The War on the Terror Masters

That's what Michael Ledeen thinks it ought to be, and we agree:

Following the defeat of the Taliban, there were four such regimes: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. They were the true terror masters, without whose active support the terrorist groups would have been unable to mount a global jihad. They had — and the surviving three still have — two common denominators: all actively support terrorism in one way or another, and all are tyrannies.

Contrary to much of today's conventional wisdom, they did not all rest on religious fanaticism: Saddam had no religious standing, having come to power as a secular socialist, and the Assad family dictatorship has similar origins. They are not all Arabs: The Iranians (aside from a small minority in the south), would bridle at that misidentification. All share a common hatred for the Western world and unconcealed contempt for their own peoples, knowing full well that their oppressed citizens are a threat to their power and authority.

It is no accident that the terror masters work together, notwithstanding the oft-overstated differences between Arabs and Persians, and Sunnis and Shiites. The Syrians and Iranians worked hand-in-mailed-glove for years, supporting Hezbollah and other terror groups in occupied Lebanon. Nearly a decade before the overthrow of the shah of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini's fanatical Shiite Revolutionary Guards were trained in Lebanon by the Sunni terrorists of Yasser Arafat's al Fatah. They are working together today, to kill Iraqis and Coalition soldiers.

The most dangerous, and paradoxically the most vulnerable, of the terror masters was, and likely still is, Iran. Most everyone agrees that Iran played a unique role in the terror war that has been waged against the United States for nearly a quarter-century. According to the State Department's annual survey, Iran has long been the world's leading sponsor of international terror. Both Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are Iranian creations and clients, which is why Imad Mugniyah of Hezbollah and Aywan al Zawahiri of Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda keep showing up in Tehran, along with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of the jihad in Iraq who had operated out of Tehran for many years. Unsurprisingly, the 9/11 Commission found hard evidence of collusion between Iran and al-Qaeda, going back into the mid-nineties.

In 2002, I argued that our first move against the terror masters should be to give political and economic support to the Iranian people in their efforts to topple the mullahcracy. At that time, the streets of the country's major cities were filled with demonstrators almost every week. Had the democratic opposition received the same kind of help we gave to Solidarity in Poland, the anti-Milosevic forces in Yugoslavia, and the anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines, the mullahs might have been brought down then and there, thus making the war against Saddam, the Assads, and the pro-terrorist elements of the Saudi Royal Family much easier, and greatly reducing the requirement for military power. A strategy of actively supporting democratic revolution throughout the region was precisely what President Bush proposed, and it made good historical sense: It was of a piece with the dramatic spread of freedom in recent decades, including the defeat of the Soviet Empire.

It was objected that such a revolutionary mission was far too ambitious, and that prudence required us to move carefully, one case at a time, all the while mending our diplomatic fences with friends, allies, and undecideds. But, as so often happens, the "prudent" strategy proved more dangerous. Moving step by step — first Iraq, then we'll see — gave the surviving terror masters time to organize their counterattack before we liberated Iraq, and, as I predicted, the extra time was also used to develop the weapons of mass destruction that rightly concern us, and give urgency to our cause.

The long period of dawdling after the defeat of the Taliban, along with the failure of strategic vision that blinded us to the regional nature of the war, enabled the terror masters to develop a collective strategy, for which we were famously unprepared. Yet there was no excuse for us to be surprised, since, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad announced publicly that a terror war would be unleashed against us inside Iraq. That terror war would be modeled on the successful campaign against American forces in Lebanon in the mid-eighties. And so it was, including the Syrian-Iranian (Sunni-Shiite) alliance, often using Saudi jihadi volunteers.

Like it or not, we are in a regional war, and it cannot be effectively prosecuted within a narrow national boundary. There will never be decent security in Iraq so long as the tyrants in Tehran and Damascus remain in power. They know that the spread of freedom is a terrible threat to them, and that if there were a successful democratic Iraq, their power and authority would be at risk. That is why they are waging an existential war against us in Iraq.

The amazing stupidity of the Themocrats on this issue is made clear by looking at a map of the Middle East. From Iraq, coalition forces have the advantage of interior lines of communication and supply when striking Iran or Syria. From Iraq, even our short-range aircraft can reach targets in either country. From Iraq, we can strike from any of several areas, not limited to huge sweeping movements such as we had to undertake in invading Iraq from Kuwait. It is a huge strategic advantage we now possess. It is an advantage the Themocrats want to piss away in order to kiss the UN's buttocks once more.

We didn't withdraw from our positions in WWII once Italy was defeated. Why should the War on Terror be different than the War on Fascism?