[Mb-civic] Iran, When? The war on terror cannot be won without addressing Iran.

[Michael Butler]

October 05, 2004, 9:30 a.m.
Iran, When?
The war on terror cannot be won without addressing Iran.



Months before the liberation of Iraq I wrote that we were about to have our
great national debate on the war against the terror masters, and it was
going to be the wrong debate. Wrong because it was going to focus
obsessively on Iraq, thereby making it impossible to raise the fundamental
strategic issues. Alas, that forecast was correct, and we're still stuck in
the strategic quagmire we created. Up to our throats. So let's try again to
get it right.

Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is only one theater in a regional war. We
were attacked by a network of terrorist organizations supported by several
countries, of whom the most important were Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi
Arabia. President Bush's original analysis was correct, as was his strategy:
We must not distinguish between the terrorists and their national
supporters. Hence we need different strategies for different enemies, but we
need to defeat all of them.

 Afghanistan was the classic example, because the Taliban regime was at once
home to, and sponsor of, al Qaeda. Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, and we
responded against the terrorist organization and against the regime that
supported it. Once the Taliban had been destroyed, and al Qaeda had been
shattered, President Bush launched a political strategy: support the
creation of a free Afghanistan, implant the basic institutions of democratic
civil society, work toward free elections so that Afghans could freely
govern themselves.

 Call it democratic revolution.

 That was supposed to be the model for the rest of the war, and it was the
right strategy. Use military force where necessary, against both the
terrorists and the sponsoring regimes, and support democratic revolution.
The whole region understood that strategy, and you could see the
consequences. There were pro-democracy demonstrations, even in the most
unexpected places, such as Damascus and Riyadh, where none had been seen in
human memory. In Iran, where the democratic opposition had shown its passion
for several years, the tempo increased. And all the terror masters, in
Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh, trembled, fearing that their moment
of power and glory was about to pass.

 The president clearly understood both the stakes and the opportunity. The
"Axis of Evil" was ‹ and is ‹ very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and
North Korea knew full well. There is now abundant evidence of the close
cooperation among them, and with their Libyan, Syrian and Pakistani friends,
ranging from nuclear projects to other weapons of mass destruction, and to
vital support (sometimes in tandem, sometimes separately) to the terror
network. 

 The terror masters also knew that their greatest threat came from their own
people, who were disgusted at the oppressive and corrupt dictatorships, and
who saw the United States as the source of their imminent liberation.

 Again, the president described the situation well: Time was not on our
side, for delay would enable our enemies to regroup and plan for the next
challenge. I kept imploring "faster, please," because it was luminously
clear that the terror masters were planning for the battle of Iraq. They
publicly announced that they would attempt to do in post-liberation Iraq
what they had previously accomplished in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s: Use
a combination of terror, kidnapping, and political/religious agitation to
break our will, drive us out, and expand their own power.

 The terror masters could not possibly stand by and permit an easy triumph
in Iraq, for that would seal their own doom. For them, the battle of Iraq
was an existential conflict, the ultimate zero-sum game. If we won, they
died. But, blinded by our obsession with Iraq, we did not see it. For once,
the president's intuition failed him. This failure to recognize the enormity
of the stakes, and hence the intensity of the coming assault, was
heartbreaking, for us and the other members of the Coalition, and for the
Iraqi people. It was the ultimate intelligence failure, a pure failure of
vision.

 Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq,
but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism, the creator of
Hezbollah, the ally of al Qaeda, the sponsor of Zarqawi, the longtime
sponsor of Fatah, and the backbone of Hamas. So clear was Iran's major role
in the terror universe that the Department of State, along with the CIA one
of the most conflict-averse agencies of the American government, branded the
Islamic Republic the world's number one terror sponsor. As it still does.

 Moreover, the Islamic Republic was uniquely vulnerable to democratic
revolution, for, by the mullahs' own accounting, no less than seventy
percent of the Iranian people hated the clerical fascist regime in Tehran,
and hundreds of thousands of young Iranians had shown a disposition to
challenge their oppressors in the streets of the major cities. Had we
supported them then and there, in the immediate aftermath of Afghanistan,
when the entire region was swept by political tremors of great magnitude,
the evil regime might well have fallen, thereby delivering an enormous blow
to the jihadis all over the world. I do not think we would have needed a
single bomb or a single bullet.

 So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and
human history is mostly the story of error and accident. There are many
battles ahead, and we may yet engage on the full battlefield. One thing is
certain: There will be no peace in Iraq so long as the terror masters rule
in Damascus, Riyadh, and Tehran. Those who attended closed discussions with
the Iraqi defense minister a week ago heard a long list of evidence and
cries of outrage against the murderous mullahcracy next door, and even
though the leaders of the West ‹ sadly including some of our own ‹ continue
to pretend that diplomacy may yet settle things in the Middle East, they
cannot possibly believe it. This is a fight to the finish, still a zero-sum
game.

 The main problem remains the failure of vision, never more evident than in
the first presidential debate. The president dismissed the question about
Iran by talking only about the nuclear "issue," while Senator Kerry,
incredibly, restated his belief that the same policy that failed to deter
North Korea would somehow work with the Iranians. The president knows who
the Iranians are, while the senator is an active appeaser. But neither was
inclined to deal with the central issue, which is that the Iranians, the
Syrians, and the Saudis are killing our men and women in Iraq, and we are
playing defense, which is a sucker's game.

 In the past week, the Iranian people have again taken to the streets in
every major city in the country. The chatterers pay no heed, because there
is only one zero-sum game that interests them, which is the election, and
the election is about Iraq, or so they say.

 Except that it isn't, really. It's about the war. The real war, the
regional war, the war they are waging against us even if we refuse to
acknowledge it.

 Faster, damnit.

 ‹ Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author
of The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen is Resident Scholar in the
Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

 
 
 
  

  
 
 
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200410050930.asp