You may well ask how it is possible for the president to talk about his counterterrorism “strategy” without addressing the main source of terrorism.  You would be right to ask, and you should also ask how it is possible that, so far as I can see, not one of the pundits, experts and commentators noticed the omission.  They were so busy with the future of Gitmo and where captured terrorists should be tried, and how many drones can fit on the head of a jihadi, that they missed the biggest thing.

Talk about a dog that didn’t bark!

The speech was bizarre, to put it mildly.  It was often incoherent, as when he gritted his teeth and actually admitted that there is an ideological conflict between us and the terrorists.  “Most…of the terrorism we face,” he said,  ”is fueled by a common ideology…that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West.”  Without taking a deep breath, he hastily added that the “common ideology” was “based on a lie.”  Why?  Because “the United States is not at war with Islam…”

It’s typical of the president’s world-view that he would assume any such war to be instigated by us, but in this case the jihadis have it right, and he’s got it backwards.  There is indeed a war, it is theirs, the jihadis’ war, and they are waging it because they firmly believe they are commanded to do so by the Almighty.  They aim to destroy or dominate Western infidels and apostates.  Those commands are in the Koran, and are repeated by a great mass of imams, ayatollahs and mullahs.  Those thousands of Iranians or Hezbollahis who chant “death to America” mean just that.  It’s the reason for their jihad against us.

But President Obama could not bring himself to mention that.  Indeed, the one time he used the words “violent jihad” he wasn’t talking about the Quds Force, or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad, or the other terrorist organizations.  He was talking about–listen very carefully–”radicalized individuals here in the United States.”  Yes, if we take the text seriously, he’s saying that violent jihad is a homegrown American thing.

I know it’s hard to believe, but here’s the full context:

…we face a real threat from radicalized individuals here in the United States. Whether it’s a shooter at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin; a plane flying into a building in Texas; or the extremists who killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City – America has confronted many forms of violent extremism in our time. Deranged or alienated individuals – often U.S. citizens or legal residents – can do enormous damage, particularly when inspired by larger notions of violent jihad. That pull towards extremism appears to have led to the shooting at Fort Hood, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon. (my emphasis)

Notice the sly use of “appears to have led” in the last sentence.   And notice that he is only talking about “deranged or alienated” individuals.  Lone wolves.  Disturbed people.   Not a mass movement that intends to destroy us.

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

We can see this impulse at work in an amazing number of governmental initiatives, from the truly terrifying new speech code for all American colleges and universities that receive federal funds, to the previously unimaginable intrusion of the Feds into our privacy, whether via the IRS or the Justice Department, as in the criminalization of journalists doing their jobs.  It goes on and on, from Obamacare to the greatly expanded role of Washington in corporate enterprise, and to myriad regulations–many of which we do not even know–and executive orders.

For the future of the American enterprise, it does not matter if Obama and his colleagues deliberately set out to create a Tocquevillian American tyranny, or if it is simply a hell that grew out of good intentions.  It’s there, and it’s getting worse.  We need to block and undo it, which requires that we have a full picture of it.

The scandals give us a chance.  They open windows into the progress of that “absolute, minute, regular, and provident” power, and we need to look through all of them.  But if we criminalize the investigations, if witnesses are afraid they will be indicted, prosecuted, and punished if they tell the truth about what they’ve been up to, our chances of getting the full picture will be enormously, maybe even fatally, diminished.

They tell us that the Democrats and the neoconservatives have largely and wrongly agreed on the tumultuous events in the Middle East, starting with the invasion of Iraq, continuing through the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and into the “Arab Spring” across North Africa and deep into the Persian Gulf.   Spengler quotes the enthusiasts, from the Obama administration to leading Republican pundits, hailing the onset of Arab Revolution.  Here’s Spengler:

The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

And here’s Mead:

both are based on the flawed and distinctly American expectation of a happy ending. A little prudence would have done the neocons a world of good in Iraq, and a bit more of this underrated virtue would have helped both parties during the Libya fiasco and larger Arab Spring.

We can all agree that neither of them looks very smart today,  which is the way of the world.  Most of the time we blunder, in keeping with my conviction that the Almighty created man for entertainment value.  And boy, have we blundered.  We can agree with Mead and Spengler that hurling ourselves into the Syrian “civil war” might very well make things even worse.  But we shouldn’t agree that, once we decided to embrace the cause of revolution in the Middle East, this unhappy outcome was foreordained.

It wasn’t.  There were plenty of decision forks along the highway,  and for the most part we adopted the witty advice (was it Yogi Berra’s?),  ”when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I was not part of that consensus (when I see near-unanimity, I run).  I argued that we should stand by Mubarak, and if he fell, we should go all the way down with him.  I thought it was a mistake to make Iraq the centerpiece of our war on terror, since Iran was the driving force of international terrorism.  And I wrote monotonously that Iraq would never have decent security so long as the ayatollahs ruled in Tehran.  So I’m not apologizing for myself when I say that I think Mead and Spengler have misdiagnosed the problem.  They seem to think that it was wrong to support democratic revolution in the Middle East, because it was never likely to succeed.  I think the problem is that we sometimes gave emotional support to the revolutionaries, but did not fight–fight politically, for the most part, only very rarely militarily–alongside them.  That’s why there were so many banners saying “America, where are you?”

I also think that Spengler’s description of Obama’s policy, “soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals,” is off the mark.  The doctrine of protecting civilians from their own tyrants was invoked in Libya, and was used to justify the use of military power, not soft power.  The other cases–from the very active and aggressive support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to the insistence that we can make a deal with the Iranian regime–are not examples of supporting humanitarian goals, but rather supporting radical Islamic movements and regimes.

Obama has talked a lot of talk, but took only a few very short walks, when he walked at all.  Worse still, at crucial forks in the road, he didn’t take it.  For the most part, he dithered.  When the Iranian people rose up against the mullahcracy in 2003 and again in 2009, we either opted out (2003, Colin Powell’s “we don’t want to be part of this family squabble”) or reassured the tyrants (Obama sent reassuring messages to Khamenei in 2009).

The mid-June circus will play out in three rings.  First, the selection of the candidates, then voting day, and finally the announcement of the winner.  In each ring, you may be tempted to watch the acrobats (candidates), but the real action is in the dark rooms of the leader.

Selection of the candidates:  Hundreds of people have proposed to run for president, including a few women (talk about spitting into the wind!).  These names go through three filters.  First, they are vetted by the intelligence services, both the Intel Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards’ intel and counterintel gangs.  Then the surviving names pass on to the Guardian Council, which narrows the list to the required number (usually quite small, 4-6).  And then Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gets to put his chop on the list.

This is the “real election.”  And the candidates are currently vying for the favors of the leader.  Take Mayor Qalibaf of Tehran, for example, a very nasty piece of work who did his pilot training in North Korea.  He’s now bragging about his thuggery, how he personally smashed students and other demonstrators in the streets, etc. etc.  Those “credentials” will help him get on the short list, but past favors to the leader and the Guards will count even more.  They know who and what he is, after all.  Still, the real election is really real, there is an intense war of all against all in Iran today, and, to put it mildly, there is a lot at stake.  The president runs the government, and the government dispenses a lot of money and the power associated with the money.  So deals are being made, and since Iran is a society in which nobody trusts anybody who is not an immediate family member (and even then…), it’s not so easy for the powerful and the power brokers to sort it all out.  Already the Guardian Council has extended its deadline for candidate selection by several days.

This is not a unique case;  Socialist regimes have often had troubles with toilet paper.  In perhaps the most colorful case to date, the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua manufactured bright rolls of the stuff, and sold it to friendlies, such as Tunisia.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t color-fast, and so Nicaragua became a literal example of Socialism giving lots of people “the old red ass.”

That pretty much ended the export of revolutionary toilet paper.

The Venezuelan crisis is a bit different, the people there are facing a shortage, not a failed product.  But still, it’s clearly part of a pattern.  Ceausescu’s Romania had the same problem, and recycled American Bibles into toilet paper. Maybe their dear allies, the Iranians will save them...they brag about their exports.  Surprised?  Well you can’t keep clean by using crude oil, can you?

Wrong!  Don’t be relieved.  Be frightened.  Tell the IG, even if you think she’s a friend, that she’ll be hearing from your lawyer shortly.  DO NOT TALK TO HER OR ANY OTHER INVESTIGATOR BY YOURSELF.  Trust me,  I’ve been there, and I survived.  I had my very own special prosecutor for years in what became known as Iran-Contra, and even though I didn’t do anything wrong (as the prosecutor had to admit, although he weasily said “we can’t find anything wrong”), lots of my colleagues, who likewise didn’t do anything wrong, were ruined.  Some of them incredibly ended up pleading guilty to crimes or misdemeanors they didn’t actually commit, to escape the crushing expenses of standing trial.

So listen carefully.  Don’t listen to anybody who hasn’t been through one of these things.  They have their own rules, and some of them are totally counter-intuitive.

Get a lawyer.  Yes, I know you haven’t done anything wrong, but you need that lawyer to make sure that you don’t make a fatal mistake now.  It is totally wrong to think “I’ve got no reason to worry about answering questions.”  You should be terrified at the very thought of answering questions, because it turns out that “making a false statement” can be a criminal act.  And it’s easy to make a false statement.  Your memory is imperfect, even if you’re young (I was in my forties and had a fabulous memory, and yet when I wrote out a timeline of everything that I had done for my lawyers, there were errors, including one whopper, which they caught).  There are ways to protect yourself against failures of memory, and a decent attorney knows them.  You need help.

If you doubt this, ask Scooter Libby.  He was a lawyer, quite a good one.  He had a friendly chat with a couple of guys from the FBI, and was prosecuted, convicted, disbarred, and shamed.  Note that the “guilty” party, the one who committed the presumed crime the FBI was supposed to be investigating, wasn’t even indicted.  His name is Richard Armitage, he was Colin Powell’s deputy, and he’s a Washingtonian in very good standing today.

The investigators, especially if they are working for prosecutors or for Congress, are looking for scalps.  They may also be interested in the truth, but that’s secondary.  Their rewards depend on scalps, and you’ve got one.  They are intent on getting it, and they’ll use all manner of cunning to carve it off your skull.

You say you can’t afford a lawyer?  Not to worry;  in big Washington scandal investigations (of which three or four may soon be empowered) every major law firm wants to play.  Pro bono (free) legal representation can usually be found.  At a minimum you’ll get a substantial discount.  Once you’ve got one, he’ll tell you not to discuss the case with anyone.  Not with media people, not with colleagues, not with friends. (By the way, you’re about to discover who your friends aren’t.  You don’t really know–yet–the list of names.  But you will, soon enough.  This is one of the side benefits of going through scandalmania, and it will serve you in good stead for years to come.  They won’t be able to trick you any more).  Just listen to the big guys, including the president and various press spokesthings.  They say “sorry there’s a criminal investigation on, I can’t discuss it.”  Memorize those words.

It takes a special skill to read bureaucratic memos. When I was getting ready to work at the State Department way back in the last century, Henry Kissinger gave me good advice:

The only reason to write a memo is if you want it leaked.

The key decisions and the real motives are very rarely written down; most of the time the truth is hidden. Deliberately. Remember the “vanished” 18 minutes of Nixon’s tapes?

And of course, the Brits did it elegantly (h/t Jeff Warren, video embedded above).

The memos have to be read — not as accurate reflections of a policy debate, but as posturing for instant history. It’s what the author(s) want(s) the journalists — working on deadline, and not very eager to dig deeply enough to figure out what was really going on — to write for their readers.

So, Roger L. Simon is right (he is always right) when he flags “the mystery of the missing video.” Somebody must have said to somebody else: “Hey! Let’s blame it on the video.”

I think I know when that happened, even if I don’t know who said it or to whom: it happened between versions two and three of the 12 draft memos. The first two talk about “attacks” that were  “spontaneously inspired” by events in Cairo. However, number three edits out “attacks” … and replaces it with “demonstrations.”

It took about five and one-half hours to get from “attacks” to “demonstrations.”

I had the great pleasure of working with Herbie in the mid-1980s when we were editors of a collection of documents captured by U.S. military forces in Grenada.  The Grenada Documents was a joint venture of the Departments of State and Defense, as was the larger project of assembling the enormous pile of captured documents, which was, and is, housed in the National Archives of the United States.

It was dirty work.  Every day an Army officer called me from the island to tell us about the day’s shipment:  where the documents had been found, what they comprised, and which ones he judged most important.  They arrived in wooden boxes, after being fumigated to protect us against unwanted encounters with spiders and scorpions.  But there was no protection against dirt, and there was plenty of Grenadian soil in those documents.  We were filthy by midday, and the equals of Charlie Brown’s pal Pigpen by evening.  You can judge for yourself if it was worth it;  as usual in such matters, the establishment intellectuals and “reporters” weren’t much interested in the harsh treatment of the poor Grenadians by their own leaders, following the lead of Soviet and, above all, Cuban intelligence officers.  I believe that the Grenada documents provide an invaluable view of life within the Soviet Empire, and almost all of them are in (very tasty) English.

It couldn’t have happened without Herbie.  He didn’t mind getting dirty.  And he loved the work, as I did.  One document in particular especially delighted us.  It was a report from the ambassador to Moscow.  The Grenadians had been begging for agricultural aid from the Kremlin, but it never came.  Finally, at a diplomatic reception, the ambassador was approached by his Bulgarian counterpart, who said (these are not his exact words) “you’ve been asking our Soviet comrades for help with agriculture.  But they have found that their methods do not work well in your part of the world.  Thus whatever assistance you receive will fail.  Thus you will receive that assistance from Bulgaria, and not from our Soviet comrades.  That way, we will be blamed for the failure.”

How good is that?  Herbie and I celebrated in our chilly room down in the bowels of the Pentagon.  What a find!  I don’t know of any other piece of paper that so thoroughly documents the cynicism of the Soviets, and the failure of their system.  After all, the Bulgarian ambassador could very well have said that Soviet agricultural methods didn’t work anywhere;  it had nothing to do with Grenada’s perfect climate, as Herbie happily chortled.

So that was Herbie.  He leaves us countless happy memories and the products of a life well spent.  Plus a large family, whose mourning we will share in the days ahead.

But then our new secretary of state has great flair for embarrassing us.  In Obama’s community of narcissists, Kerry is a bit different.  He excels at self-humiliation, as he showed in his recent sortie to Moscow, where Czar Putin kept him waiting for many hours before sparing some time to “discuss” Syria and related topics, no doubt including Iran.  As per the British Daily Mail, “Russian President Vladimir Putin kept Kerry waiting three hours before their meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday and continuously fiddled with his pen as the top American diplomat spoke about the ongoing crisis in Syria.”

I’m told that when Kerry landed in Russia, he was told a) that his hotel rooms weren’t ready, and b) that a military parade made it impossible for the Americans to drive to the Kremlin anyway, so he’d just have to wait.  Add two hours (check-in delay at the hotel) to the Mail version.

Many years ago, I traveled abroad on behalf of Henry Kissinger, by then a simple citizen, and I spoke with some important people.  I was instructed never to wait more than twenty minutes, and on two occasions I informed the important person’s assistant that I had waited fifteen minutes, and would have to leave in five more. Nothing personal, just a condition of my employment.  Both times the important person appeared almost immediately.  And I was not a cabinet member, I was a messenger boy of a famous–but former–high U.S. official.  But the American secretary of state couldn’t bear the thought of returning to Washington without even talking to Putin, and Kerry waited.

He was famously accused of being in cahoots with the Mafia, and stood trial for 7-8 years before the judges threw out the case.  A friend of mine, a great writer named Lino Jannuzzi, wrote a small masterpiece about it called The Trial of the Century, which pretty much demolished the accusation, but most of the journalists and intellectuals who pretend to be expert in things Italian remain convinced of his guilt.  In a bittersweet way it’s a tribute to Andreotti’s charisma.

Andreotti’s real power base lay in Rome, his home town, and the Vatican.  He was a devout Catholic, and if you wanted to be sure to find him, all you had to do was wait for mass to end at his favorite church.  His career started during Word War II, and he emerged from it as the personal secretary to Alcide de Gasperi, who was PM during the crucial postwar years.  As his generation aged and died off, Andreotti carried on, always with a twinkle in his eye.  Somehow he found time to write books about the history of Rome. They were very good books and nobody ever suggested he had a ghost;  the language was his, the ideas were his, and the wit and wisdom were unmistakably his.

I knew him fairly well.  For someone eager to understand the complexities of Italian political life, you couldn’t find a better guru, and he was often generous with his time.  His advice was invariably spot-on;  he pointed me at the best sources on problems I was trying to solve, whether they were contemporary issues on which I had to report for the New Republic, or historical matters for my books on Italy.  And later on, when I was briefly in the U.S. government, he said something to me that I haven’t forgotten.  “Ledeen,” he said, in his measured tone, “we can live with a dovish America, and we can live with a hawkish America.  No problem.  But we cannot survive an America that is hawkish Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and dovish Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.”

Remember he was PM seven times, and foreign minister or defense minister even more times.  He knew the details, and he’d seen many American presidents, from FDR to Reagan.

Perhaps his most famous bon mot is a good way to say goodbye:  “Power corrupts,” he remarked, “above all, those who do not have it.”