| by Jim Lobe January 26, 2003 WASHINGTON 
		- When The Washington Post published a list of the people whom Karl 
		Rove, President George W. Bush's closest advisor, regularly consults for 
		advice outside the administration, foreign policy veterans were shocked 
		when Michael Ledeen popped up as the only full-time international 
		affairs analyst. 
 "The two met after Bush's election," the Post reported cheerfully, 
		quoting Ledeen about Rove's request that "any time 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 American 
		Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the better-known 
		former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a 
		fixture of Washington's neo-conservative community for more than 20 
		years. But he is now out front, in a public campaign for the United 
		States to confront Iran, warning that Tehran will cause Washington 
		problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that "the mullahs are 
		determined to obliterate Israel".
 
 "We are now engaged in a regional struggle in the Middle East, and 
		the Iranian tyrants are the keystone of the terror network," he wrote in 
		Monday's Post. "Far more than the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the 
		defeat of the mullahcracy and the triumph of freedom in Tehran would be 
		a truly historic event and an enormous blow to the terrorists."
 
 Along with Morris Amitay, a former top lobbyist for the most powerful 
		pro-Israel lobby in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs 
		Committee, Ledeen has already co-founded a new group, called the 
		Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), which is pressing Congress to 
		approve a pending bill that would, among other things, provide some 
		US$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". And terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and 
		butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian 
		military intelligence, which in turn enabled him to expose Billy 
		Carter's dealings with the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya to the great 
		satisfaction of Republicans, who were revving up their campaign against 
		Billy's brother, then president Jimmy Carter.
 
 Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to 
		the P-2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long 
		been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington 
		in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor 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.
 
 He was a heavy promoter of the thesis that it was the KGB that was 
		behind the 1981 attempted assassination by Turkish right-winger, Mehmet 
		Ali Agca, of Pope John Paul II, a view he continues to expound today and 
		which also helps explain his contempt for the Central Intelligence 
		Agency (CIA), whose analysts never accepted the "Bulgarian Connection", 
		as it was called.
 
 In the mid-1980s, when Ledeen was working for the National Security 
		Council, he tangled with the CIA again 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".
 
 Undaunted and untouched by the Iran-Contra investigation, Ledeen 
		recorded his experience in Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account 
		of the Iran-Contra Affair, one of more than 10 books he has written 
		on U.S. foreign policy, de Tocqueville, Machiavelli and terrorism, the 
		latest of which is titled The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It 
		Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win.
 
 Ledeen has been no less prolific in his organizational work, although, 
		besides AEI - where he works with fellow foreign policy 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), 
		an activist group that promotes a strategic alliance between the United 
		States and Israel.
 He has 
		also served on the board of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon and 
		has taken an organizing role in CDI. His co-founder there, Amitay, also 
		works for JINSA. 
 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 Elliott Abrams, the director for the Near 
		East on the National Security Council. To that list can now apparently 
		be added Rove, who is as close to Bush as it is possible to get.
 
 Throughout his career, Ledeen has insisted that war and violence are 
		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 war in 
		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 
		stalled on its way to Baghdad, that France and Germany be treated as 
		"strategic enemies".
 
 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." 
		"You can't solve all problems I grant that," he told the BBC. "I mean, I 
		wrote a book about Machiavelli, and I know the struggle against evil 
		is going to go forever."
 
 (Inter Press Service)
 
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