Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is a highly regarded expert on Iran’s Green Movement and maintains close ties to opposition groups inside Iran. He posted an article at PJMedia yesterday that accurately describes what is happening in the Middle East.
He opens his article:
Killing Americans serves several purposes in the war being waged against us (we have yet to seriously engage against our known enemies): first, it’s what the war is all about. They want us dead or dominated. Second, it helps recruitment, which had dropped after the defeat of Iran, Syria, and al-Qaeda in Iraq. Morale had also dropped, and stories claiming that the top American in Libya had been raped before he was executed feeds the blood lust of jihadists, whose language and fantasies are rich with such images. Third, it enhances the power of the unseen moving hand. Fourth, it discourages our current and would-be friends and allies.
No serious person believes that an obscure movie shown to less than a dozen people many months ago was the “cause” of the simultaneous assaults in Cairo and Benghazi. Or that the assaults were unrelated, let alone spontaneous. Or that there was no state actor involved in the operation.
So why is the American press refusing to report this aspect of the story? Because the story behind the story is the total failure of President Obama’s outreach to terrorists.
Mr. Ledeen’s article concludes:
If we do not support revolution within Iran, we will get more of these attacks, and more dead Americans. In the end, we will fulfill Churchill’s prophecy to Chamberlain on the day after Munich: you thought you had to choose between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor, and you will have war. We may yet have time to choose honor — support those who have already risked their lives to defeat our enemies — and avoid the big war relentlessly engulfing us.
It would be nice if we could ignore what Iran is doing, but we do so at our own peril.