Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

The rush in the West to proclaim the advance of democracy in the Arab world has led to the propagation of an ill-conceived and dangerous corollary: that the revolts in the Middle East and North Africa also mark the irrelevance of al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups.

“Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By,” declared the New York Times. “Uprisings Put al Qaeda on Sidelines,” asserted the Wall Street Journal. And Western politicians, academics and even intelligence specialists appear to agree that, with peaceful and pro-democratic change afoot in the Middle East, the world has moved beyond al-Qaeda, leaving Osama bin Laden writhing in the dust.

If only that were true. Since bin Laden declared war against the United States in 1996, al-Qaeda’s main goals have included the destruction of the Arab world’s tyrannies and of Israel. The events of recent weeks only move al-Qaeda closer to those objectives.

Today, the dictatorships of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt are gone. Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh is little more than the mayor of his capital city of Sanaa. And Col. Moammar Gaddafi may be on his way out in Libya, unless some knee-jerk U.S.-led intervention saves him by refocusing Libyan and other North African Islamists on what they consider an infidel threat greater than Gaddafi.

As for Israel, the fall of Mubarak — and the unsealing of Egypt’s border with Gaza — pose a security disaster equal to the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Israel’s two anti-Islamist shields to the east and to the west are now history.

All of this amounts to an enormous strategic step forward for al-Qaeda. That these victories have come with virtually no investment of manpower or money by the terrorist network, and with self-defeating applause from the Facebook-obsessed, Twitter-addled West, only makes them all the sweeter for bin Laden.

Peering into the future, the autocrats’ probable successors likewise offer abundant good news for al-Qaeda and kindred groups. In Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and any other nation with a U.S.-supported tyranny that sinks in the weeks and months ahead, the role of Islamist groups will become larger — and over time perhaps dominant — if only because the populations in play are almost entirely Muslim and because Islamist groups have the most effective nationwide infrastructures to replace the old guard. And most do and will receive funding, openly or covertly, from always generous donors in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Sunni gulf states.

Each new regime is likely to host a more open, religion-friendly environment for speech, assembly and press freedoms than did Mubarak and his ilk. So it will be easier for media-savvy Islamist groups — whether peaceful or militant — to proselytize, publish and foment without immediate threat of arrest and incarceration. Indeed, Washington and its Western allies will dogmatically urge the new governments to maintain such freedoms, even as the Islamists capitalize on them.

The Islamists will follow the formulas for gaining power and then governing that are detailed in the Koran and the Sunnah, the prophet Muhammad’s sayings and traditions. Western experts have long failed to recognize these documents as Islam’s equivalent to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In Egypt, for example, governance based on them would be far more familiar, comfortable and culturally appropriate than anything opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei and his followers could offer.

The blessing of the Arab revolts for al-Qaeda and its allies also can be seen in the opening of prisons across Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. In Egypt alone, the news media are reporting that at least 17,000 prisoners have been freed. Many of those released are not thieves and murderers, but Islamist firebrands that the regimes had jailed to protect their internal security — at times even at the request and with the funding of Washington and its allies. Indeed, many were incarcerated as a result of quiet cooperation between Western and Arab intelligence services; their release is a major setback for these efforts.

So al-Qaeda and like-minded groups are now being replenished by a steady flow of pious, veteran mujahideen, each of whom will never forget that U.S. and other Western funds helped keep them jailed by Arab tyrants.

The revolts also mean that the United States and its Western allies must take on a far greater share of the counterterrorism operations that they previously conducted with the help of Arab regimes. The days of Mubarak, Saleh, Gaddafi and Ben Ali doing the dirty work for American, European and Israeli counterterrorism efforts are over. Soon it will be U.S. and Western special forces and intelligence services that will be ordered to capture or kill militants in Muslim lands — individuals that our tyrannical friends used to dispose of for us.

How tragic that in the war being waged against the United States by al-Qaeda and its allies precisely because of Washington’s relentless intervention in the Islamic world, the U.S. government will now be forced to intervene even more — or sit on the sidelines and watch al-Qaeda build or expand bases from which to threaten U.S. security.

Of course, open and vociferous participation by Islamists in the demonstrations in Cairo, Tunis, Tripoli and elsewhere would have earned a lethal and Western-supported response from Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gaddafi. So al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups simply used a talent that long ago atrophied in the West — the ability to keep their mouths shut. As usual, the West wrongly concluded that silence connotes not strategy, but impotence and irrelevance.

Bin Laden and his peers are counting on the fact that the uprisings’ secular, pro-democracy Facebookers and tweeters — so beloved of reality-averse Western journalists and politicians — are a thin veneer across a deeply pious Arab world. They are confident that these revolts are not about democratic change but about who, in societies where peaceful transfers of power are rare, will fill the vacuum left by the dictators and consolidate power. These men also know that the answer to that question will ultimately come out of the barrel of a Kalashnikov, of which they have many, along with the old tyrants’ weapons stockpiles, on which they are now feasting.

Michael F. Scheuer, chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, is an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of the new biography “Osama bin Laden.”

I have spent nearly all of February traveling around America talking about my biography of Osama bin Laden and what I see as the wisdom of a non-interventionist foreign policy for America. I will always regard this experience as a privilege. For this excursion I wish to thank Oxford University Press and all of those who listened to and then discussed these issues with me in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

I am sure I learned more in these exchanges than did my listeners, and I was heartened by the more-than-fair hearing my case for non-intervention received. I especially want to thank the chapters of the World Affairs Council that hosted me so graciously, and to recommend that an extraordinary institution in Portland known as “Powell’s Books” be put on everyone’s visit-before-dying list.

Having almost gotten home, I thought I would quickly comment on the abject failure of logic and rampant Pollyanna-ism that seems to have taken hold of the U.S. and Western media in regard to current affairs in the Arab world. While I plan to write more fully on this from home later this week, I have been struck by the media’s definition of how recent events in the Middle East are “good news for America.” The following ten points are now current on Google News and form the basis for this unadulterated, child-like, and wishing-makes-it-so optimism.

1. Security in Iraq continues to deteriorate, with one of the country’s biggest oil production facilities being shut down by an attack.
2. The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan is still losing, and reports are multiplying that General Petraeus is seeking a new job before the house of cards he and his counter-insurgency experts built collapses.
3. The Yemeni regime — deemed a “key ally” by the Obama administration — appears to be losing what little control it had of the country.
4. Mubarak’s regime, which, whatever you think of it, was the strongest and most reliable ally of Washington and Israel in the region has been destroyed, and the transition from Mubarak to a military dictatorship is being billed as the “birth of democracy.”
5. Much of Libya’s oil production is shut down and domestic gasoline prices in the U.S. are headed for economic-growth killing $4.00 or more per gallon.
6. President Obama and his fellow NATO and UN interventionists are discussing Libya with “all options” on the table, presumably including neo-colonial combat forces if Qahdafi’s resolve to survive continues to harden and his forces make gains.
7. Al-Qaeda is irrelevant and history has passed it by, even as its two main goals are on they way to being met — the destruction of the Arab tyrannies and and the fatal weakening of Israel’s security — and its third goal is reaching fruition as President Obama presides over the retreat of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Iraq with none of Washington’s pre-war goals accomplished.
8. Egypt’s long-closed border with Gaza is being opened, and Israel’s air force is merrily bombing the Gazans.
9. A bin-Laden inspired, Saudi student was arrested in Texas last week — without the usual FBI “sting” — for planning attacks on the U.S. energy sector. His motivation: Washington’s intervention in the Muslim world. (NB: There are now thirty-thousand Saudi students in the United States on easy-for-Saudis-to-get student visas.)
10. Up to 40,000 convicted Islamist militants, insurgents, theorists, and terrorists have been released from Mubarak’s prisons. Unknown numbers also have been released in Tunisia and Libya.

Now, let me frankly admit that I suffer gravely from the continuing impact of a traditional Jesuit education (Canisius College, Buffalo, NY), one that prepares its recipients to face facts as they are found; to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be; and to never allow silly, ungrounded hopes to displace logic. Armed with that education, the above ten points seem to me to offer little reason for optimism about U.S. security or economic growth — unless they are used to write the script for a new movie starring the Marx Brothers.

The piece below the broken line appeared today on the National Interest’s foreign affairs blog. It is a reflection on the costs Americans pay for their elite’s relentless interventionism, as well as for the failure of the U.S. educational system. I suggest at the end of the piece that we all could stand to closely reread George Washington’s Farewell Address; indeed, I suspect that Obama, Clinton, McCain, Cantor, Biden, and most of the Congress and media would benefit from an initial reading.

On leaving the presidency, Washington provided a clear and concise guide for what America should not do overseas; namely, (1) do not intervene in affairs in which you have no genuine national interest; (2) do not intervene in issues you do not understand; and, above all, (3) do not intervene in the name of imposing America’s political system on others as we are the model, not the war-causing installer of republicanism and/or democracy.

Had any in our governing class been familiar with Washington’s guidance, the makers of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the past half-century would have been preparing always to be ready to ask one simple question and answer it with another simple question:

Question: Who rules in Cairo? (Or Amman, Tunis, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Damascus, etc.)

Answer: Who cares?

Alas, the America-protecting path delineated by President Washington was not taken. As a result, we have just seen Obama’s administration and the Republicans not only intervene in Egypt, but intervene on both sides, just as it and its predecessors have mindlessly intervened in the Israel-Muslim war by frenetically funding and arming Israel, while simultaneously arming and providing for the defense of Saudi Arabia.

The wages of both intervention and historical ignorance are quite painful.

Osama bin Laden thought the mujahideen had seen the last of Marxist-like thinkers in 1980s Afghanistan where the “inevitability” of communism’s world mastery proved illusory. To his surprise and joy, however, this sort of mental malady reappeared with a vengeance this month as the woefully uneducated West cheered democracy’s “inevitable” advance in Egypt.

From CNN to FOX to BBC, journalists performed as weepy, ahistorical cheerleaders, describing crowds of Jeffersonian Egyptians filling Tahrir Square to replicate the events of Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787. And then — Mubarak left and democracy was installed! The unfinished republican project Americans have labored on for 800 years since Runnymede was completed in Egypt in only 18 days. We live in an age of wonders.

Is this analysis flawed? Is the argument’s logic weak? Well no, certainly not. Egypt is what it is, as the saying goes. In a time of economic crisis, political chaos, and looming violence, 80 million Egyptians grasped an alien, long-detested ideology called “secular democracy,” turning their collective back on the Islam that heretofore graced and ordered their lives, and gave them the will and courage to patiently resist Mubarak’s tyranny and rely on God’s promise of victory. They swapped Allah for paganism in just eighteen days. Why, my goodness, Katie Couric said so, didn’t she?

Well, back in his Afghan cave Osama bin Laden knows better, not having benefited from an Ivy League education. Indeed, if Salifism allows such things, Brother Osama is doing the Happy Dance. Bin Laden, his lieutenants, and their allies know that after the Western media returns to what it does best — isn’t Lindsey Lohan due in court? — Muslim Egyptians will be reaching for Allah’s rope, not Facebook’s self-deification. And the Islamists also will know the stout wall of U.S.-and-Israeli-supported Arab tyranny they have long attacked is cracking.

When the West sees pious Egyptians moving toward Islam, not secular democracy, bin Laden will have thanked God for His gifts to the mujahideen. Having designated Arab police states and Israel as Islam’s main enemies — brain-dead America simply being in the way due to its money and guns — bin Laden et. al. now see the ruins of the strongest Arab tyranny, as well as the most loyal, least demanding ally secured by Washington‘s relentless intervention in the Muslim world. They know whatever regime follows Mubarak will be weaker, more influenced by those demanding a form of Sharia law — including General Clapper’s Kiwanis-in-waiting, the Muslim Brotherhood — and, being a democracy, more representative of Egyptians’ deep, abiding hatred for Israel.

With one tyranny dished, bin Laden also will know Israel is thigh deep in disaster. Israel’s physical security long depended on repression by the Levant’s three border-controlling tyrannies: Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. After all, look at the trouble Israel gets from Lebanon’s fitfully representative political system. Now, Israel faces Jeffersonian Egypt, which, to reflect the popular will, must be less “friendly” toward it, less willing to seal its Gaza border, and unwilling to kill Egyptians trying to aid Palestinians. Perhaps the West missed the anti-Mubarak posters showing David’s star burned into his forehead. And perhaps that’s because few Western journalists explained the hard truth that Mubarak was hated not just for repression and joblessness, but because he dealt with Israel and persecuted Egyptians for their faith.

So for bin Laden and all Islamist leaders, happy days are here. Through no actions of their own, their most potent Arab foe disappeared at the hands of their other erstwhile enemies, the United States, and its allies. They can now exploit the Egyptian debacle knowing that, as they do so, Washington will be further weakened economically as the new Egyptian regime begs funds to rebuild — and hints it will take Saudi money if U.S. taxpayers are not shaken down — and the Israel-suborned Congress ships great batches of taxpayer funds to Israel for a military and border-control build-up to cope with Egyptian democracy and prepare for Israel’s other two indispensable tyrants — Jordan’s Abdullah and Syria’s al-Asad — going Mubarak‘s way.

As ever, the wages of U.S. intervention are dire. After intervening for 30-plus years to support Mubarak and allow Israel’s every whim, Washington now finds itself headed toward more intervention in a probably useless attempt to rebalance the Potemkin political “system” its intervention helped create. Like an umpire trying to make up for a bad call, Washington’s forthcoming intervention will spread the Egyptian disaster and undermine U.S. security; only bin Laden and the Islamists will benefit.

Perhaps a reading of General Washington’s Farewell Address is in order?

Non-Intervention

In a series of media appearances this week on the issue of Egypt it was again driven home to me that non-interventionism and nationalism are two positions that are outside of what Tocqueville called the circle of acceptable free speech in America. Indeed, to argue that Washington’s intervention on the side of Arab tyrannies for 30-plus years has hurt the United States makes one an America-basher; to argue that Israel is a central and increasingly lethal problem for the United States in its relations with the Arab world makes one an anti-Semite; and to argue that Washington should be banned from reaching into its citizens’ pockets, stealing their income, and giving it to Israel, Egypt, or any other foreign nation when unemployment is at 9-percent, 43 million Americans are on food stamps, the country’s infrastructure is crumbling, and 15-percent of American kids go to bed hungry makes one an anachronistic isolationist — and an anti-Semite.

We have apparently gotten to a point in American history where our governing elite, in order to feel good about themselves, prefer funding tyranny and defending theocracies like Israel and Saudi Arabia, while Americans are out of work and their kids are hungry. It seems apparent that the wages of Washington’s unrelenting interventionism are steep and bloody, and that those who lust to intervene care virtually nothing about the welfare of non-elite Americans and their families.

As an aside, whether you hate FOX News or love it, I am continually impressed by the channel’s willingness to host points of view — like mine — which are outside both its own and Tocqueville’s circle of acceptable free speech. FOX hosts seldom agree with what I say, but they seem to always seek different points of view. This is in sharp contrast to, say, the uniformity of pro-intervention and anti-nationalist views usually presented by Ms. Couric, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Blitzer, Ms. Maddow, and others cut from exactly the same cloth. And in terms of compassion for guests, no one takes better care of guests than FOX. Last night, for example, Erich Bolling was good enough to have a Rabbi on the panel who helpfully explained that to question the worth of the U.S.-Israel relationship showed not only that I was “ignorant,” but that there is “something wrong inside of me,” this last of course simply code for identifying me as an anti-Semite. Allowed to articulate my views and afforded a free, Rabbi-provided psychiatric analysis — you can’t do much better than that!

Egypt and al-Qaeda

While the ahistorical Western media, President Obama, and Secretary Clinton chirp on, like clueless clones of the lamentable Woodrow Wilson, about a “quick transition to democracy” in Egypt — where the mass of people neither recognize nor will abide a church-state separation — the big winners of the unrest in the Muslim world are, without question, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and other Islamic and Islamist groups. These entities always have identified the Muslim world’s tyrannies — and Israel — as their main enemies. (NB: The United States is attacked first because it has put itself in the way by funding, arming, and defending both.) Anything that weakens or destroys Washington’s Islamofascist allies, therefore, advances the militants’ agenda — especially al-Qaeda’s — by weakening the police states they oppose and by creating the certainty that, if those states fall, their successors will be less cooperative with Israel if they aim at all to implement their peoples’ views. For al-Qaeda, new regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria would be a particular bonanza because weaker successor governments would pay less attention to keeping their borders with Israel closed, and would be less willing to kill those of its citizens seeking to aid the Palestinians.

While it clearly is wrong to say that al-Qaeda, its Islamist allies, and other Islamic groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are the “cause” of current unrest, it is just as wrong to ignore the fact that over time they will be its greatest beneficiary.

Afghanistan-Pakistan

The following was published in The Hill’s blog on 4 February 2011:

President Obama’s State of the Union Speech cited a light at the Afghan tunnel’s end, and General Petraeus said a few hours earlier that conditions are improving in Afghanistan. For readers of Google News on Afghanistan and Pakistan these statements hit a discordant note; journalists are describing steady deterioration in both countries. While it is perhaps disrespectful to question the veracity of Messangers Obama and Petraeus, a look some facts can help assess their claims.

In Afghanistan, since 2007, the tempo of the Taliban insurgency has increased, notwithstanding U.S. reinforcements and frequent drone attacks. This period, in fact, has seen the insurgency spread from southern and eastern Afghanistan to all areas of the country, including the north where the allies of Washington and President Karzai are based. Insurgencies, of course, wax and wane, but the import of this dispersion lies in it occurring as nation-building measures meant to check Taliban appeal have had success. Three million more Afghan children are in school; more reliable supplies of potable water, electricity and medicine are available; and many miles of road have been built. There seems, then, no correlation between nation-building successes and defeating the Taliban.

Likewise, U.S.-NATO military operations have initial success, but little lasting impact. The campaign in Helmand Province last spring, for example, drove Taliban forces underground or from the province. But when operations shifted to adjacent Kandahar this fall, Taliban forces returned to Helmand. There is every reason to think this pattern will repeat when the coalition moves to its next target. Indeed, the Taliban’s leave-wait-and-return strategy is identical to that Afghans used to drive British and Soviet armies out of Afghanistan in, respectively, the 1880s and 1980s.

The Afghan political system built by the West, the UN, and India also has not gained traction. Karzai’s reelection featured questionable vote counts; the new parliament reportedly is alienating all ethnic groups; and Mr. Karzai’s mood swings — one day praising the West’s support, the next damning its militaries — raise concern about his competence and reinforces his reputation as merely Kabul’s mayor. Also troubling for regime stability is Karzai’s backing of former-mujahideen leader Abdul Rasul Sayyaf as the parliament’s speaker. Sayyaf is a Pashtun leader with a private army, a staunchly pro-Saudi Wahabi, and the facilitator of al-Qaeda’s assassination of Ahmed Shah Masood, the icon of the northern, non-Pashtun Afghans who are the West’s only (to date) reliable Afghan allies.

In Pakistan, too, difficulties abound. President Zadari’s government has made little headway against daunting economic problems or the fierce civil war it is fighting against Islamists. The still unalleviated impact of massive flooding, spiking costs for internal security and military operations, and rampant corruption — for which Zadari is legend — all prevent the regime from improving employment rates and social services. The failure reinforces the already crucial role of Arab Peninsula-sponsored Islamic NGOs in providing education, health care, and jobs.

Pakistan’s military chief, General Kayani, also faces a deteriorating security environment. His forces continue to battle Pashtun militants in a destabilizing fight in the tribal belt; other army units are aiding internal security forces against Islamists and criminals in Karachi and elsewhere in the Punjab. Kayani also is being pressed by Washington and NATO to increase army operations in the border area. This request puts Kayani in a potentially disastrous quandary: Such action will worsen Pakistan’s civil war, do little to aid the West’s Afghan war, and ultimately leave Pakistan with messes along the border and in Afghanistan when U.S. withdrawal begins later in 2011.

Also pressing negatively on Kayani is India’s presence in Afghanistan. For Pakistani leaders, as Kayani said publicly, India is enemy number one, and for the first time in Pakistan’s history New Delhi has — in Islamabad’s eyes — can now threaten Pakistan from the west. Kayani and his corps commanders believe India’s Western-backed Afghan presence puts Pakistan in a mortal strategic vice. This helps explain why Pakistan has quietly but quickly doubled its arsenal of nuclear warheads.

The world is always one of troubles, but Afghanistan and Pakistan have more than their share. And none, on its face, offers light at the tunnel’s end. Perhaps the light President Obama and General Petraeus claim to see can only be seen by a hopeful beholder’s eye.

Scheuer is Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Georgetown University, and author of Osama Bin Laden, (Oxford, 2011).

Source: TheHill.com, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/142145—afghanistan-and-pakistan-sorting-fact-from-hope

The bankruptcy of America’s ideological and unrealistic educational system — especially its universities — has seldom been on better display than during this period of unrest in the Muslim world. For the most part, the well-educated folks offering analysis on television seem befuddled that anyone could think that the mass protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen have anything remotely to do with religion. No, say they, the unrest is the result of poverty, oppression, and a dozen other things, but it has nothing to do with Islam.

Well, no. While the immediate spark for events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen came from poverty, oppression, etc, the ultimate cause is the unIslamic nature of the dictatorial governments that long have ruled the three states in question. Each regime has used the rhetoric of Islam in public statements and the methodology of European Fascism as its instrument of government. On this point the Neoconservatives were absolutely right: The Muslim world is rife with Islamofascists. What the Necons deliberately failed to add to this truism is that the Islamofascists are not found among the mujahideen, but rather man the Arab regimes that Washington, many of its Western allies, and Israel have supported for several decades.

Thus the uprisings now occurring are anti-fascist, but they are a nowhere near pro-democracy, at least in the Western sense. The international media’s propensity — especially strong in the BBC and CNN — for finding what it lusts to find is on prominent display as they seek out protesters in Cairo and elsewhere who speak English, are middle-class professionals, and wax eloquent with admiration for the West. Having found this “evidence” the media then extrapolate from what must be regarded as a rather small sample and declare that Americans are watching “We the people” movements on the Arab streets. (We have seen this absurd species of extrapolation frequently in recent years when U.S.-led military coalitions have success in one small- or medium-sized Iraqi or Afghan village and it is portrayed by the media as a nationwide trend.)

From Chris Matthews to Katie Couric to General Wesley Clark flows the nonsense they were trained to believe at university: The triumph of secularism, democracy, and globalization are inevitable and those that stand in the way are anachronistic expendables. General Clark, on Saturday, went so far as to tell FOX viewers that after Mubarak leaves Egypt there will be “some kind of an election” — presumably with Western observers — and that an international commission must be established to investigate the Egyptian government’s corruption.

In other words, the U.S. and Western interventionism that has supported Islamofascists for 50 years should now be revved up to intervene to teach our unwashed Arab brothers how to vote, be honest, and allow power to be passed from the dictator Mubarak to an unIslamic, unrepresentative, and tiny group of secularized Muslims who shave, admire Jefferson, and have little truck with that Islam stuff.

From Matthews on the left, to Clark on the right, to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the ever-hopeful-if-reality-defying heart of the Obama-Clinton fantasy world, the answer to a problem that has been partially wrought by U.S. and Western intervention on the side of tyranny is more and more intervention to again deny power to the majority. We should all be wondering how long the United States can survive the handiwork of the professors who “educated” this generation of U.S. leaders to be certain of the blessed inevitability of universal, pagan, and non-violent Westernization of the entire globe, a sort of a leftist, atheist, libertine Khalifate.

What seems lost in the wishing-makes-it-so fog of this “analysis” is the fact that nearly one-hundred percent of the Tunisians, Egyptians, and Yemenis we see on the street — indeed, all except the Westernized handful Matthews, Couric, and Clark want power passed to — are Muslim believers who not only want to improve their living and political conditions, but likewise want Islam to play a far larger role in governance, a role they believe will be lead to far less oppressive regimes. It is absolutely true that the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Yemeni dictators are hated by their peoples from imposing brutal repression, but they are also hated for limiting the role of Islam in government and their persecution of those Islamic scholars, preachers, and militants who have struggled to defend their faith. (Parenthetically, the government of our Republic under both parties long has used taxpayer funds to intervene in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen to encourage regime stability and so has facilitated both varieties of oppression. This may limit the pro-U.S. sentiment of any successor regime in these three states.)

At day’s end it is unclear whether Egypt’s Mubarak or Yemen’s Salih will fall, or whether the new Tunisian regime will be anything other than a more efficient dictatorship than the one it replaced. Fascist regimes, after all, have protected themselves by systematically disarming their citizenry and have little concern for anything save holding onto power. (NB: On the last point, they are like the two U.S. political parties.)

The Islamofascist regimes also know that the pro-democracy bark of Washington and its NATO allies is likely to be far worse than their bite because the existence of the regimes is necessary for the survival of Israel. It is the vigorously brutal oppression of the Mubaraks, Abdullahs (Jordan and Saudi Arabia), and Bashirs of the Arab world that controls borders contiguous with Israel and keeps a lid on hundreds of millions of Muslims who seethe with a desire to exact wide and lethal retribution for what they see as Israel’s theft, on-going occupation, and unfolding annexation of Muslim land.

The hearings that Congressman Peter King (R-NY) has called to discover what factors “radicalize” U.S. Muslims are a chance for non-interventionists to make an obvious point that so far has escaped the notice of almost all of the 535 federal legislators, the last four presidents, much of the media, and the academy; namely, that the United States is at war with an increasing portion of the Muslim world because of its interventionist foreign policy, especially its support for Israel and tyrannical Muslim regimes. More plainly, ongoing U.S. intervention in the Muslim world is the major engine of radicalization for young Muslims in the United States and abroad. [NB: As always, this is not to say U.S. policy either “caused” the war — America was attacked first, after all — or was made by mad policymakers. It is said to to suggest the worth of “knowing the enemy” by recognizing his motivation.]

To recognize this reality should not require congressional hearings. Nearly all of the Islamist militants captured in the United States have said, or have revealed in their paper and electronic documents, that there motivation for turning to violence was the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington’s unqualified support for Israel, and U.S. backing for Muslim tyrannies, especially in the Arab world. Similarly, most Islamists captured in Britain, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, and elsewhere have likewise identified their motivation as U.S. and Western interventionism in the Muslim world.

Because it is unlikely in the extreme that Rep. King, his committee colleagues, or their aides will take the time to read the just-noted evidence or that Rep. King will call any non-interventionists to testify in his hearings, it seems likely that this opportunity to educate Americans about why they are fighting a growing religious war at home and abroad will go a glimmering.

This said, there is one group of U.S. citizens who could force their way onto Rep. King’s stage and that group is composed of the leaders of the U.S. Muslim community. To date, what we have heard from U.S. Muslim leaders about Rep. King’s hearings amounts to whines, hand-wringing, and a sort of nascent victim-hood not unlike that always assumed by the leaders of Israel-First whenever they, their actions, or their country of first loyalty are criticized. U.S. Muslim leaders, the media have reported, fear that the King hearings will feature Islam haters and pro-Israeli testifiers who will demonize Muslims and Islam by portraying Islam as an always violent religion that hates Christians and Jews and intends to impose Sharia law from Kennebunkport to La Jolla.

Well, I think that this could well be the result of Rep. King’s hearings — although the list of testifiers seems far from set — unless U.S. Muslim leaders show a little manliness and tell Rep. King and his mostly Israel-First colleagues what they know to be the truth in two broad areas:

1.) The radicalization of young U.S. Muslim males is less radicalization than a simple decision by some of them to act on the basic tenets of their faith and do what they can to defend Islam against what most of the Muslim world perceives as an attack on Islam and Muslims; namely U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies. Through appearances at these hearings, U.S. Muslim leaders must have the moral courage to alert their fellow citizens to the fact that status quo U.S. foreign policy is driving Muslims at home and abroad to hate the U.S. government and its actions. They must speak clearly and explain that the major motivating engine for what Rep. King has described as “radicalization” is — and long has been — Washington’s intervention in the Muslim world, especially its unqualified support for Israel, military presence in Muslim lands, and protection of Muslim tyrannies.

All Americans desperately need to hear this from the leaders of the U.S. Muslim community. Indeed, it is in the vital interest of that community — if it is truly committed to integrating into U.S. society — and all Americans that this genie be let out of the bottle in an effort to promote countrywide debate on U.S. policy, as well as to prevent the further solidification of the Muslims-hate-us-for-our-freedoms dogma which otherwise may be all that is preached at Rep. King’s hearings by Neoconservatives, Israel-Firsters, Christian Evangelicals, journalists, and zany academics bent on securing taxpayer funds for their useless de-radicalization projects.

2.) Muslim leaders must also be honest about their faith and refrain from simply telling the hearings that “Islam is a religion of peace.” U.S. Muslim leaders know their faith does not have a tradition of turning the other cheek when it perceives itself to be under attack, which is the worldwide Muslim perception at the moment. (NB: Historically, few major world religions have had a turn-the-other-cheek tradition; witness Catholicism’s armed, crusading response to the provocation of Islam’s aggressive military expansion in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the unrelenting military actions of the theocratic state in Israel. The decision of contemporary Christian sects to defend their faith with whines as their brethren are being murdered is an anomaly in history of major religions.)

U.S. Muslim leaders know that all Muslims are required by God’s revelations to defend Islam against attack from within or without. They also know this action can in no way described as a “radical” response to such things as the Western occupations of Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, and Afghanistan; the Western-abetted theft of land and oil resources from Muslim Sudan to create a new Christian state; or Western support for unIslamic police states across the Arab world. U.S. Muslim leaders must tell all Americans through the venue of Rep. King’s hearings that status quo U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world is not only the main motivation but the irrefutable religious predicate for a scripturally legitimate defensive jihad. They should also state the obvious: That Islamic preachers trained and funded by Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood are encouraging young U.S. Muslims to embrace the most extreme and violent interpretation of this religious duty imaginable.

By acknowledging this reality, as we previously have discussed on this site, the above prescription for action by U.S. Muslim leaders is one that calls on them to take a risk that will make them targets for enormous criticism. Such testimony will earn for them such thundering slurs as America-basher, anti-Semite, Christian-hater, and numbers of other epithets. But U.S. Muslim leaders are in a lose-lose situation; if they do not manfully present the truth to Rep. King’s committee, they will give the entire game away to the Muslims-hate-us-for-our-freedoms crowd, which can only yield more violence by young Muslims against U.S. interests at home and abroad. In my own view, this is exactly what some Neocons, Israel-Firsters, and Christian evangelicals want.

In conclusion, I would add that all of the foregoing is based on my current acceptance, at face value, of the assertions repeatedly made by U.S. Muslim leaders that they intend to lead the U.S. Muslim community into becoming a viable, respected, peaceful, and integrated part of America’s social fabric and that they support the U.S. effort to defeat al-Qaeda and its allies. The hard reality, however, is that they cannot get to those goals from where they now stand; they have too many powerful and malevolent enemies in the U.S. governing and media elites, and they have been knowingly derelict in telling the truth to their fellow citizens. To refrain from speaking the truth in Rep. King’s hearings in order to avoid the vitriolic/hateful consequences of that truth-telling can mean one of only two things: (1) U.S. Muslim leaders abjectly lack moral courage or (2) they do not intend to integrate or want al-Qaeda defeated and see some advantage in allowing their opponents and critics to demonize Muslims as freedom-haters and so pave the way for more violence.

So far, those killed and wounded in Arizona seem to have been the victims of a mentally unstable young man. He is in custody and in all likelihood will be convicted of murder or incarcerated in an institution for the insane for the rest of his life. This is, it seems to me, as it should be.

The tragedy in Arizona, however, has started self-serving debates over gun control, the vitriol in political rhetoric, and any number of other issues on which their advocates believe they can make cynical political hay by exploiting the nation’s grief and sympathy. We all, I think, must keep in mind that the evidence now indicates a man motivated by his odd perception of the world, and perhaps by mental illness, is responsible for the attacks. There is no credible cause here for actions that either would undermine the 2nd Amendment or further limit free speech on the basis of the unsupportable claim that the violence of political rhetoric is at an all-time high and contributed to the shootings. For those indulging in the latter analysis-by-assertion, they might want to read the scathing attacks on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt by their political opponents, as well as by some of their own supporters.

One thing that does stand out in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, however, is a bill to be introduced by Rep. Peter King (R-New York) which would keep legally armed Americans a thousand feet away from elected federal politicians and senior U.S. government officials. That is, Rep. King wants to put distance between himself and his colleagues and the legally armed people that he and his colleagues work for and are paid by. Seemingly, Rep. King assumes that there is a good chance that all legal American gun-owners share the apparent derangement of the Arizona shooter.

While I believe that Rep. King’s bill implicitly defames and discriminates against legally armed Americans, there is a chance that he is onto something if he senses that voters’ patience is running out with a federal government that seems incapable of doing anything worth doing. For much of our lives, Washington has failed to act effectively on most of the big issues; indeed, elected officials often seem unaware that such issues are key concerns for those who employ them.

Over the past thirty years, for example, Americans have been told repeatedly that the federal government was going to fix the social security and medicare systems that it consciously wrecked. They have been assured that a national energy policy would be implemented to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil producers. They have been told that border control and infrastructure reconstruction would be priority goals that would be achieved. They have been told that the growing federal debt is a threat to their childrens’ future and would be fixed. They have been told U.S. foreign policy is good for America and will benefit the world by greatly reducing the chance of war.

These promises have not been kept; indeed, all the problems cited have gotten much worse, and there is no genuine improvement in sight. Tom Paine once wrote — and I paraphrase here — that no people can put up with a government that is as bad as or worse than having no government at all. It may be that ordinary, sane Americans across the country are coming to this conclusion, whether or not they have ever read Mr. Paine on the subject.

Rep. King perhaps senses a despair among Americans on the subject of their government ever successfully addressing the problems noted above and many others. Indeed, Rep. King may be catching on to the fact that we — his employers — have ourselves caught on to the fact that he and his elected colleagues have no real interest in acting to benefit ordinary Americans, and promise to fix serious problems only to secure reelection. He may well be worried that more than thirty years of frustration among voters could lead to unforeseen and very ugly kinds of responses, and so distancing non-achieving politicians from their legally armed employers is now necessary.

Historians have written that the regimes of ancient Rome armed citizens because they trusted them, and that elected Roman officials and even — after the republic’s end — the emperor were expected to be accessible to the Roman people presenting their concerns. And in the 16th century, Nicolo Machiavelli wrote that wise and effective rulers trusted and armed their people. He also wrote that if rulers disarmed their people; put physical distance between themselves and the people; and/or spent most of their time in palaces or castles heavily guarded by their security forces, they were acting in a way that would turn the people against them.

It may well be that Rep. King’s bill will go nowhere, and that legally armed voters will still be able to approach and petition their elected federal employees. That would be, I think, a good thing. But access alone will not negate the frustration and anger of voters who seem increasingly to perceive their federal government as adrift, feckless, and amazingly spendthrift, and its elected officials as people who seek office only to stay in office as long as possible to make sure they get as much of the taxpayer-provided swag as they can grab. This is not a situation or a perception that bodes well for the future tranquility of the republic.

This is just a short follow-up on the last piece I posted. I thought there might be some interest in what has transpired since I first wrote. For those who are not interested, I apologize.

On 10 January 2011 and through the day on 11 January I received a long series of e-mails from Mr. Marc Grayson (British18@earthlink.net). The e-mails addressed my many failings: bad education, bad civil servant, and chief incompetent guy responsible for 9/11. I responded to each, stressing my strong belief that Mr. Grayson is a slug, an Israel-Firster, and an opponent of free speech.

As the e-mails rolled in, it became clear that Mr. Grayson was trying to goad me into getting angry so I would use an ethnic slur of some sort that he could use against me with Georgetown and/or another of my employers. I did not take the lure and instead stressed his slug-and-Nazi-like behavior in my responses. I was interested, however, in seeing what he would do with my e-mails.

Interestingly, the subjects of this flood of e-mails were the same sort of abuse Mr. Grayson sent me in the first half of 2010. And his early 2010 e-mails, moreover, mirrored almost perfectly the kind of abuse delivered against me by a man named Gabriel Schoenfeld in the Weekly Standard and Commentary Magazine several years ago. At that time, Mr. Schoenfeld went so far as to establish a “Scheuer Watch” in his blog for the latter journal. Oddly enough, Mr. Grayson’s attacks on me in the past few used frequent quotes from Schoenfeld’s work, quotes that employed the same themes he was using: Scheuer is bad guy, with bad education, and is friend of Osama. He also placed links to two of Schoenfeld’s anti-Scheuer articles in several of his 10-11 January 2011 notes.

Well, these crafty Israel-Firsters have sprung the trap that this elderly country bumpkin never saw coming! Here’s an e-mail I received a few hours ago:

From: Frank Elliot <fjphares@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:42:15 -0800 (PST)
To: <mfs47@georgetown.edu>
Subject: Blog

I came across your blog and noticed your preference for posting private emails and email addresses. I’m sure you won’t mind then that I’ve posted on various popular blogs and websites your private emails to various people in which you make some very inappropriate statements including your email address, too.

Cheers!

What a shock? These Israel-Firsters are just too smart for poorly educated me! And now you and I are suppose to believe all of this is just a coincidence: Schoenfeld attacks me; then Mr. Grayson attacks me with the same themes; and then a third party — Frank Elliot — arrives out of the blue to post my e-mail responses to Mr. Grayson. Mr. Elliot also has sent me a second note saying that he has sent my responses to Mr. Grayson to — you’ll never guess!!! — Georgetown University. (Interestingly, Mr. Elliot’s e-mail address includes the name “Phares,” which is the last name of another Israel-First terrorism analyst, Walid Phares. I have no idea if Mr. Schoenfeld, Mr. Grayson, Mr. Elliot, and Mr. Phares are connected. I am sure it is just another coincidence.)

Well, that’s all the news. While I hope this doesn’t bore readers too badly, I do think all Americans should be a bit concerned when so much Israel-First effort is expended to silence a minor and mostly insignificant voice in the debate over U.S. foreign policy.

Finally, I am going to post separately a piece that contains about 40 of the e-mails that passed between myself and Mr. Grayson in the past 48-hours. I want call readers attention especially to note #39 in which Mr. Schoenfeld flays my integrity for claiming an award he says I did not receive.

As readers of this site know, I always admit and then try to correct my mistakes. In regard to Mr. Schoenfeld’s claim, I admit to making a mistake in a note I sent to Commentary Magazine several years ago. In that note, I mixed up the dates of two awards I was honored with during my career. To set the record straight: I received the CIA’s Intelligence Commendation Medal in 1995 for my unit’s role in capturing Ramzi Ahmed Yusuf, the bomber of the World Trade Center in 1993, and I received an award citation from from the Department of Justice/Southern District of New York for the data my unit provided to the Southern District’s attorneys that allowed them to indict Osama bin Laden in federal court.

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