Second, I wrote just a bit yesterday about the Defense Department shutting down an internal investigation in to the possibility that the United States was being run by Iranian intelligence, all too happy to have the US do its dirty work and eliminate the threat on its western border. I had seen the name "Ghorbanifar", and remembered it from Iran-Contra days (I was a senior in college when the story broke; my first summer after graduating, when not being a camp counselor, was spent watching the Iran-Contra hearings on television). Yet, even I had no idea that another alumnus from those days of Keystone Kops foreign policy had a hand in our current mess. Meet Michael Ledeen:
Assume, for a moment, that the French and the Germans aren't thwarting us out of pique, but by design, long-term design. Then look at the world again, and see if there's evidence of such a design.
Like everyone else, the French and the Germans saw that the defeat of the Soviet Empire projected the United States into the rare, almost unique position of a global hyperpower, a country so strong in every measurable element that no other nation could possibly resist its will. The "new Europe" had been designed to carve out a limited autonomy for the old continent, a balance-point between the Americans and the Soviets. But once the Soviets were gone, and the Red Army melted down, the European Union was reduced to a combination theme park and free-trade zone. Some foolish American professors and doltish politicians might say — and even believe — that henceforth "power" would be defined in economic terms, and that military power would no longer count. But cynical Europeans know better.
They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.
If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.
How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America's vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. 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.
The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.
Digby says it sounds like something out of a Le Carre novel. Actually, it sounds like something out of a parody of a La Carre novel. This is an example not so much of paranoia (although it is that, too) as it is simple delusion masked as sophisticated insight.
The irony, of course, is that the folks who bought and paid for crap like the above, embracing it with their pea-sized intellects and even smaller moral senses, actually have the temerity to call "conspiracy theorists!" on those who, all those years ago, saw it and called it for what it is.
Finally, I agree with Clark. We have reached the point where we can no longer afford to play nice with these people. Barring the very real possibility that George W. Bush issues some kind of blanket pardon for any member of his administration (a la Gerald Ford "pardoning" Nixon before he had even been formally indicted for any crime), it seems to me that it might do the United States, and the rest of the world, some good, to see these men do a perp walk at The Hague. A kind of goodwill gesture to civilized countries, showing that we will play by the rules after all.
