Sandwich boards optional after Tuesday’s midterm election.

Everybody around here — and in punditworld generally — is giving advice to the Republicans.  But the electoral results suggest that the Dems are the ones who badly need guidance.  I don’t read the numbers as a general rejection of the ruling class, and frankly I don’t believe that any serious Democrat can read them that way.  The voters rejected THEM.

The best short take I heard on the radio last night (I do not watch TV very often, and the hour or so I saw last night was just awful;  radio much better) had to do with the gubernatorial miracle in Maryland, but it applies to the whole night:  The voters said to the government:  STOP!  You’re killing us!!’

Too much intrusion, too much government, too many taxes, the screwed-up health care scam, the IRS schemes, the NSA snooping on normal innocents.  That’s gotta stop.  Get out of our way, we’re smarter than you think we are.  We can do it ourselves, we don’t need you as much as you want to impose yourselves on us.  And we are sick and tired of being robbed blind by you guys, with very limited benefits, at least to those of us who want to work hard and claw our way up.

The other smart analysis, again via radio, pointed to the exit polls’ finding of widespread fear, including fear of Ebola, fear of terrorism, fear that their kids would be worse off than they, etc.

So you got a richly deserved thrashing.

National security was a big deal, which according to punditwisdom it isn’t supposed to be, even in presidential elections and certainly not in legislative off-year elections.

So I’ve got advice for the Democrats:  repent and convert.

Repent of your failed view of the world.  You’re still mouthing hundred-year-old slogans in pidgen Marxism, all that class-conflict garbage.  It had some legitimacy in the 19th century, and in some Old World countries in the 20th, but it doesn’t explain much of anything any more.  Start with the wisdom of an old Italian friend who once headed the Communist Party’s youth organization:  “but there is no working class.”

Ben Rhodes earnestly says that detente with Iran is to Obama’s second term what “health care” was to the first.  His defining issue, the one that will define his place in the history books.  Rhodes doesn’t put it as explicitly as I will, but it’s pretty clear that Obama wants his Nixon-to-China Moment:  Air Force One carrying him to Tehran for the historic handshake or hug with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

You can understand our otherwise incoherent Middle East policy decisions if you keep that image in active memory, as Obama has for many years.  He has long yearned for his Nixon Moment, as he told Khamenei et. al. even before the presidential elections of 2008.  It may well be that he cherished the thought of another such triumphant embrace–with Putin in Red Square.  But that hasn’t gone well at all.

So that leaves Iran, and he’s working very hard to get to Tehran: virtual silence about the Iranian-sponsored takeover of Yemen, strategic cooperation with Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani, catering to Iranian wishes in Iraq and Syria, bending over backwards to accommodate Iranian nuclear ambitions, easing of sanctions, welcoming Iranian officials to a business conference in Pennsylvania (a promise of things to come).

The president’s lust for the Nixon Moment nicely accounts for his Israel policy, including the recent leaks.  Remember that Nixon’s China deal was based on the two countries’ common strategic fear of the Soviet Union.  What is our common strategic fear with the Iranians?  There’s the Islamic State, and we are certainly catering to Iranian objectives on that front, albeit in a very restrained way.  Some more menacing common enemy would be more in keeping with the Nixon model, and Israel fits the bill.  In case you had any doubts, the White House has thoughtfully made it luminously clear that we restrained Israel on behalf of Iran, and the nasty anti-Israel language provided to journalists would pass muster at Friday prayers in an Iranian mosque.

When I last wrote about this subject, I called them “homegrown” terrorists, the phrase of the month a year and a half ago.  Back then, such imaginary monsters were bombing marathons;  today they are shooting Canadian parliamentarians and security guards, and attacking NYPD guys with their jihadi axes.

It doesn’t really matter what you call them, because they’re figments of the “expert” imagination. The legend-mavens tell us that there are “normal” Americans (this part is very important) who somehow just go bad, and turn into murderous terrorists.  There is no foreign input, no alien country or intelligence service, no global conspiracy.  The terrorists are homegrown and they are on their own.  Lone wolves.

It’s not so. Patrick Poole has the data for us:

“…Max Abrahms at Northeastern University has observed:

Since the advent of international terrorism in 1970, none of the 40 most lethal terrorist attacks has been committed by a person unaffiliated with some terrorist group, (my emphasis.  Notice carefully, “none”) according to publicly available data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and stored at the University of Maryland. In fact, lone wolves have carried out just two of the 1,900 most deadly terrorist incidents over the last four decades.

That’s pretty impressive, don’t you think?  I’d like to know the two-out-of-nearly-two-thousand real cases of lone wolves on the attack, but I’ll bet you ten to one they weren’t jihadis.

There ARE homegrown terrorists, like the Unabomber, but these aren’t the people we’re talking about just now.  Unabomber is a nut, but he’s a distinctly American nut, and definitely a lone wolf.  The so-called lone wolves of recent days–the killer in Canada, the axeman in New York, and, we should add, the Oklahama City decapitator–aren’t loners, they’re members.  They’ve been inspired by local or online jihadis.

Another thing.  These jihadis often turn out to be converts, even “recent converts.”

Once again, the Iranian regime has attacked me on the front page of the hardliners’ favorite daily newspaper, Kayhan.  By my count, this is the fourth time, including the video of the Tehran show trial in which regime opponents were asked how they communicated with me (they hadn’t) and what instructions I had given them (none).  The mullahs’ complaint is the usual one:  my ongoing denunciation of the regime and my calls for democratic revolution in Iran.

The famous American theorist in his statements to the American Frontpage Magazine said; ‘”Israel has still the capacity to support the Iranian opposition and is capable of supporting them in order to overthrow the regime in Iran.”

Yes, I said it, although the mullahs have the source wrong.  It was actually in an article by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post and reprinted at Frontpage.

My Iranian critics continue:

In his statements, Ledeen claimed Israel should start a global propaganda assault against Iran revolving around the human rights and women rights issues and it should create create Internet based means of communication to bypass the firewalls. The famous American theorist added Israeli and United States support to the opposition would not weaken the opposition to the Islamic Republic, but would strengthen their position.

Let me say straight away that the regime leaders are entirely right about my position.  I hate them, and I wish I could do more to defeat them.  Alas, they are quite wrong about my presumed influence (I suppose I should be grateful for the repetition of “famous American theorist”) but in our free society, change is always possible, so I keep at it.

They are particularly sensitive about human rights, and of course about women, who are the great revolutionary force in the Middle East.  Maybe the latest horror story about acid attacks against Iranian women in Isfahan will force the White House to rethink its current collaboration with the Iranian regime.  Valerie Jarrett, call your office please and get on this.  At least put out an official guffaw at the regime claim that your boss and the Israelis are behind the acid attacks, ok?

What does it all mean?  It tells me that the regime is worried, that there is fear at the highest levels of Khamenei’s kitchen cabinet.  They know their people loathe them, they try to portray the loathing as a foreign manipulation, and as all fervent propagandists do, they have put a face on the alien menace.  My face, several times now.

We are beginning to learn that the Bush administration declined to talk about the discovery of thousands of WMDs in Iraq. But that’s only the beginning of the story, since that policy was just one part of a concerted and largely successful effort to quash unwanted news from the battlefield. That effort predated the invasion of Iraq by two years, and its consequences — a systematic distortion of recent history that shapes our national security policies — are still very much with us.

Of the Bush administration’s many failures, its inability to craft and pursue a serious Iran policy was one of the worst. I don’t know all their reasons, but I do know that they didn’t want to know about Iranian killers of Americans on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My information is first hand, it doesn’t hinge on leaks from “sources.”

Afghanistan came first, as we invaded shortly after 9/11/2001. In December of that year, I and two DoD officials met in Rome with a senior Iranian intelligence officer who had information — including documents — about Iranian hunter-killer teams in Afghanistan who had been ordered and trained to kill Americans. The information was passed on to the commanders of U.S. Special Forces, and it was confirmed. The killers were where the Iranian official told us, and they were quickly put out of business.

I felt good about the Rome trip; it isn’t every day that you get to participate in a project that saves American lives. The Iranian official said he would be available in the future, and he had other information of the same sort, dealing with Iranian activities outside the country. I told him I was positive that the United States government would get back to him, and we discussed ways to do that.

I was completely wrong, The U.S. government was furious, at the highest levels. Both Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet were told about the meeting by the CIA station chief in Rome, who, having no first-hand information (he didn’t talk to us), conjured a series of lies out of the ether. Although the meeting had been approved in advance by the White House (in the person of Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley, and, I am convinced, the National Security adviser, Condi Rice, herself), and although it had generated life-saving information, both Powell and Tenet demanded there be no followup, and the story of the meeting — the false version from CIA — was leaked to the press and presented as some kind of scandal.

I guess you could say that bureaucracy trumps life sometimes.

The Iranian official was killed in Tehran a few years later. I don’t know why.

Then there’s Iraq. For those of us who had children on the battlefield, the lethal use of IEDs was a nightmare. Indeed, over the course of the war, IEDs were the single greatest source of U.S. casualties, and they did terrible things to our guys, producing a ghastly loss of life and limbs. It seemed intuitively obvious that we should do something against this enemy device, and the Pentagon spent billions of dollars on technologies to detect and disable the things.

I had information that the IEDs came from the Iranians, who designed and manufactured many of them, trained their Iraqi proxies how to use them, and even dispatched Iranian troops to deploy them. I reported this to the excellent assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC), Army Colonel (ret) Thomas O’Connell, a family friend. I don’t know all the things he did, but I do know that he queried the so-called intelligence community, and did not get a satisfactory reply.

O’Connell ultimately issued an order to track the serial numbers on the IEDs we captured, and lo and behold they were in large part Iranian. We were even able to identify the factories at which the components were manufactured, and the sites, inside Iran, where many of them were assembled. QED, right?

ISIS vs. the Kurds so totally dominates our attention and our passions that we’ve failed to notice that the Russians are up to their necks in the fighting on the Syrian battlefield. As usual, our focus is too narrow, and we don’t see the big picture: the global war.

There’s a lot of blood being shed by the jihadis, and there’s plenty of killing by and of members of fanatical religious groups, militias, and armies that hate each other. But that’s not the whole story, by any means. Syria is enormously important to both Iran and Russia, and those bloody regimes are — and will remain — fully engaged.

I’m as hostile to Putin as is Gary Kasparov, but I wouldn’t call the Russian dictator a jihadi or a religious fanatic. Yet he’s on a mountaintop in Syria.

Assuming you didn’t hear about the Russians, start with this, from the invaluable Interpreter blog and the Oryx blog: “Russian Military Intelligence Coordinating Syrian-Iranian Attacks on Rebels, Spying on Israel.” Anti-Assad rebels captured a base, which turned out to have global significance:

Syrian rebels who overran the base have found evidence that the Syrian Army was not alone on the top of the hill. The rebels say that their evidence proves that Russian military intelligence officers were also operating on the base, and appear to have left some of the equipment — and pictures — behind. A video tour of the facility, posted on YouTube (below, click here for a copy) shows that inside the base there is evidence of the presence of Russian “Spetsnaz,” special forces units who were members of the radio electronic intelligence agency of Russia’s GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate, the Russian military’s chief foreign intelligence unit).

That base was a big deal, and it shows us something we haven’t thought about all that much — a major Russian role in the Syrian battle:

(T)he facility was of vital importance for the Assad regime as it was responsible for recording and decrypting radio communications from every rebel group operating inside Syria, making it likely the Russian-gathered information at this facility was at least partially responsible for the series of killings of rebel leaders by airstrikes.

Let that sink in for a moment, and then say to yourself: “but I thought all this slaughter was a Muslim thing.”

It IS a Muslim thing. Too. But above all it’s a global thing, it’s part of the war against the West, in which the two biggest forces are Russia and Iran.

Sorry to have gone missing, but I’ve stopped blogging when I’m overseas, and I’m crashing on research for a book on Italian Jews nowadays.  Yeah I know it’s yet another bad sign of paranoia, but still…as I contemplate how happy my mullah friends would be to host me in one of their gaols, I do try to take some precautions.

I returned in time to fast–perhaps undoing some of the effects of all that pizza and pasta–and to see that the Khamenei/Rouhani regime continues to persecute its real and imagined internal enemies.  Two recent cases warrant our attention.  The first is a long contemplative essay by a recent detainee, Ramin Jahanbegloo, an intellectual who had left Iran after becoming convinced he was at risk, but then went back to visit (FOOTNOTE:  Yes, you’d think they would know better;  it’s astonishing how many of the hostages and prisoners in Iran were grabbed when they came back for a visit, like the U.S. Marine.  I keep wondering if some regime official told them it would be fine).  He was arrested at the airport on his way out.

Jahanbegloo was ultimately ransomed out, and was aided by some diplomatic pressure (FOOTNOTE:  It DOES work.  Sometimes).  All in all, he had a fairly easy time of it.  No torture, no false announcement of impending execution.  He cooperated with his captors and interrogators, videotaping and signing false confessions when ordered, not–at least on his own account–defying the regime.  His defense was to tell the truth, that he wasn’t a serious threat to the regime, was not an enemy agent, was just…a philosopher.

He’s out, but he wonders if he wasn’t excessively cooperative.  What will his kids say about his false confessions?  His wife fought very hard for his release;  what does she think?

So while the sadists at Evin prison did not torture him physically, they exposed weakness of which, let’s say generously, he is not proud.

On the other hand, there is a great man, Ayatollah Hossein Kazamani Boroujerdi, about whom I have written many times.  The son of a famous ayatollah, Boroujerdi attracted a mass following when he advocated freedom of religion (and non-religion) and called for the traditional Shi’ite separation of mosque and state (FOOTNOTE:  for those who deny the existence of “moderate Muslims,” his example suggests you should do more study and think more deeply).  When the regime arrested him several years ago, his followers blocked the roads taken by the security forces in a desperate attempt to save the ayatollah.

Boroujerdi has been treated atrociously in Evin, and his family and supporters have been warning for many months that his health was failing.  Now they are telling us that he has been transferred to a cell that is typically used for prisoners about to be executed.

I can well imagine the frustration of the hollow men atop the Iranian regime.  They’ve had Boroujerdi arrested and tortured, they keep hoping that he’ll finally die.  But he won’t — his will to live is extraordinary.  And unlike Jahanbegloo, he’s remained defiant, and has even smuggled letters and, I am told, the manuscript of a devastating critique of the Islamic Republic, to the outside world.

Decapitation isn’t nearly so rare or so “medieval” as many commentators apparently believe.  My favorite Italian newspaper, il Foglio (Rome), recently published an excellent overview of the practice.  If you read Italian, have at it.  If you don’t, here are the points that seem most useful to a contemporary person trying to understand what’s happening, with some of my own thoughts on this ghoulish subject.

Decapitation was a well-established method of enforcing the death penalty throughout Europe until fairly recently.  The French, to take the most recent example, only stopped beheading convicted killers in 1981 when Francois Mitterrand abolished the death penalty itself.  The French method–the guillotine–was famous, having been established during the period of the Revolution, in 1792.  It spread far and wide.

The guillotine–named after one of its designers, Joseph Guillotin–was a more humane method of execution than either hanging or beheading with a sword.  Both of the latter methods were subject to technical failure (the gallows did not always break the neck of the victim, prolonging the agony for several minutes, and the “execution sword”–with a sharp tip in Asia and Africa, but a blunt end in Europe–didn’t always do the job with a single stroke).  The guillotine nearly always worked.  It worked so well that it replaced previous methods, and was used to execute criminals from all social classes, kings to beggars.

Footnote:  Guillotin wasn’t the inventor;  that honor goes to another Frenchman, Antoine Louis, who of course wanted the device to be called the “Louisette.”

Another footnote:  over its “career,” the “widow” chopped off between fifteen and twenty-five thousand heads.

Yet another footnote:  The most famous failure was the bungled execution of French King Louis XVI.  It didn’t kill him right away — he suffered horribly,  to the delight of the mob.

Back to the very beginning:  The first systematic practice of decapitation was in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs, from the 4th millenium to the fourth century B.C.  It was adopted by Imperial Rome for full-fledged citizens (slaves and thieves were crucified).

Today, the only country (not counting the Islamic State) that decapitates as an official method of execution is Saudi Arabia (however some NGOs claim that it is still used in parts of Africa and Asia).  Terrorists do it regularly, as do Mexican drug cartels.  Almost all the decapitating states used swords (the current use of knives, which takes longer, combines torture with execution).

Because it gives meaning to life, that’s why.

It’s a commonplace to anyone who’s studied the rise of fascism, of which Islamofascism is the most recent variety.  The main problem with democratic capitalism is that it’s so successful, and therefore very boring.  A generation or two of European intellectuals bemoaned the great triumph of science and industry, which they portrayed as relentlessly stifling the human soul, burying us under a hill of material things.

The Germans produced the most moving such literature — think Nietzsche, think Hesse, not accidentally the cult hero of the American revolt against materialism in the 1960s — and, seeking for paths to spiritual fulfillment, they often wandered off into Eastern mysticism.  (Californians dd, too, and sometimes still do, but that’s not fascism.  It’s Hollywood spirituality).

The spiritual path merged with politics, catalyzed by war.  All fascism, whatever version of social or political organization it advocates, insists that war is the true measure of human virtue.  A person’s valor and courage are measured by his performance in combat.  The Italian fascists insisted that Mussolini and his followers were superior people who had been molded in the trenches of the Great War.  Young men and women who believed they possessed heroic qualities raced to join the fascist movement, just as they now race to join the jihad.

It is not primarily a matter of social class, although there is a considerable literature on the recruitment of poor young Muslims to suicide terrorism, in which the recruiters offer money and security to the surviving family.  The primary passion is excitement, the thrill of fighting the enemy, of making a signal contribution to the creation of a new world, and joining an irresistible force.

How much more thrilling than plodding along in a bourgeois world with no spiritual fulfillment, but only…things.

This quest for the meaning of life is a leitmotif of human history. The British Empire was replete with them (Lawrence, for example) as was America as we marched West to fill out the continent.  Modern politics has enlisted such people in an enthusiastic mass movement that threatens democratic capitalism.  The 20th-century fascists were largely secular, substituting their own rituals for traditional religious ones;  Islamofascism turns it around, substituting religious rituals and beliefs for the largely secular ones that defined the “modern world.”

Both work so long as the movement succeeds.  Both fail when they are defeated.  That’s why we have to crush the jihad — we kill the jihadis before they kill us, and we shatter their ideology by demonstrating that their leaders are false prophets.

Faster, please…

(Reposted from Aug 29. Click here for audio of Ledeen discussing this story with Mark Levin on Wednesday.)

They do have a strategy, but they prefer to appear indecisive. That’s because the strategy would likely provoke even greater criticism than the false confession of endless dithering.

The actual strategy is detente first, and then a full alliance with Iran throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It has been on display since before the beginning of the Obama administration. During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies. The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule, as chief of staff for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and as ambassador to Ukraine. Ambassador Miller has confirmed to me his conversations with Iranian leaders during the 2008 campaign.

Ever since, President Obama’s quest for an alliance with Iran has been conducted through at least four channels:  Iraq, Switzerland (the official U.S. representative to Tehran), Oman, and a variety of American intermediaries, the most notable of whom is probably Valerie Jarrett, his closest adviser. In recent months, Middle Eastern leaders reported personal visits from Ms. Jarrett, who briefed them on her efforts to manage the Iranian relationship. This was confirmed to me by a former high-ranking American official who says he was so informed by several Middle Eastern leaders.

The central theme in Obama’s outreach to Iran is his conviction that the United States has historically played a wicked role in the Middle East, and that the best things he can do for that part of the world is to limit and withdraw American military might and empower our self-declared enemies, whose hostility to traditional American policies he largely shares.