Faster, Please!

* in the comments, viget says:

"I cannot, for the life of me, figure Michael Leeden out. He actually, surprisingly for a neocon, has moments of clarity, and has quite a bit of expertise in Iranian and Italian affairs. Sometimes he even tells us the truth. But then, he goes into full-action neocon mode and rationalizes all that he knows to be true to actually be false and falls in lockstep with the PNAC line. It's almost like he *wants* so bad to be a member of the kool-kids klub, even if he doesn't always carry their water, that he'll do anything for them.

Emptywheel's post dissecting his series on fictional conversations with Jesus James Angleton's ghost was a classic. She even went so far as to suggest that this series was actually some sort of public confession of his sins in certain points, using JJA as a literary foil. Alas, I think that post got eaten when typepad went down back in December. It also begged the question of, "was Leeden *actually* CIA, or was he just playing pretend?""

I'm with viget - trying to understand Ledeen is likely to drive us crazy. Sometimes he looks like a mastermind, sometimes he looks like a useful idiot. Sometimes he looks desperate to invade Iran, but other times I think that is just a foil and maybe he is in the pay of Iran, or perhaps in the pay of Iranian exiles.

Emptywheel's (exceptional) JJA/Ledeen post is here:

"Summary: In this post, I look at a series of columns Michael Ledeen has written using former Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton (JJA) as a literary foil. In the earliest of these JJA columns, Ledeen basically uses the character of the noted paranoid JJA as an excuse to formulate his own baseless conspiracy theories. But of late, Ledeen has been using the device to excuse intelligence breaches he--or his very close allies--have been involved in. In this new formulation, Ledeen seems to be alluding to JJA as a way to boast of his own conspiracies to those in the know, while setting up straw man arguments to otherwise deny the conspiracy.
[snip]
He uses JJA to mock the AIPAC espionage investigation, the Chalabi leak case, the Plame and Niger forgery investigations--all intelligence breaches in which Ledeen is reputed to have a very close role."

Given Ledeen's love for Machiavelli, we have to assume that he talks out of both (all?) sides of his mouth - the 'only' trick is to determine which is which. We also need to ask ourselves why he agreed to be interviewed by Larisa - I'll note that Ledeen seemed to be a somewhat reluctant correspondent with Larisa in a couple (here and here) of her earlier articles prior to agreeing to the latest interview (part 2 will run early in the week)

Given that Ledeen is presumed to be involved with Plame, AIPAC, Niger and the Chalabi-Iran leak, and given Joe Wilson's apparent claim that the PURPOSE of the iraq invasion was 'a fundamentalist military conglomerate... sitting right on the border of the Kuwait and eastern Saudi oil fields' where 'Iran is the big winner' - my working hypothesis (aka unsubtantiated guess) is that Ledeen's frequent "Faster Please" is more likely to be cover for his real motives than an honest exhortation.

To the extent that "Faster Please" is merely a cover, and in the context of Wilson saying that "iran is the big winner," I can't reconcile how/why Ledeen seems to be actively involved in conspiracies with Iranian exiles, Chalabi and Ghorbanifar.

We do know that Ledeen famously favours the 'fascist movement', which directly correlates with Wilson's 'fundamentalist military conglomerate' (despite Ledeen's "I describe myself as a democratic revolutionary") - so methinx the answer is somewhere in there...

I'm still waiting for the penny to drop. Faster, Please!