A friend sent me this Czech tv video on the mourning march to the St Vitus Cathedral in the Prague Castle.  I can’t watch it without tearing up. It’s entirely worthy of the great Czech poet, playwright, and revolutionary hero.

The leaders of the free world — not, however, the president of the United States, who is sending the Clintons to the funeral on Friday — will pay him homage, as they should.  Havel was  a marvelous leader and a rare man who remained true to his admirable principles without puffing himself up or delivering moralistic sermons.  He was well aware of his foibles and sins, and yet he worked miracles.  This season, in which so many religious people celebrate miracles, is the right time to reflect on his life.

He wasn’t lucky in his choice of birthplace:  Czechoslovakia, 1935, and the Nazis would soon arrive.  He came from a good family (dad was a restaurateur), but that made things harder for the Havels once the Communists took over after the war.  Given his “bourgeois” background, Havel was kept out of prestigious university programs, and he did manual labor for a while. He fought Communism all his life, got thrown into jail for four years, and when he came out the regime offered him the chance to emigrate to the West.  He laughed at them, went on to lead Charter 77 and then the whole country.

So he came from the wrong sort of family, didn’t have the credentials to ensure literary or intellectual success, and was singled out for punishment and repression by a very nasty regime.  Yet he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.

Did I mention that he loved music?  Both rock and jazz, because he recognized their subversive power.  He loved Frank Zappa, and made him the Czech “cultural ambassador.”  When Bill Clinton visited Prague in the mid-nineties, Havel took him to a seedy nightclub, where the American president played sax with the locals (and his wife, Dagmar, visited the club on a walking tour of the city shortly after Havel’s death).

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It’s either something in the water, or in the British DNA.  This occurs to me as I read about the poor soccer fan who used to go into “Addisonian crisis” when her beloved Manchester United was in a tense game.

Addison’s is pretty bad.  It’s an adrenal failure that leads to a shortage of cortisol, thereby dropping your blood pressure, and if it progresses further, to coma and death.

It almost killed her, although she did make medical history:

“We believe that our patient was having difficulty mounting an appropriate physiological cortisol response during the big games and therefore we present this as the first description of Manchester United-induced Addisonian crisis,” said Dr Akbar Choudhry who treated the patient.”

But fortunately, the good doctor figured it out, got her proper treatment, and now she can go to the games, scream her brains out, and not risk her life.

I know all about Addison’s disease, and not just because JFK had it.  A very important member of our family—Thurber—has it, and his symptoms are classic, just like the soccer fan’s:  anxiety, lethargy, trouble standing up, and “a sense of impending doom,” which afflicted the woman late in soccer games, but which seemed an integral part of Thurber’s personality.  You could almost hear him thinking, “all is lost.  We’re doomed!”

Thurber is the family Airedale.  A British breed.  The biggest terrier.  He looks like a stuffed animal, with his big head, his wet, black nose, his elegant ears, and his magnificent beard.

Like all terriers, Thurber thinks of himself as a perpetual puppy, and in keeping with the well-known characteristics of the breed, he is basically untrainable.  And he’s very whacky (just like the lady who got his disease).

So far as I know, he doesn’t root for Manchester United (his favorite sport is lurking-under-the-table-praying-for-food-to-fall), but otherwise his symptoms are the same as hers.  And Kennedy’s.  Now you see why I thought this affliction has something to do with the British water or the British DNA.  Three for three!  An Englishwoman, a British dog, and an Irish president.

Q.E.D.

PS:  People are curious why we named him “Thurber.”  Yes, it has to do with the great writer and cartoonist who wrote and drew so much about dogs.  He wrote a wonderful story called something like “The Dog Who Bit People,” about an airedale who bit everyone who came to visit.  Hilarious.  I wanted a dog who did that, and so…

But the experiment failed.  Thurber adores everyone, and when someone visits he flops over on his back and adopts the official State Department Negotiating Position:  legs splayed wide, tongue out, stomach quivering, awaiting a nice scratch.

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It just has to be Israel, according to the pundit class.  You know, that warmonger Netanyahu.  Or maybe it’s us.  Maybe it’s Obama, who after all killed bin Laden and Qadaffi, toppled Mubarak and bin Ali, and has proclaimed that “Assad must go.” Who else could be behind the “mysterious” wave of assassination, sabotage and explosions all over the country, from military bases to factories, from pipelines carrying natural gas to the Turks to automobiles in downtown Tehran carrying nuclear physicists to or from work?

Until recently, I was the only one writing about the systematic campaign of sabotage.  Now it’s all the rage.

The latest attack against a major Iranian target came a few days ago against a plant that manufactures “special steel” that is used, inter alia, for nose cones and other parts of missiles.  It’s the fourth major attack in the past couple of months, three of which you’ve probably read about, and one which has largely escaped notice.  The three you know are the steel plant three days ago, the monster blast at Karaj on November 12th, and the explosion on November 28th at a military complex at Isfahan.  The one you didn’t hear about  took place on yet another military facility in Khorramabad, near the Iraqi border, a couple of days after Karaj.

And then there are “minor” events, such as a couple of Basij gunned down in Balouchistan the other day.

Before we get to the whys and wherefores, a bit of detail:  the huge detonation at Karaj, which, as I have explained, surprised the attackers and distorted our understanding.  The operation was aimed at the Revolutionary Guards Corps, specifically at General Hassan Tehrani Moghadam, who was both the architect of the national missile program and one of the nastiest officials in that legendarily nasty organization.  The attackers did not know that there was a large quantity of rocket fuel on the base that day (which was the reason Moghadam was there).  The special fuel came from North Korea, and it was supposed to double tne range of Iran’s missiles.  The explosion that killed Moghadam and scores of his comrades ignited the rocket fuel, with dramatic results.  To date, 377 dead have been reported to the supreme leader’s office.  Among the dead are the attackers–they couldn’t escape the big explosion–and at least four North Korean officials, who were there for the celebration.

The attackers came from the internal opposition, and so far as I know they had no ties to any foreign anything, not a foreign intelligence service, not a foreign military organization, not a foreign government.

Of course, as always with things Iranians, you’ve got to caveat what you think you know.  It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been misinformed.  But, on the other hand, I’ve been a lonely voice for quite a while, saying that the opposition (call it the Green Movement, for lack of an updated logo) would become more violent, that the movement was, if anything, more powerful than it was at the time of the big demonstrations a year and two years ago, and that the regime was full of opposition sympathizers and collaborators.

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In January, 2007, five American soldiers were brutally murdered in Karbala, Iraq,  by a team of operatives who had been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ foreign legion, the Quds Force. The mastermind of the operation was a senior member of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based terrorist organization that is a virtual part of the Iranian regime. That man, a Lebanese named Ali Musa Daqduq, was subsequently captured in southern Iraq, as were other key members of the assassination team.

Daqduq is still under American control in Iraq, the last of the killers from the 2007 remaining in prison.  Not so the others.  Incredibly, the other captured terrorists were subsequently released to the Iraqi government in the summer of 2009, and speedily repatriated to Iran, part of a swap for British soldiers who had been taken hostage by Iranian-run thugs.  American military officers were not happy about the release, and when I discovered what was going on, and wrote about it, I received very vigorous denials from the (Bush) Pentagon, along the lines of  “what do you take us for?  We would never do such a thing.”

But they did, and not just with the Karbala killers.  Hundreds of Iranian and Iranian-trained terrorists who were once under U.S. control were sent home via the Iraqis, despite the predictable and entirely justifiable rage of American military men and women.  But they were told to do it by their political bosses, and they followed orders, as they must.

It seems they are now on the verge of liberating Ali Daqduq, who has a lot of American blood all over his claws, not only from the Karbala Five. He worked directly for the Iranians, training Iraqi terrorists — sometimes in Iraq, sometimes in Iran itself — to assassinate our troops.  They are planning to turn him over to the Iraqi government, which will, as it always has, arrange for his onward travel to Iran.

The symbolism of the release would be awful.  Daqduq is the last prisoner in American hands, and he is a proxy for Iran, our major enemy.  Everyone in the region, from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to Israel and Jordan, would see it as proof positive of Obama’s fecklessness, a final act of self-humiliation in the last hours of the Iraq War.

For once, Congressional Republicans have been fighting on the side of the angels, sending very strong letters to Attorney General Holder and Secretary of Defense Panetta, demanding that Daqduq be retained under American control, and suggesting that the best course of action is to transfer him to Guantanamo.  So far, there is no indication that anything of the sort is about to happen, and one will get you five that Daqduq gets a hero’s welcome in Tehran very soon.

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For those who may have thought the Obama administration lacked real spine on responding to the 32-year old Iranian war against us, there is now a dramatic response (mild sarcasm alert).  The State Department has launched a “virtual Embassy” to Iran, a website with some useful material about the Iranian regime’s systematic distortion of America, and American policy towards Iran, a collection of old speeches and statements from Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama, links to Hillary herself doing TV interviews, and “news” from the Voice of America.

The best of it, aside from information about visas and student exchange programs (stuff that is easily available online in any event), comes in a section about “myths” about American policy, in which the “Embassy” takes pains to point out that the United States is aware of the repression of the Iranian people, and has sanctioned the officials guilty of it:

We have designated numerous Iranian officials and organizations for their responsibility in the serious human rights abuses carried out after the disputed 2009 elections.  The Iranian government is responsible for jailing, intimidating, and isolating Iran’s preeminent thinkers, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists and civil society activists, depriving the world of their contributions to the international community of ideas.

True enough, but there are two missing words in the list of regime abuses:  murdering and torturing.  And the “myths” carry on some of our unfortunate past errors, such as apologizing for our presumed sins in 1953, when we and the Brits supported millions of Iranians calling for the return of the shah and the removal of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeqh.  Indeed, both President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright both apologized for this.

And the number one myth the State Department is at such pains to knock down is the very idea that the United States wants to topple the regime in Tehran — which is what most Iranians want.  No way, they are told:  “Fact: U.S. policy is to support international norms, respecting both the rights and responsibilities of all nations.”

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Another week, another explosion at or near an Iranian military installation (or is it a nuclear research facility?).  As usual, the regime doesn’t know what to say.  The mullahcracy is so intensely divided that different “spokesmen” from different ministries/news outlets/cults/mafias put out different versions.  There was an explosion, or at least “the sound of an explosion.”  This goes out on the wires.  Then, no, there was no explosion, it was just the sound of our fierce military training.  Then again, yes, there was something, but not to worry, just go home and shut up.  And so it goes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as our president so loves to call his intended international partners.

I’ve been reporting for many months about the ongoing sabotage of pipelines, refineries, military sites, Revolutionary Guards’ aircraft and trains, and groups of regime thugs. and have received the usual cold shoulder from publications “of record,” which is to say silent sneers.  But the tempo of attacks, most notably the monster blast a week ago that vaporized General Moghaddam and his foreign visitors (at least some of whom had taken the shuttle from Pyongyang to be with him on what they wrongly expected would be a happy day) led the Washington Post’s man in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, to note the phenomenon in a useful story entitled “Mysterious Explosions Pose Dilemma for Iranian leaders.”  He gives us a pretty good rundown of the explosions, and, living as he does in Tehran, gives ample space to regime “explanations” such as bad welding, western sanctions, and so forth.  Given the number of foreign journalists who have come to a bad end in Iran, you’d do the same.

Safe in London, on the other hand, Roger Cohen of the New York Times has no doubt about what’s happening:  his guy Obama is waging a secret war against the mullahs. “It would take tremendous naïveté,” he lectures the great unwashed,  “to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.”

So color me tremendously naive.  I would really love to believe Roger Cohen;  the very idea that Obama, at long last,  has ordered a response to the Iranian war against the west (totally unmentioned, needless to say), is delightful.  But I don’t believe it, and Cohen doesn’t give us any evidence for it, aside from intoning, as the mullahs themselves are so wont to do, that it’s the infidels and the Zionists.

Yes, there’s a cyberwar, but Revolutionary Guards generals don’t get vaporized by Stuxnet.  And Cohen’s judgment is so swayed by his fandom for Obama that it verges on the worst of the early Chris Matthews.  Try this, for example:

Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.

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Thanks to the ever-vigilant Italian press, in this case the Corriere della Sera,  we know exactly how the heirs of the Renaissance deal with dark days.  They treat it the way they cope with any other attack of ill fortune:  with magic gestures, objects, curses and careful attention to details that encourage bad luck.

The delightful (and sometimes not) details come from a new book on the superstitions of Italian VIPs, which contains warnings from the “Committee for the study of the Paranormal,” and a concluding note from Cardinal Ersilio Tonini.  They didn’t ask me for any input, even though my new book on Naples contains abundant material on magic, including the best methods for warding off attacks from enemies with evil eyes.

The Evil Eye features prominently in Italians’ methods to fend off misfortune, but there are other sources of bad luck, ranging from an assistant who wears green underpants, a member of the audience dressed in purple–an evident evil eyer–and a dinner party with exactly thirteen people at the table.

What to do?  One, a prominent astrophysicist, recites “Sh*t” three times.  Another, a Neapolitan politician, hides a golden braid under her own golden hair.  Another puts two big packages of kosher salt in her bath at least once a week, others make the symbol of what we would call “hook ‘em Horns” and cross their hands across their lower body.  Then there are those who always go on board an airplane with their left foot first, those who spit three times, and those who keep little statuettes of holy men and women (from Mother Teresa to Russian saints) and of course those who carry a cluster of cat hair…and finally an actress who touches her breast before going on the set.

I wonder what Mario Monti, the economist with the tremendous misfortune of becoming Prime Minister at a moment when Italy is teetering on the well-known abyss, has tucked away in his pockets to lure Dame Fortune to his side.

We’ll have to wait a bit for that book, but wouldn’t you love to read about the superstitions of world leaders?  Does Barack Obama have a little icon to rub at tough moments?  Does Nicolas Sarkozy curse three times?  Inquiring minds want to know, because such things are at least as important as leaders’ statements on the economy…

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This past weekend’s monster explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base outside Tehran has attracted the usual assortment of speculation and “informed information,” most of it sucked from the thumbs of pundits who feel they must write quickly.  There is still a scarcity of hard information, but I’m reasonably confident that:

–There were two explosions at the RG base at Bidganeh, one smaller, the other very large.

–At almost the same time, there was an explosion at another military base in the west, in Luristan.  The explosions seem to have been coordinated.

–The area around Bigdaneh is a military zone, with various facilities including two air fields, thus questions like “was it a munitions depot or a missile base?” are best answered “yes. Both.”

These attacks on the Guards — the symbol of the regime’s intensifying repression and slaughter of the Iranian people — are part of a pattern that includes explosions at refineries and pipelines. At the same time, strikes have been spreading (and no wonder;  up to 30,000 retired teachers have been waiting for their pensions for many months).  In short, people have lost patience, and the smaller of the two explosions at the RG base was aimed at Major General Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, one of the most brutal of the country’s military leaders.

Contrary to the inevitable suspicions of the thumb-suckers (the Americans did it!  no, the Israelis did it!  no, it was an accident!), the operation was planned and carried out by Iranians from the opposition-that-does-not-exist.  They intended to demonstrate that no leader is safe from the people’s wrath (if that base can be penetrated, any place can, and if that man can be assassinated, anyone can), and that the opposition knows its gravediggers.

The second, larger, explosion was not planned, nor was the extremely high number of casualties (I am told that hundreds of people, including some “very important foreign dignitaries,” were blown up).  That second blast was apparently from a quantity of liquid fuel designed to extend the speed and accuracy of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, the one the mullahs hope will some day carry a nuclear warhead.  My sources claim that the fuel caused the big white plume seen in the photographs.  The cloud may well have caused respiratory problems for the survivors.

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As usual, whenever the situation permits, the British press — led by the screaming meemies at the Financial Times — calls for the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi.  “In the name of God and Italy, go!” the FT intones at the beleaguered PM.  A bit pretentious, yes, but then they’re the smartest newspaper in the world and so they consider themselves fully authorized to speak on behalf of the Almighty, and  of their favorite vacation spot.

You probably know that the Brits have long had a love/hate affair with Italy.  They love it because it’s so pretty, the weather is usually better than what they’ve got (although these days the weather in Italy is catastrophic, but never mind), and they hate it because it seems to them that the Italians have a lot more fun than they do.  As well they may, although Italy’s a lot tougher than the romantics suspect.  The campaign against Berlusconi has been raging for many years, and he’s been convicted of so many crimes in the British press (although, to the rage of his critics, not by Italian courts, whose judges are for the most part on a very different part of the political landscape from Berlusconi) that the very sight of him at international meetings provokes new outbursts.  The latest is of a piece with that tradition.

It has always seemed odd to me that so many self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom are so vitriolic about the man who may well have saved Italy’s media from total control by the country’s political parties.  It was Berlusconi who funded private tv way back in the seventies, at a time when every news broadcast on the official, state-owned networks was under party management, as they mostly remain today.  The liveliest and most independent newspaper in the country, il Foglio, is underwritten by the Berlusconi family.  Meanwhile, “his” TV broadcasts are chock full of anti-Berlusconi journalists.  So what, exactly, is their problem?

(Answer:  They don’t like competition).

And of course, going back to the Brits’ stereotype of the Italians, it’s obvious to a blind man that Berlusconi et. al. have a great deal more fun than the pols in London, although it’s certainly not for lack of trying, as we all know.  I will never forget a plaintive editorial in an Italian newspaper about the Profumo scandal in Great Britain, with its all-star cast of gorgeous spies and harlots, and the Italian editorialist moaned “the Brits and the Americans have endless sex scandals;  we’re supposed to be the Latin lovers and we haven’t had a decent sex scandal for years.”

Berlusconi solved that bit of national shame.

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“Do you believe it?”

I had just started talking to the spirit of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of CIA’s counterintelligence, back when there were still a few folks who took such things seriously.  The Ouija board seemed to be in good shape, and his raspy, high-pitched voice, which more often than not sounded like a whisper, came through very clearly.

Obviously, I wanted to know what he thought about the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

JJA:  “I was going to ask you the same question.  After all, you’ve probably talked to somebody who actually knows something.  I’ve only got the news reports.”

ML:  “Yeah, but nobody’s saying a lot about the details of the case, since it’s going to trial and all…”

JJA:  “I get that.  But the Iranian guy apparently talked, didn’t he?”

ML:  “Yes, he did.  That’s pretty much standard for them, by the way.  I’m told it’s rare for Iranians to clam up.  However, now he’s pleaded ‘not guilty,’ so we’ll have to see how much of what he said will be admitted, and all that.”

JJA:  “Indeed.  But we’re not a jury, and it would seem on the face of it that if he confessed—as he seems to—then the government’s claim is certainly believable.”

ML:  “That was the opinion of a grand jury, anyway.”

JJA:  “Right-o.  But grand juries tend to believe prosecutors, as we know…”

ML:  “In fact, here in DC it is said that a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.”

JJA:  “Chortle.”  And he started chortling, until that cough of his kicked in, and there was a pause.

ML:  “Got some water?”

JJA:  “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about the liquid refreshment we get here, but it was delicious and effective.”

ML:  “I’m glad of that!  But getting back to the assassination plot, are you surprised at the number of experts who don’t believe it?”

JJA:  “Not only that;  I’m impressed at how much they think they know, even though none of them has seen anything approaching the full case.  There’s an undersecretary of the Treasury—David Cohen, I think his name is–running around describing the case to leaders of allied countries, and he seems to have made an impact with the Canadians and the French, both of whom have said that it justifies increased sanctions.”

ML:  “I agree.  And the Brits, as usual, were brought in early, trying to locate the Iranian co-conspirator, but without success. We’re in the usual funny situation concerning classified information, aren’t we?  Those who have seen it can’t talk about it, while those doing the talking haven’t seen it…”

JJA:  “That’s how it should be.”

ML:  “Somehow I knew you’d say exactly that.”

JJA:  “The other things that impress me are the claims that it couldn’t have been the Iranian Quds Force—that is, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards—because they are so professional and smart, they couldn’t possibly have done this thing, which is unprofessional and stupid.”

ML:  “Yeah, very funny.  My friend and colleague Reuel Gerecht tried to disabuse some congressmen on this score.  Did you see it?  He said:

Well, let me tell you, the truth is Iranian operations are almost always sloppy. That’s the way they have been. Do not the mix up the notion that the operations are sloppy and therefore they cannot be lethal.

…I tracked Iranian operations all over the place in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of those operations succeeded – that is they killed individuals. Most of those operations, again, it didn’t take you very long to put all of the pieces together again. The Iranians really don’t hide all that much. That is the real truth.

JJA:  “Well said.  Furthermore, we know they have sent assassins to both North and South America.  Many Iranian leaders have been indicted for the bombings in Buenos Aires in ’93 and ’94—probably because the Argentines reneged on a promise of nuclear assistance to the mullahs—and then there’s the guy they sent to Canada, posing as a political and religious refugee, whom they enlisted to assassinate Salman Rushdie.”

ML:  “But an-ex CIA guy, Bruce Riedel, says that if they were working with someone in a drug cartel, that would be a major departure from their previous behavior.  He thinks it’s fishy, fishy, fishy.”

JJA:  “Really!  From what I hear, it’s well established that the Iranians are up to their necks in drug trafficking.  After all, they operate at the source, inside Afghanistan, and you’ve written many times that Supreme Leader Khamenei is a consumer of opium.  So they are in that network.  They couldn’t operate without joint ventures with mafias and drug cartels.  If there were better open reporting on Iran’s activities in Latin America, this would be common knowledge.”

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