Ganley: Mullahs are laughing behind closed doors

IRAQ and Iran could only be “tamed” through a second world war-type effort by the western powers involving drafts, rationing and sacrifice, Libertas founder Declan Ganley suggested in a little-seen paper.

The anti-Lisbon campaigner, whose company, Rivada Networks, has lucrative contracts with the US military, warned of the consequences of an American pullout from Iraq, saying it would hand a “truly historic” victory to the Islamic radicals.

“This is not Vietnam, it’s much more serious,” Mr Ganley wrote in the 2006 paper. “Regardless of the historic reasons, the fact remains that Iraq is the main battleground of Islamic radicalism against the west. The Islamists themselves have said so plenty of times. They are shortly to be handed a victory quite unlike any seen for Islamist forces for centuries.”

The knock-on effect would be seen through the Middle East, he predicted, and a fallback to standard diplomacy would be of little use.

“As the US and Europe start yet another round of dialogue with Syria and Iran, the Mullahs are rolling around laughing behind closed doors — they did not cave in when we had leverage, now they will declare ‘the Emperor has no clothes’,” Mr Ganley added.

Iran was “near guaranteed” to acquire nuclear weapons with little real resistance, “save for at worst a few impotent ‘look tough’ Cruise missile strikes or ‘surgical raids’ for the benefit of CNN and Fox News viewers, even these options being hampered by a delusional Vladimir Putin happily selling Russian anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran,” Mr Ganley wrote.

“The fact is that, if Iraq and Iran were to be tamed and security risks eliminated, full mobilisation for war would have to be carried out, complete with drafts, rationing and all of what Churchill referred to as the ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ that it takes to secure overwhelming victory.

“The Islamic radicals look at the western world and discern that we are too ‘relative’, unwilling to sacrifice, decadent, lacking real belief in a cause, devoid of faith and what they consider too weak to go the distance.”

As the pullout from Iraq commenced, the radicals’ confidence would be emboldened, he said.

“The storm is gathering apace, it will present itself with spectacular effect in the cities of the west soon enough,” Mr Ganley wrote.

“So, given that the admirably peace-loving, civilised and educated peoples of the western world have overwhelmingly shown that they do not wish to join the struggle in which radical Islam would have us engage, what can we do to offset the risk that they won’t have the decency to leave us alone because we don’t want to argue the point their way?” he asked.

One answer — and the topic of the paper — was for the west to cut its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and gas. “We may end up discovering that the recipients of our energy euro and dollars become outright enemies of everything we stand for.”

Mr Ganley wrote the paper in August 2006 as an addendum to the report on that year’s “Forum on Public Safety in Europe and North America”, a conference his company held in the University of Limerick to discuss global security issues.

The report was distributed to a number of governments but not published publicly, according to the forum’s website. However, the paper has since been made available on Libertas’s website.

The paper came at a time when the White House was awaiting recommendations from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which reported in December 2006.

The Study Group recommended a phased withdrawal from Iraq and a renewed diplomatic push to halt the violence in the country.

But in the end, US President George W Bush ignored the study group’s recommendations and sent more troops to Iraq.