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Jewish World Review Sept. 21, 2001 / 4 Tishrei, 5762
Michael Ledeen
Unless you have been gulled by the leaks from the misnamed
intelligence community, you know that the terrorists represent
the long arm of evil regimes. We therefore have a dual task:
Kill the terrorists, and destroy the regimes that provide them
with the critical infrastructure - training, safe havens, travel
documents, technology, and all the rest - they need to
operate.
The hunt for the terrorists is a technical matter, and we must
hope that our military has enough virtue left from the Clinton
ravages to do the job. But we should have no misgivings
about our ability to destroy tyrannies. It is what we do best. It
comes naturally to us, for we are the one truly revolutionary
country in the world, as we have been for more than 200
years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it
automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us,
and are driven to attack us.
So we begin with an enormous advantage. The tyrants fear
us, and their oppressed peoples want what we have to offer:
freedom. Yes, there are the fanatics, both religious and
political. But far too much has been made of the presumed
religious fanaticism of our Middle Eastern enemies. Saddam
Hussein is not at all a religious leader. His fame and charisma
rest on his political and military power, and when the
Palestinians dance in the streets, carrying banners with his
portrait, and sing odes to Saddam, it is not because of his
Islamic faith. It is because of his murderous success. He
challenged us, he took our biggest punch and survived, and
he now carries the battle to us once again.
And yet he fears us, for he knows that his own people would
remove him in a heartbeat if only they could. And the Taliban
fear us too, the Taliban who have slaughtered and enslaved
the women of Afghanistan with a systematic sadism that
would make Stalin proud, and would warm the cockles of the
Ayatollah Khomeini's lifeless heart. And the mullahs and
ayatollahs in Tehran fear us, for they know that not one of
them could survive a free election in Iran.
Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed
peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They
need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the
Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will
respect them and preserve their freedom. The president has
brilliantly stressed our respect for Islam, and our conviction
that the majority of Muslims are peace-loving people. He
should direct Secretary Powell to fully support democratic
resistance movements in the terrorist countries, and, failing
that, to support more moderate, more pro-Western forces.
You cannot remove a regime without having a new one ready
to go.
These forces exist. In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance,
despite the assassination of its historic leader Massoud, is still
a force to be reckoned with, and they have offered us their
support in dislodging the Taliban. And there are others,
including the deposed king, still formally recognized as the
legitimate ruler of Afghanistan by most of the civilized world.
In Iraq, we have halfheartedly supported an umbrella
organization, the Iraqi National Congress, under the
outstanding leadership of Ahmed Chalabi.
Yet the State
Department, as recently as yesterday, was still telling them
that they must not, under any circumstances, operate inside
Iraq. That is sheer folly, for it guarantees that we get the
worst of both worlds: We enrage Saddam even further, but
ensure that we won't be able to get close to his throat. The
president should order these embarrassing restrictions
removed, give full support to this democratic resistance
movement, and encourage the downtrodden and long
suffering Iraqi people to join Chalabi and win their freedom.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, we must not think in the unworthy
terms of a mere military strike against al Qaeda and its
phantasmagorical leader, Osama bin Laden. We want the
destruction of the Taliban, without which bin Laden could not
have operated.
In other words, it is time once again to export the democratic
revolution. To those who say it cannot be done, we need only
point to the 1980s, when we led a global democratic
revolution that toppled tyrants from Moscow to
Johannesburg. Then, too, the smart folks said it could not be
done, and they laughed at Ronald Reagan's chutzpah when he
said that the Soviet tyrants were done for, and called on the
West to think hard about the post-Communist era. We
destroyed the Soviet Empire, and then walked away from our
great triumph in the Third World War of the Twentieth
Century. As I sadly wrote at that time, when America
abandons its historic mission, our enemies take heart, grow
stronger, and eventually begin to kill us again. And so they
have, forcing us to take up our revolutionary burden, and
bring down the despotic regimes that have made possible the
hateful events of the 11th of September.
The only consolation is that we know how to do it. And,
miraculously, we have some leaders who understand the
historic opportunity they hold in their
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