The secretary of state was back in Washington on Thursday, begging the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to take it easy on the poor Iranians.  Enough with the sanctions, he said.  Secretary Kerry has joined decades of his predecessors, buying  into the latest version of the 30-year old illusion that we can make a deal with the Tehran regime if only we deal properly and humbly with them.  He said there was a “window of opportunity” for a couple of months.  It doesn’t much matter if he really believes this legend, or is following instructions from President Obama, who is still pursuing this unholy grail despite five years of swift kicks in his behind.  The one he so loves to lead with.  Either way, it’s an embarrassment.

But then our new secretary of state has great flair for embarrassing us.  In Obama’s community of narcissists, Kerry is a bit different.  He excels at self-humiliation, as he showed in his recent sortie to Moscow, where Czar Putin kept him waiting for many hours before sparing some time to “discuss” Syria and related topics, no doubt including Iran.  As per the British Daily Mail, “Russian President Vladimir Putin kept Kerry waiting three hours before their meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday and continuously fiddled with his pen as the top American diplomat spoke about the ongoing crisis in Syria.”

I’m told that when Kerry landed in Russia, he was told a) that his hotel rooms weren’t ready, and b) that a military parade made it impossible for the Americans to drive to the Kremlin anyway, so he’d just have to wait.  Add two hours (check-in delay at the hotel) to the Mail version.

Many years ago, I traveled abroad on behalf of Henry Kissinger, by then a simple citizen, and I spoke with some important people.  I was instructed never to wait more than twenty minutes, and on two occasions I informed the important person’s assistant that I had waited fifteen minutes, and would have to leave in five more. Nothing personal, just a condition of my employment.  Both times the important person appeared almost immediately.  And I was not a cabinet member, I was a messenger boy of a famous–but former–high U.S. official.  But the American secretary of state couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Washington without even talking to Putin, and Kerry waited.

Most of you don’t know about Giulio Andreotti, who died Monday at 94 or 95, and you’re the poorer for it.  No one in political life today can possibly aspire to a career like his, and I don’t know anyone who can remotely match Andreotti’s wit, wisdom, cunning and humor.  There may be a high position in the Italian government that he never held, but I can’t think of it.  Seven times prime minister, and for decades he was universally believed to be the most powerful man in the country, the puppet master of the whole system, the master of maneuver.

He was famously accused of being in cahoots with the Mafia, and stood trial for 7-8 years before the judges threw out the case.  A friend of mine, a great writer named Lino Jannuzzi, wrote a small masterpiece about it called The Trial of the Century, which pretty much demolished the accusation, but most of the journalists and intellectuals who pretend to be expert in things Italian remain convinced of his guilt.  In a bittersweet way it’s a tribute to Andreotti’s charisma.

Andreotti’s real power base lay in Rome, his home town, and the Vatican.  He was a devout Catholic, and if you wanted to be sure to find him, all you had to do was wait for mass to end at his favorite church.  His career started during Word War II, and he emerged from it as the personal secretary to Alcide de Gasperi, who was PM during the crucial postwar years.  As his generation aged and died off, Andreotti carried on, always with a twinkle in his eye.  Somehow he found time to write books about the history of Rome. They were very good books and nobody ever suggested he had a ghost;  the language was his, the ideas were his, and the wit and wisdom were unmistakably his.

I knew him fairly well.  For someone eager to understand the complexities of Italian political life, you couldn’t find a better guru, and he was often generous with his time.  His advice was invariably spot-on;  he pointed me at the best sources on problems I was trying to solve, whether they were contemporary issues on which I had to report for the New Republic, or historical matters for my books on Italy.  And later on, when I was briefly in the U.S. government, he said something to me that I haven’t forgotten.  “Ledeen,” he said, in his measured tone, “we can live with a dovish America, and we can live with a hawkish America.  No problem.  But we cannot survive an America that is hawkish Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and dovish Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.”

Remember he was PM seven times, and foreign minister or defense minister even more times.  He knew the details, and he’d seen many American presidents, from FDR to Reagan.

Perhaps his most famous bon mot is a good way to say goodbye:  “Power corrupts,” he remarked, “above all, those who do not have it.”

As information about the apparent Israeli strikes on targets inside Syria continues to pour in, it’s easy to lose sight of the central fact: the two reported Israeli attacks are part of an ongoing war, the big war against the West. While the attacks were in Syria, the mission was primarily a major strike against Iran and Russia, two key components of the global alliance arrayed against us. Both are desperately trying to shore up the Assad regime in Damascus.

The fall of Assad would be a devastating blow to Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei’s tyranny in Tehran, would gravely weaken Russia’s strategic position in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and would threaten the strength (and even the survival) of Hezbollah, the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization and the creation of Iran’s founding tyrant, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The attacks apparently did great damage to Iranian missiles, and the vaunted Russian antiaircraft system provided to both Syria and Iran was unable to do anything to prevent them. Both have been humiliated.

The primary Israeli targets seem to have been Iranian missiles shipped from Iran to Syria, reportedly pending transfer to Hezbollah. They are capable of carrying chemical warheads, which may explain President Obama’s quick support for Israel.

The attacks came after more than a month of diplomatic activity:

–On Thursday, April 25th, the United States announced that we had evidence that the Syrians had used chemical weapons. That announcement was not merely the result of internal American deliberations; it came after several meetings with allies following claims of chemical attacks from the Syrian opposition in late March.

–There were meetings in Amman, Jordan, on April 1st and 2nd, chaired by the head of Jordanian intelligence, Faisal al Shobaki. The meetings included representatives from the United States, Qatar, and Israel, whose experts provided information from drones and satellites.

–The Saudi foreign minister met with Secretary of State John Kerry on the 16th (the day after the Marathon massacre in Boston). It was a scheduled meeting, but the session was closed (after journalists had been told it would be open). The next day, President Obama met with the foreign minister in an unscheduled session.

–On Monday the 22nd, CIA director John Brennan received the emir of Qatar and his foreign minister at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

–On Tuesday the 23rd, General Itay Bron of Israeli military intelligence announced that Israel had proof of the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

–On Wednesday the 24th and Thursday the 25th, there were further meetings in Washington to discuss the question, involving officials from France, Qatar, Great Britain, Canada, and the Czech Republic. The Czechs are world leaders in the field of chemical weapons intelligence, and their ambassador in Damascus, Eva Filipi, represents both the United States and Europe in the Syrian capital.

We are guided by myths more often than by reason.  Nothing new there;  man is a myth-making animal.  Myths spring up from our collective unconscious, they cover the globe, and they shape our thoughts and actions.  The great philosophers and the great psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts tried hard to “free us” from myths so that we could properly understand our world and ourselves.  Spinoza thought that emotions were the result of unclear ideas (I don’t agree, and neither does Barbara, the very clear object of my strongest emotions, but I digress).

Good news:  the doctor is in, and he’s going to help you.  He’s more modest about his abilities than the great thinkers and healers, so he’s just going to help you understand our world.  As for understanding yourself, well,  maybe Obamacare will pay for it.

The Myth of the Day is:  the “homegrown terrorist.”  Sometimes he or she’s called “self-made,” but it all comes to the same thing.  The idea is that there are normal Americans who, on their own, and certainly without any input from foreign countries or terrorist groups, up and become terrorists.

Such persons exist — from the Unabomber to those who have slaughtered innocents in our schools or movie theaters — but they are not the sorts that I’m talking about, the sorts the myth commonly refers to.  The myth and the phrase are typically applied to actual or would-be killers who are motivated by strong ideological or religious beliefs.  Most of the time, the myth is used to suggest that the bad guys in question don’t have any links to our foreign enemies.  They’re just Americans gone bad.

Ask yourself the obvious question:  how did they go bad?  From JFK’s assassin to the Fort Hood killer, most of them found meaning in life in violent ideologies that turned them against their countrymen and, profoundly, took them away from home.

Foreign ideologies.  Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist, Nidal Hasan was a radical Muslim.  Both killed Americans in America, after coming to identify with doctrines that were anything but homegrown.  Moreover, in recent years, establishing contact with foreign forces has become a piece of cake.  We do it online, we don’t have to travel overseas to get our indoctrination (although, as if to prove the point, a considerable number of them do).  Even when it “happens here,” the indoctrination more often than not takes place at the feet of foreign teachers and trainers.  Take the radical mosques, for example.  Most of them are funded with Saudi money, their texts come from the Saudi Kingdom, and their imams are trained by radical Saudi Wahhabis.

Roger L. Simon is right (he’s always right);  leadership is crucial, and when leadership is rotten the whole body politic rots and stinks.  Our biggest problem is rotten leadership.  Until and unless we fix that, we’re gonna have lots of trouble.  Of all sorts.

SIDEBAR:  This is why I have no patience for so many of my friends who constantly say the president has the right to choose his team (whether a new “czar” or a new judge or justice or a secretary of something or other).  If the choice is bad, we should say so and fight it. Good leaders are worth fighting for and bad leaders have to be challenged.

BACK TO SERMON:  Roger understands the way the system works by saying that the FBI’s failure to look carefully and long enough at Tamerlan-the-terrorist has a lot to do with our leaders’ reluctance to call a terrorist a terrorist or to accept the fact that radical Islamist terrorists exist.  The people who do counterterrorism shy away from seeing such terrorists, or potential terrorists, because if they point to such people, several bad things (from the investigators’ and analysts’ standpoint) happen.  First, the policy makers aren’t going to do anything; second, the investigators and analysts aren’t going to get promoted, or rewarded with bonuses; third, they may get sued or sent to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia.

So when the president had to gnash his teeth before pronouncing the T-word, it had real consequences. Language matters a lot.  Ask Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would probably chuckle and ask you right back, if there’s an Islamic terrorist in the forest, but we can’t say so, can it possibly fall?

Way back in the days right after 9/11, I wrote that we were going to have a hell of a problem dealing with religious-inspired terrorism.  You can’t really do a decent job of intelligence gathering without taking a hard look at the mosques.  That’s where a lot of radicalization and recruitment takes place, and many mosques all over the world have served as key links in the transmission belt from the terrorists’ home base to the terrorists “in the field.”  But the First Amendment protects religious speech, even when it incites the faithful against others.  So it’s a problem we need to address.  But we can’t begin to address it if we can’t say the words “Islamic terrorist” or “radical Islamist terrorist.”

This a tough problem, and when the president acts as chief censor it makes things even worse.  The rot spreads and stinks.

I knew there was something missing from the Benghazi story, something fundamental that had thus far escaped my attention. Not that the questions being asked by the hundreds of Special Forces guys aren’t important. I, too, want to know why–if this is accurate–we didn’t have military forces ready to move in. I, too, want to know why the top political figures–the president and the secretaries of state and defense (Obama, Hillary and Panetta)–were so clearly disinclined to take action. That whole phony charade about the “video” bespeaks an effort to get the world to focus on the wrong thing. The blatant, almost compulsive lack of a sense of urgency upsets me no end. OK. But I was still trying to understand what had happened, and I wasn’t making great progress. I needed help. And so, as I often do in such circumstances, I dragged out the ouija board, checked the wiring and the batteries, and switched it on. Amazingly, it worked immediately, and I was once again talking to the lively spirit of James Jesus Angleton, who once upon a time headed up CIA counterintelligence.

ML: “Wow, it worked first time.”

JJA: “Lucky me. I was napping.” (Sound of Zippo lighter clicking shut).

ML: “I’m sorry! What time is it there?”

JJA: “We don’t have time here, it’s eternal, you know.”

I tried to think of something witty to say, but it didn’t work.

JJA: “That whole night and day thing, it doesn’t apply. Darkness and light were separated on earth, after all…”

ML: “Right. Part of creation.”

JJA: “Exactly. So what’s on your mind?”

ML: “Benghazi. It doesn’t parse, somehow.”

JJA: “What’s the problem? Just begin at the beginning, you’ll get it…”

ML: “What’s the beginning? When the attack starts? When Ambassador Stevens asks for better security? With one of the intelligence reports or warnings? When?”

JJA: “That’s all scene-setting. It begins with Stevens going to Benghazi.”

ML: “Okay, he goes to Benghazi, where he’d been many times before.”

JJA: “Stop!”

ML: “Huh?”

JJA: .”..many times before. Why?”

ML: “Well there’s a widely repeated theory that he was organizing clandestine arms shipments from Libya to the Syrian opposition forces, but I don’t believe it.”

JJA: “No, no, go back further. Before they made him ambassador. The whole Libya thing, the overthrow of Qaddafi. The Libyan opposition was based in Benghazi, right? We intervened to save the people in Benghazi, right?”

ML: “Yeah, so what?”

JJA: “Stevens was a key intermediary during that period, wasn’t he? He sneaked into Benghazi on a Greek cargo ship and established contact with the anti-Qaddafi forces.”

ML: “He was a hero to the post-Qadaffi rulers. They loved him in Benghazi.”

JJA: “Well said!”

ML: “What did I say?”

JJA: “You said they loved him.”

ML: “Did I say the magic word? Is Groucho going to give me a hundred dollars?”

JJA: “I didn’t realize you were that old” (coughs, chuckles, coughs again). “Yes, the magic word is ‘love’ and according to my sources, it’s the key to the operation.”

Mr. Trita Parsi, the factotum of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), writes endlessly about Iran, American policy toward Iran, and the presumed secret history of American dealings with Iran. Even though an American court found him to have made false accusations against another Iranian-American (in a case that Parsi himself brought in an embarrassing failed effort to demonstrate his independence of the Iranian regime), he is still taken seriously by many journalists and even scholars.   They should know better, but he gets respect he doesn’t deserve.

So I thought I would try to illuminate a small corner of his writings, the nonsense he’s written about me.  I have a competitive advantage, after all;  I know about these matters from my own experience.  He writes about meetings involving me and just one other person, but he has never communicated with me, nor is there any evidence that he read my own accounts of events.  The number of factual errors is, let us say, very impressive.

It’s hard to get most everything wrong, but Mr. Parsi has done his best.

In his book Treacherous Alliance; the secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U. S., Parsi says a great many things about me, most of which are false.

● He mistakenly claims that I had easy access to Pres. George W. Bush (page 232) through Karl Rove “with whom he met periodically.” In fact, I had three or four conversations with Rove in eight years, and never spoke with President Bush except to thank him for inviting us to the White House, along with several hundred other Jewish Americans, for an annual Chanukah celebration.

● He says that I was a consultant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. False.

● With regard to a meeting in Rome in December 2001 that I helped organize, he has the Italian participants wrong, and he defames one of the American participants, Larry Franklin, saying that he “would later plead guilty to spying for Israel in 2005 and… is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence.” Franklin made no such plea, and never served time in prison.  There are public records to prove that Mr. Parsi’s claims are false.

● Concerning that same meeting in Rome, Parsi alleges that I concealed it from American government officials, but it was fully approved by Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley, and I not only informed the American ambassador to Rome in advance, but twice briefed him in Rome on what had transpired.

● Parsi also owes an apology to the Italian government. He writes “as a student of the Italian fascist movement, Ledeen enjoyed extensive contacts within the Italian intelligence service,” apparently meaning that the Italian intelligence service in the 21st century was part of the “fascist movement.”  Ridiculous and misinformed.  Remember, this is a guy who sues others for libel…

He has a chapter called “Scandal” that deals with “Iran-Contra.”  It’s  badly confused and crammed with errors.  He writes that my role — meeting with Israeli and Iranian officials and middlemen — was my own initiative, an incredible claim when the records of the White House travel office show that my trips were paid for by the National Security Council, to which I was a part-time consultant.  Mr. Parsi doesn’t seem to understand how the American government works;  it was hardly possible for me to have had conversations with top foreign officials without formal approval from the USG.  But he couldn’t be bothered to read the (published) documents.

Margaret Thatcher, former British Prime Minister, speaks on July 1, 1991 in London. Photo by David Fowler / Shutterstock.com.

Lady T was one of history’s most remarkable groups of leaders.  Blessed are we who lived at a time of giants, starting with her, Reagan and John Paul II, and onward to Walesa, Havel, Lee Kwan Yu, Deng Xiaoping, Bukovsky and Sharansky.  Scour the world today with that group in mind and your heart sinks.  Such moments are very rare, and she was surely in the front of the amazing assemblage of world-historical figures.  Even the second-raters, like Gorbachev and Mitterrand, look very impressive.

She saved British capitalism, and she gave Britain another generation as an important country.  She spoke magnificently, and she had great courage.  When she told Bush The Elder “Don’t go wobbly,” they both understood that she would certainly not.  It must have frustrated her no end to have to deal with a pale reflection of her pal Ronnie, as it must have annoyed her no end when the Conservatives removed her in favor of their own pale reflection, John Major.  So far as I could tell, they purged her because they just felt it was time to do something different.

She was the first Western leader to say that “we could do business” with Gorbachev, by which she meant he was the ideal gravedigger of his own system.  And she was by far the most clear-eyed of the “Europeans” when it came to the creation of the Eurozone. Here, take off a few minutes and listen to her.  Pay attention to the remarkable clarity of her language, of her delight in political debate, of her sure command of the issues.

More on the next page.

I don’t really follow North Korea (mostly, I try to stay up-to-date on a few countries that begin with the letter “I”), but it seems to me that we are looking at recent events in the wrong context. North Korea is a charter member of the Axis of Evil, and works hand in glove with the other surviving regime of that infamous trinity, Iran. I’ve been writing for years about the intimate relationship between the two, ranging from North Korean assistance in digging tunnels in Iranian mountains and in the Tehran subway system, to Iranian cooperation with North Korean missile and nuclear programs.

Let’s just say that they work together a lot. So when I see the North Koreans jumping up and down and threatening to nuke us, I ask myself what’s in it for the Iranians? And I add the others in the global anti-American alliance. What’s in it for the Chinese? The Russians? The Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorians and Nicaraguans? Because all these guys coordinate so many of their activities that I can’t understand important events in any one of them without putting those events in the big context. When I see the Russians and the Chinese fighting against anti-Iranian sanctions, I remind myself that they, along with the Latin Americans, are in a banking network with Iran. When the Iranians sit down to negotiate about their nuclear program, I ask myself: what do the Russians want? And so it goes.

To be sure, it’s hard to find anyone this side of James Jesus Angleton who agrees with me, and he’s dead. But still, why do you think the North Koreans are threatening thermonuclear war these days? Yes, they may really be planning to attack us, but if I were the head of an intelligence service I would ask my smartest people to test an hypothesis: what if it’s misdirection? What if there trying to get us to focus on them, when something else is in the works someplace else?

Don’t ask me what the something else is, or the location of the someplace else. I don’t know. It’s only a theory after all. And I agree that the North Koreans may well be crazy enough to attack us. But if this is all part of a strategic operation by the anti-American alliance, then we should carefully go down our list of likely targets, and see what the major terrorists are up to.

I would ask my smartest people to pay special attention to people and communications moving north from Venezuela, where a very important election campaign has just begun to choose the successor to Hugo Chavez. The bus driver who served as his vice president would benefit from some dramatic event inside the United States, and the Russians, Iranians and Chinese are actively working for his victory.

However this all turns out, the basic point is valid and important: I don’t think we can understand the world anymore if we take it country by country. We have to look at bigger pictures.

(Thumbnail on PJM Homepage assembled from multiple Shutterstock.com images.)

General James Mattis has left Central Command, as of Friday, and it’s just as well, since he is entirely the wrong man to preside over our retreat from Afghanistan, and in all likelihood from the broader region.  Mattis, the most beloved Marine officer of this generation, is an attack dog, our Patton (like Patton, he is a very cultured man who composes poetry in Greek, and his famously sulfuric language may well be, as it was in Patton’s case, a conceit used to bond with his fighters rather than a reflection of his true rhetorical preference).

Barbara Ledeen once sat next to him at dinner and pronounced him one of the most interesting men she had ever met.  Which is quite a compliment.

Among my collection of secret documents is a poster design–not even the Marine Corps could actually put it out–featuring a quotation from General Mattis to “Iraqi sheikhs.”  It begins “I come in peace, I did not bring artillery,” and it ends “you F**ck with me, I’ll kill you all.”

No wonder he was the Marines’ most beloved leader.  No wonder the best recent portrait of him is whimsical and Hollywoodian.  It’s hard to “explain” him to an American public that doesn’t know much of anything about the military, or about warfare:

Coincidentally, Mattis’ retirement comes at the same time as our younger son’s departure from the Marine Corps after four years, including a deployment to Helmand Province in Afghanistan.  His older brother, also a Marine officer, was twice in Iraq, including a stint in Anbar Province during some very dark days.  And their older sister was twice in Iraq and twice in Afghanistan, most recently on General McChrystal’s excellent staff in Kabul.