(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Fred Hiatt today unleashes an Editorial Page attack on Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency whom Hiatt labels "the Rogue Regulator." Bizarrely, though revealingly, Hiatt begins by complaining that "Mr. ElBaradei was lionized by opponents of the Iraq war for debunking Bush administration charges that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear program before the 2003 invasion" -- as though having been right about Iraq, and thus admired by "by opponents of the Iraq war," is a sign of low credibility.

It is hard to overstate the bitterness and resentment which the Serious Pro-War Beltway Elite like Hiatt, who were wrong about everything, still harbor towards those, such as ElBaredei, who were right about Iraq, principally because those who were right serve as an ongoing, painful reminder of what poor judgment the likes of Hiatt possess, of how untrustworthy are the foreign policy pronouncements of the Serious People in Hiatt's world. Thus, Hiatt's attack on EdBaredei begins with the complaint that he "was lionized by opponents of the Iraq war" for being right. That's because in Hiatt's world, having been right on Iraq -- and being "lionized" by war opponents -- are actually hallmarks of unseriousness. Ask Scott Ritter (if you can find where he can be heard). Or Howard Dean.

This morning, Hiatt is specifically angry about ElBaradei's attempts to thwart those whom ElBaradei labelled the "crazies in Washington," those who -- as Hiatt puts it -- "want to say, 'Let us go and bomb Iran.'" Hiatt defends the "bomb Iran" crowd as follows:

We're not part of that camp, though we consider its members saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Hiatt, like most of official Washington, is desperate to maintain the Seriousness credentials of those who want to bomb Iran, as that group now includes such luminaries as Joe Lieberman, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and by all reports, Dick Cheney. To do so, Hiatt lowers the Seriousness standard about as far as it can be lowered -- thus, the members of Bomb Iran crowd are, Hiatt assures us, "saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," and thus presumably worthy of respect.

It should go without saying that being "saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" is a worthless standard, entitling those who meet it to absolutely nothing in the way of respect and credibility. But as low as it is, it is highly questionable whether, as Hiatt claims, the leading members of the "Bomb Iran" crowd meet even this standard.

The preeminent and most highly regarded right-wing expert on Iran has been and continues to be Michael Ledeen, who has devoted his life to engineering "regime change" in Iran.
With perfect timing to match the new White House campaign, Ledeen has just released a new book titled "The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction." National Review's Andrew McCarthy oozed praise for the book and for Ledeen, calling it a "tour de force [that] shows the war with Iran is already on." Ledeen's book, says McCarthy, "is required reading for anyone -- which ought to mean everyone -- desirous of understanding the existential threat we face and why its beating heart is Tehran."

McCarthy summarizes the lessons he drew from Ledeen's "tour de force" this way:

For three decades, Iran has made war on the United States and unabashedly told the world that it seeks the destruction of the United States, all the while -- directly and by proxy -- murdering and imprisoning Americans. . . .

If the United States is to win the war on terror, regime change in Iran is a must. How it is to be done can be debated. That it must be done cannot be doubted. Michael Ledeen performs an invaluable service by making that crystal clear.

Whenever right-wing warriors want to urge a new war with Iran, they invariably cite Ledeen, who serves as "Freedom Scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributor to National Review, and some sort of regular contributor to "Pajamas Media." Simply put, there is no more ridiculous, deceitful, untrustworthy and just outright laughable political figure of influence than Michael Ledeen.

To begin with, Ledeen is plagued by the single most absurd yet fundamental contradiction one can imagine. His central argument, repeated over and over and now a staple in neoconservative mythology, is that Iran has been at war with the U.S. continuously ever since 1979. We just haven't fought back yet.

Yet Ledeen played a central role in brokering the sale by Israel to Iran of highly advanced weapons as part of the Reagan administration's Iran-contra shenanigans in the 1980s. A military confrontation with Iran would likely subject U.S. troops to attack from the very same nasty weapons which Ledeen and his friends provided to Iran during a time when, Ledeen and neoconservatives now insist, Iran was waging war on the U.S. As Scott Lemieux, among many others, has noted, providing arms to a country "waging war against the U.S." -- as Ledeen did with Iran in the 1980s if his central premise is to be believed -- is called treason.

Ledeen's credibility-destroying pronouncements are too numerous to chronicle here. In January, he declared in Pajamas Media that "Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, is dead." Days later, Khamenei appeared in public and gave a major speech, and continues to live. Even Michelle Malkin's Hot Air called Ledeen's announcement "a major embarrassment" for Pajamas. Identically, Ledeen has repeatedly announced that Osama bin Laden is dead, even after he is proven to be alive. This individual -- with this ludicrous record, who does not speak Persian, and who has never even set foot in the country -- is the right-wing's leading and most respected "Iran expert" when it comes to urging war.

To test Hiatt's defense of Ledeen and the "Bomb Iran" movement he leads -- namely, that its "members are saner than many of the statements of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" -- consider the exquisite interview Ledeen just gave yesterday to geopolitical expert and political analyst Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review. How is it even possible to top this when it comes to "insanity":

Lopez: Why should I think "Iran" when I hear "al Qaeda"?

Ledeen: Because they've been working together since 1994, and we are now up to our uvulas in evidence showing Iran's support for al Qaeda in Iraq. The 9/11 Commission -- as Tom Joscelyn has written for years -- found striking evidence of the al Qaeda/Iran partnership, starting with the sensational discovery that Imad Mughniyah, the operational chief of Hezbollah, was on the plane that took some of the 9/11 terrorists out of Saudi Arabia, en route to the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Lopez: So does bin Laden and crew work for Iran? Have they always?

Ledeen: I don't know about "always." Certainly they have worked closely with Iran for quite a while. I think the Iranian domination of al Qaeda started when we destroyed al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The key leaders ran to Iran and have mostly been there ever since.

Lopez: Was Iran involved in 9/11?

Ledeen: I don't know. It's possible, but certainly unproven. The most tantalizing factoid is the story of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistics officer for the 9/11 operation. He went to Iran for a month in late December, 2000, and then he returned to Iran less than a week before 9/11.

So, to recap: Shiite Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda work in tandem and have since 1994 (at least). "Bin Laden and his crew" work for Iran, and have done so "for quite a while." Iran is apparently arming everyone in Iraq, Shiite and Sunni alike. And although we cannot prove that Iran was behind the 9/11 attacks, it is certainly possible, and there is "tantalizing" evidence suggesting this is so.

There simply is nothing which our country's warmongers can do or say -- no matter how removed from reality and/or patently deceitful -- that will deny them membership in Fred Hiatt's Seriousness Club. Demonstrating this same point, contrast Ledeen's comments about Iran to the claims made by Rudy Giuliani the other day when asked by a questioner what the U.S. has accomplished in Iraq. Giuliani first hid behind the troops, insisting the questioner had done something morally wrong by even questioning the mission in Iraq:

I think that's a terrible thing to do. . . . I think it's a mistake, both substantively and emotionally, both, to tell our troops that they're accomplishing nothing in Iraq.

Giuliani then, according to The Weekly Standard, justified the invasion this way: "American troops deposed Saddam Hussein, 'who was a major pillar of support for Islamic terrorism,' Giuliani said." Saddam Hussein was a "major pillar of support for Islamic terrorists." Al Qaeda works for Iran. Saddam might have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Iran might be responsible for the 9/11 attacks. There is simply no limit, no constraint of reality, on what they say.

But in the Fred Hiatt world, none of this matters, because accuracy and reality are not considered virtues. The only virtue is a willingness to advocate war -- i.e. "toughness." That is why Hiatt thinks he is saying something derogatory about ElBaradei when he says he "was lionized by opponents of the Iraq war" for being right. To Hiatt, ElBaradei's credibility is undermined because he is on the side of opponents of the Iraq war, no matter how right he was. And the "Bomb Iran" crowd is instrinsically entitled to respect -- no matter how insane and deceitful are their claims -- because they advocate war, which is an inherently Serious position.

There is no other way to put it. From any rational perspective, Micheal Ledeen -- the preeminent Iraq Leader on the Right -- is a joke, as are the statements from those who view him and his like-minded comrades (i.e., Norm Podhoretz) as prophets, including Rudy Giuliani. Yet Ledeen continues to sit atop of our nation's pro-war organs and command respect because the only true establishment Seriousness metric is the extent to which one is willing to urge war, and Ledeen excels in that regard.

Between ElBaradei on the one hand (who was right about virtually everything he said concerning Iraq) and the likes of Hiatt and Ledeen (who were wrong about virtually everything), it is not difficult to figure out who merits credibility and who does not. A simple rational assessment of their record permits only one conclusion.

But in the world of the Washington establishment, that calculus is reversed. And that explains so much of the disaster we have created for ourselves in Iraq, and the even worse disaster we are in the process of creating for ourselves in Iran. In the Fred Hiatt view, Michael Ledeen is Serious and Mohamed ElBaradei is not. What else does one need to know?

UPDATE: As he typically does, Hiatt is merely repeating here the standard trope that has arisen among the most extremist neoconservatives. Here is what the Very Serious John Bolton said in May on Fox News in accusing ElBaredei of being an "apologist for Iran":

One thing we have to do very clearly in the IAEA is tell the director general there to sit down and stop trying to interfere with our [U.S.] efforts to prevent proliferation. ElBaradei . . . has been an apologist for Iran right from the start of this, that's why his continued efforts on a diplomatic front have been unhelpful.

Of course, ElBaredei -- whom Hiatt helpfully notes in the very first sentence of his Editorial is "Egyptian" -- was constantly depicted by war cheerleaders prior to the last war as an apologist for Saddam for daring to suggest that we ought to complete the inspections to find out whether Saddam really did have those weapons. For all the Establishment hand-wringing over lessons learned, the same people who brought us the invasion of Iraq -- the John Boltons and Fred Hiatts and AEI Scholars and their Establishment enablers -- are, in fact, engaged in precisely the same behavior today.

UPDATE II: Fred Hiatt actually repeated this same attack on ElBaradei as well as Hans Blix more than four years ago when, in a March 11, 2003 Editorial urging the invasion of Iraq without waiting for completion of the inspection process, Hiatt wrote (via Lexis; h/t Thomas C):

So why do the inspectors sound so upbeat? Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei are international civil servants who are desperate to prove that agencies like theirs can be effective. Their reports to the council have been constructed as arguments for continued inspections, rather than as reports on Iraq's compliance. Mr. Blix has dodged repeated requests that he judge Iraq against the terms of Resolution 1441; instead, he has retailed indications of "progress" on such issues as interviews with scientists, which in turn are hailed by some as proof that the "inspections are working." Such discussions have a surreal quality, because they ignore the elephantine fact that Iraq has still not disclosed its weapons. Mr. Blix doggedly pursues "unanswered questions" about huge stores of unaccounted-for materials -- but in reality, his team has little of substance to do. It can only wait to see if Iraq will be more forthcoming, or hope for a lucky break that will lead it to hidden stockpiles.

Mr. ElBaradei has responded to similar problems by turning on Iraq's accusers. In his first report to the council, Mr. ElBaradei argued against the logic of Resolution 1441, saying that inspectors could be used to contain Iraq even if Saddam Hussein didn't cooperate. He has used his two subsequent presentations to dispute evidence offered by Britain and the United States, while coming close to declaring Iraq free of any nuclear program. Last Friday, Mr. ElBaradei made headlines by denouncing one secondary piece of evidence, about an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain fissile material from Niger, as a forgery. But the allegation is not central to the case against Saddam Hussein, and it did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council. Such diversions have lamentably become the substitute for U.N. oversight of real Iraqi disarmament; weeks or even months more of them may help unify the international community, but can yield little else.

Just fathom how shameless a person like Hiatt has to be -- how beyond embarrassment and indifferent to grotesque error -- for him to attack ElBaradei on Iran using the same exact arguments he made, almost verbatim, to attack ElBaradei's absolutely correct claims with regard to Iraq -- i.e., he is defying the UN mandate, is overly trusting of the Bad Regime With Weapons, is too eager to avert war, etc.

Hiatt insisted that the invasion of Iraq proceed without waiting and ElBaradei argued that the inspection process should be completed, but in Hiatt's mind, even though he thinks exactly the same way as he did prior to Iraq, he is still the Serious One and it is ElBaradei's credibility -- and even his trustworthiness and allegiances -- which are suspect. That is just amazing.

UPDATE III: As indicated, one can only capture a small portion of Michael Ledeen's madness in one post. Hence, there is no reference here to the article Digby dredges up in which Ledeen suggested we would need to wage war against France and Germany because they are in league with Al Qaeda and Iran to destroy us; nor to his article despicably arguing in favor of the invasion of Iraq: "One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today."

Nor does it reference Ledeen's patently false claim last year that he opposed the Iraq war when he repeatedly cheered it on. It also says nothing about his lurking around (at least) the forged Niger documents from Italy, and nothing about his role in the AIPAC/espionage scandal.

Nor does this post even mention what Jonah Goldberg approvingly called "The Ledeen Doctrine," whereby Ledeen argued: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." This is the Leading Iran Expert among neconservatives. And it is a person who remains Deeply Serious in the Fred Hiatt World.