Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Several years ago, I was asked during a television interview why the U.S.-led coalition was not winning in Afghanistan. I responded by saying something close to: “Because we have not killed nearly enough of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and their civilian supporters.” At the time my answer struck me as a withering blast of the obvious, but it shocked and won denunciation from much of the media, pro-Republican and pro-Democrat. The pro-Democratic media, however, were especially upset and surprised — notably the hilarious, ban-the-1st-Amendment folks at “Media Matters for America” — that anyone in this day and age could believe, as the Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest memorably said: “War is about fighting, and fighting is about killing.”

Now, with President Obama’s personal, unconstitutional war on Libya raging, the pro-war alliance composed of the Administration; the pro-Obama, pro-intervention media; that pair of zany, war-loving Republican senators McCain and Graham; and the Neoconservatives are finding the killing-shoe is on their foot. These folks combined to start a completely unprovoked, unnecessary, and illegal war which they knew would be short, successful, and so quickly forgotten by Americans. But last week they heard the most honest Flag Officer in the U.S. military — CJCS, Admiral Mike Mullen — publicly warn them that Gaddafi’s forces are nowhere near broken and that his troops outnumber the “democratic resistance” by 10 to 1.

Admiral Mullen came as close as a loyal serviceman can come to publicly schooling his commander-in-chief on the fact that if Obama does not want to be defeated — and so add to the Bush-Clinton legacy of feckless war-making — he must recognize that the White House is quickly nearing its last option; namely, the killing of large numbers of Libyans.

Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates, it seems, knew from the start that Obama and his war-to-spread-democracy team — Clinton, Rice, McCain, and Graham — would get the United States into a lose-lose situation in Libya. Both men flirted with insubordination by publicly advising against armed intervention, and Gates has courageously drawn a line in the sand by saying he would not authorize deployment of U.S. ground forces to Libya. Both men did their level best to serve and protect Obama and his Cabinet-level Viragoes, but their superiors’ desire to transform Muslim Libyans into secular democrats was too strong, arrogant, and self-righteous to stem.

And now it’s about time to admit defeat or pay the piper of war in the only coin he accepts as legal tender — corpses.

Obama is surveying a Libyan scene in which his warnings to Gaddafi, with those of fellow cash-strapped, interveners Cameron and Sarkozy, have gone unheeded; the UN’s warnings and war-approving resolution have been mocked; the arms and economic embargoes have not worked; U.S.-NATO air power has done what damage it can to create a no-fly zone; and the sainted “democratic” resistance is splintering. If he can master the new experience of absorbing reality, Mr. Obama will see his sole option. If there are — to pick a number — 40,000 pro-Libyan troops and 5,000 rebels the answer will be easy: Kill 30,000-plus Libyan troops and many of the civilians they are based or hiding among and you will win the game for the rebels and — if the Viragoes are right — secular democracy will triumph. If this is not done, Mr. Obama can always admit defeat — as he has in Afghanistan — and consign those he so nobly championed to a post-intervention blood-letting by the Gaddafi regime.

Sitting in the Oval Office later this week or next — perhaps with war lovers McCain and Graham — Mr. Obama will find that 51 cards from the U.S.-power deck have been played and only one lies on his desk. And when deteriorating conditions for the Libyan rebels move Mr. Obama to turn over the card and read his last option, he will find it inscribed “Dear Mr. President: I told you so” and signed by Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, C.S.A.

And then what will Obama, the Viragoes, McCain and Graham, the Neocons, and Media Matter’s free-speech haters do? No matter, America and its people will be the losers whatever they decide to do.

The rising concern in Washington, London, and other allied capitals over what is happening in Libya is reminiscent of concerns about Iraq once it became clear that the aftermath of removing Saddam would not be a cakewalk for the U.S.-led coalition. This concern is best seen in the increasing number of U.S., UK, and French officials — named and anonymous — and pro-war journalists who are talking about the possibility of encountering “unintended consequences” from the Libyan intervention.

In Iraq, as all recall, the resistance to the U.S.-led coalition was described as an “unintended consequence,” a phrase meant to suggest that what happened in Iraq was not predictable. We also have heard the same term used to the same purpose in Afghanistan. In both cases, the phrase is meant to mislead the voting public and to disguise the failure of both Western leaders and their generals to have done even a cursory review of the history of foreign interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan before they launched their own.

Since 2003, nothing that has happened in Iraq is much different than what British forces experienced there after World War I, and absolutely nothing that U.S. and NATO forces have encountered in Afghanistan is alien to the experiences of the Soviet army, the British army (twice), and the forces of Alexander the Great. In two wars that have cost the U.S. and its allies in excess of a trillion dollars, a pre-war investment of a few hundred dollars in history books and military memoirs would have precisely detailed what Western militaries would encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan. More important, the works would have recounted the strategies and actions that failed to bring foreigners victory in either place. Because civil and military leaders did not prepare in the most rudimentary historical terms before invading, both wars are being lost by Western militaries who seem to believe they are the first to walk on what is very well-worn ground.

All this is to say that when we hear the somber phrase “unintended consequences” there is no reason to believe that such consequences could not have been predicted, and at time easily predicted. In Libya, no less than in Iraq and Afghanistan, the stable of coming disasters that Western officials will describe as “unintended consequences” will have been fully predictable. Here are just three:

1. There is no reason — logical or historical — to believe that air power alone can win much of anything. Air power always fails to achieve victory, unless it is used to support ground forces, which are the real key to any successful military operation. When this becomes clear in the next weeks or months, and the question of introducing Western ground forces is debated, any assertion from Washington or London that ground forces are needed because “Qaddafi was tougher than we thought” will be a facade to cover the perfectly predictable failure of air power alone to bring victory.
2. There is good reason to assess that whatever military backbone there is in the Libyan resistance comes not primarily from defectors from Qaddafi’s military, but rather from current or former Islamist mujahideen. For nearly 30 years, young Libyan males have been prominent in number and talent in Islamist insurgencies in Afghanistan — against the Soviets and the U.S.-led coalition — Iraq, the Balkans, Central Asia, the North Caucasus and elsewhere. In addition, Libyan Islamist groups have long struggled against Qaddafi’s regime inside Libya, especially in the country’s east. Indeed, one of the reasons Washington associated with and supported Qaddafi after 9/11 was because he was delighted to kill, persecute, and incarcerate Libyan Islamists at home and help us attack others overseas. In this regard, Qaddafi, like Egypt’s Mubarak, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and Yemen’s Salih, was a key element in Washington’s counter-Islamist strategy. After U.S.-led forces lose their political leaders’ war in Libya, and it becomes clearer that we gave air cover to men who share bin Laden’s goal of driving the U.S. from the region and destroying Israel, we will hear Obama, McCain, Kerry, and their fellow European war-mongers complain about “intelligence failures.” They will assert that those “failures” yielded the unintended consequence of U.S. and Western aerial support that ensured not only Qaddafi’s survival but also the survival and re-invigoration of Libya’s Islamist mujahideen. This claim will be a lie to hide what was and is a perfectly predictable outcome.
3. No one in the Muslim world will be fooled by the insistence of President Obama, Secretary Clinton, Ambassador Rice, and Senators McCain and Kerry that the war on Libya is not being led by the United States. Having witnessed on television two U.S.-led wars on Iraq; the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan; drone operations in Pakistan and Yemen; and numerous other examples of impressive U.S. military power, Muslims will perceive — and perception is reality — that only the U.S. military could manage, supply, logistically administer, and coordinate the Western military offensive against Libya. As to the goal of “protecting innocent Libyans” so often stated by Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and the UN Secretary General, Muslims will reject that contention out of hand after seeing — in color and in real-time — U.S., British, and French warplanes killing their brethren in Libya, while several hundred miles to the east they simultaneously saw Israeli pilots flying U.S.-made aircraft on missions to kill Palestinians. After the offensive war against Libya sharply deepens Muslim hatred for the United States and its allies, Washington will be bemoan this fact as an unintended consequence and Secretary Clinton will blame it on bad public diplomacy. Nonsense. Intensifying Muslim hatred for the West — and especially for the U.S. government — was easily predictable before the first cruise missile landed near Tripoli. And this is something that “mad- dog Qaddafi” and Osama bin Laden knew with certainty, even if all the genius Ivy Leaguers who infest, confuse, and debilitate Washington did not.

There are another dozen examples of the claims of “unintended consequences” that Washington and its allies will make after their offensive air war on Libya fails and they either ignominiously acknowledge defeat or arrogantly forge ahead toward an even greater defeat by committing ground forces. Since 9/11, as I have argued elsewhere, Washington and its allies have been marching toward hell because they refuse — despite overwhelming and readily accessible evidence — to understand that their war with the Islamist movement is based on the mujahideen’s intense, religion-based motivation for self-defense which flows from the impact of U.S. and Western policies and actions in the Muslim world, and not from blind hatred for what Western societies think and how they behave at home. The West’s attack on Libya is proof positive that Washington and its allies remain abjectly ignorant of the Islamists’ motivation, and have chosen to studiously throw ever more fuel on a fire that may yet spread into a clash of civilizations.

• Arab protesters demand democracy — but not secularism.

The Arab world’s unrest has brought forth gushing, rather adolescent analysis about what the region will look like a year or more hence. Americans have decided that these upheavals have everything to do with the advent of liberalism, secularism, and Westernization in the region and that Islamist militant groups like al-Qaeda have been sidelined by the historically inevitable triumph of democracy — a belief that sounds a bit like the old Marxist-Leninist claptrap about iron laws of history and communism’s inexorable triumph.

How has this judgment been reached? Primarily by disregarding facts, logic, and history, and instead relying on (a) the thin veneer of young, educated, pro-democracy, and English-speaking Muslims who can be found on Facebook and Twitter and (b) the employees of the BBC, CNN, and most other media networks, who have suspended genuine journalism in favor of cheerleading for secularism and democracy on the basis of a non-representative sample of English-speaking street demonstrators and users of social-networking sites. The West’s assessment of Arab unrest so far has been — to paraphrase Sam Spade’s comment about the Maltese Falcon — the stuff that dreams, not reality, are made of.

A year from now, we will find that most Arab Muslims have neither embraced nor installed what they have long regarded as an irreligious and even pagan ideology — secular democracy. They will have instead adhered even more closely to the faith that has graced, ordered, and regulated their lives for more than 1400 years, and which helped them endure the oppressive rule of Western-supported tyrants and kleptocrats.

This does not mean that fanatically religious regimes will dominate the region, but a seven-year Gallup survey of the Muslim world published in 2007 shows that a greater degree of Sharia law in governance is favored by young and old, moderates and militants, men and even women in most Muslim countries. While a façade of democracy may well appear in new regimes in places like Egypt and Tunisia, their governments will be heavily influenced by the military and by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. If for no other reason, the Islamist groups will have a powerful pull because they have strong organizational capabilities; wide allegiance among the highly educated in the military, hard sciences, engineering, religious faculties, and medicine; and a reservoir of patience for a two-steps-forward, one-step-back strategy that is beyond Western comprehension. We in the West too often forget, for example, that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda draw from Muslim society’s best and brightest, not its dregs; that al-Qaeda has been waging its struggle for 25 years, the Muslim Brotherhood for nearly 85 years; and that Islam has been in the process of globalizing since the 7th century.

As new Arab regimes develop, Westerners also are likely to find that their own deep sense of superiority over devout Muslims — which is especially strong among the secular left, Christian evangelicals, and neoconservatives — is unwarranted. The nearly universal assumption in the West is that Islamic governance could not possibly satisfy the aspirations of Muslims for greater freedom and increased economic opportunity — this even though Iran has a more representative political system than that of any state in the region presided over by a Western-backed dictator. No regime run by the Muslim Brotherhood would look like Canada, but it would be significantly less oppressive than those run by the al-Sauds and Mubarak. This is not to say it would be similar to or more friendly toward the West — neither will be the case — but in terms of respecting and addressing basic human concerns they will be less monstrous.

The West’s biggest surprise a year out may well lie in being forced to learn that Westernization, secularization, and modernization are not synonyms. The postwar West’s arrogance — dare I say hubris? — has long held as an article of its increasingly pagan faith that these concepts are identical, inseparable, and the proudest achievement of superior Western culture. Well, not so. Muslims make an absolute distinction among the concepts.

Modernization, in the sense of the tools of technology, is something they pursue with a passion. From air-conditioning to computers to a variety of other communications gear and high-tech weaponry, there is little Luddism among Muslims. Indeed, the military forces of the United States are now losing wars to Islamist mujahideen who stay one step ahead of Western military technology in areas like improvised explosive devices and using topography to disguise their locations from satellite photography. Through their sophisticated use of the Internet and other media vehicles, moreover, they are dominating the so-called information war and making Western propaganda efforts appear for what they are: reality-defying, intellectually sterile, and designed for the non-existent I-am-ready-to-blow-myself-up-because-Americans-drink-beer Islamist enemy.

As Washington and its allies remain locked in two wars with Islamists — and itch to start another in Libya — they are cultivating a new generation of Muslim enemies by neglecting the fundamental difference, for Muslims and other non-Westerners, between modernization on one hand and Westernization and secularization on the other. In Steve Coll’s fine book The Bin Ladens, he describes the late Saudi King Faisal as a champion of technical progress without privatization of religion; indeed, Faisal was an austere and pious man who was the motive force behind an attempt to modernize the kingdom, but at the same time he was prepared to resist secularism with force. As Coll also notes, Osama bin Laden attended a “modern” school that taught math, sciences, geography, and English — as well as faith — that was established by Faisal. Bin Laden, Coll writes, received an up-to-date but fiercely anti-secular education that was “inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign.”

This is the point at which the West’s jejune expectations for secular democracy in the Muslim world will come dramatically a cropper in the years ahead. By willfully misinterpreting English-speaking, pro-democracy Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian Facebookers as representing the Arab world’s welcoming view of secularism, Western leaders, especially the media, have deluded one another into believing that Islam’s doors are open for women’s rights, pornography, blasphemy, man-made law, popular elections, and a host of the West’s other secular-pagan attributes.

In this judgment, they will be dead wrong, and they will find that any Western help dispatched to move Muslim societies in these directions will earn the Faisal/bin Laden response: fierce and possibly violent resistance. Two examples of this phenomenon — one country-specific, one international — are already on display.

In Afghanistan, the country’s post-2001 inundation by Western non-governmental organizations and private-sector construction, mercenary, and consulting firms brought with it bars, bordellos, and the proliferation of Western dress — all viewed by many pious Afghan Muslims as offenses to their faith. The creation of this pint-sized version of Hollywood’s lifestyle in Kabul had particularly unfortunate consequences for the U.S.-led coalition. This un-Islamic behavior helped prompt much of the city’s citizenry to collect and pass information about the West’s military and civil plans — and those of the Karzai regime that abetted the Westerners — to the Taliban and other mujahideen groups for violent exploitation.

Worldwide, the West’s extravagant — not to say mindless — praise for the once Muslim but now anti-Islamic feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a further example of its ignorance about the depth of anti-secularism in the Muslim world. Hirsi Ali is the perfect embodiment of the West’s unshakeable conviction — best expressed by Secretary Clinton and Madeleine Albright — that Muslim women want to be “just like us.” This Western image of Hirsi Ali as a kind of Joan of Arc bent on freeing Muslim women from their religion’s superstitious shackles is shared by some Muslim women — but very few. The bulk of reliable polling data by Gallup shows most Muslim men and women alike want a large measure of Sharia law to be employed by the regimes that govern them. There are no data showing that Muslim women long to decamp to a semi-pagan society where Lady Gaga and Lindsay Lohan are role models.

Indeed, the West’s heroic Hirsi Ali tends to be viewed in the Islamic world as an apostate to her faith. She also is seen as a new edition of the British imperialist Lord Curzon, bent on performing anew Kipling’s call for improving the lot of her little brown sisters by diktat or force.

At day’s end, the success of the United States and its allies in concluding their war with the Islamist movement depends on an adult assessment of the Muslim world. The basis of this analysis must be a realization that modernization, Westernization, and secularization are not interchangeable terms. The technological tools of the West are largely welcomed, admired, and used in the Muslim world — witness the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — but continuing attempts to impose Westernization and privatization of religion will, at this point in history, remain a vibrant casus belli for Muslims and earn a fierce and martial resistance.

We must begin to recognize that while America’s neoconservative and progressive thinkers fallaciously prattle on about the Islamists being on the verge of Islamicizing the West, it is the West’s half-century campaign to impose and then maintain secularist tyrants on Muslim states that has supplied the main motivation for the growing number of Muslims who believe themselves and their faith to be at war against the West. Continued failure to make this simple and clear semantic distinction will bring the late Professor Huntington’s concept of a clash of civilizations much closer to fruition.

Source: Michael Scheuer, The American Conservative

Next to the right to bear arms, I do not think there is a clearer statement in the U.S. Constitution than the one that says only Congress can declare war. Reasonable people can argue about other, less clear passages, but these two neither need nor will abide “explanation and interpretation” from our Ivy League betters. (NB: I once thought the same about Freedom of Speech, until the elite folks who feel duty-bound to perfect the rest of us riff-raff came up with the debate-stopping tool of laws against “hate speech.”)

With Libya, I believe, we see the end of congressional control over the question of when America goes to war. There has been a good deal of criticism of President Obama’s slowness in unleashing the U.S. military on Colonel Gaddafi’s no-threat-to-the-U.S. forces, but I think, to the contrary, Obama got exactly what he wanted.

From the first, Obama said that “Gaddafi had to go” and so committed the United States to a policy of regime change in Libya. But he had to disguise his intent and goal to satisfy the remaining interest-group shreds and Pacifistic tatters of the Democratic Party that he was not copying George W. Bush.

So what to do?

Well, Obama laid back and let the British and French leaders advance the newest glorious cause of secular progressivism — neo-colonial military intervention. With London and Paris in the lead, the Western interventionist bloc managed to produce a UN resolution authorizing military action against Gaddafi in the name of humanitarian concerns and the hoax known as international law. (How many former USSR officials have been tried for murdering 60 million people between 1917 and 1991?) Up to the last moment, Obama disingenuously played the part of a shy and unwilling bride, determined to protect her virtue to the last. The credibility of his demeanor was, of course, made mock of by Secretary Clinton’s relentless call for “bombings of Libyan military assets,” and the wild-eyed and not-far-short-of-crazed U.S. UN ambassador, Susan Rice. Ms. Rice’s war lust ought to be sated by the gift of an AK-47, a box of granola bars, and one-way ticket to Benghazi. (NB: Beware also of the lie told by Obama, Clinton, and Rice; Senators McCain and Graham; and much of the media that because Qatar and the UAE are involved in the military mission, and because the UK and France led at the UN, the Libyan intervention will not be seen as a U.S.-led invasion by the Muslim world. Horse hockey! Muslims are not as naive as the bulk of Americans and far better able to see reality through the fog of their leaders’ lies. The Islamic world will see the Libyan action for what it will be: A U.S.-led intervention in yet another Muslim land.)

With the UN Security Council’s authorization for this regime-destroying, neo-colonial military adventure, Mr. Obama threw off his chaste white garments, immediately repeated his “Gaddafi must go” statement, and quickly donned the traditional garb of the U.S. bipartisan elite — the chain mail of military intervention. And so all Americans now go off to another war in which not a single genuine U.S. interest is at stake, and one that cannot be won — if our elite can find a way to define the term — without boots on the ground.

For all of its proven and admirable lethality, ferocity, and tenacity the U.S. Air Force and NATO’s air forces have definitively shown that air power alone never wins anything. Even with large ground-force contingents, for example, the combined U.S. and NATO air forces have not been able to stave off defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of insurgents armed mostly with Korean War-era weapons.

So the die is cast regarding Libya, and the West will fail in its arrogant military endeavor. With Gaddafi’s forces already in Benghazi’s outskirts, the war will quickly become a street-by-street, infantry fight in which the Libyan army’s artillery, armor, and troops can only be destroyed from the air at the cost of destroying much of the city and its civilian population. At this, of course, our effeminate progressive warriors will blanche, realizing that war is not a clean business (a fact not taught at Harvard) and that Gaddafi has lured them into a situation that cannot be “won” from the air. What then? What else? U.S. Marines, British commandos, French legionnaires, and Canadian infantry will be deployed to do what Western leaders will describe as a short operation to “mop up the remnants” of Gaddafi’s forces that air power did not kill. Many months later those troops officially will still be “mopping up,” but actually will be in the midst of a life-and-death fight with Gaddafi’s forces; the veteran Libyan Islamist mujahideen who were at core of the anti-Gaddafi resistance until the West intervened; and other veteran mujahideen who will come — with aid from wealthy Gulf Arab donors — from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Sudan to fight the infidel invaders and occupiers. (NB: This very possible potential outcome is, of course, why China and Russia abstained at the UN. After all, when your enemies are about to make a blunder of epic and immensely costly proportions, why get in the way?)

And as bad as another military defeat will be for the United States, the demise of the Constitution’s war-making provision is even worse. Obama made no pretense of wanting, let alone getting congressional authorization for his war, and the Senators and Congressmen behaved as spineless ciphers, ready to abdicate their clear constitutional prerogatives to Obama; to has-been European imperialists; and to the fundamentally corrupt, anti-American United Nations. These cowering men and women also showed themselves unwilling to manfully oppose the very essence of tyranny: A U.S. president taking America to a war that only he, his bipartisan cronies, and the media want; without a congressional declaration of war; and with last week’s polls showing that 65-percent of Americans opposed U.S. military intervention in Libya.

And people thought George W. Bush had too much power and used it too arrogantly.

An article of my was published on the National Interest’s blog this week. As you will note, I think events in Bahrain may yet present the United States with a great strategic disaster.

With the West focused on Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, it may be in tiny Bahrain where Washington pays the piper for 35 years of intervention in the Arab world. A prolonged Sunni-Shia shooting war in Bahrain would make other regional events pale in importance to the United States and the West. Bahrain could well be the place where the world as we know it ends.

Since 1945, Washington has championed, funded (through oil purchases), and defended the Arab Peninsula’s tyrannies. It has backed the Sunni regimes’ suppression of Islamist firebrands, and those governments, in turn, defused some anti-regime ire among their senior clerics and militant Islamists by suppressing the hated Shia minority even more brutally.

The 2009-10 slaughter of Shia Huthi tribesmen in Yemen by the U.S.-trained and/or -armed forces of Riyadh and Sanna reveals the Sunni regimes’ attitude toward Shia. In effect, Saudi Arabia and Yemen did to the Huthis what Gaddafi today is doing to Libyan rebels, though the Libyans are better armed.

Question: Why the differing U.S. and Western reactions to the two events?

Answer: (a) Washington needs Saudi oil and Riyadh’s purchases of U.S. debt, and (b) Washington and its allies need Salih’s regime to fight al-Qaeda in Yemen. In short, A + B = Destruction of the Huthi minority with the silent acquiescence — nay, silent approval — of the virtuous Western advocates of freedom strugglers in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia.

There was almost no regional impact from the Sunnis’ vicious hunting of Yemen’s minority Huthis. But in Bahrain, the Shias are the long-oppressed and discriminated-against majority. Having seen Shia Bahrainis in Manama’s streets for more than a month trying to overthrow a Sunni monarchy, Western journalists and politicians — most recently, Secretary Clinton on 15 March — have cheered on the Shia, apparently not realizing the West’s Arab Peninsula Sunni “allies” will not, indeed, cannot tolerate the creation of a Shia regime on the peninsula.

After watching Washington and its allies give Iraq to the Shia; stand aside as Shia and pro-Shia politicians gain power in Lebanon; and encourage Bahraini Shia to revolt, the Saudis and their Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners decided to try to stop the Washington-led wrecking of their security. Riyadh and the UAE sent about 2,000 troops to Bahrain this week. They have already broken up Shia demonstrations, killing several and wounding many. The Saudi-led GCC seems ready to kill as many Bahraini Shia as needed to maintain Bahrain’s Sunni regime.

What is it that motivates Riyadh and its GCC sidekicks but seems to escape the U.S. and Western democracy cheerleaders? Well, try these for starters:

1. Many Sunnis literally hate Shia. They consider them heretics; in fact, as non-Muslims. Killing heretics is seen as duty by many Sunni Muslims, including influential senior Saudi scholars. This is clear in the regularity with which Shia are indiscriminately killed in Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Many Western reporters have described the Sunni-Shia rivalry as similar to that between Rotarians and Kiwanis. Nothing could be more untrue. This is an intense, thousand-year-old, and violent hatred.
2. GCC leaders — especially in Riyadh — know they have oppressed their Shia minorities with steadily increasing fervor for fifty years. They know that to lift this coercive lid now, in the name of the alien, unIslamic concept of “secular democracy,” would be suicidal. It would unleash the pent-up Shia thirst for power and revenge, and would alienate GCC religious scholars.
3. The Sunni states know a Shia Bahraini regime would ally with its coreligionists in Iran, at least de facto, for protection, thereby giving Hizballah and Iran’s intelligence services a secure base on the peninsula. They also know that a Shia-ruled Bahrain could and probably would inspire the large Shia population in Riyadh’s oil-rich Eastern Province to revolt against the al-Sauds’ police state.

These, to say the least, are compelling motivations for the Saudi-led GCC to use military forces to stop a Shia takeover of Bahrain. If the GCC undertakes lengthy military action, the Saudis and their partners may well drag the United States into the conflict via the blank-check war commitment Washington gave Riyadh long ago when it decided to protect the Saudi tyranny in return for easy, inexpensive access to oil. U.S. military involvement in Bahrain also is likely because Saudi armed forces, though armed with hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S.-made arms, are near-to hapless. There is every chance the Saudis, without U.S. help, could be stymied or even beaten by Bahraini Shia fighters. And, as icing on the Saudis’ cake, violence in Bahrain would prompt Israel and its U.S.-citizen lobby to press Obama’s administration to help the Sunnis — whom they hate, but less than Iran — against those they will call “Iran-backed Shia Bahraini terrorists.”

Some may think this scenario far-fetched, but who would have: expected the U.S. military to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars; thought Mubarak and other Arab tyrants would be overthrown; or believed al-Qaeda and its allies would be a threat ten years after 9/11. As always, U.S. interventionism is self-defeating, but as Washington presides over lost wars, a crumbling, tyrant-based strategy in the Arab world, and a growing domestic Islamist threat, the worst may be yet to come. A Sunni-Shia civil war in Bahrain could well yield: U.S. military operations to save the weak Saudi army and secure the 5th Fleet’s base; a Sunni-U.S. war with Iran; and, sky-rocketing oil prices and damaged production facilities.

Compared to these potentialities, Gaddafi’s survival in Libya is small beer. What is now simmering in Bahrain is capable of repaying Washington‘s interventionism with a disaster amounting to what Tom Clancy once called “the sum of all fears.”

Published at The National Interest (retrieved on Mar 17, 2011): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-sum-all-fears-5032

On FOX News this week, I described President Obama’s attitude toward Libya and the Muslim world generally as that of an “arrogant” and “racist” interventionist, a description I thought would surprise few. To my surprise, however, this commonplace analysis provoked a flood of angry and astounded, Claude-Rains-like “I’m shocked” comments from Obama supporters and those generally ignorant about the ongoing collapse of the always wrongheaded, tyrant-based, and pro-Israel U.S. strategic policy in the Muslim world and the interventionist causes of the unfolding disaster.

Obama’s arrogance: We have now seen the president on television multiple times saying things like “Qaddafi must go”; “The international community will not tolerate Qaddafi’s continued rule”; and — my favorite — “Qaddafi must stop killing his own people” (NB: This comment is interesting and smacks of Obama’s and Senator John Kerry’s — Obama’s regime-change stalking horse — debilitating experience of an Ivy League education. Crack a history book and what do you find: Established, internationally recognized governments — dictatorial, monarchical, or democratic — almost always resist treasonous rebellions with military force. King George III’s government resisted the treasonous colonials until they beat the British army and became virtuous Americans. It’s simply the way of the world. I believe Lincoln once said that no government provides for its own dissolution and overthrow.)

Now, if this is not “arrogance,” I am afraid I do not know what arrogance is. Obama is orchestrating the defeat of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of enemies’ armed mostly with Korean war-era weapons. The ultra-modern and unprecedentedly powerful U.S. Navy finds it impossible to destroy the slapdash Somali pirate “fleet”; a job which its three-masted, wooden predecessors disposed of in short order in the 19th century. And Obama and his security advisers get their foreign-policy fantasies tied in an ideological knot because General Clapper truthfully states what today seems obvious: Qaddafi is winning.

When you stand at the world’s most attention-getting pulpit and speak — as Mr. Obama has — as if you have overwhelming power and are ready to wield it, but when you are, instead, in the midst of a major strategic disaster in the Arab world and you are all but impotent to temper, let alone stop it, you are undeniably the superstar of arrogance.

Obama’s racism: Racism, of course, comes in all kinds of varieties, and I doubt many humans are immune from one or another of its manifestations. Obama’s racism is most evident in his clear and oft-stated belief that the world must be made all secular and all democratic; indeed, all secular-democratic.

Now, Obama’s acolytes, most of the media, and many Americans approve of and prosper under the secular democracy now operating in the United States. Some poor souls also support endless wars by advocating its export. And when Obama — or presidents Bush and Clinton, for that matter — assert their intention to bring the glories of secular democracy to all of the world, it sounds good if they say it fast, but if you stop to consider the words and their intent, they truly are a combination of the ideas of such war-causing international busybodies as the racist Woodrow Wilson and the imperialist Rudyard Kipling, or more contemporaneously Hilary Clinton, John McCain, CNN, the BBC, and every Neoconservative.

Obama and other recent U.S. presidents are out to teach foreigners to elect good men, as well as to help elevate our uncivilized little brown brothers to the heights of our near-perfect secular (semi-pagan) democracy. Whether those little brown brothers want to give up their faith, tribalism, patriarchal societies, family structures, societal mores, or ethnic distinctiveness is irrelevant. Mr. Obama and his predecessors know what is best for all of them, and U.S. policy will be to impose it on them at all costs, even if we have to intervene and kill many of our little brothers — and perhaps uselessly waste the lives of many of our soldiers and Marines — to bring about this sublime culmination.

Doubt this? Watch what happens if Qaddafi survives. The U.S., the EU and the UN will impose economic sanctions — but will keep buying Libyan oil — that will kill innumerable Libyan civilians and leave Qaddafi and his crowd, like Saddam and his, unaffected.

This policy and the attitude that drives it are arrogant and racist.

Rep. King’s hearings

As I have noted here before, Rep. King’s hearings are an important opportunity for U.S. Muslim leaders to tell the Congress the truth. Though it would take moral courage and a willingness to be abused, U.S. Muslim leaders now have access to a highly publicized forum in which to explain to Congress and all Americans that the main instruments of “radicalization” in the Muslim-American community are the proselytizing activities conducted or sponsored by the Saudis, other wealthy Arab Peninsula donors, and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the impact of U.S. and Western foreign policies in the Islamic world, especially unqualified U.S. support for Israel.

It seems clear that if U.S. Muslim leaders do not honestly testify before Rep. King’s hearings, the hearings’ witnesses will yield a consensus that Muslims hate America for its liberties, freedoms, gender equality, etc. They will also deliver testimony that exonerates Washington’s relationship with Israel from any kind of responsibility for the war being waged against America by the Islamist movement. This end product of Rep. King’s hearings was signaled this week by Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia/Israel), the Republican leader in the House who, I believe, may have broken the law by meeting privately with Netanyahu. Cantor supported the hearings; he would not have done so if he thought that the truth about the hugely negative impact of Washington’s relationship with Israel was going to discussed. “What I can tell you,” the Washington Post quotes Cantor as saying, “is [that] I believe that we in this country are threatened by the spread of radical Islam, both abroad and at home.” Cantor is right, and his and most of the Congress’s blind support for Israel is one of the main reasons that Islamist strength is growing at home and overseas.

Sadly, U.S. Muslim leaders seem content to miss this opportunity to get the truth on the table for debate, and instead will weep crocodile tears about how they are being discriminated against. They will thus miss a chance to assist their adopted country, and will make many of their fellow countrymen question whether they actually intend to behave as responsible U.S. citizens.

Al-Qaeda and Arab unrest

At the risk of trying readers’ patience with continued attention to this issue, I would again like to note the analysis-by-assertion that is dominating political oratory and media reporting on the question of al-Qaeda’s relevance in the wake of “democratic revolutions” in the Arab world.

Al-Qaeda’s goals in the Muslim world have been three in number since 1996:

1. Drive the United States as far as possible from the Muslim world.
2. Destroy the U.S.- and Western-supported Muslim tyrannies.
3.  Destroy Israel

Let me say again that it seems to me that all three of these goals are being advanced by the Arab rebellions:

1. The United States military is already retreating in defeat from Iraq and Afghanistan because presidents Bush and Obama did not want to win. (However the politicians and media dress up these disasters, they will be seen across the Muslim world as the second superpower’s defeat at the hands of Allah’s mujahideen.) In addition, Washington’s tyrannical satrapies are dying one by one, with, oddly, Washington stabbing each in the back in turn. It is most unlikley that successor regimes will play the role of U.S. lackey as did, say, Mubarak, and that much U.S. political influence will end up being driven from the region. (Among the many miserable failures of the Western journalists covering the rebellions is their failure to tell Americans that one of the reasons Mubarak and the other tyrants were so hated was because they did Washington’s bidding in repressing Islam and protecting Israel.)
2. Al-Qaeda’s second goal is mostly covered above, but it is again worth noting that the Arab tyrannies were key and productive U.S. allies in Washington’s war with al-Qaeda and the Islamic movement. How their destruction can be seen as a net loss for al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups takes a kind of logic that the good Jesuit fathers did not teach me.
3. The Arab revolts clearly have pushed Israel farther along the road toward destruction. After destroying Israel’s eastern anti-Islamist shield by removing Saddam, Washington and its allies have destroyed Israel’s western anti-Islamist shield by helping to destroy the Arab tyrannies in Egypt and across North Africa. Again the logic that leads to the conclusion that these events yield a net negative for al-Qaeda and its allies is inexplicable. (This is not to argue that Washington should have protected the tyrannies. It is only to say that this is the dire price we pay for interventionist and pro-Israel policies that made us partners to tyranny for nearly half a century.)

Sundry questions

These issues have caught my eye in the past few weeks. I pose them as questions because I have not thought through my own answers and would benefit from your ideas/comments.

• Is it the United Nations’ job to aid in the destruction of member-state governments — Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, etc. — which were recognized as voting UN members in good standing?
• Is what goes on in the Ivory Coast so vital to the interests of the United States and its allies that they — and the United Nations — were required to intervene and impose sanctions on the country over a disputed presidential election, an action which has helped drive Ivorian society toward civil war?
• Is there really a “peace movement” in the United States, or is that so-called movement simply a cynical and wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party? The nearly complete silence of the peace folks has been quite noticeable, I think, as Obama adopts all of the Bush policies that drove what apparently are peace-frauds into the streets during the Bush years.

This article was written for the Washington Post. It is on their website now and will be in Sunday’s print edition. In writing the piece, I simply tried to point out the advantages that al-Qaeda and its allies will derive — or at least seek to exploit — from the ongoing unrest in the Arab world, and to use their documents and statements over the past 15 years to see how current events mesh or do not mesh with their goals.

The responses so far — mostly personal abuse, long Post readers’ substitute for thought — seem to miss the point that facts are facts, and that hope, optimism, and a quixotic (zany?) belief in the ease of installing democracy where church and state are one in the minds of most people may not suffice to win the day for democracy. Perhaps future comments will address the issues at hand, but those received so far — along with media’s consensus that al-Qaeda and its allies are finished — reinforce my belief that America’s troubles in the world are in large measure the fault of an intellectually bankrupt and ideologically driven educational system, especially in the areas of history and religion, as well as the near complete absence of the common-sense knowledge that human nature never, ever changes. Perhaps the teachers’ unions and the federal Department of Education really do need to be broken up, and responsibility for education be returned the lowest possible level of government.

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.