Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Most U.S. politicians have for so long shilled on behalf of Israel’s ahistorical and deceitful contention that a nation has a “right to exist” that it probably was inevitable they would come to believe the lie themselves. As noted here previously, every country has the right to defend itself according to its own best lights, but no country has a right to exist. Existence depends on national defense capabilities and a readiness to use war as a last resort to annihilate the few entities that pose life-and-death threats; a determination to avoid cultivating enemies at home and abroad; a prosperous economy that affords opportunities for all; and a cohesive social fabric that encourages free speech and welcomes an armed citizenry. Without these attributes a nation-state eventually goes up the spout, be it Israel or the United States.

President Obama’s 22 June 2011 speech on Afghanistan amounted to a declaration that the United States has a right to exist even if it refuses to defend itself. He is wrong. Certainly no country on earth has more human, economic, military, and historical assets at its command in attempting to survive than the United States, but if those assets are not used in an effective and timely manner Americans will eventually find that there is no one out there who will make sure that our country continues to exist.

Mr. Obama surrendered to worldwide Islamist forces on June 22nd. He and most of the U.S. political elite live in a world that does not exist and so make decisions that are uninformed by reality. In saying that the “wave of war is receding” Mr. Obama proved himself either ignorant or stupid, or perhaps just hopeful that those attributes characterize most of the electorate. America has lost its unnecessary war in Iraq. Washington accomplished nothing there that it set out to do; al-Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist groups have reformed and are on the offensive; and a Sunni-Shia civil war is shaping up that will destabilize the region — and perhaps oil production — even further.

America also has lost its war in Afghanistan. Even with the surge of U.S. soldiers and Marines the reality today is what it was before the surge: Karzai’s government and military/security services are not viable; the Taliban-led insurgency has the military initiative; and U.S. forces control a piece of ground only so long as they stand on it and are willing to kill to keep it. On this last point, when Obama, Gates, Mullen, and Petraeus say that the progress of the U.S.-NATO coalition is “fragile,” they are saying that there has been no military progress that can be sustained without the presence and combat activity of U.S.-NATO forces. The now ongoing movement of coalition combat forces from the Kandahar region to eastern Afghanistan, for example, will cede to the Taliban any recent gains in the former and demonstrates that the current level of forces cannot hold any territory unless they physically occupy it. What happens when there are 33,000 fewer U.S. troops in Afghanistan is really quite easy to predict: Defeat countrywide for the Karzai regime and a return to the status quo antebellum under the Taliban.

What happens in Libya also is vital, even beyond the $700 million Mr. Obama has already wasted there in his unconstitutional war of presidential whim and monarchial ambition. A hundred days into the NATO-disguised U.S. war on Libya, we have proven that U.S.-NATO air forces probably will not be sufficient to beat Qaddahfi. We are thus in the midst of another lose-lose situation for America in the Muslim world. We lose because we singled out another Muslim country with oil that did not threaten the United States to be the target of regime change, and we lose because the most militarily potent nation on earth and its allies have so far failed to make that change. Thus, we have created another situation where the world’s only superpower may well again be unable to score a military victory against vastly inferior Islamist forces, making Washington 0 for 3 in Muslim-world wars since 2001. The impact of this outcome on the Muslim world’s perception of Western strength can be imagined when it is recalled — as one of my students mentioned in class last week — that Libyan forces have in the past been beaten by the mighty military machine of Chad.

Going to war, of course, should always be America’s last resort, a condition the Founders sought to assure by giving Congress the sole power to declare war. With the Congress’s supine abdication of its constitutional war-making prerogative, however, we now have presidents from both parties who believe war is a good first option for waging our governing elite’s democratic/cultural/feminist war on the Islamic world. As bad as this situation is, it is made infinitely worse by the last four presidents’ unwillingness to win the wars they start, as well as by the unwillingness of even one of their senior military advisers to resign rather then preside over the wasted lives of our soldiers and Marines in wars in which their leaders cannot define what “winning” means; indeed, wars in which so-called “great warriors” like Petraeaus and McChrystal will not even use words “win” or “victory.”

At a time in U.S. history when our country is bankrupt, our borders are uncontrolled, our elected officials routinely behave unconstitutionally and as sex-addled adolescents, and our murderously expensive military is a laughing stock among or current and would-be enemies, it is vital to acknowledge that the United States of America has no right to exist that comes from, or can be enforced by God or any other entity.

America, like all nations, can only assure its continued existence by the consistent application of common sense, by the work of its own hands, by acting in a manner Theodore Roosevelt once described as “fearing God and taking your own part,” and by knowing, as the Bible says, that “God helps those who help themselves.” U.S. politicians and generals who chant or, worse, believe an absurd mantra like “a nation has a right to exist,” while behaving in ways that erodes the rule of law by unconstitutional acts and believing that regularly losing wars for half-a-century is irrelevant to U.S. security, will eventually find themselves alongside Israel’s leaders circling the drain that at times helpfully flushes arrogant, militaristic, and hubristic fools from human affairs.

As Ayman al-Zawahiri takes charge of al-Qaeda (AQ) he faces a situation more promising than any the group has encountered since its formation near the end of the Afghan-Soviet war. Of course having such an opportunity and exploiting it are two different things, but if al-Zawahiri controls his personal abrasiveness, limits his micro-managing tendencies, and works with his Shura Council to pick a talented deputy from al-Qaeda’s coming generation — best bets: Abu Yaha al-Libi and Naseer al-Wayhashi — the future for al-Qaeda, its allies, and those they inspire is bright. Here are some of the reasons for this conclusion.

1. The horizontal growth of al-Qaeda has continued without let up for a decade. On 9/11, most AQ manpower, leaders, and training facilities were in Afghanistan. Today, AQ is still in Afghanistan, but has a sizable and growing presence in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, Iraq, Palestine, and the Levant states. AQ is larger and more geographically dispersed than a decade ago, and the information leaked after bin Laden’s death shows that communications and cooperation between and among AQ’s core and branches is ongoing — more or less shattering the Western social scientists’ zany myth of a “leaderless jihad.”
2. Washington has admitted defeat in both Afghanistan and Iraq by beginning to withdraw forces without accomplishing the goals identified as essential when the invasions began in 2001 and 2003, respectively. As noted here previously, the U.S. superpower’s twin defeats will do much to alleviate the Muslims world’s engrained defeatism and move the younger generation toward jihad, especially given the minimal amount of death and damage the jihadis had to inflict on the U.S. military to win in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the jihadi perspective, they not only beat U.S. military forces twice, but they did so far more easily and with far less loss than it took to defeat the Soviet superpower.
3. The Israel-Palestine issue is now a Muslim-world issue and not one limited to the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Thanks to the bin Laden’s rhetoric and actions, the Internet, and 24-hour television, the Muslim world as a whole is now involved in the conflict. And thanks to the West’s destruction of the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak, non-Palestinian Sunni fighters can much more easily move from the west into Gaza and from the east into the Arab Levant states to train, fund, incite, and fight alongside their Palestinian brothers.
4. As important, there is no longer any reason for Muslim world to hope the U.S. government will play an even-handed role in the Israel-Palestine dispute. As President Obama and UK Prime Minister Cameron spoke in London last month of a “new” approach to the Muslim world, Muslims simultaneously watched the wholly-AIPAC-owned U.S. Congress give Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu 25-plus standing ovations as he called for war on Iran and any other Muslim state or entity Israel identifies as a threat. As President Obama says, Muslims surely know corruption when they see it, and from what they saw on TV they can have no doubt that the U.S. political system and its media have been thoroughly suborned and corrupted by disloyal Israel-First U.S.-citizens to unquestioningly support a country that consistently undermines U.S. national security interests.
5. AQ and other Islamist groups are finding a less threatening and increasingly hospitable operational environment in the Arab world as Washington and its Western allies cheer on the destruction of the Arab tyrannies that have been — as bin Laden consistently said for 15-plus years — the main enemies of the jihadis and the Muslim peoples. Well-organized, veteran, and competently led clandestine groups always have a distinct advantage when operating in confused, at times chaotic, and potentially violent conditions such as those in which the Islamists now work in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya. In each of these countries, moreover, the jihadis know that whatever level of relaxation in security Washington and the West can secure for the activities of “democratic forces” makes their own operations easier and put them in a better position to quickly liquidate the tiny, naive, and unarmed democratic presence when the time is right.
6. AQ appears to be completing training and preparations to conduct HAMAS-like operations inside the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, India, and other English-speaking nations, as well as continuing to plan for an attack larger than 9/11. Over the past 4-to-5 years, bin Laden developed a strong cadre of U.S.-citizen Muslims — Azzam al-Amriki, Samir Khan, Adnan Shukrajuma, Anwar al-Awalki, etc. — who have used and are using their fluent, idiomatic English and organizational skills to recruit and incite other U.S. Muslims — such as Major Hassan, Najibullah Zazi, and Faisal Shahzad — to attack domestic U.S. targets. In addition, Iraq has evolved into an operational laboratory for AQ fighters to become increasingly proficient in assassinating political, military, and security leaders; attacking police and security forces with armed fighters and/or car bombs; and destroying or disrupting components of the country’s energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, AQ forces in North Africa offer hands-on training in kidnapping-for-ransom.
7. AQ and other anti-U.S. Islamist groups also benefit from the U.S. government’s unwitting but highly effective campaign to alienate and radicalize America’s Muslim community. There continues to be much glib talk by U.S. political leaders and the media about the power of the U.S. “melting pot” to absorb and Americanize Muslim immigrants just as it did to Germans, Italians, Poles, Irish, Swedes, and other immigrant groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but that idea ought to be seriously questioned. When Italians, Swedes, and Poles came to America to settle, for example, they did not see their new government daily threaten, sanction, bomb, demonize, and invade the countries and peoples from which they came. Today’s Muslim immigrants, however, do watch such things each day on TV and the Internet, and all polling shows that most interpret those actions as a war on Islam. They also hear their AIPAC-owned federal legislators attack Islam and cheer on every Israeli action that kills Palestinian insurgents. These things probably do little to promote Muslim assimilation into and love for the American polity.
8. In the last six months, Islamist organizations in the Arab world have witnessed a substantial decrease in anti-Islamist operations by the security services of toppled and teetering Arab tyrannies. Arab security services that once killed and captured America’s Islamist enemies on a daily basis — and shared intelligence from those operations with U.S. and Western intelligence services — are now impotent to do so, or are working full time either to prop up failing regimes (Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen) or those being attacked by the U.S. and its allies (Libya). This reality has created a large blind spot in the Arab world for the United States vis-à-vis the Islamists’ plans and intentions, and has greatly increased the workload of an already stretched-to-the-limit U.S. intelligence community. This disaster for U.S. and Western security has been augmented by the large quantities of ordnance and explosives the Islamist have acquired during the collapse of several Arab regimes, as well as by the thousands of veteran mujahideen who have been freed from Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan, and Yemeni prisons to rejoin the Islamists’ ranks.
9. As if the Islamists had not benefited enough from the Arab Spring, President Obama, in a speech on 19 May 2011 specifically designed for Muslims, fully signed on to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s cultural/feminist war on Islam. In the speech, Obama left no room for doubt that he will use U.S. forces — military, political, diplomatic, and economic — to intervene in the Muslim world to install secular democracy, establish Western-style women’s’ rights, and to drive religion from governance and the public square in the Islamic world just as he and his party have driven religion from governance and the public square in America. Obama, in essence, issued a declaration of cultural war on Islam that could not have been more useful to the jihadis if they had been able to write the script for him. And it surely is ironic that while members of both U.S. parties worry and prate about the non-existent chance of American society being Islamicized, both parties support a foreign policy that seeks to de-Islamicize Muslims overseas by military means.
10. Finally, AQ’s oldest, most reliable, and most effective ally — the U.S. bipartisan political and media elite — remains firmly in place. President Obama and his cabinet, the Congress, most of the mainstream media, and all the Republican presidential candidates — save the ever courageous Ron Paul — have signed up to the lie that the Islamists and their growing number of supporters in the Muslim world, North America, and Europe hate America because of its freedom, liberty, elections, and gender equality, and not for what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world. As long as these persons and entities parrot this obvious lie America is doomed, and AQ and its allies will be in high clover as the number of jihadi volunteers in the coming generation will exceed the number that came from the generation now on the battlefield.

At day’s end, then, al-Zawahiri is stepping into bin Laden’s large shoes with potentially debilitating personality traits and leadership quirks. He would, however, have to intentionally deploy and intensify those traits and quirks with an eye toward deliberately destroying al-Qaeda and his own life’s work to negate the enormous advantages and opportunities he has inherited from the late Osama bin Laden and his utterly dependable U.S. ally.

Two simple truisms seem appropriate these days when discussing the Afghan war: “If you don’t understand your enemy, you will lose to him” and “If you do not kill your enemies, they will surely kill you.” U.S. political, military, and civil service leaders have neither tried to understand what motivates the Taliban and its allies nor have they tried to comprehensively kill them. As a result, they now stand at the inevitable destination — the brink of a vastly humiliating defeat that cannot be disguised.

Following are four points that are useful to keep in mind when listening to the nonsense about a “negotiated settlement” in Afghanistan that is now flowing from the mouths of Obama, Brennan, Clinton, Levin, Petraeus, and prime ministers Cameron (UK) and Harper (Canada).

1. The United States and its NATO allies already have announced their defeat at the hands of the Afghan mujahideen. The U.S. and Britain will begin withdrawing troops next month at a time when the mujahideen have the battlefield initiative; have thoroughly infiltrated Karzai’s government and military and security forces; and have ample funds, arms, and volunteers provided by their benefactors on the Arabian Peninsula.
2. The Taliban have heard the U.S.-NATO coalition announce its surrender and have no reason to think there is any Western will left to fight, especially after hearing Obama whine out this week his and the West’s fatal lack of bloody-mindedness in yet another weepy apology for civilian Afghan casualties. This war is absolutely a zero-sum game for the Taliban, the other mujahideen, and Pakistan — a mindset that the West believes no longer exists — and U.S.-NATO claims about likely compromise from the mujahideen’s side is no more than idle chatter meant to give Western populations hope where there is none.
3. Given NATO’s near-term withdrawal, the absence of Western willpower, and the combat ineffectiveness of Karzai’s forces the Taliban and its allies will continue their thousand-cut campaign, and let Obama and his NATO colleagues talk amongst themselves and to their media acolytes about the equitable negotiated peace that is approaching. In addition, Pakistan’s army and intelligence services — sick of its effete Western allies’ obsessive insistence that its Pakistan’s duty bleed and win the war for them — will increase aid to the Taliban and its allies to ensure that Karzai’s regime and India’s presence in Afghanistan are in time erased after NATO retreats. Pakistan will be supported in this endeavor by Arab Peninsula regimes eager to see an Islamist government restored in Kabul that will block the extension if Shiism through Afghanistan into Central Asia.
4. When the U.S.-NATO coalition withdraws or is driven out by the mujahideen, the Taliban, and its allies: (a) will reestablish an Islamist government that will rule over most of the country with the same religion-based, brutal, but effective law-and-order regime that held sway on 10 September 2001, and this will be welcomed by most Afghans; (b) will wage a war of revenge against the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shias who were ahistorical enough to think the U.S. and its allies know how to win wars and stupid enough to support a vicious Western cultural war aimed at destroying Afghanistan’s conservative Islamic and tribal culture; and (c) will welcome al-Qaeda and other non-Afghan Islamist insurgent groups to resettle in Afghanistan, knowing full well that the West will not be back to fight, except with its usual feckless combination of threatening rhetoric and the long-failed of policy of trying to achieve victory by killing or capturing its Islamist enemies one at a time.

One final point is worth making about the coming U.S.-NATO defeat in Afghanistan, this one in regard to the Muslim world as a whole — which now includes North America and Europe — and especially its young men. When the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, it had a galvanizing impact on Osama bin Laden’s generation of young men. For the first time in several centuries, Allah had allowed Muslims to defeat a Western power, and one of the world’s two superpowers at that. Much of the inspiration that has put mujahideen on the battlefield against the West and Israel since 1989 flowed from the defeat of the Red Army, and the Muslim world’s consequent belief that the mujahideen had destroyed the Soviet Empire.

Even with this victory and even after the victory of 9/11, however, bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies found that they continued to encounter a deeply engrained defeatism among Muslims. The rhetoric of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and other Islamist leaders contains a clear and consistent theme that such defeatism must be overcome in each Muslim before Allah will reward His faithful with victory over their remaining enemies. In other words, the Islamists’ message to their fellow Muslims is that Allah will not help those who do not get off their behinds and help themselves. The continuity of this theme in the post-bin Laden period is apparent in al-Qaeda’s 3 June 2001, 100-minute motivational video entitled “You are responsible only for thyself.”

It will be difficult, to be sure, to measure the worldwide galvanizing impact of the mujahideens’ Taliban-led defeat of the U.S.-NATO coalition in Afghanistan and the subsequent reestablishment of an Islamic Emirate there. But could that impact possibly be less than that which followed the Soviets’ defeat? In 1989, after all, there was no Internet and 24-hour Arabic television coverage of the Red Army’s humiliation; today such coverage is intense and ubiquitous. In addition, the mujahideen will have beaten the second superpower and its most militarily potent allies not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq as well — something no other power on earth ever has accomplished. Most important, this accomplishment will be seen across the Islamic world as both the result of Allah’s will and His reward for those Muslims who got off their behinds to fight and defeat His and Islam’s infidel enemies.

Overall, the decision by Western political leaders to allow their armies to be so easily and cheaply beaten in Afghanistan will have for them and their peoples very unfortunate and bloody long-term consequences.

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, it is of first importance to confront the reality that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization, not a terrorist group. This is not a mere semantic difference.

• Al-Qaeda remains a formidable foe, even after bin Laden’s death, because it is a large, veteran, well-organized, and resilient insurgent group that long ago institutionalized planning for leadership succession in all facets of its operations, military, financial, logistical, training, etc.
• There is, in fact, no better proof that al-Qaeda is an insurgent organization — and that the West fools itself by terming it a “terrorist group” — than its ability to absorb the killing of so many senior leaders while still functioning effectively and expanding in numbers and geographical reach.
• In terms of senior leaders killed, moreover, there is no Islamist terrorist group America has ever fought that could have endured and survived the punishment U.S. military and intelligence services have meted out to al-Qaeda since the late 1990s.

Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are both products of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies (1979-1992). This experience not only taught them that with faith, patience, and contiguous safe haven a superpower can be beaten, but that any group aspiring to fight and defeat a superpower must be prepared to suffer heavy and repeated loses not only of foot soldiers but also of leaders, including the most senior leaders of an organization.

• Bin Laden built al-Qaeda on the pattern of the major Afghan Islamist insurgent groups that fought the Red Army; namely, those of Ahmad Shah Masood, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and Yunis Khalis. These groups all suffered steady and significant leadership casualties at the hands of the Soviet military, which engaged in assassination operations on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border during their ten-year occupation of the former. The Soviets found it impossible to defeat the Afghan insurgent organizations by killing their leaders, a process Washington is now calling “cutting off the head of the snake.”
• The Afghan Islamist groups, moreover, put a great deal of effort into succession planning not just because of Soviet targeted killings, but also because they suffered significant leadership loses from the internecine battles that raged between and among them; this was especially true for the groups of Masood and Gulbuddin. To date, this source of leadership losses is not one al-Qaeda has faced.
• Bin Laden — and, incidentally, Mullah Omar — took this lesson to heart, and since the early 1990s built an organization that expends substantial amounts of time, thought, and training preparing for leadership succession at all its levels.

As noted, the attrition of al-Qaeda’s leadership ranks has been steady for much more than a dozen years. Renditions, targeted killings, and battlefield kills and captures have all taken a toll, and yet there is little indication that the U.S.-NATO coalition has anything more than a body count to show for its work. Killing or capturing al-Qaeda leaders one at a time provides no credible metric with which to measure the overall progress of the U.S.-NATO war effort.

For the core of al-Qaeda, successful preparation for leadership losses is most apparent in the position of the group’s overall military commander.

• Al-Qaeda’s first military commander, Abu Ubaydah al-Panshiri, for example, died in Africa by drowning in May, 1996.
• Abu Ubaydah was replaced by Muhammad Atef — also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri — who ran al-Qaeda’s military operations until he was killed in Kandahar in November, 2001.
• Muhammad Atef was immediately succeeded by the former-Egyptian Special Forces officer, Sayf al-Adl.
• Sayf al-Adl remained commander until he was caught while traveling in Iran and held under house arrest for several years by Iranian authorities.
• Al-Adl was replaced by Abu Faraj al-Libi, who was captured in Pakistan in May, 2005.
• Al-Qaeda’s overall military commander since Abu Faraj’s death has been difficult to determine from open sources, but much attention has been focused on the U.S.-citizen Muslim, Adnan Shukrajuma.
• Most recently, Sayf al-Adl is reported to have been released by Iran and has returned to al-Qaeda. Media reports claim al-Adl has been named interim leader for bin Laden. After bin Laden’s permanent successor is selected by al-Qaeda’s Shura Council, al-Adl may resume his former post as al-Qaeda’s overall military commander, and Shukrajuma may return to leading operations aimed at the continental United States, a post he is reported to have held before the death of Abu Faraj.

The foregoing rough — and perhaps incomplete — chronology represents a significant level of attrition among al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, and yet, through it all, U.S. and British civilian and military intelligence estimates have continued to conclude that al-Qaeda remains a potent threat to the United States and its major allies at home and abroad.

It also must be noted that core al-Qaeda’s ability to fill significant and recurring leadership losses is also a characteristic shared by its branches outside South Asia.

• In Yemen, for example, al-Qaeda’s senior and talented chief, Abu Ali al-Harethi, was killed by a drone strike early in the war. Al-Qaeda in Yemen had difficulty in immediately finding a qualified replacement and lost several of al-Harethi’s successors until Abu Wahayashi escaped from a Yemeni prison and took over the post. Wahayashi — bin Laden’s former private secretary — now commands al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian Peninsula [AQAP] and must be viewed as a candidate to succeed bin Laden. AQAP also appears to be al-Qaeda’s preferred venue for exhibiting and developing the talents of U.S.-citizen Muslim volunteers who join the group, including Samir Khan and Anwar al-Awlaki.
• In Saudi Arabia, the al-Qaeda organization lost at least a half dozen leaders since its first leader, Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, was killed in the middle of 2003. This severe attrition in large part led to combining the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al-Qaeda and basing the overall command of al-Qaeda operations on the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
• In Iraq, al-Qaeda-in-Iraq [AQI] lost its commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006 and then lost his replacement and its Iraq military commander — Abu Umar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Muhajir, respectively — on the same day in 2010. The now resurgent AQI organization currently is led by Abu Bakr Husseini al-Baghdadi.
• Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb [AQIM], al-Qaeda’s allied group in Somalia [al-Shabbab], and al-Qaeda’s branches in Lebanon and Palestine have likewise replaced killed senior leaders while continuing to conduct organizational expansion, media activities, and military operations.
• Beyond the leaders of these branches, al-Qaeda also has replaced such senior figures as Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Tawfiq bin Atash, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nasiri, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, Abu Layth al-Libi, Abu Mustafa Abu-al-Yazid, and dozen or more senior leaders who were captured before 9/11.

While planning for succession always has been a priority for al-Qaeda, the process was intensified after 9/11 both because of the group’s losses and bin Laden’s concern for al-Qaeda’s survivability in the event of his death, whatever its cause.

• Since he began speaking publicly in 1996, bin Laden said that he did not expect to live to see the end of the war he had declared against the United States. His wish, he said, was to die a martyr; he hoped that, if God granted him such a death, his blood would inspire young Muslims to join the jihad, which he clearly expected to be a multi-generational struggle.
• Reflecting this fatalism, bin Laden and his lieutenants after 9/11 began to disperse the organization in an effort to ensure that it could not be decapitated by the kind of operation that finally killed bin Laden. In this effort, they were overwhelmingly successful.
• At 9/11, for example, the majority of al-Qaeda’s manpower, training facilities, and planning operations were concentrated in Afghanistan, and much of that infrastructure was wrecked by the U.S.-NATO coalition by the middle of 2002.
• But even given this disaster, bin Laden presided over a dispersal process that today sees al-Qaeda with some presence in Afghanistan, and strong branches in Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, the Levant, Palestine, Iraq, and across North Africa. Objectively, al-Qaeda today possesses a larger organization than it had at 9/11, as well as a far broader geographic base.
• In addition, bin Laden in the last five years of his life devoted time and resources to building al-Qaeda’s influence and operational capabilities in the English-speaking world. Through the rhetorical, operational, and media skills of U.S.-citizen Muslims like Azzam al-Amriki [Adam Gadahn], Adnan Shukrajuma, Samir Khan [Inspire Magazine], Omar Hammami [Somalia], and Anwar al-Awalki, al-Qaeda has inspired U.S.-citizen Muslims to undertake violent activities inside the United States, men such as Major Nidal Hassan [Fort Hood], Najibullah Zazi [NYC subways], and Faisal Shahzad [Times Square].
• That bin Laden consciously sought to prepare al-Qaeda and the Islamic world for his demise can also be seen in his relative quiet over the past five years, a quiet that was filled by repeated media presentations showcasing men from al-Qaeda’s next generation of leaders — men such as Abu Yaha al-Libi, Anwar al-Awalki, Abu Wahayashi, and Azzam al-Amriki. This process was aimed at acquainting Muslims with al-Qaeda’s future leaders.
• Overall, the success of al-Qaeda’s dispersal efforts has not only made the organization nearly impossible to decapitate, it has given it multiple operational platforms it did not possess in 2001. The activities of these branches, moreover, give many more men the opportunity to train, gain combat experience, and develop as leaders than did the al-Qaeda organization that existed on or before 9/11. The branches — which today are seldom the venue of U.S. drone or Special Forces attacks — likewise ensure that a pool of quality leadership candidates is largely safe and readily available for al-Qaeda’s senior leaders to designate as successors-in-waiting for those leaders who surely will be lost in combat or via capture.

In conclusion, it is fair to say that al-Qaeda has long been well prepared to handle the unexpected death of leaders, even of bin Laden himself.

• After nearly 16 years of trying, as the last three U.S. presidents have said, to bring al-Qaeda’s leaders “to justice one at a time,” the West finds itself faced with a most welcome body count of dead al-Qaeda leaders, but with no credible measure of progress against the group as a whole, much less the movement it inspires and instigates.
• While the West must clearly continue to kill and capture as many al-Qaeda leaders in as many places as possible, this alone will not stop the steady growth in al-Qaeda’s size and thus in its ability to replace leaders. Likewise, the martyrdom of bin Laden and other senior leaders is likely to inspire numbers of young men to join the cause.
• Until the West’s political leadership accepts the clear reality that young Muslims are inspired to join al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies not only because of the words and deeds of the groups and their leaders, but because of what Western governments do in the Muslim world, U.S. military and intelligence services will find that their efforts to kill or capture al-Qaeda leaders and other Islamist chiefs will do little to slow the growth of the international militant Islamist movement in the coming generation, and with it the threat to U.S. interests at home and abroad.

While some in the media swoon over President Obama’s “plan” for the Middle East — note the Washington Post’s piece by David Ignatius — and the Israel-First fifth column prepares to teach the Democrats a lesson in 2012, the rest of us common folk can see how irrelevant we are to the foreign-policy plans of Mr. Obama and our bipartisan political elite.

In his May 19th, 2011, speech, Obama details our elite’s desire to reshape the Muslim world in its image, an image which has nothing to do with America and everything to do with a coterie of very well educated elitists issuing edicts that tell Americans and Muslims to accept behavioral instructions from their betters and then think, act, and vote accordingly. And Mr. Obama, again, demonstrated the bankruptcy of the U.S. educational system. A product of two of our most prestigious universities, Mr. Obama was arrogant, ignorant of the world, and blithely unaware that he is either.

Adopting the crazed and crusading words of Mr. Bush and the Neoconservatives, Obama began his Middle East speech by saying “we know our own future is bound to this region,” and proceeded to instruct the Islamic world that, because this is true, Muslims must become just like us — or else. From there on, Obama signals his and our political elite’s disdain for Americans and assumes a mantle of interventionism much more encompassing than anything ever worn by the lamentable Woodrow Wilson.

In his arrogance, Obama condemns “the relentless tyranny of governments that deny their citizens dignity” and argues that “[i]n too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of too few,” referring in each case to Arab dictators. He seems unaware that he also described a U.S. government that, under both parties, has for thirty years denied its own citizens dignity at every turn:

• Both parties have ruined the economy so we have to hold out the begging bowl to Chinese and Arab dictators. They also have created 9-percent unemployment; made the nation hostage to foreign oil producers; put 45-plus million Americans on food stamps; and left 20-percent of American kids without enough to eat.
• Both parties have made our military contemptible by refusing to allow U.S. forces to win wars our presidents unconstitutionally start.
• Both parties have refused to enforce existing immigration and border-control laws so that Mexico’s impoverished population, endemic corruption, and drug-related violence are flowing into our southwestern states. The Democrats also use this festering wound they and the Republicans created to prepare the ground to abridge the 2nd Amendment.
• And while all this goes on, both parties steal money from the pockets of U.S. citizens to give to Israel, spend on the defense of the Saudi tyranny, and fund an Egypt run by a military dictatorship.

Obama and his bipartisan colleagues do not seem to realize that tyranny can be defined not only as political and physical oppression by foreign regimes, but by the callousness, indifference, incompetence, and lawlessness of the United States government. Ought not Washington give top priority to the “dignity” of U.S. citizens, who are, after all, the ones who pay taxes and see their soldier-children die to help Bush and Obama chase the insane goal of giving dignity and U.S. wealth to foreigners?

In his ignorance of the world, the super-Wilsonian Obama then performed as an interventionist extraordinaire, detailing his diktats to the Muslim world and Israel:

• Obama out-Bushed Bush and the Neoconservatives by a country mile, calling for U.S.-dictated (and enforced?) regime change in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Iran, and Yemen.
• Obama unilaterally declared Islam out and secular democracy in. He then redeclared Mrs. Clinton’s cultural/feminist war on Muslim society and Islamic culture by announcing that Washington demands the implementation of “free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion, equally for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders — whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.”
• Obama dismissed some of the age-old and lethal religious problems in Islamic civilization — Coptic Christians-vs.-Muslims, Shia-vs.-Sunni — as meaningless rivalries akin to those between Kiwanis and Rotarians. Obama never recognized that he, Mrs. Clinton, Senator Graham, and Senator McCain ensured the slaughter of more Egyptian Copts by promoting “democracy” in Egypt, and that he and Bush increased the hatred of Sunnis for Shias by making Iraq a Shia state, a move that increases the chance of regional sectarian warfare. He finishes with a goal that could not be enforced by all the military might at America’s disposal: “Coptic Christians must have the right to worship freely in Cairo, just as the Shia must never have their mosques destroyed in Bahrain.” Obama also seems to forget that he, Bush, and Petraeus got a semblance of stability in Baghdad because they allowed the Shias” sectarian cleansing of most of the city’s Sunni population.
• Obama intervened more deeply into a Muslim-Israeli religious war that is irrelevant to U.S. national interests and security. He ordered Israel to obey his new policy on a return to the 1967 borders, thereby undermining its right to defend itself as its leaders see fit. No country has a “right to exist,” but all have an absolute right to defend themselves. Obama, in dictating to Israel, takes the fallacious right-to-exist doctrine and adds to it the caveat “as long as Barack and Hillary approve.” [1] On this issue, Obama once again proves he, his party, and the Republicans cannot get a handle on the Founders” simple definition of non-intervention, which is; do not get involved in foreign disputes and wars in which you have no interest. (NB: Some U.S. citizens who call themselves non-interventionists also misdefine non-interventionism on this issue by arguing that non-interventionism means being anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.) The appropriate non-interventionist position is: A pox on Israel and Palestine, both are absolutely unessential to U.S. interests or security and should receive no U.S. funding or protection. [2]
• Obama abolished the sovereignty of the nation-states he dislikes and promised to direct U.S. officials to use money and technology in an interventionist campaign across the Muslim world that will create chaos, violence, and Islamist strength, not democracy. “Our message is simple,” Obama said, in words fit for a man unfamiliar with reality, “if you take the risks reform entails, you will have the full support of the United States. — Across the region, we intend to provide assistance to civil society, including those who may not be officially sanctioned, and who speak uncomfortable truths. And we will use the technology to connect with — and listen to — the voices of the people.”

After detailing his interventionist, democracy-mongering, and probably war-producing agenda, Obama caps his crusader presentation with a monumental lie: “So we face a historic opportunity — There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity.” For Obama and our bipartisan governing elite nothing could be farther from the truth. These men and women welcome “self-determination and opportunity” only if it results in secularism and Western-style democracy, which, of course, requires the destruction of Islam.

In his May 19th speech, Obama declared war on most of the world’s Muslim population; made himself the agent through which Professor Huntington’s warning of a “clash of civilizations” will become reality; and ensured that the remembered words and deeds of Osama bin Laden will continue to inspire young Muslims to hate and fight the U.S. government for its unrelenting interventionism in the Muslim world.

1. One can never rule out the chance that Obama cleared his remarks with Netanyahu before he spoke. By insisting that HAMAS must recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” Obama and Netanyahu may be betting that HAMAS stands by its guns — as it will when asked to surrender because of a “right” dreamed-up by the West — and thereby can be made to take the fall for another breakdown of the “peace process.”
2. If Obama blind-sided the Israeli government, the one positive aspect of his intervention is that he might have cost himself and the Democrats the 2012 election by alienating the Israel-First fifth column of U.S. citizens, much of the media, AIPAC, and the AIPAC-suborned Congress. Electing the Republican Party as it is currently configured is no improvement, but Obama’s defeat would show Americans how deeply U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters have corrupted their political system, while simultaneously cutting Israel’s throat with their maximalist, Muslim-hating positions. With this corruption manifest, Americans might then begin to eradicate these agents of a foreign power from U.S. political life.

While Mrs. Clinton, General Petraeus, and Senator Kerry leak information to the media about “accelerating” peace talks with the Taliban, Mullah Omar and his lieutenants are thanking Allah for Islam’s clearly approaching victory in Afghanistan. The Clinton-Petraeus-Kerry disinformation now flowing is simply meant to prepare Americans for a U.S.-led surrender in Afghanistan. We are defeated there, and while Democrats and Republicans may tart up the retreat of the U.S.-NATO coalition as “mission accomplished,” the truth will be that the second superpower was defeated in Afghanistan by mujahideen armed only with faith and weaponry of Korean War vintage.

U.S. officials have told the media that they are talking to Taliban leaders about what “conditions” they want in exchange for joining a Karzai-led Afghan government. They ought to save their time. The Taliban and its allies today want what they have demanded since 12 September 2001: POWER. This is the non-negotiable demand of Mullah Omar, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and other Afghan insurgent leaders. These men know that the Afghan war is a zero-sum game; they either win or they lose. They also know that there will be no post-NATO coalition arrangement that lasts any longer than the departure of the last Western bayonet. The Afghan leaders may give the U.S.-NATO coalition a decent interval to withdrawal — as they did the Red Army — but Karzai and any of his colleagues who stay behind will be tortured, carved up, and then hung from the same lampposts the Afghan communist leader Najibullah and his sidekicks were hung from in the 1990s after Moscow abandoned them.

Currently, the Taliban and its allies are on top of the world. The Obama administration, the British and French governments, and most of the other coalition countries are publicly discussing an accelerated withdrawal. Telling Mullah Omar and his colleagues that you are going to leave is — of course — music to the ears of men whose forte is patience, fatalism, and a killer instinct. And after all, what could be a more heady experience for Allah’s warriors than to hear the leaders of infidelity publicly admit they are licked and about to creep shamefully away, tails appropriately between legs.

The death of Osama bin Laden also helps the Taliban. Mullah Omar and the other mujahideen would have preferred that he lived, but his death does not hurt the Taliban’s war effort. At the most basic level, U.S. military officials already have said that al-Qaeda’s main assistance to the Taliban — training, logistical support, and intelligence gathering — continues without interruption. In addition, Mullah Omar will be forever honored across the Muslim world as the one Muslim leader who was willing to defy the United States and temporarily lose his country to host and protect a fellow Muslim mujahideen, the “great lion of Islam,” Osama bin Laden. Omar’s protection of bin Laden moved the largely localized Taliban movement onto the Islamic world’s center stage.

Bin Laden’s death also removes a hindrance from Taliban fund-raising. As long as bin Laden was alive and closely identified with Omar and the Taliban, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Peninsula regimes had to be circumspect in how much and how openly they funneled money to the Afghans. Absent bin Laden — and given their growing anger and contempt for the Obama administration’s slavish support for Israel and back-stabbing of Arab leaders — the Saudi regime and its fellow Gulf tyrannies can be less clandestine and more generous in moving funds to the Taliban, which, after all, is more accurately described as the product of the Saudi religious establishment, rather than that of Pakistani machinations. Private donations to the Taliban from wealthy Gulf Arabs and wealthy Muslims worldwide never ceased, and now are likely to increase.

Finally, the Taliban will receive even more support from the Pakistan’s army and intelligence service. With Obama and NATO leaders having thrown in the towel in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s generals must move to start cleaning up the mess NATO will leave behind and to begin stabilizing their country, which first of all means finding a modus vivendi with the Pakistani Taliban that will begin to curtail that group’s violence inside Pakistan.

If that can be accomplished — and supplies of Arab-provided money and guns will speak loudly — the generals will then encourage the Pakistani Taliban to assist Mullah Omar and his allies in intensifying their war of attrition against the U.S.-NATO coalition and, after the coalition’s defeat, to aid in the destruction of Karzai’s regime. All of this promotes Pakistan’s vital national interests: lessening domestic violence; removing U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan; eliminating Karzai’s pro-Iran, pro-India regime; reinstalling an Islamist government in Kabul; and leaving India’s presence in Afghanistan untenable, thereby restoring Pakistan’s strategic depth on its western border and allowing the repositioning of military units to its border with India.

The way ahead in Afghanistan, therefore, seems to have been clearly demarcated by the West’s feckless politicians, diplomats, and — most especially — generals. The coming bottom line appears to be: The West loses, and the Taliban wins.

But not so fast, there is more to it. While it is true that the West loses, it is more accurate to say that Islam wins. And when thinking about what that victory will mean, it is worth recalling that Osama’s bin Laden and his generation were galvanized in favor of defending Islam via a jihad by the Afghan mujahideens’ defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan. It probably is wise — although a bit late — to ponder what impact the mujahideens’ defeat of the U.S. superpower in Afghanistan and Iraq will have on this generation of young Muslims, including those in North America.

With Osama bin Laden’s death it seemed for a moment that the U.S. government and the media might begin to assess why al-Qaeda and the Islamist movement are larger, more geographically dispersed, and more active in the United States then they were at 9/11. Having treated bin Laden for more than decade as a celebrity rather than as the thoughtful leader and modern manager he was, his death ought to have sidelined the Entertainment-Tonight approach to bin Laden/al-Qaeda/Islamist analysis and allowed all concerned — officials, journalists and citizens — a chance to step back and ask why America’s Islamist problem continues to expand. Two weeks after bin Laden’s death, however, the chance of such a clear-headed assessment — like the so-called Arab Spring — seems to be fading. [1]

First things first. The Obama administration and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress are making a hash of the aftermath of the raid that eliminated of bin Laden. The CIA and the U.S. military conducted a highly professional operation that accomplished its goal with no casualties. Since the Navy Seals returned to their bases in safety, the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government have engaged in an orgy of self-immolation in terms of America’s defense, one that benefits only the media they pander to. Leaking information about the military’s stealth helicopters gives all and sundry knowledge of a U.S. advantage best kept secret. Descriptions of the CIA observation post in Abbottabad make it extraordinarily more difficult to repeat that achievement against a now embarrassed, and therefore energized and alert, Pakistani security establishment.

The steady leaking of details about how bin Laden communicated with his organization titillates journalists and their readers, and allow Obama, John Brennan, Eric Holder, the sad likes of Lieberman, McCain, Graham, and other elected members of both parties to thump their chests, while giving al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups a useful and precise inventory about what we know of their communications systems at a time when they are racing to change and disguise them. The ignorant-of-Islam manner in which bin Laden’s burial was handled — his own followers, for example, would have torn down any shrine set up to mark his burial place on land — again underscores the lack of any conception whatsoever among our media and bipartisan political elite that America is involved in an expanding religious war. And while there is no cause to appease the enemy, it is always wise to avoid gratuitous errors — like bin Laden’s burial at sea — that benefit the Islamists and resonate negatively across the Islamic world among militant, moderate, and nominal Muslims.

Having frittered away many of the benefits wrought by the courage of CIA officers and the Seals for base political motives, Obama, McCain, and untold other senior officials — elected and unelected — also have reinforced their already strong positions as the chief recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda and the Islamist movement as whole. Claiming to have dealt a decisive blow against the limited number of Muslim thugs who hate our freedoms and lifestyle by killing bin Laden, our bipartisan political elite has once again demonstrated its willful ignorance of what motivates our Islamist foes. Not caring a whit about elections, gender equality, or civil liberties in U.S. society, the Islamists are motivated by our foreign policy — especially Washington’s slavish support for Israel and defense of the Saudi police state — and by Washington’s cultural war that seeks to impose secular democracy on Islamic civilization. This crusade has been waged by the last four U.S. presidents, but by no one more fanatically than Hilary Clinton and her I-Pad-distributing band of State Department imperialists. When you look for the Islamists’ motivation, as well as the basis of their appeal to the coming generation of young Muslims, you need look no farther than Mrs. Clinton’s half-baked pro-feminist, anti-Islamic cultural crusade.

And before the end of May, Obama, leading politicians in both parties, and the media will further cauterize the bleeding caused Islamists by bin Laden’s death via a matched pair of events which — in their simple absurdity — are worthy of a Marx Brothers’ movie. The media is reporting that President Obama — even as he and NATO merrily bomb hell out of Libyans — will soon deliver another we’re-all-peaceful-friends address to “the Muslim world,” like the Kiplingesque effort he delivered in Cairo when Mubarak was still his bosom friend. Most likely he will identify bin Laden’s killing as a success for the West and for the Muslim world — ignoring bin Laden’s heroic, Robin-Hood-like status therein — and then go on to tell all Muslims how they need to be more like Westerners. Obama will assure them — as he assured Americans in the 2008 campaign — that Washington is willing to help them ditch their old-time religion and rifles and step into the bright, if sordid light of modern paganism he, his party, and many Republicans represent and seek to install worldwide.

Having thus hectored Muslims in his best Wilsonian manner, Obama will then welcome America’s most reliably dangerous and war-mongering enemy to Washington, Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Having just assured the Muslim world of his good intentions, Arabic print media and satellite television channels will cover Obama talking, dining, and briefing the press with Netanyahu. They will then broadcast to the Muslim world coverage of Netanyahu speaking to a joint session of Congress and calling for more punitive measures against the Palestinians, war with Iran, and U.S. taxpayer funds to help Israel arm its military and steal more land. Most damagingly, the Muslim world will see most of the 535 Congressman and Senators — bought and paid for by AIPAC and other Israel-First U.S. citizens — stand and wildly applaud Netanyahu’s call for a war on Iran and so, in essence, an endless war with Islam. Muslims will draw the only possible logical conclusion: “Osama was right, no matter what the Americans say; they are bent on destroying Islam.”

One longs to hear Groucho, as President-Captain Spaulding, saying to Israelis and Palestinians, “Hello, I must be going, you boys fight it out to the death and, if anybody lives, ring me when it’s over.” Alas, that’s not to be. America’s unnecessary war with Islam will continue to bleed and bankrupt us, many in coming generation of Muslims will enlist in the jihad, and Osama — wherever he is — will be smiling and thanking Allah for enemies such as Obama, Bush, Clinton and the malignant and disloyal [2] Israel-Firsters who are driving America to more wars, economic ruin, and international isolation.

Endnotes

1. One kind of specious analysis, however, seems to have been skewered by leaks describing bin Laden’s hands-on management of al-Qaeda even from hiding. This is the social scientists’ pet theory of “leaderless jihad,” which — like their other fatuous theory about deradicalizing Islamists — has never been much more than a means by which social scientists can entrance naive politicians and thereby get their hands on money from the public treasury.
2. The term “disloyal” in this context refers to any U.S. citizen who seeks — via rhetoric, lobbying, bribery, campaign contributions, or media manipulation — to involve the United States in another country’s wars or external disputes even though no U.S. interests are at risk. The Israel-Firsters certainly fall into this category, as do George Clooney and his fellow Hollywood celebrities who have helped to create a situation in Africa that will lead to war by successfully pressing the U.S., the UN, and the EC to back the theft of oil-rich lands from Muslim Sudan and give them to a new Christian state apparently to be called Southern Sudan.

Since Osama bin Laden died, my Israel-First friends have returned to attacking me with gusto. Good old british18@earthlink.net — I think his name is Mark Grayson, who claims to be a brilliant and wealthy lawyer — popped up to threaten me with legal action, and someone person called Alan Reynolds (iihmg@yahoo.com) has begun sending slanderous materials about me to the media outlets I appeared on or talked to this week, starting with the Dallas Morning News. Worth noting is that Reynolds recommends that people talk to the scholar Walid Phares rather than me. Readers of this space will recall that Mr. Phares’ name also came up in the mix during the last spate of Israel-First attacks on me.

But the most interesting development in this round of Israel-First threats and attacks is the appearance of a person called “Margaret King” (margaretking28@yahoo.com). She has written to FOX along the same slanderous line as Mr. Reynolds above —Ms. King indicated that a man named Larry Johnson (ix.netcom.com) did the “research” — and she also has written to tell me that she is sending my “anti-Semitic” comments to the President and Provost at Georgetown. This is the tactic of old British18, but she says she and Israel-First have control over tenure appointments at Georgetown and will get them to deny me tenure — I’m an adjunct professor, so not eligible for tenure — just as she and Israel First got Yale to deny tenure to Juan Cole. She also infers that she and her money got me fired from the Jamestown Foundation. I have responded with sarcastic and snotty comments which led to the following notes from her.

Here is what Ms. King said about wrecking Professor Juan Cole’s career at Yale after I said that her threats to my tenure chances didn’t scare me a lick (since I didn’t have any such chances):

1.) From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com>
To: scheuermf@aol.com
Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 4:48 pm
Not a problem. Georgetown University senior personnel will be kept apprised of your more inappropriate remarks, particularly, those on your blog. Juan Cole was denied tenure at Yale due to his own blog and, ultimately, left.

2.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 4:56 pm

That’s what Juan Cole said, too, prior to being passed over for tenure and forced to leave Yale because of inappropriate posts on his blog.

3.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:10 pm

That’s what Cole said, too … before finally being dismissed by Yale for remarks on his blog. He since moved to Michigan.

4.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:23 pm

Juan Cole certainly thinks so. The winters in Michigan are terribly cold for poor Juan. Losing tenure at Yale was a big disappointment. Pity he didn’t take me seriously at the outset.

I repeated at this point that she didn’t scare me a lick, but she insisted that she and Israel-First controlled things at Georgetown.

5.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:31 pm

My prayers are always answered. Especially, by the Jesuits at Georgetown.

Then Ms. King went on to infer that she and Israel-First’s money got me fired from the Jamestown Foundation. The following e-mails followed a note from me that said she was dreaming if she thought she had any influence at Jamestown.

1.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 5:56 pm Jamestown gladly accepts my largesse.

2.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:04 pm

Foundations rely on the kindness of philanthropists. But, you already know this.

3.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:15 pm

The Board at Jamestown thinks otherwise.

4.) Re: Georgetown Provost O’Donnell From: Margaret King <margaretking28@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf@aol.com Date: Sat, May 7, 2011 6:30 pm

I’ll be sure to say hi to Jim Burnley [I don’t know this name] on your behalf, next time.

I am fairly plain spoken, but this is pretty brazen stuff. Did Ms. King and Israel-First’s money really wreck Professor Cole’s career at Yale, and does their money control appointments and tenure at Georgetown. I guess we will have to wait and see.

I regret being quiet for so long. (I have the nerve to presume here, perhaps wrongly, that my silence was not welcomed.) Anyway, I have posted almost all of the comments in the que and will get to the rest this weekend.

So much has happened since I last wrote that I thought I would post a few bullet points and then follow-up next week with fuller pieces.

Here goes:

1. The death of Osama bin Laden is great news for the United States, and it is much better that he was killed rather than captured. The U.S. Navy Seals and the Intelligence Community — especially CIA — deserve high marks for their courage and accomplishments. Those entities clearly know they scored a terrific tactical victory that is a solid step on the road toward final victory. They also know their success did not yield anything close to final victory, notwithstanding the triumphalism of the pathetic young children and addled adults who were this week in the streets to celebrate bin Laden’s death. These are the same folks who, three years ago, formed the “non-partisan peace movement” and were in the same streets to protest the work of U.S. military personnel and CIA officers as that of murderers and torturers.
2. The political aftermath of our military success could have been handled better by the Marx Brothers than by the White House and the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. They have leaked very sensitive information for partisan purposes, and have made future military and intelligence operations in Pakistan more dangerous and difficult. And their story of the attack changed so often that some doubted the veracity of the claim that bin Laden is dead. We ended up in the absurd position of having al-Qaeda today confirm bin Laden’s death and thereby validate the accuracy of the U.S. government’s claims
3. As discussed here before, Pakistan’s interests and those of the United States in regard to Afghanistan, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda/bin Laden are not and have never been congruent, and U.S. politicians have known that since 9/11. This is a war that we will win or lose based on what we ourselves do. No proxy — not Pakistan, not Yemen, not any other country — is going to do our dirty work. Let us hope that Sunday’s killing of bin Laden is a sign that both parties are aspiring toward adulthood and henceforth will not delegate the protection of the United States to foreigners who sensibly have no intention of sacrificing their interests for ours.
4. Both houses of Congress are blowing hot air when it comes to the threat to cutoff aid to Pakistan. Why? Because we have given Pakistan the whip hand in the bilateral relationship. The reality is that our last two presidents and those popularly regarded as military geniuses — McChrystal and Petreaus — have marooned a 150,000 strong U.S.-NATO military force in Afghanistan. The supply needs of that force are absolutely dependent on Pakistan’s permission to use Karachi port to bring in supplies by ship and then unload and truck them through Pakistani territory to Afghanistan. We could not bring in enough supplies via cargo aircraft and the overland routes through the Former Soviet Union to Kabul are frequently closed by winter’s snow. Bottom line: U.S. aid must flow to Pakistan as long as the U.S.-NATO force is in Afghanistan — unless the Congress wants to see that force starve, lose mobility, and slowly run out of fuel and ammunition.

The announcement this week that British, Italian, and French military officers are being sent to “advise” the Libyan resistance expands NATO’s intervention in Libya and adds to the number of U.S., French, and British Special and intelligence forces already on the ground there. As well, the Obama administration’s decision to send military equipment worth $25 million to the resistance deepens U.S. involvement. The “just-protecting-civilians” and “no-boots-on-the-ground” mantras emanating from Washington and NATO capitals are quite simply lies.

This first small tranche of U.S.-NATO ground forces were sent to Libya to pinpoint targets for NATO air attack; size up the composition, attitudes, and talent of the anti-Gaddafi resistance; and find and prepare landing strips and assembly areas for Western troops. The just deployed British, Italian, and French officers will assess the work accomplished to date; provide general-staff-like direction for the resistance’s military operations; and prepare for an influx of U.S.-NATO troops if Washington and its allies lack the manliness to admit the intervention was a mistake, and instead continue what Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy have implicitly described as a crusade for democracy.

The slow, deliberate advance toward inserting substantial ground forces is hardly a surprise. Air power can win nothing by itself; Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy were surely told this by their military advisers before the intervention began. It also is clear that the citizenry that supports Gaddafi’s regime — for reasons of loyalty, self-interest, or fear — is as large or larger than that supporting the Libyan resistance. On this point, there is neither media reporting nor U.S. or NATO propaganda reporting any problems — sabotage, ambushes, assassinations, etc. — in the rear of Libyan regime forces as they push east toward Benghazi. If Libya was truly a nation-in-arms against Gaddafi, we surely would be seeing his forces’ rear areas plagued with hit-and-run attacks by resistance fighters.

So two months into the Libyan Democracy Crusade, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Graham, and their colleagues among Europe’s Knights Templar are where anyone with a lick of commonsense knew they would be once the decision to intervene was made. These great and worldly Wilsonian minds must soon decide whether to admit defeat and leave the Libyan resistance to its fate — the correct option — or authorize what will amount to a Western invasion of Libya to take power from Gaddafi and give it to a resistance based in the country’s most thoroughly Islamist and pro-mujahideen region. Odds are that they will do the latter because, as Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy wrote in an invasion-justifying article in the New York Times on 14 April 2011, “Britain, France, and the United States will not retreat until the United Nations Security Council resolutions have been implemented and the Libyan people can choose their own future.”

On the eve of a potential U.S.-NATO invasion, then, it is worth looking at the costs — beyond wasted funds — that this Libyan misadventure will impose on the United States and its allies. If Obama, et. al, make the right decision and abandon the Libyan resistance, the price will be high but tolerable. The Muslim world will claim the resistance was abandoned by an anti-Muslim West because it would increase the role of Islam in governing post-Gaddafi Libya — which it would. The UN also would be discredited, although for some this would be a net positive given that the UN’s founders never intended it to be the pivotal agent for destroying member states, as it has been so far in 2011 in Libya, Egypt, Ivory Coast, etc.

If, on the other hand, Obama and his brother democracy crusaders decide to invade Libya to fulfill a UN “mandate” to “protect innocent civilians,” the West’s self-imposed defeat and the costs attendant to it will be much greater. Why?

• There is no guarantee that the military forces of a U.S.-NATO-Libyan-mujahideen coalition can long survive as a functioning entity, let alone defeat Gaddafi. U.S.-led military coalitions are zero for three in winning interventions to date in Muslim lands — Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan — and the Islamist portion of the Libyan resistance will be as inclined to attack “crusader forces” as they are Gaddafi’s. The word quagmire is much overused, but this situation would surely merit that description.
• If a U.S.-NATO invasion defeats Gaddafi — then what? A stable democratic successor regime? An Islamic government? A combination of the two? Or a failed state? The last option probably is the most likely, which means either a long-term Western occupation — which would spur an Islamist insurgency — or a quick Western skedaddle which would leave Libya to the best organized portion of the resistance, the Islamists. (NB: Hows that for a lose-lose situation?)

Both of these bad options are in the future and so remain avoidable. But the West already has suffered an enormous loss by choosing to try to destroy Gaddafi’s regime, which the Wikileaks’ documents show was an anchor of the West’s counter-al-Qaeda efforts in the Maghreb. If Gaddafi survives, his regime will be hesitant — to say the least — to renew cooperation, and it will be weaker and facing a reinvigorated and now well-armed domestic Islamist opposition.

This, in turn, will mean Tripoli will have less control over its borders and so the movement of North African mujahideen into and out of Tunisia and Algeria will be much improved, causing increased trouble for the still inchoate regime in Tunis and the already-at-war-with-al-Qaeda regime in Algiers. Needless to say, reliable access to Algeria’s energy production is infinitely more important to the United States and its European allies than anything to be found in Libya.

The unnecessary Libyan intervention, then, is marching toward a disaster for the U.S. and NATO, as well as toward a triumph for the Islamist movement inspired and symbolized by bin Laden. There are absolutely no unintended consequences at play in the deteriorating situation. It is the direct and utterly predictable result of the daft, messianic Wilsonianism of Obama, Clinton, McCain, Graham, Sarkozy, and Cameron, leaders who, by intervening to install democracy, are on the verge of making the Maghreb and Egypt safe for the spread of Islamist militancy.