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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epsteinbd who wrote (62356)	12/19/2002 8:58:32 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Ledeen is pissed about our inaction towards Iran. Why am I not surprised? December 19, 2002 8:45 a.m. A Prophecy for the New Year Faster, please!. I'll be traveling for the next ten days, but it the next round in the Iranian saga is pretty clear by now, so I thought I'd pass it on. The hardliners in Tehran have decided that their only chance of survival is a massive crackdown on all forms of dissidence, so they are first going to give the useless President Khatami an offer he can't refuse: Either quit, or submit. They will give the pathetic "reformers" the back of their hands, and then bring down an iron fist on the students, the teachers, the trade unions, and even the dissident mullahs. Sad to say, even more brave Iranians will be rounded up, clubbed into submission, or tortured to death. This may ? but only may ? remove all illusions in Foggy Bottom and in the appeasement capitals of Western Europe, and finally put some spine in the still-silent human-rights and feminist gangs in the West, and confirm President Bush's many accurate statements about Iran, from the "Axis of Evil" onward. And I hope it will finally convince my government that we must not stand idly by as the Iranian regime gets ever stronger, and unleashes a new wave of terror against the West. There have been many signs that this is in fact going on right now. A week ago I wrote about a Palestinian terror group that had been rounded up in Germany, run from long distance (that is, Tehran) by a Jordanian by the name of Sarkawi. It turns out that Sarkawi also ran the assassination team in Jordan that killed an American diplomat in Amman a couple of months ago. For those who still doubt that Sunni and Shiite terrorists work closely together, this story is yet another nail in that empty coffin. On the domestic front, the iron fist is in full evidence. In the last couple of days there were demonstrations in Kermanshah after the bloody murder of a student. As other students poured into the town, the security forces stopped buses, and assaulted the students with razor blades, burned them with cigarettes, beat them with chains, and arrested a large number. Ditto in Tehran, where 150 students were rounded up and held against impossibly large bail. Nothing yet in the Western press, but, of course, that is no surprise to us. Meanwhile, the French have arrested some North African terrorists who were planning big operations over the holidays (what a pity that appeasement doesn't work as it's supposed to! If it did, France would be the safest country in the world today.). The French were tipped off to these people by some brave Muslim leaders, who informed French security forces that the North Africans had been trained in Iran and then infiltrated into France via their native countries. So we face just what we deserve for our feckless inaction: an ever more ambitious and bloody regime in Iran, utterly devoted to our destruction, and churning along ? as recent stories have made clear ? toward nuclear weapons (notice the recent shipments from North Korea, the third member of the unholy trinity along with Iran and Iraq) and other nasty powders and spores. As I wrote in The War Against the Terror Masters, we face a unified challenge, and we will have to fight a regional war (I'm sure you've read the accounts in the British press of Syria's covert assistance to Saddam in preparation for the war against the United States). Woe betide our strategists if they send our soldiers into Iraq without preparing to defend our flanks against the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran, fully funded by the Saudi royal family. The terror masters believe they will have to fight us sooner or later, and they'd rather send their terrorist forces against us in Iraq than wait for us to move against them at our convenience. Faster, please. We're already very late. ? Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters.