This in from al-Reuters:

Iraqi and U.S. troops battled Shi'ite militiamen in a village northeast of Baghdad on Thursday...Iraqi security officials said IRANIAN FIGHTERS HAD BEEN CAPTURED IN THE FIGHTING (emphasis added)...The U.S. military had no immediate comment.

Some day we will be forced to deal fully with the war we are in, and when that happens we're going to discover a lot of very nasty problems about the future of America. One of them has to do with, of all things, the First Amendment. Consider this story from Wednesday's (June 21) London Times about British jihadis coming to Queens to recruit Americans.  And where did they recruit them?  In a mosque, of course. Because there's always a mosque, as my Italian friend Magdi Allam has been repeating for several years. Not all mosques are jihadi, but all jihadis come from a mosque.

 The mullahs have had a lot of bad news in recent days - news with a particularly sinister aura, in fact. So sinister that they are asking themselves what they have done to incur the Wrath of Allah.

I kid you not. First is the loss of one of their terrorist stars, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the deus ex machina of the terror war against us in Iraq. Not only does that deprive the mullahs of a prime instrument for generating Sunni/Shia civil war, but it is a serious blow to recruitment throughout the terror network.

The Mahmoud Ahmadinejad interview in Der Spiegel has its moments, to be sure, but overall it's about what you would expect. He's an uncultured fanatic who will never admit error but simply reassert his lies.  We should transliterate his name from Farsi as Ahmadinutjob. (Thanks to Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation for this suggestion.) He's not at all interested in what we call "the pursuit of the truth," so there is no real interview or dialogue (the crowd calling for negotiations with this regime ought to study this text, because if they do it seriously they will realize that you cannot negotiate with these people).  He constantly projects Iranian political culture onto the rest of the world, which is what you would expect from an uncultured ideologue. And it's astonishing to watch the Spiegel interviewer fall into one rhetorical trap after another.   In many ways, the interview is noteworthy for its exposure of the fecklessness of a German interviewer facing an Iranian bully. 

[First a note on OBL, as so many of you have asked:  how can the Bin Laden audio tape be real when I said he died last December?  Two comments.  Why do we never get to see this guy?  Why is there never a video like with Zawahiri or Zarqawi?  It's much easier to fake audio than video.  Yet the bottom line now is I don't know.  My sources in Iran are very - very - well placed.  They all swear OBL died early December 2005, and tell me they have been to his grave site.  They are mystified by this tape and doubt it's for real.  But they are checking, and I'll let you know what they know. ---ML]

You just don't get it, but it's all so obvious. I mean, we had to do something, so I set it up."

I had finally gotten through via my broken-down ouija board to my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, for many years the head of CIA's counterintelligence operations, and I had asked him about the Mary McCarthy story. I had expected him to be furious at the discovery that a CIA officer was meeting with Washington journalists, contrary to agency policy.

In Sunday's Washington Post Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman provide their gullible readers with a reprise of one of the great myths of the runup to the Iraq war: that President Bush used blatantly false information to justify the war.

The story revolves around various claims by several intelligence services that Saddam's agents were trying to buy uranium in Africa. At least three European services - the French, the Italian, and the British - told Washington about the reported Iraqi efforts.

Linzer and Gellman are wrong, indeed so clearly wrong that it takes one's breath away. The British government did indeed have information about Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa.  The definitive British parliamentary inquiry - the Butler Commission Report of July, 2004 - totally endorsed the position of British intelligence.

Nonetheless, the conventional media spin is that "Bush lied."  How can that be?  Part of the answer - the other part being the malevolence of the press - is that the White House made a total hash of the whole thing, as is their wont.

The "Protocols of the Elders of Harvard"  is what Roger Simon elegantly calls the now-infamous "Israel Lobby" screed written by a professor/administrator from Harvard's Kennedy School, and another academic who holds an endowed chair in the political-science department at the University of Chicago.

It might finally disabuse people of the conventional nonsense that professors at our "elite" schools are really smart.

"The Israel Lobby" is really dumb, both intellectually and politically. It should dissuade rational Harvard and Chicago donors from giving any further money to the Kennedy School (where one author, Steven Walt, was, incredibly, the academic dean until his abrupt resignation following the publication of the unfortunate screed) or to the Chicago political-science department (where John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair).

It should also help bright high-school students and their parents realize that a lot of "top" universities are living on largely undeserved reputations.  If folks like Walt and Mearsheimer are the stars of that galaxy, it's best to send our children to a different solar system.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dying of cancer. But he is convinced that his legacy will be glorious. He believes that thousands of his Revolutionary Guards intelligence officers effectively control southern Iraq, and that the rest of the country is at his mercy, since we present no challenge to them - even along the Iraq/Iran border, where they operate with impunity.

They calmly plan their next major assault without having to worry about American retribution. The mullahs have thousands of intelligence officers all over Iraq, as well as a hard core of Hezbollah terrorists - including the infamous Imad Mughniyah, arguably the region's most dangerous killer - and they control the major actors, from Zarqawi to Sadr to the Badr Brigades.

As part of its relentless campaign to blame all of mankind's misfortunes on George W. Bush, this Tuesday (3/14) the Washington Post unleashed Karl Vick (my candidate for the Walter Duranty Memorial Prize) and David Finkel on American efforts to help Iranians who dare to challenge the mullahs.

In keeping with the paradigm established by Walter Duranty - the New York Times reporter who never found Stalin the least bit objectionable - Vick/Finkel blame Bush for the ongoing savagery of the Islamic republic.

No matter that pro-democracy dissidents have been arrested, tortured, and murdered for 27 long years in Iran.  Such news would undermine the whole thrust of the Post's latest effort at agitprop, so we don't hear anything about anti-regime protests, even though they are the true background to all events in contemporary Iran.

It’s only fair that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be subject to a fawning puff piece the Washington Post. After all, Stalin’s greatest p.r. agent was a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist at the New York Times. Stalin’s guy was Walter Duranty, and Ahmadinejad’s is Karl Vick, who began his long wet kiss Wednesday with:

On the afternoon of Jan. 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reached for the phone and got Latin America on the line. In quick succession, he chatted with President Fidel Castro of Cuba, rang up President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and, sensing yet another kindred spirit, reached out to Evo Morales, the young firebrand who had just been elected president of Bolivia.

The Syrian-Iranian terror alliance goes back a quarter-century, when Hezbollah was created to wage terror war against American and French forces in Lebanon. There was a neat division of labor: Syria controlled the territory, and Iran ran the organization. Hezbollah's murderous successes are legendary, from the suicide bombings against the French and American Marine barracks to a similar operation against the American embassy, all in Beirut in 1983, to massive bombings of Jewish targets in Argentina in 1992. That alliance remains intact, and provides the base of the terror war in Iraq today. Now the Iranians are concerned at signs of cracks in the edifice of the Assad regime. The Assad family's grip on Syria is weakening, and this is welcome news indeed, both for the long-suffering Syrian people and for us. The Iranians are desperate to keep Assad in power, and Hezbollah armed to the teeth. Should things go the other way, Iran would lose its principal ally in the war against us in Iraq.

Bit by bit we are getting to the inevitable showdown with Iran. This administration, like every other Western government, has hoped against hope that it would not come to this. President George W. Bush, for reasons good and bad, threw in with the Europeans' phony-negotiation scheme, even though he knew it would fail. Like the others, he hoped that revolution would erupt, and that decisive action on our part would not be necessary. Like the others, he preferred not to face the hard fact that revolutions rarely succeed without external support. Had Ronald Reagan been around, he would have told W that the democratic revolution that ended the Cold War only finally succeeded when the United States supported it.

First, a news bulletin:According to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden gave the world the most marvelous Christmas present he could possibly give by departing from it in mid-December. The Al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Moslem Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.Now on to the subject at hand.Of all the confusions surrounding the war in Iraq, perhaps none has clouded so many minds as the phony question, "Are we fighting domestic insurgents or foreign terrorists?" The people who purport to answer this question with "data," should look again at the demographics of Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and they can start by asking themselves, "Who's an Iraqi"?That question is surprisingly difficult to answer...

Like everyone else in Washington, I’ve been reading excerpts from James Risen’s new book, the one that "exposes" the "crimes" of the Bush administration with regard to the war on terrorism. The most recent excerpt deals with the CIA’s activities vis-à-vis Iran, and Risen says some very shocking things, things which a serious city would find far more troublesome than the legalities about NSA’s intercepts of conversations involving terrorists. Most shocking of all is that Risen doesn’t even notice the truly horrible aspects of his own story. He doesn’t have the wit or the energy to think half a step beyond the tale he’s been told.

The French just arrested 20 people, apparently pretty close to doing some mean terrorist thing. In late September, nine people were arrested in Paris in "what officials said was a crackdown on suspected Islamic terrorist activities." It was later reported that the DST (internal-security service) had learned that members of this group had been trained in Lebanon, and possessed an exotic poison: seeds of the "nigelle" plant, said to be highly lethal. At the end of October, the London Telegraph reported that French authorities had discovered that "an Islamic terror cell has smuggled two surface-to-air missiles into Europe in a plot to shoot down planes at one of France's main airports..." For extras, the terror group, part of the Zarqawi network, had chemical and biological agents including ricin, cyanide, and botulin.

More than three years ago, prior to the liberation of Iraq, I lamented that our great national debate on the war against terrorism was the wrong debate, because it was: “About using our irresistible military might against a single country in order to bring down its leader, when we should be talking about using all our political, moral, and military genius to support a vast democratic revolution to liberate the peoples of the Middle East from their tyrannical rulers. That is our real mission, the essence of the war in which we are engaged, and the proper subject of our national debate.” The proper debate has still not been engaged, and the Bush Administration’s failure to lead it bespeaks a grave failure of strategic vision. The war was narrowly aimed against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein.

In response to Iran's call for the elimination of Israel, tonight (Nov.2) in Rome, thousands, probably tens of thousands, will demonstrate in support of the Jewish state. The demonstration has been organized by Giuliano Ferrara, the larger-than-life editor of the feisty daily newspaper il Foglio, and the demonstrators will range from members of some Italian Islamic organizations to foreign minister Giancarlo Fini (long a bete noire of America's "leading" newspapers and networks), just back from a trip to the Middle East. It takes courage to stand up publicly for Israel against the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, especially in contemporary Europe, where anti-Semitism is on the rise, where the Jewish population is minuscule (there are slightly more than 40,000 in all of Italy, less than one percent of Italians), and where the Islamic population is expanding rapidly. I have not noticed any such demonstrations here, for example. But the Italians, as is their wont, have once again broken the stereotype most foreigners hold of them, and have directly challenged the mullahs.

Tuan Le, "of Atlanta," according to this weekend's Washington Times, is accused of having smashed Nguyen Quoc Huy in the face last June 21, in the course of a protest at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel here in Washington. Le is the son of "a black U.S. soldier who was killed in action during the Vietnam war." He came to this country in 1993 from Vietnam and is a legal permanent resident. Huy is the vice chairman of the prime minister's office of Vietnam.

Le's lawyer, Kenneth Robinson, plans to present "a possible psychiatric defense," because he was tortured as a child in Vietnam. Among other things, Robinson says, Le was ordered to dance by Communist soldiers. When he refused, "the soldiers stuck bayonets through the backs of his heels." Le didn't walk for a year. And, still according to Robinson, some of Hy's security guards recognized Le and taunted him.

Le may be facing deportation from a court system that apparently has to find him insane or punish him. To which my question is, who's crazy here? Le seems to me to have taken reasonable, albeit somewhat undiplomatic, action. To call him insane seems totally nuts to me. Isn't he entitled to hit the guy in the face? But then, I'm not a lawyer…

Let’s start with al-Reuters’ thoughtful contribution to the well-being of the Western world. One of their star reporters has found a new way to bash the United States: We’re not paying off the crystal-ball operators: RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil, Oct 6 (Reuters) — A Brazilian court will consider a psychic's claim that the U.S. government owes him a $25 million reward for information he says he provided on the hiding place of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Brazil's second-highest court, the Superior Court of Justice, decided on Thursday the Brazilian justice system could rule on the matter and told a court in the psychic's home state of Minas Gerais to judge the case. The lower court had earlier told Jucelino Nobrega da Luz it could not take up his claim and it would have to be judged in the United States, but the higher tribunal ruled otherwise.

For the clerical fascists who rule the terror countries of the Middle East, the only education children should have is to sit around and memorize the Koran and the sayings of Mohammed.The clerics want good little Moslem androids, who will accept the preposterous belief that all knowledge was acquired several centuries ago and that man’s only worthwhile intellectual activity is to imbibe that knowledge in order to recite it when called for.The most devastating critique of such a system is laughter, which the leaders of the terror regimes can not and dare not tolerate. Laughter bespeaks fun, and fun is totally forbidden.

My old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton (once upon a time the head of CIA's counterintelligence forces) was in a somewhat milder mood than the last few times we'd "talked," thanks to my unreliable ouija board and the relentless static that seems to accompany my efforts to communicate with spirits in The Beyond.ML: It seems the al-Reuters Agency and others in the deadwood media are painting a fairly depressing picture of your old organization. "CIA Director Porter Goss...faces a shortage of experienced spies created by a post-September 11 stampede to the private sector, current and former intelligence officials say..."JJA: Haha. Very droll. The usual divertissement from the Reuters crowd.ML: But still, don't you think it's legitimate to worry about hundreds or thousands of people leaving the clandestine service? JJA: More like a blessing.

The mullahs of Iran are altogether capable of deciding that events are now running strongly in their favor, and that they should strike directly at the United States. They look at us, and they see a deeply divided nation, a president who talked a lot about bringing democratic revolution to Iran and then did nothing to support it, a military that is clearly fighting in Iraq alone, and counting the days until we can say "it’s up to the Iraqis now," and — again based on what they see in our popular press — a country that has no stomach for a prolonged campaign against the remaining terror masters in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.Osama bin Laden came to similar conclusions, and ordered the events of 9/11. Why should the Iranians — who have been major supporters of the terror network ever since the 1979 revolution — not now do the same?

As we mourn New Orleans, let us also celebrate it, as New Orleanians famously celebrate their own dead. The city has long been admired for its literary creativity, its exceptional food, its wonderful music, and deplored because of its legendary corruption and degradation. The possibility of its destruction no doubt played a role in the character of its people, and it is no accident that an annual bacchanal took place there, in the riotous celebrations of Mardi Gras. Death has always been omnipresent in the consciousness of the city; dancing in defiance of death was the city's trademark, and the spirited music that defined New Orleans for much of the world was played at the happiest occasions, and at the most famous funerals.New Orleans is one of a handful of cities that are defined in large part by the recognition that it can all come to an end most any day. Joel Lockhart Dyer wrote that “New Orleans is North America's Venice; both cities are living on borrowed time.”

Iranian President Ahmadi Nejad has been busy putting together a cabinet for the Islamic republic. While all real power remains firmly in the clammy hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, it's worth taking a look at some of the new ministers, if only because it tells us two important things: (1) The face the regime wishes to show to the world at large, and (2) the policies the regime intends to unleash on the long-suffering Iranian people.Let's start with the interior minister:

At first I thought there was a short circuit in my ouija board, because there were sparks coming out of the thing, just when I thought I’d finally connected with my old friend, the late James Jesus Angleton, former legendary head of CIA counterintelligence. But then I realized that it was, indeed, Angleton, cursing and sputtering (his poetic side — the side that made him the editor of The Yale Literary Review when he was an undergraduate in New Haven back in 1940 — somehow got lost when he got angry).ML: Hey! That used to be my ear...JJA: Sorry, sorry, but this Able Danger business is just too much.ML: You mean Congressman Curt Weldon’s discovering that a military intelligence unit called Able Danger figured out a year before 9/11 — from open sources — that Mohammed Atta was part of an al Qaeda cell inside the United States, but Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick stopped them (three times!) from telling the FBI?JJA: Damn right, but that’s not even the half of it. All these stories, all this faux shock, “oh my gosh, we knew it but we couldn’t act on it”, they just make me sick.

The Al Qaeda watchers have a new chant: They tell us that the once-centralized terror organization is now largely decentralized, and that the separate cells have a great deal of autonomy. Osama bin Laden may still provide the ideology, but the locals do their own planning and operations. Thus, the Washington Post found that the expert consensus on the London attacks was that, yes, these people might be linked to al Qaeda in a broad, political/religious/ideological way, but the operation itself, like many in the recent past (Madrid or London, for example), was a local product.The insistence that “Al Qaeda” — defined as the main enemy — is highly decentralized has a lethal effect on designing an effective antiterrorist policy, for it reinforces the strategic paralysis that currently afflicts this administration. If we conceive the war against the terrorists as a long series of discrete engagements against separate groups in many countries, we will likely fail, beginning with Iraq.

That the London killers were native Brits surprised a lot of people, which is testimony to our capacity to forget our own history. The 7/7 terrorists were neither the first British terrorists (take Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," for example), nor the first terrorists born and bred in a Western democracy. It is quite easy to compile a long list of native American, British, French, German, Spanish, and Italian terrorists — suicide and otherwise. Mohammed Bouyari, the assassin of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, was born and bred in the Netherlands.These facts were known, but got relegated to that part of the spirit that shelters active thought from unpleasant truths. The knowledge that our societies contain people ready to kill us had not penetrated the awareness of the British people, and, with them, countless Europeans and Americans.

It was widely noted, most passionately by the Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, that when Tony Blair reminded the House of Commons that many countries had been scourged by the terrorists in recent years, he omitted Iraq from the list. His speechwriters had Iraq in a different part of their database; Iraqis weren't victims of terrorism in the same way as Brits, Americans, Kenyans, and Indonesians. One's instinct is to let it go as an oversight, but there was another country missing from the list, and this case was somewhat less widely noted: Israel. And at this point, one is forced to do some thinking. What do these two countries have in common, that they should both be ignored in the British government's response to the London attacks?Iraq and Israel are arguably the two major victims of Islamic terrorism. Yet they did not come to Blair's mind. Or maybe they did, and maybe there was a reason they were omitted.

The cheerless creatures who rule the Islamic republic of Iran have developed a particularly wicked use of torture. Not only do they use the full panoply of physical and psychological horrors on their captives, but they then send the victims back into their homes and neighborhoods for brief periods of “parole” or “medical leave,” so that their friends and families can see with their own eyes the brutal effects of the torture. You will not have read about this in your daily newspaper, or seen his face on your evening news broadcast, nor will you have heard about it from the Department of State — which has a considerable bureaucracy devoted to the advancement of human rights — nor from the White House, nor from the self-promoting entrepreneurs of the likes of Human Rights Watch or the intellectuals and elected representatives who call for President Bush to “talk to” the mullahs in order to “resolve our disagreements.”Instead, our government maintains a pious silence on the matter, evidently more afraid of being accused of undermining the efforts of the French, German, and British governments to arrive at a satisfactory agreement with Iran on the matter of the mullahs’ impending atomic bomb.

As the President’s critics are rightly reminding him, more time has passed since 9/11 than transpired between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of the Japanese empire, and our most lethal enemies are still in power and still killing our people and our friends. It is good that the desire for freedom is now manifest among the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia, and it is very good that dramatic strides toward self-government have been taken by the Georgians, Kyrgistanis, Ukrainians, Iraqis, and Lebanese. But it is not good enough. Indeed, it is shameful that we have yet to seriously challenge the legitimacy of the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus, who represent the keystone of the terrorist edifice.Our enemies know this, because, to their delight and perhaps their surprise as well, they are still in power throughout the Middle East. Until and unless they are removed, the terror war will continue, our friends in the region will be killed, tortured, and incarcerated, and the president’s vision of regional democratic revolution will go down the memory hole.

The brutal treatment of Iranian women by the Mullahcracy is a daily occurrence. As "Iran Focus" recently reported, "at least 54 Iranian girls and young women, between the ages of 16 and 25, are sold on the streets of Karachi in Pakistan on a daily basis," according to "a senior women's affairs analyst...speaking to a state-run news agency." The analyst, Mahboubeh Moghadam, added that there are at least 300,000 runaway girls in Iran right now, the result, in Moghadam's words, of "the government policy which has resulted in poverty and the deprival of rights for the majority of people in society."Professor Donna M. Hughes, at the University of Rhode Island, one of the few Western scholars courageous enough to keep reporting on these horrors, says that the enslaved women are typically sold to people in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, such as Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. But the slave trade is not limited to the Islamic world.

President Bush, along with Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, has not rallied to the side of the Iranian people, even though the Iranians have abundantly demonstrated their desire to be rid of the mullahs. Two weeks ago there were massive demonstrations and work stoppages in the oil-rich regions, centering around the city of Ahwaz. The demonstrators called for an end to the regime, scores of people were killed, and hundreds were beaten and arrested. On May Day, workers again demonstrated against the regime, this time in all the major cities. In Tehran, strongman and likely president-in-waiting Hashemi Rafsanjani was hooted down by the crowd, and pictures of him and Supreme Leader Khamenei were torn down and trampled. Yet no one in the American Government spoke a word of support for the demonstrators, and no one has yet endorsed the one thing that unites the overwhelming majority of Iranians, whatever their political proclivities: a national referendum on the legitimacy of the regime itself. If there were a national ballot on the single question — Do you want an Islamic republic? — the regime would pass into history overnight. But there is silence in official Washington.

It has long been assumed that a repressive regime could survive as long as it had the will to crush any opposition, and that clever tyrants could deflect hatred of their regime by conjuring up an external enemy. There is still a tendency, particularly among intellectuals, to assume that these principles apply to contemporary dictatorships like those in China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet recent events suggest that these three countries, which are united by common interests and which help one another with advanced military technology, from missiles to WMDs, are losing control despite their fierce determination to cling to power and eventually fight and win a great war against the West. All three have nearby examples of new democracies, and their peoples are asking, with increasing intensity, why they are not permitted to govern themselves.

Two cheers for the Silberman-Robb Commission Report, which for the first time raises some of the basic issues about the rot that has long festered within the intelligence community. Yes, it’s too long, (much too long), and unfortunately the authors are forever telling us “we think, we recommend, we believe,” rather than just writing simple declarative English. But okay, that’s the way commissions work, and there is a lot here that makes it worth the heavy plowing to get through the 600 pages. Unfortunately, the entire argument — one of the great merits of the enterprise is that there is actually a sustained and coherent argument from beginning to end — rests on an unprovable assumption that is unnecessary and, alas, quite misleading.The report suffers from the community’s favorite conceit: that there is something called “tradecraft” that distinguishes an intelligence analyst or case officer from every other scholar or investigator. In the case of analysis, this is nonsense; it’s one of the little clouds that intelligence officers use to dismiss conflicting views and criticism. Yes, those who analyze satellite images need special skills, but so does a sociologist analyzing urban turmoil. And the “tradecraft” of the real spooks, the case officers and deep cover spies, has been perhaps the greatest community failure for at least a generation.

A couple of years ago, before I learned better, I was on a BBC radio broadcast in which they had a reporter on the scene in Tehran reporting on big riots in Tehran following a soccer game. The BBC woman in London asked me what I thought about it all, and I said it was a sign of discontent with the regime. She commented, "But we have soccer hooligans in England, too, don't we?" To which I responded, "Yes, but they aren't burning effigies of Tony Blair. The Iranians are burning pictures of Khamenei and Rafsanjani."The Iranians continued to do so last week, which of course the media continued to pretend it was just another soccer riot.

This week throughout Iran there were monster demonstrations in eleven provinces and 37 cities, and many thousands — one source said more than 30,000 — people were arrested, some only briefly, others shipped off to the infamous prisons and torture chambers of the regime. The most dramatic events took place in Shiraz, where the demonstrators directed a chant toward Washington: "Bush, you told us to rise up, and so we have. Why don’t you act?"Which is precisely the right question. The president publicly promised the Iranian people that the United States would support them if they acted to win their own freedom, and the Iranians are now calling on Bush to make good on that promise.

Many of the brave people in the suddenly democratic Arab streets are inspired by America, and by George W. Bush himself. The president clearly understands this, but, in one of the most frustrating paradoxes of the moment, this vision is rather more popular among the peoples of the Middle East than among some of our top policymakers. For anyone to suggest to this president at this dramatic moment, that he should offer a reward to Iran for promising not to build atomic bombs, or that we should seek a diplomatic "solution" to Syria's oft-demonstrated role in the terror war against our friends and our soldiers, is a betrayal of his vision and of the Iranian, Israeli, Lebanese and Syrian people. Yet that sort of reactionary thinking is surprisingly widespread, from leading members of congressional committees, from the failed "experts" at State and CIA, and even some on the staff of the National Security Council.

Bit by bit, we are getting a fuller picture of our enemies on the ground in the Middle East, and the fanciful legend of a bunch of religiously inspired fanatics is eroding. If only someone could convince our so-called intelligence agencies to step away from their false assumptions (Porter Goss was on display last week, babbling about the "Sunni insurgency," as if that nonsense had not been exploded 30 years ago), we might make more progress.We are engaged in a regional war against a terror network that cannot be reduced to a simple ethnic or religious element. The network is bound together by a common hatred of us and our friends and allies, not by a single religious fanaticism, and the terrorists come in all shapes and descriptions. Their effectiveness is largely due to support from the terror masters in foreign countries, and we cannot win the battle of Iraq without destroying the terror masters in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh. There is no escape from this destiny. If they survive, we lose.

Has there ever been a more dramatic moment than this one for the Middle East? The whole region 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. The results will not satisfy any serious person. As Iraq constitutes a new, representative government, and wave after wave of elections sweep through the region, even the Saudis will have to submit to the freely expressed desires of their people. Free elections do not solve all problems. Many of the fascist tyrants of the last century were enormously popular, and won huge electoral victories; Stalin was truly loved by millions of oppressed Soviets; and fanatics might win an election today in some unhappy lands. But this is a revolutionary moment, we are unexpectedly blessed with a revolutionary president, and very few peoples will freely support a new dictatorship, even one that claims Divine Right from Allah. But the wheel turns, as ever. Such moments are transient, and if they are not seized, they will pass, leaving the bitter aftertaste of failure in dry mouths and throttled throats.

To the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you." — President Bush, in the State of the Union Address