Michael Ledeen Takes Down Stephen Hadley

And, by extension, George W. Bush for tolerating such idiocy:

Sometimes I think Hadley missed his calling. He could have been a great standup comedian, because he delivers these gag lines with a totally straight face. One can well imagine Khamenei and Ahmadinejad groaning in agony from the pressure of sitting around a table with Condi. And one can easily foresee the devastating effect of Saudi calls to the Iraqi faithful to stop fighting. As for the “funding,” well, it’s apparently continued apace lo these many years, and not only to the death squads in Iraq, but to potential recruits, ahem, in these very United States.

Above all, the Hadley memo gets a failing grade because there is no suggestion whatsoever that we should be doing anything really mean to the Syrians, Iranians, and Saudis, all of whom are up to their necks in jihadism in Iraq. And the failure to address this — the ongoing failure of strategic vision that has plagued this administration’s thinking since well before the beginning of Operation Iraq Freedom — is of a piece with their failure to “understand” Maliki.

Here’s a guy in Baghdad who comes from the Shiite underground, a terrorist organization. He knows — in spades — the ability of Iranian intelligence agents to assassinate anyone deemed an enemy. He sees — in detail — that the Iranians are all over his country, killing his people, killing Americans and Brits. His very life depends on his ability to navigate the tricky waters of the vast Middle East war. He knows the Americans put him in office, and so he’s got to find a way to make them happy, but he also knows the Iranians can remove him from the world of the living. He’s got to make them happy too. They want an Islamic Republic, which is counter to the wishes of the Iraqi Shiite leaders, and probably to his own desires. What to do?

We are never going to get serious about the Iranian threat until the mushroom clouds appear over Israel and America. It really has come down to this.