Let's Show Ahmadinejad What America Stands For

The visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New York has stirred up a lot of controversy and emotions. It has forced Americans answer some hard questions about what kind of country we are and what message we want to send to the rest of the world.

Ahmadinejad's plans to visit Ground Zero and lay a wreath there evoked outrage from many. "Assisting Ahmadinejad in touring Ground Zero -- hallowed ground for all Americans -- is outrageous," said former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. If anyone should know how sacred Ground Zero is to Americans, it would be Giuliani, who was there just as much as, if not more than, the rescue workers were, taking such dignitaries and celebrities as Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdul Aziz, Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, Donald Rumsfeld and many others on guided tours of this consecrated burial ground. Of course, it is unconscionable for a politician to use Ground Zero for a photo op or to try to score political points on the tragedy of September 11 and I am glad the New York Police Department listened to Giuliani and denied Ahmadinejad permission to go there. What kind of a message would it send the world if we let someone like that use Ground Zero for a publicity stunt? Even though most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and Iran has not been conclusively linked to the 9/11 attacks, I am sure that there are people working on making a connection and one will be revealed before we declare war on Iran.

Then Columbia University sparked new outrage by inviting Ahmadinejad to speak there, defying President Bush's stated policy of not having any dialogue at all with our enemies. Although Columbia President Lee Bollinger said that he would "introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges" about Ahmadinejad's views on the Holocaust, Israel and terrorism, many people believe that a university, which is full of impressionable young minds, is not the place for this sort of discussion. Michelle Malkin pointed out the hypocrisy of Bollinger's refusal to punish students who stopped a member of the Minutemen from speaking by rushing the stage and allowing Ahmadinejad to speak. How could the university let one group stop someone from speaking and not let another group stop someone from speaking? That kind of double standard makes a mockery of the First Amendment.

In what might be the most rapid fulfillment of Godwin's Law on record, some compared Ahmadinejad to Hitler. "Why are they inviting the Persian Hitler to Columbia?" said Columbia alumnus and conservative writer David Horowitz. "Would Columbia have invited Hitler to speak?" asked others.

Although I believe this was probably intended as a rhetorical question, Columbia Dean John Coatsworth decided that he would try to tamp down some of the heightened emotion surrounding this debate by going ahead and answering the question on Fox News: "If Hitler were in the United States and he wanted a platform from which to speak he would have plenty of platforms to speak from in the United States. If he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion, to be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, we would certainly invite him."

But Coatsworth's attempt to inject some thought and rationality into the debate over whether Columbia should let Hitler speak (for the second time--well, almost) just raised more important questions: If you were a doctor and Hitler had a life threatening illness, would you treat him? If Hitler knocked at your door and he was bleeding and he said he had been in an automobile accident, would you invite him in to use your telephone? If you were a Catholic priest and Hitler told you in confession that he had killed six million people, would you keep your vow of silence or report him to the authorities? And finally, a question that I think would stump a lot of conservatives, if Hitler's mother wanted to abort him, would you drive her to a Planned Parenthood clinic or counsel her to keep the baby?

Although Ahmadinejad's visit has forced us to confront a lot of difficult questions, it has also given us a chance to show the rest of the world what kind of a country we are. If some people in the world have gotten the mistaken impression that America can be pushed around, I think our response to Ahmadinejad's threat to visit Ground Zero shows that we are not as weak as they may think. And though Columbia continues to defy the government by giving Ahmadinejad a forum (we'll see how they feel when they lose federal funding and alumni donations), the protests that will greet him and the number of people who called for Columbia to deny him an opportunity to speak shows that though we value the First Amendment in theory, it is not a suicide pact. Maybe they just let anyone speak at universities in Iran but that's not the American way. In America if our enemies want to spout their propaganda, first they have to get through a phalanx of very loud protesters who will try to shout them down.

People in the Middle East respect strength not weakness. By insulting Ahmadinejad and rebuffing his attempts at dialogue, we gain his respect. If we want to have peace in the Middle East, humiliating their leaders and refusing to talk to them is a good first step.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran, Giuliani, Columbia University, Michelle Malkin, Politics

Knee Jerks

Democrats don't like President Bush's proposals only because they are against anything he supports, says Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus about their reaction to President Bush's State of the Union address. "If George W. Bush proposes something, it must be bad," she writes. "Such is the knee-jerk state of partisan suspiciousness that when the president actually endorses a tax increase -- a tax increase that would primarily hit the well-off, no less -- Democrats still howl." Everyone knows that Democrats love tax increases so the only possible explanation for their not liking this one is that they are so blinded by hatred of Bush that they are against anything he is for. I guess if Bush told Democrats to jump off a bridge, they would probably refuse to do it, even if it was the right thing to do.

Marcus doesn't understand why Democrats don't like the President's proposal to help people pay for health insurance by telling them they can deduct it from their taxes at the end of the year, as long as they survive to the end of the year and aren't too sick to work and don't need to spend the money they would use for health care to pay for food or rent. "Listening to Democratic reaction to Bush's new health insurance proposal, you get the sense that if Bush picked a plank right out of the Democratic platform -- if he introduced Hillarycare itself -- and stuck it in his State of the Union address, Democrats would churn out press releases denouncing it," Marcus writes. Democrats should just be happy the President is proposing to do anything about health care at all. Now I don't really understand the President's health insurance plan and all those numbers just make my head spin, but I am sure that if President Bush is proposing it, then it must be a good program.

Robert Novak is also appalled by the Democrats' knee-jerk rejection of the President's efforts to work with them. When President Bush proposed the creation of a "new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror," the Democrat Congress (as Bush likes to call them even though for some reason they stubbornly prefer the ungrammatical term Democratic Congress), rudely rebuffed him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wrote Bush a very mean letter, which Novak called "the most overt snub of a presidential overture since Abraham Lincoln was told that Gen. George B. McClellan had retired for the night and could not see him."

You would think that the Democrats might be grateful that the President was going out of his way to work with them despite the fact that they are traitors and cowards who hate America and want us to lose the War on Terror. "The Democratic leadership is beyond consultation on Iraq," Novak wrote. Perhaps they would prefer that the President not consult them on the measures he has already decided to take in Iraq. He was only telling them what he decided to do out of courtesy so they should at least have the courtesy to listen to him. Instead, they are trying to pass resolutions that the President is just going to ignore anyway. How rude is that?

Because Democrats and liberals refuse to work with the President and just contradict everything he says, many pundits believe that the logical response is to simply take the opposite side that liberals are taking. Unfortunately, it's not quite so simple. For example, if a liberal says that the sky is blue, most pundits might think that they should say that the sky is yellow or orange or green. However, we know that the sky is actually blue most of the time. In this case, the correct response is to say that liberals believe the sky is blue for the wrong reasons. Or that the sky may in fact be blue but that liberals have pointed this out in a shrill and obnoxious manner that makes them look wrong even if, in this rare instance, they are right.

Joe Klein learned this lesson the hard way when he was forced to backtrack after telling George Stephanopoulos that we should consider striking Iran with nuclear weapons. It must have seemed at the time to be a suitably anti-liberal position but Klein subsequently realized that it might not actually be a good idea to launch a nuclear first strike against Iran. However, Klein, to his credit, graciously acknowledged his mistake and magnanimously thanked liberal bloggers for pointing it out. "Let me give credit where it's due: I probably would not be writing this were it not for all the left-wing screeching," he wrote. "So thanks, frothing bloggers, for calling me on my mistake. You can, at times, be a valuable corrective. At other times, though, your vitriol just seems uninformed, malicious and disproportionate."

I had been under the impression that Klein supported the War in Iraq. But now Klein says that actually he was not in favor of the War in Iraq; he was just opposed to liberals who were against it, which is not the same thing so you can't blame him if we lose. In his very first history-making blog post, Klein wrote, "The Democrats who oppose the so-called 'surge' are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it. The latest to make a fool of himself is Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who argues that those who favor the increase in troops are either cynical or delusional…. As for [Bill Kristol and Fred Kagan], Krugman's right: they've been wrong about Iraq. But at least they've taken the trouble to read the doctrine and talk to key players like [General Jack] Keane and General David Petraeus. Liberals won't ever be trusted on national security until they start doing their homework." According to Klein, liberals seem wrong even when he thinks they are right, so you can't blame him if he seems wrong sometimes when he opposes them.

Predictably, Klein was attacked by liberals for this post, which just proved his point that liberals are obnoxious and stupid and not to be trusted even if you agree with them. I was so appalled by how they treated Klein that I left this supportive message in the comments: "I'm glad you are attacking liberals for how they got us into this mess in Iraq but I'm afraid that a lot of liberals might just dismiss your important words because they have something against you personally. Your words might have more credibility if you posted as Anonymous instead and it would preserve your objectivity as a journalist. It's probably difficult for your writer's ego to sign something as Anonymous but people do it in the blogosphere all the time. You might want to try it." But instead of taking my advice, Klein came out swinging: "The illiberal left just hates it when I point out that the Democratic Party's naiveté on national security -- and the left wing tendency to assume every U.S. military action abroad is criminal -- just aren't very helpful electorally," he taunted. "Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure."

In fact, a number of pundits now claim that they would have been opposed to the War in Iraq if only liberals hadn't been against it. If liberals didn't hate America and love Saddam Hussein so much, if they weren't so stupid and naïve and rude, if they didn't always want America to lose, then some pundits who supported the War in Iraq and are now against it might have been against it all along. So you can't really blame people like Thomas Friedman or Andrew Sullivan for supporting a war they now think was a mistake. It was really the fault of liberals for making them think that way by their poorly formulated arguments. If only all those Democrats hadn't voted against the war, then many pundits wouldn't have supported it.

Frankly, I'm more than a little confused by all of this. If some of these pundits think the War in Iraq is such a bad idea, maybe they should have tried to formulate their own opinions about it instead of reflexively supporting it because they hate liberals so much. Maybe pundits should stop trying to define themselves by what they are against, the way they claim Democrats and liberals do, and start defining themselves by what they are for.

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Jon Swift, Iraq, State of the Union, SOTU, Robert Novak, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Joe Klein, Journalism, Blogosphere, Internet, Politics, Liberals, Democrats, Foreign Policy

Breaking News: Michael Ledeen Is Dead

Exclusive: Must credit Jon Swift
According to a confidential source, Michael Ledeen, Pajamas Media's supreme pundit, is dead. Apparently he was not well for some time. I have not been able to get any independent confirmation of what my source is telling me, but I have decided to go ahead with this story anyway because, after all, that is what Ledeen would have wanted me to do.

Sadly, Ledeen did not live to see his greatest scoop vindicated: his report that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was dead. Or if he hadn't actually died, was dying. If not right at the moment, then eventually. Iran denied the report, dismissing it as "Internet rumors," and even Michelle Malkin, who is a bit of a stickler for verifying rumors before she prints them, said, "This is either going to be a two-ton feather in Pajamas's cap or a major embarrassment." Even after pictures surfaced of Khamenei (which may have been of an imposter! Or Photoshopped!) making an appearance in public, Ledeen stuck to his guns. His last post on January 10 reported the death of Carlo Ponti, who is, in fact, dead.

Despite his untimely death, Michael Ledeen will continue to live on through the influence his ideas will have on American foreign policy for years to come. Ledeen often advised and Karl Rove on foreign policy and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz were among his admirers. If it is true that we have declared double-secret war on Iran, you can thank Ledeen, who was a tireless advocate for regime change Iran. Ledeen is a longtime expert on Iran whose expertise on the country goes back to his stint as an advisor to Robert MacFarlane in the Reagan Administration when he helped negotiate the deal that would later be known as Iran-Contra, just one the many successful foreign policy initiatives Ledeen was involved in. In fact, Ledeen was more than a pundit, which elicited grudging admiration even from critics like Matthew Yglesias, who wrote after his name surfaced in relation to the forged documents about yellowcake from Niger (which he denied any involvement with), "I used to find Ledeen's habit of popping up in these contexts to be a bit shady. Nowadays, I think it's sort of admirable. My life as a trained professional political pundit is pretty dull. Lots of time looking at computer screens and the occassional conversation. My other friends in this game are all the same way. But Ledeen does wet work! It's just so cool and makes me look pretty lame by comparison."

But our upcoming (or ongoing) war with Iran is not the only legacy Ledeen leaves behind. Ledeen warned in 2003 that France and Germany may have made an alliance with Islamic terrorists to bring down the United States. "They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down," he wrote. "So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans." Eventually, it looks like we may have to go after our "allies," Ledeen said: "If this is correct, we will have to pursue the war against terror far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, into the heart of Western Europe." When we invade France and Germany, we'll have Ledeen to thank. I think we can all sleep better at night knowing that he was giving this kind of advice to the Bush Administration.

There is no question Ledeen's foreign policy advice will be greatly missed. Ledeen supplied the principal rationale for going to war with Iraq, which his friend Jonah Goldberg called the "Ledeen Doctrine." According to Goldberg, Ledeen once said, "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." Although he modestly claimed later to have nothing to do with the decision to invade Iraq, and, in fact, told Vanity Fair, "I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place," it was typical of the man not to seek out credit for his ideas. Some critics would go so far as to accuse Ledeen of lying about his support for the war, but they just didn't understand the subtle, sophisticated way he had of expressing himself. For example, when he told an interviewer that we should invade Iraq "yesterday," what he was actually saying was that we shouldn't invade Iraq because everyone knows it would be impossible to do something yesterday unless you had a time machine. And just because he criticized those who opposed the war, it doesn't mean he supported the war. He was highly critical, for example, of Brent Scowcroft who said that, "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror." To Ledeen, that was a good thing. "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today," Ledeen wrote.

Ledeen claimed that he actually wanted to go after Iran before we went after Iraq. But even if he did believe that Iraq was the wrong crappy country to throw against the wall at the wrong time, as he now claims, he predicted that the American people would welcome the War in Iraq with flowers, no matter how many people were killed. "I think the level of casualties is secondary," he said. "I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.... What we hate is not casualties but losing." If it is true that the American people love war, then Ledeen may have been the most American person of all.

Ledeen's unique perspective grew out of his interest in Italian fascism, which he studied while earning a PhD. at the University of Wisconsin and then in Rome, where he went after being rejected for tenure at the Washington University in St. Louis. (Faculty members said he was rejected for plagiarism and the "quality of his scholarship" but it was no doubt in reality because of his iconoclastic conservative views.) Ledeen believed that despite the bad name Mussolini gave to fascism, there were plenty of good fascist ideas that were worth salvaging. His theory of "Creative Destruction," which holds that sweeping away the old order through violence is the only way for society to progress, was one of the black-shirted babies Ledeen saved from Mussolini's bathwater. "Change -- above all violent change -- is the essence of human history," he wrote in his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership. Ledeen's many protégés in the Bush Administration who subscribed to his ideas about "creative destruction" would no doubt be surprised to learn that American foreign policy of the last few years owes a tip of the hat to ol' Benito Mussolini.

To know Ledeen was to love him. He leaves behind a beautiful family who will continue his important work: his wife Barbara, a former aide to Sen. Rick Santorum; his daughter Simone who nabbed a job working for the Civilian Provisional Authority in Iraq and did such a bang-up job getting the Iraq economy on its feet by driving around bags of cash in the trunk of her car; and his sons Gabriel, a Marine, who spent a lot of time drinking designer coffee in Iraq, and Daniel, a student at Rice University, who once asked Michael Moore how he felt about Hezbollah distributing his film Fahrenheit 9/11, but was unfairly cut off before he could ask his follow-up question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" Let us remember them all in our prayers.

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Jon Swift, Iraq, Michael Ledeen, Iran, Khamenei, Michelle Malkin, Pajamas Media, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Journalism, Politics, Pundits, Foreign Policy