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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Feb. 15, 2007 / 27 Shevat, 5767

Where Sadr Calls Home: The War of the Persian Succession intensifies

By Michael Ledeen

Ledeen
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The wonderful Tom Joscelyn noticed that al Qaeda’s putative No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, has called on all Muslims (not just all Sunnis) to unite behind al Qaeda and specifically behind Mullah Omar, the grotesque chief of the Taliban. It is indeed noteworthy, for at least two reasons. First of all, it goes hand in hand with the calls for Muslim unity issued by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the eve of the Hadj and on subsequent occasions. Second, as Allahpundit muses, one could infer from this that Osama is no longer around, which I have believed for some time. After all, we haven’t seen a video of The Tall One for more than two years. I rather suspect that al Qaeda ceased to exist after we liberated Afghanistan, and that, ever since, these unsavory characters have been under more or less effective control by their Iranian hosts.

Of course, the Iranians deny it all. Even though the Washington Post announced last week that the Iranians were offering to deliver their al Qaeda "prisoners" to us, if only we’d make nice, the regime nixed the very idea in one of its most authoritative publications, Beztab. Indeed, they said that there aren’t any al Qaeda personnel in Iran at all. Maybe the earlier scoop came from Walter Pincus, who recently failed to distinguish between Carl Levin and the Pentagon’s inspector general.

The last bit of news from Iran is the unsurprising but still significant retreat of Moqtada al Sadr to his safe haven across the border, where the mullahs will feed him, at least for a while. For those who have convinced themselves that Moqtada is primarily an Iraqi patriot, rather than an Iranian agent, this ignominious abandonment of his troops should — although it won’t — peel the scales from their eyes. And it also underlines the nervousness in Tehran. Khamenei probably knows he’s going to die without any of the great victories he has pursued: Lebanese democracy has not yielded, there is no Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Israel is still there. Indeed, the small adjustment to our behavior in Iraq — a handful of arrests of Iranians — must send chills through his malignant body, since it shatters the great lie in which he and his followers had so passionately believed: that America has no stomach for war, and will break and run when attacked systematically.

All this adds to the intensity of the War of the Persian Succession, and effectively creates a power vacuum atop the Islamic Republic of Iran. I’ll bet you that our intelligence services in Iraq are getting a lot of Farsi-speaking walk-ins these days, as many of them will calculate that the tide may be turning and they’d best take our insurance with the Americans.

But the really big Iranian news came from Europe with the announcement that the EU’s experts have concluded that they have totally failed to deter the Iranians’ nuclear-weapons program. "At some stage we must expect that Iran will acquire the capacity to enrich uranium on the scale required for a weapons program," according to an internal EU document quoted by the Financial Times. As the FT glumly reports, all EU governments have been informed of this conclusion, along with the (obvious) analysis: "the problems with Iran will not be resolved through economic sanctions alone." Or by economic bribes, either. The EU, along with the U.S., have offered all manner of seductive goodies to the mullahs, but it didn’t work, as they surely knew from the beginning. Everybody knew.

Or did they? One has to wonder whether the president and the secretary of State knew it would fail. They certainly gave it unrestrained rhetorical support. If you buy the theory that W’s foreign policy is simply the application of winning poker to geopolitics, then you will think that, just as in the run-up to Iraq, he simply outwaited the Europeans. Knowing diplomacy had no chance, he let them play out the string. Now they must fold, and he is ratcheting up the ante against the mullahs.

This would also explain the timing of our newfound toughness. With the failure of the EU initiative, there was reduced concern that the Europeans would attack us for stepping up the pressure on the Iranians. This is reflected in a series of economic measures taken by European financial institutions, which will make life in Iran even more difficult. It would be really great if somebody found where Khamenei and the other oligarchs have stashed their private loot (I think a lot of it is in China, by the way)...and put it in escrow for a free Iran.

One can dream, can’t one? One can even dream that we will act faster. Please.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Michael Ledeen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of, most recently, ""The War Against the Terror Masters," Comment by clicking here.

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