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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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