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"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) |
| Jonah Goldberg, Ledeen's colleague at National Review magazine, coined the term "Ledeen Doctrine" in a 2002
column. This tongue-in-cheek "doctrine" is usually summarized as "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," which Goldberg remembered Ledeen saying in an early 1990s speech. The term "Ledeen Doctrine" is often mistakenly attributed to Michael Ledeen himself.
(7) |
| 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? (8) |
|
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| 1) http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.364/transcript.asp |
| 2) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/10/man_of_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/articles/2004/10/10/man_of_the_world?pg=3 |
| 5) http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/ledeen/ledeen.php |
| 7) http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg042302.asp |
| 8) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/10/10/man_of_the_world?pg=3 |
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