Bill Berkowitz
April 3, 2006

Freedom House receiving US government money "for clandestine activities inside Iran"

While Mohamad ElBaradei, the atomic energy chief of the United Nations, urges restraint, Michael Ledeen, an American Enterprise Institute neocon, advocates "regime change" in Iran, and charges the Bush Administration with being asleep at the wheel

Regardless of what Michael Ledeen thinks of conflict in the Middle East, Iran has been in George W. Bush's sights for quite some time. Recently Bush Administration officials and some members of the European Union have been warning that conflict with Iran over its nuclear program may be inevitable, particularly if Iran doesn't cease its effort to perfect uranium enrichment.

In a newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) the Bush Administration placed Iran squarely in its crosshairs. Along with affirming Bush's preventive (not "preemptive"*) strike doctrine -- as outlined in the 2002 NSS -- the current document clearly has Iran in mind when it states that the U.S. is "committed to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people."

On March 30, 2005 the Financial Times (London) reported that at a speech at New York's Freedom House, Bush "stepped into an intense debate among democracy activists in the US and Iran over how US dollars should be used to carry out the administration's policy of promoting freedom in the Islamic republic."

Freedom House is one of the organizations that is receiving money from the Bush Administration "for clandestine activities inside Iran," according to the Financial Times. A Freedom House research report concluded that "Far more often than is generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, non-violent civic resistance -- which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes and civil disobedience to de-legitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders."

Reuters recently reported that "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said...[that] the United States...will talk to Iran about Washington's accusations of Iranian destabilization of Iraq, in the first public acceptance of an Iranian offer to meet."

How U.S. policy toward Iran plays itself out remains to be seen, but economic sanctions and/or the use of military force appear to still be on the table.

If the unfolding scenario has more than a whiff of the familiar, that's because, well...it is familiar.

While the run-up to a possible military strike against Iran doesn't parallel the run-up to the War on Iraq, there are a number of similarities.

Like Iraq, right wing think tank-connected neoconservatives -- particularly the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen-- pushing for regime change. Like before the war on Iraq, administration officials are claiming that an Iranian-developed nuclear program could threaten the U.S. Like Iraq, competing exile groups are vying for the attention and support of the administration; information from some of these groups--like that provided by Iraq's exile-in-chief, Ahmad Chalabi--has been less that stellar. There have been disagreements within the administration as to how to proceed. And now there's show and tell at the UN Security Council.

As many reports, and a few books by former administration officials, have indicated, a war with Iraq was on the minds of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney long before the March 2003 invasion. It may have even pre-dated 9/11: In a post-2000 election phone call to President Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Vice President Cheney seemed to indicate that the issue he was mainly interested in being briefed on was Iraq, MSNBC's Chris Matthews told his "Hardball" audience in late March.

During the period between 9/11/2001 and March 2003, neoconservatives in the U.S. were riding high. The remaking of America's foreign policy was coming to fruition. A successful invasion of Iraq would, in all likelihood, lead to bigger and better things, including regime change in Iran and Syria, and an entire reshaping of the Middle East. Or so thought the Neocons.

During the run-up to and in the first fews weeks after the invasion of Iraq neoconservatives including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and James Woolsey were getting as much media time as they could handle. U.S. news magazines had dubbed "Rummy"--Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld -- a "matinee idol" conducting "must see" press conferences.

The first U.S. bombs landed in Baghdad in March 2003, a month after Secretary of State Colin Powell had given a nearly completely false presentation to the United Nations Security Council. The reports by the United Nations weapons inspectors, led by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq, and the documents provided by Mohamad ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were completely disregarded because they disagreed with the administration's fallacious campaign against Iraq.

ElBaradei speaks from experience

Mohamad ElBaradei remembers those politically and emotionally charged days very well. At a recent forum in Doha, the capital of Qatar, ElBaradei told the audience that the international community should "steer away from threats of sanctions against Iran, saying the country's nuclear program was not 'an imminent threat' and the time had come to 'lower the pitch' of debate," the Los Angeles Times recently reported.

According to the newspaper, ElBaradei's conciliatory remarks in Qatar followed on the heels of a late-March agreement by the U.N. Security Council "to give Iran 30 days to respond to requests from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, that it halt uranium enrichment research."

"There is no military solution to this situation," said ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize-winning director-general of the IAEA. "It's inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution."

ElBaradei's assessment of the current situation with Iran is clearly based on his experience. After UN inspectors didn't find any indicators that there was any kind of nuclear arms program in Iraq, that finding was ignored by the Bush Administration. The intervening years have proved that the IAEA was right when it determined that Saddam Hussein did not possess any of the alleged weaponry, or any programs to create it.

"I work on facts," ElBaradei said in remarks reported by Reuters. "We fortunately were proven right in Iraq, we were the only ones that said at the time that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, and I hope this time people will listen to us."

Michael Ledeen is disappointed

Three years after the invasion of Iraq, many of the most neoconservative war hawks who promoted the ill-conceived war have slinked away from the spotlight.

Not Michael Ledeen.

Ledeen, a resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, DC-based conservative "think tank", who told Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna that the invasion of Iraq was the "Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place," nonetheless continues to push for "regime change" in Iran.

According to The New Yorker magazine's Connie Bruck, "Ledeen has been predicting for many years that Iran is on the verge of popular revolution, which only requires some outside help to become a reality." A few years ago, he was brash enough to tell a group of Iranian expatriates in Los Angeles--where some 600,000 exiles live: "I have contacts in Iran, fighting the regime. They need funds. Give me twenty million, and you'll have your revolution."

In a NationalReviewOnline (NRO) post dated March 28, Ledeen charged the Bush Administration with being asleep at the wheel with regards to the Iranian threat.

Ledeen's story, titled "Iran Is at War with Us: Someone should tell the U.S. government," claimed that the Bush Administration has "done nothing to make the mullahs' lives more difficult, even though there is abundant evidence for Iranian involvement in Iraq, most including their relentless efforts to kill American soldiers."

"The evidence" that Iran has its fangs deeply embedded in Iraq, "consists of first-hand information, not intelligence reports," Ledeen wrote. "Scores of Iranian intelligence officers have been arrested, and some have confessed. Documentary evidence of intimate Iranian involvement with Iraqi terrorists has been found all over Iraq, notably in Fallujah and Hilla. But the 'intelligence' folks at the Pentagon, led by the hapless Secretary Stephen Cambone, seem to have no curiosity, as if they were afraid of following the facts to their logical conclusion: Iran is at war with us."

If the Bush Administration was serious about spreading democracy, "we would be actively supporting democratic revolution in Iran," Ledeen wrote. While it's true that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "went to Congress to ask for an extra $75 million to 'support democracy' in Iran...the small print shows that the first $50 million will go to the toothless tigers at the Voice of America and other official American broadcasters, which is to say to State Department employees. The Foreign Service does not often drive revolutionary movements; its business is negotiating with foreign governments, not subverting them. There were whispers that we were supporting trade unions in Iran, which would be very good news, but such efforts should be handled by private-sector organizations, not by the American government per se."

Ledeen recommends that the U.S. stop dillydallying and "take action against Iran and its half-brother Syria, for the carnage they have unleashed against us and the Iraqis. We know in detail the location of terrorist training camps run by the Iranian and Syrian terror masters; we should strike at them, and at the bases run by Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards as staging points for terrorist sorties into Iraq."

Ledeen concludes that once the mullahs see that we are serious, "that we are determined to promote regime change in Tehran and Damascus, and will not give them a pass on their murderous activities in Iraq, then it might make sense to talk to Khamenei's representatives. We could even expand the agenda from Iraqi matters to the real issue: we could negotiate their departure, and then turn to the organization of national referenda on the form of free governments, and elections to empower the former victims of a murderous and fanatical tyranny that has deluded itself into believing that it is invincible."

Ledeen's mission

"Preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader--a dictator--willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures,' which few know how, or are willing to employ." --Michael Ledeen

For a chunk of his professional life, Michael Ledeen has been out to remake the world. And it hasn't mattered how many innocents get slaughtered along the way.

Pacific News Service's William O. Beeman provided this short bio on Ledeen in a May 5, 2003 article titled "Who is Michael Ledeen?"

Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He is a former employee of the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council. As a consultant working with NSC head Robert McFarlane, he was involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair -- an adventure that he documented in the book "Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair." His most influential book is last year's "The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win."

(In her New Yorker piece about the strategy of the Iranian exile community, reporter Connie Bruck pointed out that one of Ledeen's roles during the Iran-Contra affair was to "arrange meetings between his friend the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and the U.S. government.")

Ledeen's "views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001," William O. Beeman reported. "He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq."

According to Beeman -- the author of "Language, Status, and Power in Iran," which was published in 1986, and "The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other" published in 2005 -- in an April 30, 2003 talk entitled "Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism," at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Ledeen declared "the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon."

In a conversation with the New Yorker's Connie Bruck, Ledeen indicated that back in 2001 and 2002, "when he pressed the case for Iran with friends in the Administration, he had support from some officials in the Pentagon and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney." According to Ledeen, however, administration officials felt that "the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad."

In "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago," Ledeen wrote: "Change--above all violent change--is the essence of human history." In a story posted at National Review Online he asserted, "Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically...it is time once again to export the democratic revolution."

Ledeen also appears to have scooped just about everyone with his claim that Osama bin Laden is dead.

"I wrote several weeks ago that I was told bin Laden died in Iran in mid-December 2005," Ledeen told Raw Story. "I trust the (Iranian) person who told me, but it's easy for even the best people to get such things wrong, so time will tell. Thus far there is no sign he's alive, and Zawahiri acts more and more like the commander."

* Many commentators incorrectly call Bush's wars "pre-emptive." A pre-emptive war is described as when an attack is obviously imminent. Iraq had no weapons capable of attacking the US, nor any programs capable of making such weapons. Historically, pre-emptive wars are described as allowable when an enemy has clearly amassed its troops on another country's border.