Michael Ledeen says the terror masters and their media enablers are playing us for suckers: Very Different Playbooks.

The fascists believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust race (or nation), would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.

The terror masters have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.

In the past few days there has been a great to-do about a possible Iranian role in Iraq, mediating between us and Moqtada al Sadr. In the end, it came to nothing. Iran’s deputy foreign minister was either unwilling or unable to deliver Moqtada, blamed us for the “failure,” and went back to Tehran. But the point of the exercise was not to solve a problem for us — on the contrary, the Iranians intend to create ever greater problems on the ground — but to deliver a message to the restive Iranian people: “The Americans are so weak and impotent that they have to turn to us for help. So just forget about any American help to get rid of us.”

If we can’t manage Iraq without the mullahs, we certainly can’t be strong enough to help the Iranian people get rid of the mullahcracy and achieve freedom.

It would have been embarrassing enough if this were the first time the Iranians had played such a game. But this was a humiliating replay of the “We’ve got al Qaeda guys for you” joke that they played on us at least twice in the last year. Remember when Deputy Secretary of State Armitage announced that his Iranian buddies were going to deliver al Qaeda terrorists in a matter of weeks? That never happened either, and again, the main point of the game was to demonstrate that the Bush administration was perfectly willing to negotiate with the mullahs. And therefore the United States wasn’t going to remove them.

There is an additional stratagem involved in these little games: The mullahs figure that, if they can keep us engaged in the games, we won’t crack down on their nuclear program. And the more time they can gain, the greater their chances of building an effective supply of atomic bombs. It’s working.