So let’s consider the alternatives:

The regime is fracturing under pressure. Good, war may be averted.

This is total disinformation to buy the regime time. Well, there’s the rub. This is the outcome the Bush administration needs to overcome.

It took them more than two weeks before they reported the story about the Jewish man who was kidnapped in Paris and tortured by a gang of mostly Mulsim thugs.

They don’t seem to have learned anything from the time they refused to report on the Holocaust in the early 40′s.

There is always some kind of dissension witin such a regime, if history is any guide. The trouble is being able to understand the degree and scope of the dissension before hindsight make it irrelevant. History seems to indicate that outsiders don’t have a very good track record there, either.

So yes, if enough pressure is applied, the Iranian regime will crack. Where and how to best apply that pressure to create maximum good results and minimum unintended consequences is an almost complete unknown. I doubt anyone outside Iran has more than an educated guess, even the esteemed Ledeen. Educated guesses are notoriously unreliable convincers of fence sitters, too.

Of course, if I understand Ledeen correctly, his view seems to be that we should apply a lot of pressure and opportunistically watch for the cracks to appear–then target more pressure. After all, Reagan knew the Soviet Union economy would implode in an arms races with the West. But he didn’t predict that exact nature of the implosion, or the exact series of events that would occur to bring about the implosion.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether there is dissension or not. The dissension will not go anywhere unless pushed. And the pressures that will create dissension are the same pressures that will percolate existing dissension into something useful to us. We’d like to know about dissension as a metric for how we are doing at a given moment, but it shouldn’t dictate the long-term policy.

As discussed here – even actions short of economic sanctions can serve to this purpose.

No, I can only guess. Itís very likely that a significant number of Iranís elites prefers not to give the middle finger to the West. They want to live the good life and not die for Allah. But do these individuals possess the power to stop the extremist crazies? Beats me. We are living in a dangerous era. Thatís not going to change anytime in the near future. Americans often expect a crisis to be solved virtually overnight. After all, World Wars 1 & 2 and even our Civil War ended after a relatively short period of time. That unfotunately is not going to happen in our fight to the death against Islamic nihilism. Our grandchildren may very well be dealing with this challenge long after we are placed into our graves. We are in this for the long haul.