Marathon Pundit: Michael Ledeen: Regime change now in Iran

The stated policy of any common-sense candidate (Sorry, Barack) for president should be regime change in Iran. Dialogue and diplomacy doesn't work with maniacs. They utilize it as a useful tool. Adolf Hitler did it at Munich in 1938, and Der Führer with another evil man, Josef Stalin, used diplomacy to forge the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact the following year. Two years later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

As for war with Iran, we've been at war with the Islamic Republic since 1979--and our troops in Iraq are getting killed by Iranian supplied weapons.

Author and Pajamas Media columnist Michael Ledeen writes:

The central element of any sensible policy toward the Islamic Republic must be regime change. Fascist regimes, like their communist counterparts, do not change their essence, because they totally believe in the rightness of their cause and the inevitability of their triumph. The war with the Islamic Republic will be won or lost, but it will not be negotiated away as the mullahs convert to common sense and the love of peace.

If you're not reading Michael Ledeen's Pajamas column, what's holding you back?

His previous column, Maybe We're Winning in Iraq, is a must-read too:

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.