This is the text of a briefing I am giving to Senate and Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill this morning.

The Reagan Doctrine was above all a paradigm-shift. We weren’t going to try and outlast the Soviets anymore, we were going after them. We didn’t want peace with them, we didn’t want to get along with them, we wanted them gone, history, da svedanya, adios and goodbye. Support of various anti-Soviet insurgencies was a conscious assault on the structure of the Soviet Empire. The goal wasn’t simply freedom for this or that Soviet colony, but the full collapse of the Empire as a whole, which ultimately meant the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

This strategy… worked. The Reagan Doctrine is the most spectacularly successful geopolitical strategy of modern times. The question now is: where and how can such a strategy be best applied to the War on Islamofascism?

I think the “where” is Iran. Iraq is a job for the United States Military. Iran is not -- not in the sense of the 3rd ID taking Tehran. During the Cold War, we needed US and NATO forces in Europe capable of blocking a Soviet invasion, say through the Fulda Gap. But we didn’t need US soldiers to fight in the jungles of Nicaragua or protest in the streets of Prague and Budapest. What we needed - and what we had -- were large numbers of people living in these countries willing to struggle for their own freedom. This is what we need, and this is what we have, today in Iran.

The main obstacle in implementing a Reagan Doctrine for Iran is the same we had with implementing a Reagan Doctrine for the Soviets: Squishes in the White House and the State Department. In the 1980s they were Michael Deaver, Dick Darman, Jim Baker, and George Shultz. Today they are Robert Blackwill, Richard Armitage, and the entire Near East Bureau at State.

Thus to implement a policy of regime change in Iran, there must be a strategy of regime change in the National Security Council and the State Department.

Comfortable? Have a bucket of buttered popcorn and a cold beer at the ready? (If you were my friend Otto, you’d have instead a Grey Goose martini.) All set for the greatest political fireworks show of your life? Showtime is about to begin.

Those SwiftVet ads, you see, have been just the pre-lims to warm the audience up. The main acts will be much more entertaining. They’ll begin with signs appearing at Kerry campaign rallies saying:

Ho, ho, ho - Kerry must sign the One-Eight-Oh

What does that mean, you ask? It is the demand that Kerry sign a DoD (Defense Dept.) Form 180, which authorizes the release to the public of all military records the Pentagon possesses on him.

Ask anybody who knows how to street fight, and they’ll tell you the most important thing is not to get mad. Lose your temper, act out of rage, and you lose your emotional intelligence, your capacity to think calmly and react quickly - so you get the crap beat out of you.

This is why Hollywood casting directors are proposing that actors Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels be replaced in the coming sequel to the 1994 movie Dumb & Dumber with… John Kerry and Dan Rather.

Oh, excuse the typo. It’s Dan Ra^ther.

No kidding, folks - the characters of Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne in Dumb & Dumber are Einsteins compared to Hanoi John and Frequency Dan. Let’s take Danny first.

Sir Thomas Gresham, who lived from 1519 to 1579, was Queen Elizabeth’s financial advisor. He was so good at it that he paid off all of England’s European debts by playing the Antwerp stock market in Belgium and made himself the richest man in Britain. But his greatest contribution was reviving the debased English shilling by convincing Elizabeth of the truth of what history calls Gresham’s Law: that bad money, if allowed to exist, will wipe out the value of good money.

The ghastly series of events in the past weeks -- two commercial airliners blown out of the sky in Russia on August 24, two buses blown up by suicide bombers in Israel on August 31, the threat to behead two French hostages unless France rescinds its school ban on Moslem head scarves, the threat to behead two Italian women unless Italy retreats from Iraq, the genocide in Sudan, the hideous butchery of hundreds of Russian children in Beslan last week, the car bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta today - make it quite clear that Gresham’s Law now needs to be applied to Islam.

If Sir Thomas were alive today, he would explain that his law pertains to the validity not just of monetary institutions, but political, social, cultural, and economic institutions as well. All issue their own “currencies” - the measure of their moral worth and practical value. The moral worth and practical value of the currency of Islam has become so debased that it may be unredeemable.

In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, just south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a valley called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the ice buildup of a stream that refuses to melt even in the heat of the Gobi summer. But it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk

This is a speech I am delivering to the Council For National Policy in New York on the eve of the Republican Convention.


One surefire way to make yourself really stupid is to acquire an overload of what the Greeks called hubris, the overweening pride that leads to one’s doom. The ancient Greeks had observed time and again the causal connection between hubris and stupidity. If they were with us today, they would tell us that anyone possessed of this self-destructive synthesis needs psychiatric counseling instead of trying to be President of the United States.

It was 30 years ago, during a conversation at his brownstone in Brooklyn, that Dennis “The Wizard” Turner concisely explained to me what he thought of liberals. “I honestly think,” he said, “that Liberals are more disgusting than Communists.”

Dennis’s observation was brought to mind when I read a message from Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition . Lou was telling me about acts of depravity so unimaginable that I thought not even liberals were capable of them. I was wrong.

My friend and neighbor, well-known economist Richard Rahn, summarizes the Republicans’ greatest political weakness thus:

The Democrats are good at selling falsehoods, and the Republicans are lousy at selling the truth.