Read this Human Events interview w/ Michael Ledeen, Iran expert. In one sense it's chilling, because he believes Iran already has nukes. On the other hand, he's also more optimistic than most commentators I've read about our chances of coping with Iran without war.
Thomas Friedman rightly calls Iran the one Red State in the Middle East. The Iranian people are very pro-American. They demonstrate every 9-11. They go through the streets with lighted candles mourning the death of Americans. They want to go to Disneyland. They want to be part of the Western world. They have a long history of self-government and democracy, unlike a lot of other Muslim countries in the Middle East, and I believe that when we get there we will find that Islam really is out of business in Iran for at least this generation.
Which sounds very good, but intelligence saw Iraqis dancing in the streets when we rolled through, and that only sort of happened. In retrospect, since we let the Iraqis down after instigating a revolution after the first Gulf War, we shouldn't have had our hopes so high that they'd trust us right away. But anyway, why is Ledeen so confident?
Every now and then things filter out that you wouldn't expect to filter out. For example, they conducted their own opinion poll two or three years ago. It was carried out by someone in the information ministry. So, imagine, you're an Iranian and you're walking down the street of, say, Isfahan, and some guy comes up to you with a clipboard and says: "Hi, I'm from your information ministry and I would like to ask you a few questions about how you feel about us." So you know it's a loyalty check. Under those circumstances, 73% of Iranians said they did not like the regime and wanted it changed. So the real number, a friend of mine said, must be 99%. If you get 73% with that method, it's obvious that the real number is higher. So, they know that their people hate them. There's never been any doubt about that.
Read it. He has lots of simple recommendations for things we should be doing but aren't: radio, support for unions, etc. Think Persian Solidarity. The Ledeen interview has a companion piece in this interview with Pat Buchanan on the same subject. It's interesting that they mostly have the same view, even though they come at the topic from totally different directions, and assume different facts (PJB doesn't think they're anywhere close to a nuke, eg.)
