MICHAEL LEDEEN IS CELEBRATING

Where Evil lurks

It's not every day that one gets an actual actor of history blogging about an event he's connected to. But yesterday, probable war criminal Michael Ledeen, was celebrating the victory of crooked neo-fascist ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Yesterday's Guardian reckons his new government will be the most far right in many years, (probably since Mussolini was strung up by his heels towards the end of World War II).

Italy's next government is likely to be more conservative even than the one that ruled the country for five tumultuous years to 2006. Berlusconi will no longer have to take into account the moderating influence of the centre-right Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC), which broke with him shortly before the campaign and was the only other party to win a significant representation in the lower house.

But he will have to take seriously the virulently anti-immigrant Northern League, led by Umberto Bossi. It scored a resounding triumph, more or less doubling its presence in parliament.

...For the first time since the second world war, Italy will have a parliament cleanly divided between two main groups, which should bring it stability. But Berlusconi's triumph will send a shiver of apprehension through Brussels, where memories are still fresh of the way his government let Italy's public finances run out of control, threatening the stability of the euro. Romano Prodi, the former European commission president and Italy's ex-prime minister who narrowly defeated Berlusconi two years ago, reversed the trend. But to cut the budget deficit, he made the centre-left deeply unpopular by raising taxes and clamping down on evasion.

Italy's next government faces an unenviable task in trying to reinvigorate a failing economy. That was reflected in the generally cautious rhetoric of both leading candidates in the campaign. Last year, the EU announced that the Italian economy had been overtaken by Spain's.

Other symptoms of Italy's failure are legion. They include a flag carrier airline, Alitalia, which is losing €1m a day, and a refuse crisis that engulfed Naples and the surrounding region of Campania and appeared to many Italians to embody their country's plight. Projections suggested the right had triumphed by an unusually large margin in Campania.

During the campaign, Berlusconi vowed to slash taxes and boost infrastructure spending in an effort to stimulate the economy. He insisted the budget deficit could nevertheless be contained by improving efficiency in the public administration and embarking on a huge programme of public asset sales.

The election turnout, usually high in Italy, was three points lower than at the last general election in 2006 - 82%, compared with 85%, according to initial data from the interior ministry. There was speculation that the drop reflected disillusion among the young at an ageing and cronyism-prone political class.

The country looks set for five years of government headed by a 71-year-old man who has a string of trials behind him for alleged financial wrongdoing. All his convictions have been overturned on appeal and other charges against him expired under statutes of limitations.

This morning's NY Times speculates that "it was unclear whether Italians voted for Mr. Berlusconi out of affection or, as many experts said, as the least bad choice after the nation weathered two years of inaction from the fractured center-left... Rejecting the sober responsibility of the departing prime minister, Romano Prodi, Italians chose in a moment of national self-doubt a man whose dramas-- the clowning and corruption scandals, his rocky relations with his wife and political partners, his growing hairline and ever browner hair-- play out very much in public."

So what does this have to do with Ladeen? After all, all the neo-fascists and neoCons are celebrating tonight, right? Well, yes, but not all the neoCons or neo-fascists were involved with helping the Bush Regime trick the American public into supporting an illegal attack on Iraq via forged documents purported to show Iraq buying yellow cake from Niger. Yeah, that document. It has never been proven in a court-- and perhaps never will be-- but people who know what happened, say all roads lead, not just to Rome, but to Michael Ledeen in Rome.

After being caught plagiarizing, Ladeen was denied tenure at the University of Wisconsin and a legitimate academic career in America vaporized. He moved to Rome, where he studied fascism and worked as a spy for Italy. His pseudo-academic book, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936, which is considered shoddy if not totally worthless by legitimate scholars, painted an admiring picture of fascism and the far right. As big an admirer of historical Mussolini as he is of modern day Berlusconi, Ledeen approvingly described fascist Italy as "a generator of energy and creativity." Ledeen is one of the most repugnant and shadowy figures on the fringes of the American right. He has played a role in multiple scandals, from Iran-Contra to engineering the attack on Iraq. Currently he has been working with his allies inside the Bush Regime to provoke a war with Iran before Bush leaves office. And, yes, he's celebrating today.