The October issue of
Hillsdale
College
’s “Imprimis” has printed an adaptation of Michael Ledeen’s speech “Understanding Iran,” delivered on August 4, 2008:
My favorite response to people who say, “Why don’t we just sit down and talk with the Iranians?” is to remind them of the movie Goldfinger. There’s a wonderful scene in the middle of the movie when Sean Connery as James Bond is spread-eagled on a sheet of gold, a laser beam is cutting through the gold sheet and about to slice him in half, and Gert Fröbe as Goldfinger is standing up on a balcony looking down at him. Bond looks up and asks, “What is this Goldfinger? Do you expect me to talk?” And Goldfinger replies, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” That’s exactly the Iranian attitude.
In fact, we have been talking to the Iranians, almost non-stop, for 30 years. There isn’t an American president from Jimmy Carter to the present who has not authorized negotiations with
Iran
. The classic case occurred during the
Clinton
administration. We ended all kinds of sanctions against Iran, let all kinds of Iranians into the U.S. for the first time since the 1970s, had sporting matches with the Iranians, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. Then President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright started publicly apologizing to
Iran
for this and that. But when all was said and done, Ali Khamenei reminded everyone that
Iran
is in a state of war with the
U.S.
, and that was the end of negotiations. This is what has happened every single time we have tried talking to or appeasing
Iran
.
. . . Only a madman can believe that negotiating with the Iranians will produce some result different from what we’ve had now for 30 years, including very recently under the current administration. But many continue to believe it.
There is a striking tendency among people in modern Western governments not to recognize the existence of evil in the world. My professional career has largely been spent studying evil. My Ph.D. is in Modern European History, and I studied fascism. Before that I was research assistant for a historian named George Mosse, who wrote books on National Socialism. People from my generation studied these things because we were trying desperately to understand how men like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin came to power, and why nobody saw it coming and understood what was at stake.
Why was there the humiliation of
Munich
and then the Nazi invasion of
Poland
before an appeasement government in
Britain
fell and Winston Churchill came to power? Why did it require Pearl Harbor for the
U.S.
to enter World War II? Could we get to the point where we understood these evil regimes so well that when the next one came along we would see it coming and stop it in its tracks? But over the past 30 years we have seen the same situation play out with
Iran
, and still we dream of negotiation. . . .
Look also at recent American policy toward
Iran
. Since 2001,
Iran
has been identified as part of the “axis of evil” and branded as the world’s greatest sponsor of international terrorism. The Soviets always used to say, “If you say A, you have to do B.” That is, if you accept certain kinds of information, that drives you to act. But we have not acted against the Iranian regime, even though, as luck would have it,
Iran
is tailor-made for the same political strategy that toppled the Soviet empire. . . .
. . . The point is, we have an implacable enemy which has no intention of negotiating a settlement with us. They want us dead or dominated, just as our enemies did in the 1930s and ’40s. You can’t make deals with a regime like that.
Our choices with regard to Iran are to challenge them directly and win this war now, to do so only after they kill a lot more of us in some kind of attack, or to surrender. There is no painless way out, and the longer we wait, the greater the pain is going to be.
The
United States
has just elected the least experienced president in modern times, who plans (after extensive “preparations”) to talk to
Iran
“at a time and place of my choosing.”
And offer them what?