The American Spectator

Washington Prowler

(Page 4 of 5)

News coverage is catching up with the story. Wednesday provided a slew of fresh reports and op-eds, all of them suggesting in one way or another that U.S. plans for Iraq may amount to nothing because Shiite power is quickly proving both greater and better organized than anyone had supposed. "U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites," a Washington Post headline announced. Then there's the Iran factor, as captured by the New York Times story headlined, "Iran Said to Send Agents Into Iraq: Groups, Including Some Exiles, Is Filling a Power Vacuum." The only bright spot for the U.S. may be that Iraqi Shiites have their own divisions and leadership rivalries, and not all these Iraqis are that eager to tie their future to non-Arab Iran's.

But then consider two recent pieces from leading Iran expert and democracy exporter Michael Ledeen. In the first, a cover story written a few weeks ago for the London Spectator, was almost optimistic about what can and must be done to the "very worried" terror-sponsoring dictators of Syria and Iran. Yet in a column for National Review Online two days ago, Ledeen expressed great concern that "the political battle for the freedom of the Iraqi people...may be over very quickly, to our surprise and shame" -- above all because of what Iran has already managed to do.

A day before the N.Y. Times story on these activities, Ledeen noted that "the true audacity of Tehran lies in their political motives." He reports that "Iranians have infiltrated more than a hundred highly trained Arab mullahs from Qom and other Iranian religious centers into Iraq, especially to Najaf and Karbala, the holy cities of the Shiite faith. They are poisoning the minds of the (largely uneducated) Iraqi mobs with a simple slogan, repeated five times a day in the mosques: 'America did it for the Jews and for the oil.' They are also distributing cash to the Iraqis." These are details the Times neglects to mention.

Ledeen goes on:

"Just as they did against the shah, the Iranian Shiite leaders intend to build a mass following, leading to an insurrection against us. Look carefully at the banners carried by the Shiite demonstrators. They are very clean and well produced, with slogans in both Arabic (for the Iraqis) and English (for Western media). That is the Iranian regime at work, one of the most brilliant and patient intelligence organizations in the region. The slogans chanted by the mobs in Baghdad are Iranian slogans, calls for an Islamic state."

Or this: "The Iranians will combine this political strategy with terrorist acts and assassinations, as in the case of the very charismatic Ayatollah Khoi in Najaf. He was a real threat to them, because of his personality and his solid pro-Western views. So they killed him, and they are planning to kill others of his ilk, along with as many Coalition soldiers as they can murder."

Is the situation hopeless? Ledeen offers some suggestions, one of which would involve working through pro-Western mullahs in Najaf and Karbala to win over the minds of Iraqi Shiites, the other to proceed with ousting the ayatollahs of Iran. The latter currently seems less likely than even any move against Bashar Assad's Syria. The former meanwhile appears a complete pipe dream, considering Ledeen's above-cited description of the already poisoned minds of largely uneducated Iraqi mobs. Ledeen has stressed that the victory in Iraq is just the opening battle in a long, long war on terror. Yet he also says the U.S. has a window of no more than a month or two to prevent the Iran's Islamic Republic from succeeding in its so far "brilliantly managed campaign" to emerge as the real winner in Iraq.

His conclusion is maybe the most depressing reading of the current situation yet written: "...we are up against a desperate enemy with great skill and cunning, and the cynical ruthlessness that comes from an ancient civilization that has survived countless invaders and occupiers over many millennia." From anyone else it would sound like an argument against having become involved in Iraq in the first place.

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p> A Knight's Tale (posted 4/22/03 12:32 a.m.) br> As an Indiana University alum I often received unsolicited calls from IU fundraisers hoping for a donation of some kind. I always tell them one thing: no money until they rename Assembly Hall after Bobby Knight. Oh, and they can apologize to him too. For almost 30 years he put Bloomington on the map and kept it there. He was Mr. Indiana. Then the university's p.c. police trumped up charges to oust him. He now coaches at Texas Tech, where this year he declined to collect his six-figure salary on the grounds that he hadn't done a good enough job. Meanwhile, Myles Brand, the IU president who orchestrated the anti-Knight coup, has gone on to run the NCAA. But word from Bloomington is that Brand hasn't cut his ties to IU. He's merely on some form of administrative leave, so as not to jeopardize the six-figure annual pension he expects to collect in due course. Next time the fundraisers call I'll add that maybe they should hit him up instead. /p>

Indiana's official animus against Knight verges on the Orwellian. The other day I received the spring issue of the "Indiana Alumni Mini Magazine." It includes an interesting feature on thirty ways Indiana University has "changed the world in which we live." There are items on such famous IU connected figures as DNA researcher James Watson, on Ernie Pyle, Hoagie Carmichael, Kevin Kline, Mark Spitz, Alfred Kinsey, and even Mark Cuban, the "flamboyant, outspoken owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks," who earned his BS from Indiana in 1981 and who, together with a fellow IU alum, went on to pioneer "the development of live video and audio streams over the Internet." What motivated them? "They wanted to watch IU basketball games live."

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