NRO

At the Crossroads Iran’s moment.

By Michael Ledeen, NRO contributing editor & resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author, most recently, of Tocqueville on American Character

November 26, 2001 3:15 p.m. While the diplomats gather in Bonn to negotiate the makeup of the new government of Afghanistan, the Middle East tyrants sit poised atop a precipice, awaiting the arrival of the American armies to send them to their doom. We are now in a position similar to that of General George S. Patton in the summer of 1944. Having swept across France in a month and routed the Wehrmacht with the unexpectedly irresistible speed and power of his 3rd Army, Patton intuited that the German army had become a hollow shell, and that he could destroy it in a matter of weeks or even days. But fuel was in short supply, and the Allied invasion plans called for a frontal assault along a broad front, not a lightning strike. Patton begged for fuel for his tanks, but he did not get it. The Germans reorganized, toughened their morale, and fought again, producing the horrendous Battle of the Bulge with their last desperate assault.

As then, it is hard for us to appreciate how profoundly we have changed the "facts on the ground," and yet how fragile is that transformation. Patton was right about the Wehrmacht, and yet within a couple of weeks the moment of supreme opportunity had passed. Today the entire Middle East has seen a new American will combined with irresistible armed forces. If we strike quickly against the terror states, we have every reason to believe they will collapse like a house of cards. If we delay, they may yet convince themselves that a successful resistance is possible, dragging out the war, adding casualties on both sides, and opening the door to meddlesome outsiders, from the United Nations and the European Parliament to China.

Just look inside the Middle Eastern tyrannies that support the terror network to see the forces of freedom at work. The Iranian people demonstrate repeatedly, demanding an end to the oppressive Islamic Republic. On November 18th, Nicola Byrne wrote in the British Guardian about her experiences at the Iran-Ireland soccer game in Tehran. "It soon became obvious that the source of their anger was not just the mediocre performance of their national team. Watched by the country's senior clerics from the VIP stand...Under an enormous mural of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, Iranians ripped out and set fire to seats, tore down banners depicting images of the country's senior mullahs and trashed the windscreens of several hundred cars outside." And she went on to describe the efforts of the regime to halt "the beginnings of the social revolution which becomes so evident every time they play."

A few days later, a large crowd demonstrated at a ceremony to commemorate the assassination of Dariush Foruhar and his wife three years ago. Foruhar was the leader of the Iranian People's Party, which was subsequently suppressed. The crowd chanted "Death to the Taliban, in Kabul or Tehran," and "Referendum, referendum, this is the people's battle cry," demanding a plebiscite on the abolition of the Islamic Republic. They denounced Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and called for freedom and democracy, despite a massive turnout by state security police.

Repeated demonstrations of such explicit intensity are undoubtedly the result of 22 years of misery under the mullahs, but they are also fueled by the knowledge that the American army is on the borders of Iran. Like Tom Hanks shipwrecked on a desert island, the Iranians are trying desperately to get the attention of our passing rescuers, hoping we will take notice and liberate Iran. The mullahs and ayatollahs are well aware of their peril, and have slyly been trying to present themselves as opponents of the very terrorism they have done so much to fester, train and equip. At the U.N. last week, and during a shockingly soft interview on CNN, Iranian President Khatami feigned friendship for the United States, lamenting some of our policies while shedding crocodile tears for our murdered innocents.

Iran is ready to blow sky-high. The Iranian people need only a bright spark of courage from the United States to ignite the flames of democratic revolution.

Similarly in Iraq, opposition groups have exposed glaring weaknesses in Saddam's oft-celebrated security apparatus. Over the past month, Iraqi opposition groups have carried out numerous acts of sabotage, striking at oil refineries, pipelines, and police headquarters. During the Thanksgiving weekend, a Shiite resistance organization claimed to have hit one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad with a mortar shell.

Actions of this sort cannot be carried out without considerable popular support, and their many successes thus disprove the claim — recited with misguided monotony at the highest levels of the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency — that it is hopeless for the United States to support the Iraqi democratic opposition forces. Quite the opposite is true: we are obliged to support them.

As in Afghanistan, we need to create a zone of freedom, to which Saddam's enemies can run to find safety and normalcy. We have long proclaimed a "no fly" zone in the north of Iraq; now is the time to declare it a "no trespassing" zone for the regime, a haven for Saddam's enemies, and a staging ground for democratic revolution. If Saddam dares challenge our control, we should deliver a crushing blow.

Years ago, a besieged leader of the Lebanese Christians, overwhelmed by Syrian-supported Muslim fighters, cried out, "the Western world should either support us, or change its name." If the freedom-craving Iranian and Iraqi peoples could cry out to us today, they would echo his words. They are willing to risk their lives for our common ideals of freedom and democracy. They see the greatest instrument of democratic revolution — the American Army — so close they can almost touch it. They have heard President Bush promise to carry the war to all countries that support and harbor terrorists, and they know their own countries are in the forefront of the ranks of the terror states.

They are ready to roll, and their hated regimes are vulnerable as never before. We do not have to invade, because we already have allied forces on the ground. We will surely have to support them once the fighting starts, but, just as the Taliban collapsed once our seriousness was manifest, and we delivered on our promises to the Afghan people, Saddam and the mullahs will follow suit.

It would be shameful to lose this opportunity to reshape the Middle East, extend the zone of freedom, and deliver a terrible blow to the terror network.

Now.

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2001

Answers

OG,

What an incredible article! I sure hope that we do the right thing this time - they've been suffering for a LONG time, well before even Khomeni, even before the Shah.

I hope they have the freedom and justice they've been wanting for so long...

-- Anonymous, November 26, 2001