Flirting with Fascism
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html

On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.

Ledeen has gained notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph in his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like a prophetic approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq, Ledeen wrote,

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

This is not the first time Ledeen has written eloquently on his love for “the democratic revolution” and “creative destruction.” In 1996, he gave an extended account of his theory of revolution in his book, Freedom Betrayed — the title, one assumes, is a deliberate reference to Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. Ledeen explains that “America is a revolutionary force” because the American Revolution is the only revolution in history that has succeeded, the French and Russian revolutions having quickly collapsed into terror. Consequently, “[O]ur revolutionary values are part of our genetic make-up. … We drive the revolution because of what we represent: the most successful experiment in human freedom. … We are an ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues.” Denouncing Bill Clinton as a “counter-revolutionary” (!), Ledeen is especially eager to make one point: “Of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the revolutionary tradition.”

Ledeen’s conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”

Ledeen supports de Felice’s distinction between “fascism-movement” and “fascism-regime.” Mussolini’s regime, he says, was “authoritarian and reactionary”; by contrast, within “fascism-movement,” there were many who were animated by “a desire to renew.” These people wanted “something more revolutionary: the old ruling class had to be swept away so that newer, more dynamic elements—capable of effecting fundamental changes—could come to power.” Like his claim that the common ground between Nazism and Italian fascism was “exceedingly minimal”—Ledeen writes, “The fact of the Axis Pact should not be permitted to become the overriding consideration in this analysis”—Ledeen’s careful distinction between fascist “regime” and “movement” makes him a clear apologist for the latter. “While ‘fascism-movement’ was overcome and eventually suppressed by ‘fascism-regime,’” he explains, “fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country.” Indeed, Ledeen criticizes Mussolini precisely for not being revolutionary enough. “He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism.” Ledeen therefore concurs with the fascist intellectual, Camillo Pellizi, who argues—in a book Ledeen calls “a moving and fundamental work”—that Mussolini’s was “a failed revolution.” Pellizzi had hoped that “the new era was to be the era of youthful genius and creativity”: for him, Ledeen says, the fascist state was “a generator of energy and creativity.” The purest ideologues of fascism, in other words, wanted something very similar to that which Ledeen himself wants now, namely a “worldwide mass movement” enabling the peoples of the world, “liberated” by American militarism, to participate in the “greatest experiment in human freedom.” Ledeen wrote in 1996, “The people yearn for the real thing—revolution.”

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.”

One of the greatest exponents of such youthful vitalism was the high priest of fascism, the poet and adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio, to whom Ledeen devoted an enthusiastic biography in 1977. Years ago, I visited D’Annunzio’s house on the shores of Lake Garda: there is a battleship in the garden and a Brenn gun in the sitting room. D’Annunzio was an eccentric and militaristic Italian Nietzschean who “eulogized rape and acts of savagery” committed by the people he called his spiritual ancestors. The poet was also an early prophet of military intervention and regime change: he invaded the Croatian city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in 1919 and held the city for a year, during which he put into practice his theories of “New Order.” In 1918, moreover, D’Annunzio had dropped propaganda leaflets over Vienna promising to liberate the Austrians from their own government, something Ledeen hails as “a glorious gesture.” D’Annunzio’s watchword was “the liberation of human personality.” “His heroism during the war made it possible,” Ledeen writes, “to bridge the chasm between intellectuals and the masses. … The revolt D’Annunzio led was directed against the old order of Western Europe, and was carried out in the name of youthful creativity and virility.”

As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire “to tear down the old order” (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. In 1932, Asvero Gravelli also divided Europe into “old” and “new” when he wrote, in Towards the Fascist International, “Either old Europe or young Europe. Fascism is the gravedigger of old Europe. Now the forces of the Fascist International are rising.” It all sounds rather prophetic.

Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
November 21, 2005 Issue
by Philip Giraldi
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html

From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.

Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.

The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6.

But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it was “lacking in detail” and “very limited” in scope.

In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.

Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.

The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.

On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.

Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.

On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.

President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.

The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were managing the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the Financial Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to establish the authenticity of the forgeries.

At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.

It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.

The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.

Freedom House receiving US government money "for clandestine activities inside Iran"
Bill Berkowitz
Mediatransparency.org
April 4, 2006

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.

Great thread! I've been warning people about this sick bastard since day one of the POAC.

They're like fleas!

Timesonline UK
'Forgers' of key Iraq war contract named
Michael Smith
The Sunday Times April 09, 2006
[Snip]
...The story of the fake deal had begun with a meeting in a Rome bar in February 2000 set up by Antonio Nucera, an officer in the Sismi, the Italian intelligence agency, between two of his former agents, Rocco Martino and Montini.

However, unknown to the Sismi, Martino, a former policeman turned spy, had been working for the French intelligence service, the DGSE, since 1996. He was controlled by the DGSE head of station in Brussels, who paid him a retainer of between £1,050 and £1,400 a month.

“Nucera asked if I was interested in meeting a person who worked in an African embassy and who had been able to supply [Nucera with] documents and information, including the embassy’s cipher,” Martino told an investigating magistrate during an Italian inquiry.

Montini is understood to have agreed to work for Martino, who paid her £350 a month as a “sub-agent”.

In the spring of 2000, she handed him a document relating to a visit to Niger by Wissam al-Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican. Martino passed it to his French handler.

The French, who were watching for an attempt by Saddam to obtain uranium from Niger, showed great interest and told Martino they wanted more information. Martino asked Montini if she could get a copy of a contract for Niger to supply Iraq with uranium.

“Martino told me that if he was able to obtain a copy of a contract then he would have earned a lot of money from an unspecified ‘intelligence’ organisation,” she told the magistrate.

.The lure of the money was apparently too much. “She was [the ambassador’s] trusted personal assistant. The consul Zakariaou . . . needed money. He would help her forge the documents,” the Nato sources claim.
Martino passed the contract to his French handlers, but they spotted it was a fake and refused to pay.


Some time in 2002, however, they obtained another apparently incriminating document, the source said. This was a letter purporting to be from al-Zahawie relating to a visit to Niger in 1999 to discuss the possible supply of uranium. This did not constitute evidence that Niger had agreed to supply yellowcake but it did indicate Saddam was trying to obtain it.

The letter, deemed “credible” by the Butler inquiry into Iraq intelligence, appears to be the evidence that led to Bush’s claim in January 2003 that the British had “learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”....

“Good religion teaches men that politics is the most important enterprise in the eyes of God. Like Moses, Machiavelli wants the law of his state to be seen, and therefore obeyed, as divinely ordered. The combination of fear of God and fear of punishment—duly carried out with good arms—provides the necessary discipline for good government.” Michael Ledeen—Karl Rove’s “advisor”

“Strauss believed that the role of religion was indispensable to the political success of a nation. For a political society had to hold together and act as a unit in lock step with the leader. Strauss believed that religion was the means to inculcate the desired ideas into the minds of the masses. He didn’t care what religion—just as long as it was a religion that could link itself to the political order.” Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Don Rumsfeld and Michael Ledeen did their doctoral studies under the tutelage of Leo Strauss at Chicago and it is they who brought Straussian ideology to government and have wrapped their “policies” around that ideology. It goes without saying Bush believes this.

--“Machiavelli…has not lost his democratic faith. His call for a brief period of iron rule is a choice of the lesser of two evils: if the corruption continued, a real tyranny would be just a matter of time (making it even harder to restore free institutions); whereas freedom can be preserved if a good man can be found to put the state back in order. Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom.” (Michael Ledeen)

Pentagon confirms Iranian directorate as officials raise new concerns about war
Larisa Alexandrovna
Rawstory.com
Thursday June 15, 2006

Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.

Officials point to new developments, such as a recent meeting in Rome between an Iranian arms dealer and controversial neoconservative Michael Ledeen and the March creation of the Iranian directorate inside the Pentagon, as examples of recent events similar to the lead up with war in Iraq.

These officials also add that an as-yet uncompleted ‘Phase II’ investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence suggests the same problems may recur when addressing Iran. They note that the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate mirrors the so-called Office of Special Plans, which played a major role in feeding intelligence to the President that bolstered a case for war.

Ledeen goes to Rome

A recent trip by Michael Ledeen to Rome has raised red flags among those concerned about a potential war with Iran. Some believe that Ledeen -- a long-time advocate of Iranian regime change -- was involved in the Niger forgeries scandal.

In late 2001, Ledeen, mid-east expert Harold Rhode and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to a Washington pro-Israel lobbying group) traveled to Rome to meet with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and various Italian, Iranian, and Egyptian intelligence agents. Not long after, documents falsely purporting that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium surfaced in the international intelligence community, ending up at an Italian magazine, Panorama, for which Ledeen wrote periodic articles.

Ghorbanifar and Ledeen were directly involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, which implicated then-President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H. W. Bush and the highest ranking members of the Reagan administration in the illegal sales of weapons to Iran.

Ledeen’s recent visit to Rome and meeting with Ghorbanifar have created new concern that something is developing with regard to US plans for Iran. Ledeen, however, denies that his visit to Italy was anything other than a personal trip with his wife Barbara.

“I did not ‘go to Rome.’ I went to Naples to see the San Gennaro celebration and the opening of the Fontanelle cemetery after more than twenty years of closure,” Ledeen wrote in an email to RAW STORY.

“You'll be able to read descriptions in my forthcoming book, Virgil's Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles," he added.

Ledeen, who has spent the last year working on a book about Naples, confirmed traveling to Rome as part of a visit to meet with friends. When asked if he had met with Ghorbanifar while in Rome, Ledeen confirmed the allegation by intelligence sources, but said that this visit was of a personal nature, unlike his previous visit.

“We visited various friends in Rome and Florence,” Ledeen said.

“[Ghorbanifar] is a friend of mine, and so, as it has been for more than twenty years, I talk to him from time to time and I meet with him when our schedules intersect,” Ledeen added.

Ledeen characterized the meeting as part of a "normal friendship."

“I would say on average I see him twice a year for a day or half a day," he said. "And it's not just him, it's sometimes his wife, his daughter... imagine! A normal friendship.”

Pentagon confirms Iran Directorate

Military and non-military intelligence sources have also raised worries over what some describe to as “the Iran group” and others as “the Iran working group” and still others as a “cabal” operating out of the Pentagon.

A recent article by Laura Rozen for the Los Angeles Times revealed the Pentagon has created yet another Office of Special Plans-type body called the Directorate for Iran, or the Iranian Directorate.

“The Pentagon's directorate began with six full-time staff members," Rozen reported. "But they can draw on expertise throughout the government, providing access to potentially hundreds of specialists."

The notorious Office of Special Plans – which focused on Iraq -- is now believed by most experts to have provided a secondary conduit of cherry-picked intelligence on Iraq to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the White House. (More here)

One former intelligence official, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, described OSP in a mocking tone as a “separate channel of information.”

John Pike of Global Security, a Washington-based intelligence clearinghouse, was less polite in his description of OSP.

“It was created to, as Dean Acheson urged Harry Truman, to scare hell out of the American people by making things a little bit clearer than the truth,” he said.

Lt. Col. Barry E. Venable, a spokesman for the Pentagon, confirmed the creation of the directorate for Iran in both a phone conversation and an email message.

“As the State Department stated in early March (Daily Press Brief, Mar. 3), the U.S. Government is organizing itself better to address what Secretary Rice called ‘one of the great challenges for the United States, a strategic challenge for the United States and for those who desire peace and freedom,’” Venable wrote.

“As a counterpart to the State Department's new Office of Iran Affairs, the Department of Defense has split off a new directorate for Iran-related policy issues from the existing Directorate of Northern Gulf Affairs in the Office of Near East and South Asia Affairs (NESA),” he added. “These regional policy offices fall within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.”

Venable also confirmed that the new directorate falls under the policy side -- more specifically -- under the new number three at the Pentagon, Eric Edelman. Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, holds the same position that Douglas Feith held when he ran OSP at the Pentagon in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

Moreover, sources say that the Iranian Directorate is staffed with many of the same people, including OSP’s former director Abram Shulsky, and receives expert analysis from such controversial figures as Project for the New American Century member Reuel Marc Gerecht, who by all accounts was a failure as a CIA field officer. It also includes military personnel such as Ladan Archin, who appears to be serving in the Larry Franklin analyst role among a sea of think-tank operatives and neoconservative war hawks.

When asked specifically about Shulsky, Venable described his involvement as follows:

“Mr. Shulsky continues in his position as Senior Advisor to the USD (P), focusing on Mid-East regional issues and the [global war on terror].”

Ledeen says that he is not involved with the new Iran operation out of the Pentagon.

Iraq intelligence inquiry remains incomplete

Former intelligence officials also point to a yet-to-be completed Phase II investigation of Iraq pre-war intelligence by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“The committee continues its work on Phase II and hopes to complete it as soon as possible,” said Wendy Morigi, Communicators Director for Senator Rockefeller, Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “One of the key sections, however, which was to review the office of former Undersecretary Doug Feith, has been postponed by the Chairman until the Pentagon IG completes its own investigation.”

As previously reported by RAW ST0RY (article here), Phase II consists of several areas of focus that the Committee is investigating in order to determine Iraq pre-war planning and post-invasion failures -- specifically in five key areas:

-Whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information;

-The postwar findings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments;

-Prewar intelligence assessments about conditions to be expected in postwar Iraq;

-Any intelligence activities relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and

-The use by the Intelligence Community of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress.

The Office of Special Plans aspect of the investigation has been part of the reason for the delay in the delivery of Phase II by the Committee and is contingent on the Pentagon Inspector General’s office concluding its own investigation.

The lack of a comprehensive report as to how the Pentagon conducted itself prior to the Iraq war, as well as afterward, raises suspicions among some still in uniform about the Pentagon’s Iran Directorate's role going forward. Many see parallels between what is already known about the Office of Special Plans and what appears to be escalating activity surrounding Iran.

Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told RAW STORY that “In the short term the risk for military confrontation [with Iran] has been reduced,” but cautions that “In the long run, however, unless there are talks taking place the risk for a military strike remains the same.”

Michael Ledeen
Old American Century
10-17-04

"If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well and our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
. -Michael Ledeen October 29, 2001, speaking on a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (1)

Michael Arthur Ledeen (Ph.D.) Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin.

Ledeen's books include Universal Fascism, which speaks favorably of fascism as a "revolutionary movement," and Gabrielle D'Annunzio, a glowing biography of the founder of the Italian Fascist Party. Far from being a historical oddity, Ledeen argued, D'Annunzio helped invent modern politics: "D'Annunzian political style -- the politics of mass manipulation, the politics of myth and symbol -- have become the norm in the modern world." (2) Even the June 30, 2003 issue of American Conservative magazine say Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.(3)

He is a scholar at the neo-conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute, which also counts the former chair of Pentagon Defence Policy Board Richard Perle among its members and shares the same address as the PNAC. He also writes regularly for American Spectator magazine. A former Rome Correspondent for the New Republic newspaper, Ledeen first rose to political prominence as a member of the National Security Council during Ronald Reagan's reign.

In 1985, that he became a well-known figure in the US when his Israeli intelligence contacts were used to help broker the illegal Iran/contra rebel affair - a move was aimed at destablising the popular left-wing government in Nicaragua.

Prof Ledeen is also believed to have the ear of the White House's current Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and has regular conversations with him. (4)
Ledeen's ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. His views virtually define the stark departure from American foreign policy philosophy that existed before the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. 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.

Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled "Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism," for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, "the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon." (5)
In a March 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen dismissed worries that the American public would lose heart if there were too many casualties in the then-imminent Iraq war. "All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .," Ledeen declared. "What we hate is not casualties but losing." (5)

Ledeen urged the then-newly installed Bush administration (National Review Online, March 8, 2001) to purge the "environmental whackos, radical feminazos," and "foreign-policy types on the National Security Council Staff and throughout State, CIA, and Defense, who are still trying to create Bill Clinton's legacy in the Middle East." (6)

Ledeen noted in a recent e-mail interview with the Boston Globe "I spent 15 years studying fascism, trying to understand how something so awful could have happened, and obviously, resolved to fight it and similar things in the future." He later rejects the label "conservative." "I have always thought of myself as a `liberal democrat' in the sense that Walter Lippmann used the word,". Ledeen claims his own politics are perfectly mainstream. "I think of myself as a fairly typical American," he claimed in the e-mail interview. "I hate tyranny, and I dread mass movements because they often produce the worst sort of tyrannies, the ones that genuinely inspire passionate followers. I love freedom and clearly have a strong anarchist streak, which I come by honestly. My uncle Izzy Brody was a Russian anarchist who came to America in search of freedom, and found it." One has to ask, given his fascist fan-works and extreme right wing neocon rhetoric, are these statements merely a smokescreen? (7)

1) http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.364/transcript.asp
2) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/art..._the_world?pg=2
3) http://amconmag.com/06_30_03/feature.html
4) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3031803.stm
5) http://www.alternet.org/story/15860
6) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/art..._the_world?pg=3
5) http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/ledeen/ledeen.php
7) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/art..._the_world?pg=3

Everything You Need to Know About Michael Ledeen
http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/MichaelLedeen.html
By Katherine Yurica
April 7, 2005

Would you be surprised to find that a man who was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration, a man who is the darling of the Bush White House and is an adviser to Karl Rove, a man who loves Machiavelli and studies him, a neo-conservative who has close ties to one of America’s leading “Christian” Dominionists—Pat Robertson, and a man who called Pearl Harbor “lucky” and a providentially inspired event—may be the man who is behind the forging of the Niger documents that convinced America to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq?

Ian Masters, host of Background Briefing, in Los Angeles, interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of Counterterrorism operations at the CIA. Cannistraro came close to naming the man who forged the Niger documents. When Masters asked, “If I said ‘Michael Ledeen’?” Vincent Cannistraro replied, “You’d be very close.”

Who is Michael Ledeen? Or perhaps more importantly, what does he believe? Here are just a few quotes from his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago. (Truman Talley Books (St. Martin’s Press), 1999.) Ledeen wrote:

“When Jimmy Carter was president, he was so appalled by the assassinations that had been carried out by American officers and agents that he issued a stern executive order forbidding the practice. This had the unanticipated consequence of favoring the forces of evil, because we could not go after individual terrorists….In his moralistic attempt to make murder less likely, Carter made it more likely, by both our enemies and ourselves.” (pp. 94-95)

“There are several circumstances in which good leaders are likely to have to enter into evil: whenever the very existence of the nation is threatened; when the state is first created or revolutionary change is to be accomplished; when removing an evil tyrant; and when the society becomes corrupt and must be restored to virtue…Saving a state that has sunk into corruption is Machiavelli’s most passionate concern…” (pp. 101-102)

“Moses created a new state and a new religion, which makes him one of the most revolutionary leaders of all time…The execution of the sinners was necessary to confirm Moses’ authority.” (pp. 102-103)

“The winning formula is threefold: good laws, good arms, good religion. We are back to Moses.” (p. 111)

“Good religion teaches men that politics is the most important enterprise in the eyes of God. Like Moses, Machiavelli wants the law of his state to be seen, and therefore obeyed, as divinely ordered. The combination of fear of God and fear of punishment—duly carried out with good arms—provides the necessary discipline for good government.”(pp. 117-118)

“American evangelical Christianity is the sort of ‘good religion’ Machiavelli calls for. The evangelicals do not quietly accept their destiny, believing instead they are called upon to fight corruption and reestablish virtue.” (p. 159)

“Once corruption has taken hold of a free nation, it is headed toward tyranny.” (p. 172)

Notice that in the next quote, Ledeen’s presupposition is that only liberals are “corrupt.” He criticized Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1996 for refusing to attack Bill Clinton’s character during the campaign.

“Refusing to hold public officials accountable for their corrupt practices reinforces the people’s perception that turpitude and power are inextricably linked, and undermines even the best laws and institutions. Inevitably, with the passage of time, liberty itself is crushed.” (p. 173)

“Paradoxically, 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.’ (p. 173)

“Machiavelli…has not lost his democratic faith. His call for a brief period of iron rule is a choice of the lesser of two evils: if the corruption continued, a real tyranny would be just a matter of time (making it even harder to restore free institutions), whereas freedom can be preserved if a good man can be found to put the state back in order. Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom.” (p. 174)

“Machiavelli’s favorite hero…Moses exercised dictatorial power, but that awesome power was used to create freedom.” (p. 174)

“We should not be outraged by Machiavelli’s call for a temporary dictatorship as an effective means to either revivify or restore freedom.” (p. 174)

Speaking of Germany following W.W. II, Ledeen wrote:

“We ‘denazified’ the country, hung many of the major leaders of the Third Reich, and forced all adults to answer detailed questionnaires about their activities and associations during Hitler’s rule.” We barred from positions of power and civic influence those who had actively participated in the Nazi regime.” (p. 175)

It would be foolish for America’s political strategists and congressional leaders to ignore Michael Ledeen and his interpretation of Machiavelli. Mr. Ledeen speaks from the cutting edge of a group of men and women who desire nothing more than to reconstruct America in their own image. This nation is in grave danger. Ledeen belongs to a group of men, including Harry Jaffa, Pat Robertson, Willmoore Kendall to Allan Bloom, who, according to Shadia Drury, scholar and author of Leo Strauss and the American Right, share “the view that America is too liberal and pluralistic and that what it needs is a single orthodoxy that governs the public and private lives of its citizens.”[1]

The belief in a single voice that governs the public should cause all Americans to understand these men want to convert this nation to a permanent dictatorship. Their inspirer was Leo Strauss, a professor who taught Machiavellian methods to many of them at the University of Chicago. In fact, Paul Wolfovitz earned his doctorate under Strauss and many of the neo-cons in the White House studied under him. Strauss believed every society needs a “single public orthodoxy.” As Drury put it, “a set of ideas that defines what is true and false, right and wrong, noble and base.” Strauss believed that the role of religion was indispensable to the political success of a nation. For a political society had to hold together and act as a unit in lock step with the leader. Strauss believed that religion was the means to inculcate the desired ideas into the minds of the masses. He didn’t care what religion—just as long as it was a religion that could link itself to the political order.


Michael Ledeen singled out the evangelicals as most like the “Machiavellian” model described by Strauss. Evangelicals, while decrying the aberrant power of a Jim Jones over his congregation, have always had little Jim Joneses telling them what to do and how to live from their pulpits all over America. Evangelicals thirst for power, submit to power, and now are harnessed to a power that is driving them toward the completion of the take over of the USA. Our only hope is to wake up the churches and call them to repentance. And the irony is, as Ledeen points out, if we will stand up and attack the immorality and corruption within the Republican Party, which has reached the lowest depths in the history of our nation, and which the GOP supports, the bedraggled verbally abused Democrats will sit up and notice at long last that they are recognized as the moral leaders they have always been. What Leo Strauss and Michael Ledeen and the other dominionists really hate, is the loving Christian ethics that established FDR's New Deal. You see, the great success of Christian liberalism is that it threatens their greed and that’s what the fight is all about.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Leo Strauss and the American Right by Shadia Drury, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, New York.

'Viva Fascismo'
by Anwaar Hussain
SmirkingChimp
January 24, 2006

'Fascismo' is the Italian for Fascism. Strictly speaking, the term is relevant to the autocratic political movement that ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini.

Fascismo, however, is also applied to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and, loosely, to all other authoritarian-cum-totalitarian regimes since then.

Fascismo is characterized by dictatorial attempts to impose state control over all aspects of citizens' lives: ranging from political and social to cultural, and economic. Fascismo lauds the nation, state, or race as superior to individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. As an attractive facade, and to whip up mass support, fascismo uses popular rhetoric, calls for a heroic collective effort towards make-believe goals and demands loyalty to a single leader or group of leaders.

Fascismo thrives in a state milieu of insecurity. As people would sacrifice any thing to feel secure from real or imaginary threats (economic, xenophobic, terrorism, crime, etc.), national security remains the main rallying point of fascismo. Toward this end, a sense of insecurity is pumped non-stop into every stratum of societies in fascist states.

The most distinct characteristic of a fascist state, however, remains corporate power and its sinister collusion with the state. Benito Mussolini - who knew something about fascismo - had a more down-to-earth description: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."

Out of the three most dominant attributes of fascismo i.e. corporate power, militarization of society and racism, the first two stand out as the most common in fascist states. It is clear for all to see that these two traits are now firmly entrenched in the greatest ever power on planet earth. Fascismo has gate-crashed in the grand United States of America. A group of leaders having manifest fascist leanings have America in a stranglehold. Life is slowly being choked out of America's democratic spirit. The world watches on in a dumbfounded awe.

Some past American leaders have been most prophetic about America's current state of affairs. Abraham Lincoln, the great seer, once stated, "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed."

Likewise, Kennedy once told the Americans "The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power,". Sen. Huey Long was even more accurate when he said, "I'm afraid, based on my own long experience that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."

A small but ruthless group of men, the "money power" described by Lincoln, has stolen democracy from the American people. These men adhere to a political philosophy that sends shivers up the collective spine of global citizenry. To get a glimpse of where these men come from in their politics, it would be appropriate to briefly familiarize ourselves with the ideas of their lead guru, one Michael Ledeen, for it is this man's portentous ideas that are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned. A quick reading of the brief rejoinder he gave to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft in 2002, regarding regime change in the Middle East, is enough to give an inkling of which end of the political spectrum these men come from and where they are headed;

"He fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror." One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today........."

The above was Ledeen's take on America's foreign policy. For the internal control of America, in a paragraph in his latest book 'The War Against the Terror Masters' , he has this to say;

"Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence--our existence, not our politics--threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission."

Given both his passion and his influence over the men with the guns, the current ruling American elites, it would not be far fetched to assume that fascismo has finally arrived in the great United States of America.

So who, if any, would stop this inexorable American march towards fascism?

To answer this question, let us first identify the groups of citizens who are capable of effecting a change in the governance of a given country.

Any state, fascist or otherwise, comprises of two distinct sets of citizenry that can profoundly affect the governance of that state, the elites and the masses. These two sets may work together, or singly, to bring about the desired change. When the elites only bring about a change, it is usually to further their own perks and privileges. When the masses rise to do the same, revolutions are the usual outcome with unpredictable consequences. The best results are achieved when the two sets work in tandem to realize the wanted change in their states.

Unfortunately, in fascist, or fascism-prone states, the elites follow a two-pronged strategy. One, to keep the masses in line and two, to siphon off as much money as possible from the rabble to themselves. In dominant military powers, like America, with vast capacities for waging war, maintaining that country on a permanent war footing is the natural choice for fascist elites of such countries. War, without doubt, is the most profitable swindle of them all. Not only does war produce enormous wealth for the elite, it keeps the sheeple divided, shocked, unable to present any kind of resistance and easy to control with sham legislation in the name of national security. It really is that simple.

America, for example, is estimated to have gone to war in no less than five dozen places on the globe since WW II and has dropped, by some estimates, over a hundred million tons of bombs on foreign lands over the last 50 years.

Additionally, in America of today, money is already in the hands of the fascist elites with less than 5% of the population now controlling over 95% of the country's wealth. Avarice, though, knows no bounds and the present set of American leaders knows this fact for sure. They, therefore, have been wooing these very elites in a variety of ways. They give them tax cuts, help them accumulate wealth without checks and balances and dangle the promise of new markets for their produce with imperialistic expansion. Especially, shifting of the tax burden from the elite onto the masses has been the corner stone of the present cabal's internal economic policies.

Moreover, in today's America the elites are spread evenly in the two major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. While they may appear to be on the opposite ends of the political scale, they have a commonality of interest in looting the masses. The elites in Democrats, the opposition in today's America, would much rather have common Americans direct their fury into the electoral system rather than stir them to challenge the ruling elites. For however fraudulent the election process may be, the practice also keeps them in their positions of power and privilege. The ruling elite's complicity in this sinister game, of course, is a definite given.

Therefore, American elite rising to check this relentless stride toward fascism is a non-starter. And with nary a Gandhi, Mandela or King visible on the American horizon, the elites and the masses working in tandem to bring about the desired change seems equally non-viable.

That leaves us with the second set of citizenry capable of providing a serious challenge to this apparently unstoppable march of fascism in the United States of America--the common Americans. Though an ever-growing number of informed Americans are indeed fighting a brave rear-guard action to stem the rot, much more is needed. Only a massive awareness by common Americans, the realization that they have only each other to bond with and their willingness to challenge the powers that be of this illegitimate takeover of their country, the destruction of their constitution and Bill of Rights, can stop the ongoing fascist onslaught in America.

Upton Sinclair had once said: "Fascism is capitalism plus murder."

What hope, if any, is there of stopping the unremitting slide toward fascismo, this dangerous mix of capitalism and murder, in America? Will the lifeless body of American dream replace the torch on the statue of liberty in a deafening sheeple chant of viva fascismo? Or will the American masses transform themselves into a seething, raging torrent to check the relentless march of fascism in their country?

These, then, are the ultimate questions.