slopes of strategic vision and inspirational leadership. But that’s our world.

Ledeen is absolutely positive that there is a "trove of devastating information about Iranian activities in Iraq" but that, for some reason, the Bush administration is sitting on it, refusing to share it with the rest of us. But does this make any sense? At every opportunity, the Bush administration has asserted that Iran is meddling in Iraq. They seem desperate to convince the public that this is true. Yet when critics and reporters start to ask them to corroborate such claims, they refuse. If they had this treasure trove of "devastating" information, why on earth wouldn't they release some of it? Does Ledeen really think that the Bush administration (the Bush administration!) wants "to take the diplomatic route"? Really? Could any accusation make less sense?

In his last paragraph, Ledeen makes clear that nothing less that regime change in Syria and Iran is acceptable, that anything less is "appeasement." Unclear, as always, is how Ledeen thinks such regime change should come about. Apparently the President just needs to "pound the table and say 'enough!'" I'm not sure what happens after that, but I'm sure it will be glorious.

I've now rambled on longer than I'd intended and have probably given Michael Ledeen's crackpot ravings more attention than they deserve, but I fear that we may be slipping into the same intellectual malaise that gripped the country back in the fall of 2002. We can't let that happen. We can't allow the Michael Ledeens of the world to stifle debate and bully us into abandoning our senses. Ledeen's brand of knee-jerk bellicosity and sloppy thinking is a cancer on our political discourse. It's well past time to tune him out.