I retrieved a yellowing paper book from the shelf from Michael Ledeen in 2007 titled "The Iranian Time Bomb". Pundits thought he was crazy at the time for considering Iran a major geopolitical challenge. Given recent history, I wonder what they'd say now? Michael's closing chapter lays out his thesis: the fight is not Iran vs Israel but Iran vs America. "The Iranian war against the US is ... a major component of ... the third Muslim assault against the infidel West".
It’s a contest between powers and principalities. But the argument fell on deaf ears; a conflict between unbeliever and believer sounded archaic, something secular liberals could not understand and promptly forgot. But the Iran challenge became a fact anyway even though it had to be described in terms of a larger global matrix dubbed the Axis of Upheaval, “a term coined in 2024 by Center for a New American Security … to describe the growing anti-Western collaboration between Russia under Vladimir Putin, Iran, China, and North Korea beginning in the early 2020s.”
But whatever you call it the Iranian Time Bomb always contained an element of religious motivation that Washington, especially the Democratic Party, has been blind to. The recent victory of Zohran Mamdami, an Ugandan born Muslim socialist, over former governor Andrew Cuomo underscores this. "There is no real precedent for what happened tonight. Progressives across America will genuflect to him." How could the King of New York lose to Doctor Zodiac?
That the two flagship cities of the Anglo world, London and New York, will have radical Muslim mayors a quarter century after 9/11 is an impressive demonstration of the power of demographics and institutional capture. But most of all it suggests that a civilization that believes in nothing will fall to one that believes in something, whatever that might be.
Ledeen, then writing in the shadow of the invasion of Iraq, urged Western strategies not to put their entire trust in force of arms, but in supporting the emerging and dissident elements of the Iranian people. If you appeal to their deepest aspirations, he argued, they will come. "The Iranian people need 3 things ... hope, information and some material support ... the Iranians feel abandoned," Ledeen wrote.
They got none of this from Washington and certainly nothing from Obama in the years that followed, perhaps because then – as now – the defenders of the ayatollahs believed radical Islam was actually on “the right side of history”. Some elements of Ledeen’s idealistic vision were glimpsed amidst the flash of JDAMs during the 12 Day War between Israel and Iran, like survivors accidentally seen in found footage. Israeli hackers briefly took over Iranian state TV and broadcast a call for uprising. “Iranian media said Wednesday that Israel briefly hacked the state television broadcast, airing footage of women’s protests and urging people to take to the streets.” Perhaps the high point came when Israel destroyed "the Basij headquarters, the Evin Prison for political prisoners and regime opponents, the ‘Destruction of Israel’ clock in Palestine Square, the internal security headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards”
For a moment it seemed the ayatollahs would be not only physically, but metaphysically defeated. But it was not to be. Following the 12 Day War ceasefire the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Council was reprieved from destruction by airstrike and promptly acted to kill its foes. “Iranian authorities are pivoting from a ceasefire with Israel to intensify an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, particularly in the restive Kurdish region, according to officials and activists,” the Guardian wrote.
Some pundits, like those in the BBC, argue that the Islamic Republic has been fatally wounded, the ceasefire notwithstanding. ‘After spending nearly two weeks in a secret bunker somewhere in Iran during his country's war with Israel, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, might want to use the opportunity of the ceasefire to venture out. … When – or indeed if – he does emerge from hiding, he will see a landscape of death and destruction. He will no doubt still appear on state TV claiming victory in the conflict. He will plot to restore his image. But he will face new realities – even a new era. The war has left the country significantly weakened and him a diminished man.”
Then perhaps Khamenei will be reasonable and talk to Europe. But there’s a lot of ruin in a civilization and perhaps even more in a theocracy. Khamenei can still reflect, amid the ruin around him that Khomeini was once in even lower estate, just an idea living in exile in France, who still beat Jimmy Carter in the end. For as Albert Camus famously pointed out, an idea never dies. It just has to wait out the BBC. Before the ruins of Evin prison we should know “what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
But diplomats often know no more about the plague than the jubilant crowds, nor do they learn from books.
Michael Ledeen in his last days was encouraging a movie: Keys to Paradise: a reference to plastic keys given children ... by the Iranian regime that was using those kids to walk in front of their troops as human mine sweepers during the Iran-Iraq war. The project was canceled. The great blind spot of the secular/atheist West is in its inability to take "death to America, death to the Jew, death to the infidel" seriously. The secular progressives reckon in the only way they know how and are blind to all else.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man
Don’t ask Andrew
Ask Zohran
