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Michael Ledeen has two settings, "fulminate" and "sleep":
"For nearly thirty years—ever since the Islamic Fascist Revolution that overthrew the shah, and the Ayatollah Khomeini declared war on the United States (a.k.a. "The Great Satan") — American presidents have convinced themselves that the mullahs were secretly willing to normalize relations and live with us in peace."Even if one grants that Khomeini himself was in any sense a "fascist," Khomeini's faction was part of a politically diverse coalition which overthrew the U.S.-supported Shah (for whom the term "fascist" would more appropriate). In the period after the Shah's removal, Khomeini outmaneuvered his coalition partners, consolidated his own power at their expense, and, in a familiar scenario, took advantage of the post-revolutionary environment to enact a series of brutal measures designed to keep himself and his faction in power.Almost from the beginning, Khomeini's regime was opposed not only by his former coalition partners, but, when the authoritarian aspects of his theory of the "rule of the jurisprudent" (vilayet e-faqih) became apparent, also by a substantial group of Shi'i clerical scholars, many of whom continue to view Khomeinism as a heretical innovation of Islam. These scholars and activists are precisely who the U.S. needs to be supporting in their efforts to bring democratic reform to Iran. When U.S. politicians openly threaten violence against Iran, it undercuts what small ability these activists and scholars to work against the regime, and gives the regime a pretext to crack down on them.
