Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen is a neoconservative journalist and theorist. He writes "Faster, Please!" column for Pajamas Media, is a Freedom Scholar for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; is on the advisory board of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon; and is a contributing editor of National Review. He was first the Executive Director and now on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

Recent commentary

In National Review, he mentions Norman Podhoretz's questioning Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, suggesting that Rush Limbaugh is hostile to Jews "for wondering if Jewish voters are having buyer's remorse regarding Obama." Ledeen indeed thinks Obama should be questioned, but he thinks Foxman and his supporters "are so blindly partisan that they can no longer distinguish between their friends and their enemies," including "American Evangelicals — arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel people in America — but conveniently disappears when the government goes after real Jews for presumed "dual loyalty." Which, one might say, is the core principle of the ADL. Foxman wants Rush to apologize. Nuts. I want Foxman retired and replaced by somebody who fights for Jews and our friends."

A Wall Street Journal article in September 2009, just before Obama Administration talks with the State of Iran, pointed out that this was nothing new: there have been 30 years of various attempts at talks since the 1979 Islamic revolution. He is dubious about diplomacy:

Thirty years of negotiations and sanctions have failed to end the Iranian nuclear program and its war against the West. Why should anyone think they will work now? A change in Iran requires a change in government. Common sense and moral vision suggest we should support the courageous opposition movement, whose leaders have promised to end support for terrorism and provide total transparency regarding the nuclear program.

George W. Bush Administration

In 2000, he was part of a project that produced strategy document published by Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum and Ziad Abdelnour's U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon that advocated a wider U.S. role in Lebanon, by forcing Syria to get out of Lebanon and to destroy alleged weapons of mass destruction. It called for confrontation rather than engagement. Signers included Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, Paula Dobriansky, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ledeen, and Frank Gaffney, Jr..

While a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he enthusiastically supported the Iraq War.

In 2004, he spoke to the Middle East Forum to summarize the issues of terror and democracy in the Middle East. Ledeen agreed that the problem did not start on 9/11, but said that while Jimmy Carter declared war on terror (although not by that name), George W. Bush waged war on terror. He makes the accurate point that not all Middle Eastern terror is based on radical Islamism, noting that before the Iraq War, there were four "terror masters" in the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, of which only two had Islamist governments: Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Syrian and Iraqi regimes secured and maintained their power precisely because they were the opposite of Islamists, or secular tyrannies. He suggesed, however, "Rather, if looking for a common theme among the "terror masters" one should identify tyranny threatened by U.S. democratic strength and success."

Ideological development

As far as his ideology, John Laughland, in the paleoconservative American Conservative, John Laughland quoted from Ledeen's book, The War Against the Terror Masters:

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Laughland said that these references to creative destruction were not his first, and uses it as the basis for linking Ledeen's ideological development to Italian Fascism: in his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, he discusses his theory of revolution; Laughland suggests that the title is a "deliberate reference to Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. Ledeen explains that “America is a revolutionary force” because the American Revolution is the only revolution in history that has succeeded, the French and Russian revolutions having quickly collapsed into terror. Consequently, “[O]ur revolutionary values are part of our genetic make-up. … We drive the revolution because of what we represent: the most successful experiment in human freedom. … We are an ideological nation, and our most successful leaders are ideologues.” Denouncing Bill Clinton as a “counter-revolutionary” (!), Ledeen is especially eager to make one point: “Of all the myths that cloud our understanding, and therefore paralyze our will and action, the most pernicious is that only the Left has a legitimate claim to the revolutionary tradition.”

"Ledeen’s conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian fascism." In 1975, he published an interview, In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, an interview Ledeen said he enjoyed because it annoyed the left wing precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” According to Laughland, "What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary. Ledeen had himself argued this very point in his book, Universal Fascism, published in 1972. That work starts with the assertion that it is a mistake to explain the support of fascism by millions of Europeans “solely because they had been hypnotized by the rhetoric of gifted orators and manipulated by skilful propagandists.” “It seems more plausible,” Ledeen argued, “to attempt to explain their enthusiasm by treating them as believers in the rightness of the fascist cause, which had a coherent ideological appeal to a great many people.” For Ledeen, as for the lifelong fascist theoretician and practitioner, Giuseppe Bottai, that appeal lay in the fact that fascism was “the Revolution of the 20th century.”"

Early career

Ledeen was part of a "band of brothers" that moved U.S. policy from detente to confrontation with the Soviet Union, headed by Dorothy "Dickie" Fosdick and Richard Perle. The group included Frank Gaffney, Jr., Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith and R. James Woolsey. Perle was the center of the young group which was directed by a Jackson staffer, Dorothy "Dickie" Fosdick.