Michael Ledeen doesn’t just worry me. He freaks me out a little. He freaks me out because I am not sure how influential he really is in this administration. He has been calling for regime change in Iran and Syria for ages, and he continues to call for that today. One of the infuriating things about Ledeen is his cleverness and evil sense of humor. He has now decided to refer to Muslim militants as fascists. It’s an interesting term for Ledeen to use because he has been fascinated with fascism for over thirty years. In 1972, Ledeen published a book called Universal Fascism wherein he argued that Italian fascism had been right-wing, but revolutionary rather than reactionary.
In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”
Ledeen has a lot of quirky ideas about revolution and creative destruction. He’s a dangerous man. I’ll get into his history a little in just a bit, but first I want to look at how he uses the word fascism to refer to Iran.
No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted “insurgency” in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable.
Considering Ledeen’s long history of defending fascism, it’s odd to see him use it to describe the mullahs in Iran. But it fits into his maddening inconsistency. To really understand Ledeen’s relationship to fascism it is necessary to know some history. Ledeen has long ties to Italian intelligence agencies. In this context it is necessary to understand two things. The first is the legacy of Ledeen’s hero, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was raised mainly in Rome, but came to America for graduate work at Yale and Harvard. In 1943 he was recruited into the OSS. He remained in intelligence work after the war and was stationed in Italy concentrating on counterintelligence work. It was in 1948 that the CIA gots its start in election rigging.
As the last month of the 1948 [Italian] election campaign began, Time magazine pronounced the possible leftist victory to be “the brink of catastrophe”.
“It was primarily this fear,” William Colby, former Director of the CIA, has written, “that had led to the formation of the Office of Policy Coordination, which gave the CIA the capability to undertake covert political, propaganda, and paramilitary operations in the first place.”
But covert operations, as far as is known, played a relatively minor role in the American campaign to break the back of the Italian left. It was the very overtness of the endeavor, without any apparent embarrassment, that stamps the whole thing with such uniqueness and arrogance — one might say swagger. The fortunes of the FDP slid downhill with surprising acceleration in the face of an awesome mobilization of resources…
Thus began the CIA’s long flirtation with unreconstructed Italian fascists. Their motive appears to have been innocent enough: opposing Communist influence in Western Europe. But playing with fascists has its consequences as can be seen by the sorry history of Propaganda Due. Propaganda Due is a topic for a whole other diary. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that Silvio Belusconi was a member of the Masonic fascist group. For more information look at Operation Gladio and the biography of Licio Gelli. Ledeen is tied right into this history and that is why he is a prime suspect as the source of the Niger documents that spurred l’affair Plame.
Marcy Wheeler has done an examination of Ledeen’s strange fascination with James Angleton. It is evident that Ledeen feels a special kinship with Angleton, as he frequently writes columns wherein he has imaginary conversations with him. This may be related to another part of Angleton’s legacy. He was instrumental in setting up Israel’s intelligence agency, MOSSAD.
Ledeen has been involved in several controversies. He was involved in a disinformation campaign tying Jimmy Carter’s brother to Yassir Arafat and Qaddafi. It didn’t help Carter’s re-election prospects. He was directly involved in the Iran-Contra affair. And then, of course, there are those Niger Yellowcake forgeries.
In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro’s business partner and columnist for the American Conservative magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by “a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy.” When Horton guessed whether that was Ledeen, Giraldi confirmed it and added that the ex-CIA officers, “also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing.”
In Ledeen’s latest article he makes some extraordinary claims. First he notes that more Iranians visit Lebanon than citizens of any other country:
I’ll bet you your favorite farm that one of them was the world’s most wanted man, Imad Mughniyah, the operations chieftain of Hizbollah, the world’s most lethal terrorist organization.
Actually I won’t bet; it would be unethical. We know that Mughniyah flew to Damascus a while back with Ahmadinejad, and went to Lebanon to work with his buddies.
How does he know that? That might have made the news. I mean, Imad Mughniyah has a $25 million bounty on his head.
Then he makes a rather alarmist prediction:
After a few days of fighting, I would not be surprised to see some new kind of terrorist attack against Israel, or against an American facility in the region. An escalation to chemical weapons, for example, or even the fulfillment of the longstanding Iranian promise to launch something nuclear at Israel. They meant it when they said it, don’t you know?
Raising the specter of a nuclear attack? More par for the course with this guy.
And he concludes with a staggeringly dizzying twist of logic.
The longer we dither, the more likely it becomes that we will sadly and unnecessarily find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort, with all the terrible consequences that entails.
Faster, please. Your options are narrowing. You cannot escape the mullahs. You must either defeat them or submit to their terrible vision. There is no other way.
We must go to war with Iran or Syria now, or we may “find ourselves in a military confrontation of some sort”? That is a remarkable piece of thinking. I’ll leave you with one of his more candid statements.
“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”
The man should be in jail, not Karl Rove’s top foreign policy advisor.
