Brandon

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Winning the War on Terror One Country at a Time

Those who doubted our keystone strategy, starting with Iraq's liberation, may wish to ignore the following analysis by Michael Ledeen. He unmasks the weakness of Jihad and puts the lie to the Iraq insurgency as "freedom fighters" argument posed by the left.

The fruits of staying the course with our Iraq policy may finally begin to bear some fruit throughout the region. With the Lebanese people themselves demanding an end to Syrian occupation and political pressure mounting on both Syria and Iran, the dominoes are beginning to fall.

Visit just about any of the clandestine Iranian web sites where every word President Bush and Secretary of State Rice utter on freedom is reported and passed on to generations weary of theocratic rule.

The political pressure which may be our best weapon for change would NOT have been possible without the clear demonstration of our commitment to use military power in Iraq.


Thanks to Neognostikos for pointing me to Ledeen's article.


Michael Ledeen on Democracy on National Review Online: Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one? The Middle East is boiling, as the failed tyrants scramble to come to terms with the political tsunami unleashed on Afghanistan and Iraq. The power of democratic revolution can be seen in every country in the region. Even the Saudi royal family has had to stage a farcical 'election.' But this first halting step has fooled no one. Only males could vote, no political parties were permitted, and only the Wahhabi establishment was permitted to organize.

This glorious victory is due in large part to the truly heroic performance of our armed forces, most recently in that great turning point, the battle of Fallujah. Our victory in Fallujah has had enormous consequences, first of all because the information we gathered there has made it possible to capture or kill considerable numbers of terrorists and their leaders. It also sent a chill through the spinal column of the terror network, because it exposed the lie at the heart of their global recruitment campaign. As captured terrorists have told the region on Iraqi television and radio, they signed up for jihad because they had been told that the anti-American crusade in Iraq was a great success, and they wanted to participate in the slaughter of the Jews, crusaders, and infidels. But when they got to Iraq and discovered that the terrorist leaders immediately confiscated their travel documents so that they could not escape their terrible destiny they saw that the opposite was true. The slaughter of which Fallujah was the inescapable proof was that of the jihadists at the hands of the joint coalition and Iraqi forces.

It would be an error of enormous proportions if, on the verge of a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East, we backed away from this historic mission. It would be doubly tragic if we did it because of one of two possible failures of vision: insisting on focusing on Iraq alone, and viewing military power as the prime element in our revolutionary strategy. Revolution often comes from the barrel of a gun, but not always. Having demonstrated our military might, we must now employ our political artillery against the surviving terror masters. The great political battlefield in the Middle East is, as it has been all along, Iran, the mother of modern terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and the prime mover of Hamas. When the murderous mullahs fall in Tehran, the terror network will splinter into its component parts, and the jihadist doctrine will be exposed as the embodiment of failed lies and misguided messianism.

The instrument of their destruction is democratic revolution, not war, and the first salvo in the political battle of Iran is national referendum. Let the Iranian people express their desires in the simplest way possible: "Do you want an Islamic republic?" Send Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel to supervise the vote. Let the contending parties compete openly and freely, let newspapers publish, let radios and televisions broadcast, fully supported by the free nations. If the mullahs accept this gauntlet, I have every confidence that Iran will be on the path to freedom within months. If, fearing a massive rejection from their own people, the tyrants of Tehran reject a free referendum and reassert their repression, then the free nations will know it is time to deploy the full panoply of pressure to enable the Iranians to gain their freedom.

The time is now. Faster, please.

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