the execrable michael ledeen

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Yesterday, I came across this bit at the end of a piece by Jason Ditz at Antiwar:

One notable exception has been Michael Ledeen, a longtime proponent of regime change in Tehran now based at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), who suggests that Mousavi has been radicalized by the events of the past week and bears little resemblance to the moderate seen on the campaign trail.

"Does Mousavi even want to change the system? I think he does, and in any event, I think that’s the wrong question," Ledeen wrote on Monday. "He is not a revolutionary leader, he is a leader who has been made into a revolutionary by a movement that grew up around him."

Ledeen also attacked as "embarrassingly silly" the views of Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh, two fellow neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In a Tuesday op-ed in The New York Times, Pletka and Alfoneh had dismissed the opposition movement as "little more than a symbolic protest" that had been "crushed" by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

For Ledeen, by contrast, "The most powerful leaders in Iran are facing a life and death showdown" and Mousavi’s aim is to bring down the Islamic Republic itself.

However, Ledeen’s positions on Iran have always been idiosyncratic even among neoconservatives. He has maintained for years that the Islamic Republic is on the verge of collapse and that Iran’s populace is secular-minded, pro-U.S., and merely waiting for an opportunity to throw off their rulers.

Perhaps due to perceptions that Ledeen is "crying wolf" about the end of the Islamic Republic, other hawks seem less inclined to share his confidence in revolution in Iran. Most are preparing to stake out a hard line against Tehran whether it is Mousavi or Ahmadinejad who ultimately emerges as the victor.

and it put me in mind of how I'd wanted to stress Ledeen's deep involvement in the project of getting back control of Iran. He's done a number of hit pieces on Ahmadinejad over the last four years, and if you're a rube reading them, you're apt to believe him, and I ain't linking them here. Google them if you must see it to believe it, but, again, if you've heeded me and taken the time to listen to the discussion linked by the image directly below this post, learning about Michael Ledeen will help flesh it out for you considerably.

Just while searching an image for this post I ran across a 2006 piece in Mother Jones by Laura Rozen that mentions him in connection with a bogus Iranian dissident by the name of Amir Abbas Fakhravar who also just happens to be mid-punditizing on the mainstream media just now... and not accidentally at all.

Anyway, these days Ledeen is billed as a Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and writes newspaper opinion pieces and has a blog, none of which I will link to either. You can Google if you must. He is an arch neocon, not much admired in true conservative circles:

Ledeen was especially interested in the role played by youth in Italian fascism. It was here that he detected the movement’s most exciting revolutionary potential. The young Ledeen wrote that those who exalted the position of youth in the fascist revolution—like those who argued in favor of his beloved “universal fascism”—were committed to exporting Italian fascism to the whole world, an idea in which Mussolini was initially uninterested. When he was later converted to it, Mussolini said that fascism drew on the universalist heritage of Rome, both ancient and Catholic. No doubt Ledeen thinks that the new Rome in Washington has the same universalist mission. He writes that people around Berto Ricci—the editor of the fascist newspaper L’Universale, and a man he calls “brilliant” and “an example of enthusiasm and independence”— “called for the formation of a new empire, an empire based not on military conquest but rather on Italy’s unique genius for civilization. … They intended to develop the traditions of their country and their civilization in such a manner as to make them the basic tenets of a new world order.” Ledeen adds, in a passage that anticipates his later love of creative destruction, “Clearly the act of destruction which would produce the flowering of the new fascist hegemony would sweep away the present generation of Italians, along with the rest.” And Giuseppe Bottai, to whom Ledeen attributes “considerable energy and autonomy,” was notable for his belief that “the infusion of the creative energies of a new generation was essential” for the fascist revolution. Bottai “implored the young … to found a new order arising from the spontaneous activity of their creation.”

I mean, you should read the whole piece, but this paragraph is probably a representative-enough sample.

It doesn't look as though his listing at SourceWatch has been updated recently, but we can throw in the link to his Wikipedia page, where I highly recommend you at least give a hard scan to his street creds.

You might miss it reading all these bios of him, but as I linked before in one of my link blitzes, Ledeen is in tight with Mousavi, whether in a friendly way or just because Mousavi can't shake him, I don't know. But you put this together with Mousavi being backed by Rafsanjani who is acting for all the world as though he's succumbing to the corporatocracy's economic hit men's bribes and their jackals' threats, and making use of their "superior" election services to boot, and things just can't help but stink to high heaven.