Friday, September 04, 2009

Andy: Some Democracy Hawks Pay Lots of Attention to Islamism   [Michael Ledeen]

I think we are still suffering from the same failure of strategic vision that afflicted us in Iraq. 

I'm a member of an endangered minority, a democracy hawk who spends lots of time on Islam and Islamism. According to your latest, excellent piece, we don't exist. But we have said from day one that we are in a regional war, and cannot win that war until and unless we have defeated the Islamist regime in Tehran. I said that it was impossible to "win" durably in Iraq so long as the regime in Tehran was still in place, because a free Iraq was a mortal threat to the mullahs. Ditto for Afghanistan.

I have long said that we could bring down the Iranian regime without sending in troops, because the Iranian people hated the regime and if we helped them — politically, much as we helped the pro-democracy dissidents in the Soviet Empire — they would rise up and overthrow the regime.

Most pundits either said that was wrong, or gave some excuse, such as "there isn't enough time," as if anyone could predict such a thing. Yet anyone who wishes to look at Iran plain, can see that the Iranian people are in open rebellion right now. And STILL the pundits don't call for supporting the Iranian people, even though no action in the war against terror/Islamists/al-Qaeda etc. etc. would do so much for our cause as regime change in Tehran. They still look at the war piece by piece, instead of stepping back to look at the full context. My forthcoming book, Accomplice to Evil;  Iran and the War Against the West, is an attempt to answer the old question: Why do we refuse to see evil when it is right in front of our noses?  The Iranian tyrants make no bones about their intention to destroy us, and they are killing us every day.

Iran is not the only issue, but it is certainly a central issue, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, West Bank, Gaza . . . as in South America . . . Yes, Islamism matters a lot, but Hugo Chávez is no Islamist (and yes again, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are spreading radical Shi'ism throughout South America).

I think al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. All our intelligence agencies say so, they mostly say that bin Laden and Zawahiri are there, don't they?

Finally, the mater of counterinsurgency doctrine: Winning the support of the people in order to defeat the insurgents is not the same as promoting democracy. The best book I know on counterinsurgency was written by David Galula, a French officer in Algeria. He was adamant that wars of this sort are won by the side that gains the support of the people. It is not a question of democracy, and it is not won as a result of ideology. He insisted that ideology has very little to do with the final outcome. It is all about winning and losing; the people support the side they believe is going to win, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They might prefer democracy, but they will always go with the winner.

09/04 12:46 PMShare