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THE HANDSTAND |
JULY 2003 |
| DOREMUS
OBSERVES : MATTERS OF INTEREST Doremus
Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah The Daily Informer,
in Sinclair Lewis' famous book "It Can't Happen
Here", at its conclusion, drove out saluted by the
meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in
the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of
freedom.....still Doremus goes on, into the sunrise, for
a Doremus Jessup can never die. POLITICS-U.S.: A SHADOWY RIGHT-WINGER URGES ACTION ON IRAN By Jim Lobe 24 June 2003 Inter Press Service WASHINGTON, Jun. 24 (IPS/GIN) -- When 'The Washington Post' published a list of the people who Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's closest adviser, regularly consults for advice outside the administration, some, but not all, foreign-policy veterans were surprised when the name of Michael Ledeen popped up. "The two met after Bush's election," the Post reported cheerfully, quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that, "anytime you have a good idea, tell me". "More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas, faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric," noted the newspaper. "When I saw that, I couldn't believe it," said one retired senior diplomat. "But, then again, with this administration, it seemed frighteningly plausible." Michael A. Ledeen, resident scholar in the "Freedom Chair" at the ultra-right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a behind-the-scenes fixture of Washington's neo-conservative "Likkudite" community for more than 20 years. But he is now going public in a campaign for the United States to overthrow the Iranian regime, warning that Teheran will cause Washington problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that "the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel". Along with Morris Amitay, a former top lobbyist for the self-proclaimed most powerful lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Ledeen has already co-founded a new group, called the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) (www.c-d-i.org) which is pressing Congress to approve a pending bill that would, among other things, provide some $50 million in aid to both exile groups and opposition forces in Iran. To Ledeen, whose own contacts with the mullahs in the Iran-Contra affair 15 years ago remain the source of some mystery, Iran is "the Mother of Modern Terrorism". Terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence (SISMI), which in turn enabled him to expose president Jimmy Carter's brother Billy's dealings with the Gadhafi regime in Libya to the great satisfaction of Republicans, who were revving up their campaign against the president who would be defeated in 1980 by Ronald Reagan. Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections -- including alleged ties to the mysterious P-2 Masonic Lodge, whose scandal that rocked Italy in the early 1980s -- have long been a source of speculation and intrigue.He returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" adviser to the new secretary of state, Al Haig. Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB "pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East. " In the mid-1980s, when Ledeen was working for the National Security Council, he tangled with the CIA over his efforts with Israeli spy David Kimche to gain the release of U.S. hostages in Beirut through an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, in the opening stages of what would become the Iran-Contra affair. But Ghorbanifar did not come through. Despite Ledeen's assessment of the middleman as "one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known", he flunked four lie detector tests administered by the CIA, which had long warned that the Iranian "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance". Ledeen has been no less prolific in his organizational work. Besides the AEI -- where he works with fellow neo-cons Perle, former United Nations Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Joshua Muravchik, and Reuel Marc Gerecht -- his main institutional forum over the past 25 years has been the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA), a low-profile activist group that promotes the strategic alliance between the United States and Israel. He is also close to key figures in the administration, particularly Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, whose pro-Likud politics he largely shares; Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; and scandal-tarred Elliott Abrams, director for the Near East on the National Security Council. To that list can now apparently be added Rove. Throughout his career, Ledeen has insisted that war and violence were integral parts of human nature and derided the notion that peace can be negotiated between two nations. He was a fierce opponent of the Oslo peace process. "I don't know of a case in history where peace has been accomplished in any way other than one side winning a war and imposing terms on the other side," he said two years ago. He also has expressed little faith in traditional U.S. allies, notably in "Old Europe", which he spent much of the 1980s attacking for being insufficiently anti-Soviet. As Washington moved toward its invasion of Iraq, for example, he even questioned whether France and Germany were in league with al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. "The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States," he wrote, suggesting three weeks later, as the U.S. offensive seemed to stall on its way to Baghdad, that France and Germany be treated as "strategic enemies". U.S. troops soon swept into Baghdad as the Iraqi army disappeared in way that some analysts believe was calculated. For Ledeen, Iraq was only the beginning of the broader struggle against the "terror masters". "As soon as we land in Iraq, we're going to face the whole terrorist network," he told an interviewer in March. "Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are the big four, and then there's Libya." |
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