Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

The third issue of Inspire, al-Qaeda-in-the-Arab-Peninsula’s English-language magazine, was released last night and is devoted al-Qaeda’s recent attempt to destroy cargo aircraft with package bombs. [1] The magazine explains that the failed attack was called “Operation Hemorrhage” and is one part of a broader offensive meant to cause “maximum losses to the U.S. economy” and major damage to the “aviation industry, an industry that is vital for trade and transportation between the United States and Europe.”

The magazine describes an operation fully in keeping with Osama bin Laden’s strategy of trying to drive the U.S. economy to bankruptcy. Inspire’s writers claim that economic damage is more important than human casualties at this point in al-Qaeda’s war on the United States. They explain that the bombs that were placed on the cargo aircraft cost just $4,200, and so their discovery before detonation did no damage to al-Qaeda’s treasury or capabilities but, even in failure, exacted major security-expenditures by the United States and other countries. In fact, the writers note,

“To bring down the U.S. [there is no] need to strike big. In an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, [it is] more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch and [will] circumvent [the] security barriers America worked so hard to erect.”

The magazine also takes time to gloat at the British and — implicitly — the U.S. and other governments allied with it. “The British government,” Inspire notes,

“said if [an ink] toner weighs more than 500g[rams] it won’t be allowed aboard a plane. Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion? Do they think we have nothing to send but printers?”

Inspire argues that the current state of al-Qaeda’s war against the United States demands a “strategy of attacking the enemy with smaller, more frequent operations … [a] thousand cuts.” Toward this end, the magazine says that the cargo-plane operation marks the end of the first phase of a “multi-phased operation.”

“[The] next phase [is] to disseminate technical details of [the] device to the mujahideen around the world to use from their countries. [The] following phase would be for us to use our connections to mail such packages from countries below [the West’s] radar and to use similar devices in Western countries. … American interests will remain our target.”

The foregoing is a partial and initial look at al-Qaeda’s description of the new anti-U.S. campaign it initiated by placing bombs on cargo aircraft. Al-Qaeda clearly recognizes that the mujahideen invariably defeat the United States and its allies even when their operations fail or are stopped by Western security services.

In the present case, al-Qaeda invested $4,200 in a failed attack that yielded panic across two continents; tens of millions of dollars in new, security-related government expenditures; doubts about the viability of detection technologies that Western governments have paid billions of dollars for since 09/11; and a slowing impact on the worldwide air-cargo industry.

And in the United States, these negatives come on top of a rising tide of anti-Washington rage among American travelers who face a choice between being photographed nude or sexually molested at airports by federal civil servants. This anger toward and distrust of the federal government was bought by al-Qaeda for the few thousand dollars it invested in a failed suicide bomber at Christmas 2009.

While these two failed al-Qaeda activities keep paying huge dividends for the Islamist war effort — for an investment of less than $7,500 — President Obama, his terrorism czar John Brennan, and General Petraeus continue to assure Americans that the only route to safety lies in protecting Afghan civilians and winning the enemy’s hearts and minds.

May God help us all.

1. This article is based on excerpts of a copy of Inspire acquired and disseminated by a private-sector firm called The IntelCenter, which is based in northern Virginia. In my view, The IntelCenter is without peer in the private sector in terms of the timely acquisition and distribution of statements by al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and its allies. The even-handedness of the firm’s translations of non-English-language jihadi materials is likewise without peer.

President Obama and Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton are publicly bribing Israel to halt settlement construction for 90 days in return for 20 F-35 joint strike fighter aircraft, valued at about $3 billion dollars. In other words, Israel, a gangster-ridden, theocratic sandpit at the far end of the Mediterranean, has demonstrated its ability to extort almost anything it wants, whenever it wants it, from the greatest power the world has ever known.

Indeed, Israel now has a chit worth at least $3 billion dollars it can call in whenever it’s a bit short of U.S. taxpayer money. Netanyahu and his cabinet — with full support from the U.S.-citizen-staffed, Israel-First Fifth Column — can simply make noises every 90-days about building more settlement homes and then sit back and wait for the next bribe to arrive. Who knows, maybe an aircraft carrier or a half-dozen nuclear submarines will be in the next bag of swag demanded by Israel and the Israel-Firsters? Presumably Netanyahu has a pretty long shopping list of material items he wants U.S. citizens to pay for, as well as foreign policy goals for which he wants U.S. troops to fight and die.

Perhaps some order can be put into this process so U.S. taxpayers know how much Washington will send to the doomed-by-the Neocons’-Iraq-war Israeli state before it is washed away by the tide Sunni Salafist mujahideen rolling west from the Gulf and South Asia through Iraq. Why not put that miserable little cur Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) — whose loyalty to Israel over the United States is as lethal to Americans as Anwar al-Awalki’s disloyalty — in charge of the project. President Obama, in a spirit of bipartisanship, can name Rep. Cantor “Czar for bribing Israel and making sure more U.S. troops get killed by Islamists.”

Rep. Cantor should be assigned two tasks in this era of economic distress, one to keep track of the cost of bribing Israel and the other to keep count of the dead U.S. soldiers and Marines that will result therefrom. It’s the least he can do given that he has proven the felony provisions of the Logan Act — meant to protect Americans against being sold out to foreigners by fellow citizens — do not apply to him or other pro-Israel U.S.-citizens who meet privately with Israel’s prime minister and deliver who knows what information and promises from the Israel-First suborned U.S. Congress. (NB: Cantor meets Netanyahu on 10 November 2010 and three days later Obama and Clinton offer Israel 20 F-35 strike-fighter aircraft. Coincidences happen, I guess.)

Beyond the sickening spectacle of Obama and Clinton panting in eagerness to bribe Israel, and the brazen public display of disloyalty by Cantor and other Israel-Firsters — Democrats and Republicans — we also see ol’ “America-will-never-be-at-war-with-Islam” Barack again proving he has lied to the Islamic world. With the F-35 bribe for Israel on the table for inspection, 1.4 billion Muslims will see that Obama’s “Muslim outreach” program, as described in his Cairo and Indonesia speeches, is not genuine and will not slow Washington’s bipartisan ardor for supplying Israel with more and better weapons with which to start wars and kill Muslims.

Obama is a curious man: Extremely well-educated and extraordinarily unable — or unwilling — to see how one of his actions negatively impacts a variety of other U.S. interests. In this case, he does not seem to realize that the war-encouraging substance of his bribe to Israel for the temporarily cessation of settlement construction will look to Muslims much like a U.S. declaration of war on the Islamic world. And that this is the rule not the exception in his behavior is shown by his recent performance in India, where he declared a “strategic partnership” with New Delhi at the cost of driving Pakistan further into Saudi and Chinese hands and making sure that Pakistan’s survival is now tied to the success of those fighting to drive both the U.S.-NATO coalition and India from Afghanistan. At day’s end, perhaps a complete inability to integrate obviously related subjects is an Ivy-League education’s main product.

Finally, the decision by Obama and Clinton to bribe Israel at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $3 billion ought to be juxtaposed with a commercial now playing on U.S. television. The commercial claims 15-percent of American children live in hunger and asks viewers to donate to a fund to be used to eradicate this problem by 2015.

By 2015? Why not in six months? Why not re-appropriate the $6 billion going to Israel ($3 billion annual aid and the F-35s) and the nearly $6 billion that goes to the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, and Egypt and wipe out childhood hunger by mid-2011? I have never believed the Founders even remotely intended the constitution to authorize the federal government to reach into U.S. citizens’ pockets and steal money to give to foreign leaders, many of whom are gangsters, corrupt kings, tyrants, or fundamentally anti-American. Does anyone believe it is possible that the Founders would have supported paying $12 billion to foreign governments at any time, let alone when 15% of American kids are hungry? Maybe someone should ask Obama, Clinton, and Cantor for their views on this issue. Maybe that someone should be a hungry nine-year-old kid.

There has been much recent moaning and groaning in the media about the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States. These queries have been accompanied by agonized and bewildered questions about where such sentiment comes from and what causes it. This scenario would be comical — nay, hilarious — if it was not destined to bring war into the United States. Let me say that I believe the two biggest and most obvious sources of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States are the U.S. Congress and Muslim-American leaders.

The pro-Israel Senators and Congressman in the United States Congress. Tick off any number of names: Lieberman, Schummer, Graham, Cantor, Ackerman, McCain, Levin, Berman, Ros-Lehtinem, Bilirakis, Titus, McConnell, Cardin, Burton, Rothman, Demint — the list quite literally includes most members of both houses. These men and women have absolutely no qualms about praising, abetting, and funding any Israeli action that kills Muslims. When Netanyahu comes to the United States, they meet with him publicly and behind close doors (without State Department representatives); stand with him in defiance of sitting presidents; and then join him in calls for war with Iran, Syria, (someday) Turkey, or anyone else Israel wants the United States to fight a war against.

There is no reason for any Muslim-American to believe that even one of these pro-Israel representatives or senators have the slightest interest in their views, or any concern whatsoever for the life of any Muslim that Israel deems to be expendable. Needless to say, there is no reason for any non-Jewish-American citizen to believe these senators and congressmen care anything about their interests. If they did, why have the given a foreign brigand like Netanyahu the ability to take 300 million Americans into war with Iran that can only push the United States farther down the road toward ruin?

Why is there growing anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, and why do many Muslim-Americans increasingly believe their government regards Muslim blood overseas as cheap? In large measure, you need look no further than Capitol Hill.

The cowardly leaders of the U.S. Muslim-American community. By behaving as victims and failing to speak the truth as they know it, U.S. Muslim leaders encourage their fellow citizens to believe that the lies of U.S. political leaders are true: Muslims hate freedom, liberty, gender equality, elections, democracy, and all the other things most Americans consider their birthright.

Muslim-America leaders know that Islam, like other major religions, is a religion of peace until its followers perceive themselves to be cornered by enemies who appear intent and able to destroy it. It is irrelevant whether this perception is correct; those holding it are confident of its veracity and will fight with determination and ferocity. The nuclear-armed Israelis, for example, perceive themselves mortally threatened by AK-47-armed Palestinians, and so since 2000 Israeli forces have killed six Palestinians for every Israeli killed by Palestinian fighters in the never-ending Israel-Muslim religious war.

U.S. Muslim leaders must stop whining and speak forthrightly, telling their fellow citizens that most American-Muslims are living proof that U.S. politicians lie about Muslims hating Americans because of how they live, vote, and think. They must publicly affirm both that most Muslim-Americans are integrating into U.S. society, and that increasing numbers of young Muslim-American males are picking up arms or explosives because they perceive U.S. foreign policy as an attack on Islam and its followers.

These Muslim-American leaders also must admit that they have a deadly serious problem within their community in the form of Islamist scholars and clerics who are sent and/or sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood or by Arab regimes — especially Saudi Arabia — to labor to incite young, U.S.-citizen Muslim men to attack America because of its foreign policy, as well as to make sure that American-Muslims do not integrate into American society. [NB: This last-noted reality exactly mirrors the efforts by Israel and Jewish-American groups to de-integrate Jewish-American citizens from U.S. society so they put Israel’s interests above those of the United States.]

Muslim-American leaders must also speak honestly in order to replace the dastardly lies President Obama and his terrorism adviser, John Brennan, tell so often and so blithely, and which so greatly undermine America’s ability to defend itself. These Muslim-American leaders must tell their fellow U.S. citizens the irrefutable truth: The overwhelming number of references to jihad in the Koran and in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions and sayings are martial in nature, and that very, very few references — and none that are controlling — have anything whatsoever to do with efforts to become a better person. U.S. citizens and their leaders need to hear this hard truth clearly, loudly, and repeatedly so that they can begin to understand why growing portions of the Islamic world are at war with the United States. No one can deliver it with sufficient authority save those Muslim-American leaders who both know and love their faith and honestly desire to be part of America’s society and political system.

Until Muslim-American leaders begin to educate all Americans on this issue, there is no chance of slowing the growth of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States or defending the United States against those led and inspired by Osama bin Laden. If Muslim-American leaders continue to deliberately hide the realities of their faith and so the motivation of Islamist fighters here and abroad, they will encourage the anti-Islamic sentiment that Israel’s supporters on Capitol Hill — with their colleagues in the media, AIPAC, and major universities like Harvard — aggressively and knowingly cultivate with the aim of encouraging Islamist attacks in the United States by Muslim-Americans.

On this point, Israel, the Muslim Brotherhood, AIPAC, al-Qaeda, most of the U.S. Congress, and Saudi Arabia are brothers-in-arms. They all intend to provoke a war between America and Islam by showing that the United States and Israel are one in the same entity, one that is intent on destroying Islam. This is a difficult thing to say, but the actions and often the words of all these groups over the past 15 years lead to no other conclusion.

With mid-term voting over it is difficult to know exactly how many reliable voices and votes Tea Party (TP) issues will command in the Republican caucus beginning in January, 2011. Indeed, a cynic might expect savvy, long-time Republicans to simply absorb the Tea Party’s position on economic issues, make the TP’s voice nothing more than a “me too!” on economic legislation, and then run candidates to purge TP-supported representatives in 2012.

One way for the TP to avoid getting emasculated and then steamrolled in 2012 is to delineate specific goals in the areas of foreign and national security policy that must be supported by the Republican caucus, if the latter expects reliable TP support on economic issues. The TP’s foreign-affairs goals — if what its leaders said in the campaign is true — will be non-interventionist, pro-Constitution, and adamantly America First. Quick, substantive progress on these fronts ought to be the non-negotiable price for reliable TP support in the Republican caucus.

Now, TP representatives will be lectured by their Republican caucus mates and the so-called “conservative” Democrats about the “complex ballet of international politics,” and how naive first-termers are wise to stand back and let old congressional hands take the lead in dancing the U.S. part in that ballet. The media, too, will pipe in, describing any TP’er who seeks to return constitutionality and sanity to the conduct of U.S. foreign and national security policy as a “bull in the China shop,” a “racist,” an “Isolationist,” or even — hold on to your hat — an “archaic nationalist in world headed for a global government.” (NB: One would think any American would covet the last epithet as a badge of honor and defiance.)

With this sort of knee-jerk, not to say vicious opposition to the TP’s non-interventionism, it is important to keep the movement’s goals clear and simple, and then be willing to stand by them come what may. Let me suggest five relatively easy anti-interventionism actions that I think would meet with loud approval from most Americans who are not elitists, religion-crazed, or war-loving; that is, from most voters.

1. Legislation making it illegal for the president to take the country to war or use U.S. military forces for more than ten days — to allow for preemption of immediate threats — without a formal declaration of war, which he (or she) must ask for, and on which the Congress must publicly vote after public debate.
2. Legislation making it illegal for the president of the United States to commit U.S. military forces in support of an ally choosing to initiate an offensive war against one of its enemies. If already-in-place treaties require the United States to support offensive wars by treaty-partners, the Executive Branch will be directed to appropriately amend them or to give notice of U.S. withdrawal per the treaty’s provisions.
3. Legislation declaring U.S. neutrality in all wars involving states not tied to the United States in a defensive alliance. The legislation will order that declarations of neutrality be accompanied by the automatic application of a full embargo of U.S.-made arms on all combatants.
4. Legislation declaring that no U.S. military forces will serve at any time under the command of a non-U.S. commander or an international organization.
5. Legislation that terminates foreign aid of all kinds if the U.S. domestic unemployment level rises above 4 percent. Consideration would be given to restarting foreign aid when the unemployment level drops below 4 percent and remains below 4 percent for 12 months.

Each of these five points is in the interest of Americans: they restore the war-declaring prerogative to Congress, as the Founders intended; they eliminate a president’s ability to take America to war at his/her whim, which the Founders strove to guard against; they neither favor nor discriminate against any foreign country, per the guidance in Washington’s Farewell Address; they keep the United States out of other peoples’ wars; and they apply a respectable degree of common sense in using U.S. taxpayer funds to care for Americans when they are in need.

Many people have ideas about how the Tea Party can preserve its identity and score substantive legislative accomplishments that will be seen by voters as measurable deeds that match the TP’s words. The federal government’s debt, growth, and accumulating power must be cut, and laws that make U.S. interventionism and wars less likely contribute to effort. Success in the foreign-policy and national-security areas, moreover, would give Tea Party candidates a solid base on which to contest future elections by making them members of the only movement that did something tangible to restore the Constitution, revitalize republicanism, and champion those non-elite Americans who are paying for Washington’s interventionism and unnecessary wars with their taxes and their children.

I have received several notes from people I respect asking what I meant by saying: “We need to get serious about killing many more of our Islamist enemies and their civilian supporters.” I said some form of this on FOX News this week and in several articles I have written in recent weeks.

My statements and the questions they provoked go to the heart of the reason that I began — with the help of several very kind and talented people — to write at this site. As I noted in the first piece I wrote here, I have nothing but the greatest respect for the people at AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com, and at other sites dedicated to liberty and a non-interventionist foreign policy. They were kind in publishing my work when I first began writing; I remain in their debt.

I began writing here, however, because I believed, and still believe, that the wages of U.S. intervention abroad are war and more war, and that that reality will not change until the American electorate removes our bipartisan interventionist elite from federal office. Let us hope that the Tea Party and other non-interventionists begin that process today.

But it is important to recall that this is a process, and one that is getting a very, very late start. The U.S. government’s interventionism has been growing and solidifying for half-a-century; our grammar and high schools inculcate our young with a belief in the innate goodness of sticking our noses in other peoples’ business and trying to change them — via coercion if necessary — into mirror images of ourselves; and then, on high-school graduation, many of these young people go to universities that largely support endless, militant interventionism, teaching that America proves its worth by what it does to westernize people overseas — especially by building democracies — not by what it does to improve life in North America.

On top of all this, most of the media is interventionist to the hilt. Whether to install rights for women where they are anathema; destroy Iraq and Iran for Israel and Christian Zionists; champion the cause of a female poet in Burma; pour countless millions down the corrupt Haitian drain when Americans are hungry and jobless; or give 400 million borrowed-from-China dollars to massively corrupt Palestinian leaders, the media are often an important motor driving U.S. interventionism.

Now, all of this should be ended as quickly as possible. But that laudable goal is not yet near the horizon. Even if change toward non-intervention begins to take hold today, the Congress, the media, the schools and universities, and the White House will stay in the interventionists’ hands. Another step forward may be made in 2012, but given the vagaries of politics, it is possible that some 2010 gains by non-interventionists will be rolled back. Unless an event occurs domestically that forces most Americans to see the great and perhaps irreversible damage that has been and is being done to the republic by Washington’s interventionism, it will take decades to retire the Wilsonian fantasists who cause wars, waste our blood and money, and erode our liberty.

Where does this leave America? Well, it leaves us with growing popular support for non-intervention — which is good news — but it also leaves the interventionists in power and, more important, it leaves 80-percent of the Muslim world interpreting U.S. foreign policy as an attack on Islam meant to destroy the faith and its followers. While only a percentage of that number has taken up weapons to fight the United States, the motivation for others to begin fighting will continue and grow more compelling while Washington is run by interventionists and its foreign policy in the Muslim world is static.

This reality, in turn, requires Americans to think not only about how to legitimately rid ourselves of interventionists, but about how we defend the republic against the anti-U.S. enemies the interventionists have cultivated and nurtured in the Muslim world for 50 years and more. No matter how much we dislike war, the interventionists have brought us wars which will have to be fought in tandem with political campaigns to send into permanent retirement those politicians, teachers, and journalists who drive the intervention that ignites wars.

To defend the republic while ridding it of interventionists, I do not know of any other viable choice but to use the U.S. military to kill increasing numbers of the Islamist enemy and its supporters. Because the only action that will sap the enemy’s motivation to fight is an end to U.S. interventionism, and because we cannot remove the interventionists and their policies in the foreseeable future, we will have to fight hard and bloodily overseas for the republic’s survival. And we must not shy from the fact that the interventionists — in their slavish, self-interested support for Israel and Arab tyrants — have and are enraging growing numbers of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males. At some point in the not distant future, these young men will begin conducting attacks in the United States that will come to be regarded as commonplace.

Whether I am right in this calculation, time will tell. And I can say truthfully, moreover, that there is no one who hopes more than I do that those I admire at AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com, and in the Liberty movement generally are correct in believing both intervention and war-making can be opposed and halted at the same time.

But I do not think this is a realistic possibility. Instead, I believe only the ferocious, bloody-minded use of U.S. military forces against the Islamist enemy and its civilian supporters can keep our foes at bay until U.S. voters rid the republic of the interventionists who have given us nothing but war.

Perhaps it is needless to say, but if we the voters fail to eliminate the interventionists and their policies, the chance of ending this era of seemingly endless war is remote at best, and that, of course, would all but ensure the end of liberties we have known. Indeed, the American citizenry has a vital role to play, while U.S. Marines and soldiers spend their lives to buy time to end war-causing intervention.

Thus, the voters’ task of ending intervention is of transcendent importance. If you doubt that, consider the words of a leading antebellum statesman and future vice president of the Confederacy. “No principle is more dangerous to us,” said Alexander Stephens, “than that of compelling other nations to adopt our form of government. No instance is to be found upon record of any republic having ever entered upon such a hazardous crusade, which did not end in the subversion of its own liberties and the ultimate enslavement of its own people.”

While still a developing story, today’s successful al-Qaeda effort to get explosives into the United States and Europe on aircraft flying out of Yemen again emphasizes the deception presidents Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton have practiced on the American people. Nothing could be more untrue then the claims by these men that al-Qaeda and its allies are merely a small bunch of — take your pick — thugs, criminals, or nihilists who have nothing to do with the Islamic religion. This lie, quite simply, is slowly killing American security.

We are facing a talented, patient, pious, and determined enemy which is motivated by the tenets of Salafi Islam, a kind of Islam that is not mainstream in the Muslim world but one that is a respected mode of belief, the followers of which are the fastest growing sect in Sunni Islam. The Islamists who fight us are religiously motivated men who believe U.S. foreign policy is a weapon meant to destroy Islam and its followers; they will continue attacking as long as Washington maintains this foreign policy status quo, especially vis-a-vis U.S. support for Muslim police states and Israel. (And this status quo will stay no matter who wins the Congress next Tuesday. Why? Because the legislators will not seek energy self-sufficiency as long as their profligate spending depends on loans from the Arab Peninsula’s tyrannies (and China), and because many legislators have been suborned by U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters, men and women whose first loyalty is not to the United States.)

On the strategic level al-Qaeda’s successful airborne movement of explosives from Yemen to the United States is an important success for the organization’s campaign against U.S. and Western economies. And it is an example of the type of operations bin Laden is planning at his leisure while General Petraeus and his gun-toting social-scientists fecklessly seek to win Muslim hearts and minds. Like the botched Times Square bombing earlier in 2010, today’s events amount to victory in failure. While there is no icing on al-Qaeda’s cake — that is, no corpses or physical destruction for media broadcast — the United States and its allies will now spend huge amounts on increased security measures, technical gadgetry, and security employees; will slow down job-producing commerce by intensifying security for cargo-carrying aircraft; and will become ever more intrusive (and smug) in stripping the last bits of privacy from Americans who travel by air. And while all this probably useless spending, hiring, and snooping goes on, the jokers who get elected next Tuesday will leave almost completely unguarded thousands of miles of America’s land and coastal borders.

Here is a piece I published this week on the National Interest’s foreign-affairs blog. It deals with Osama bin Laden’s new audiotape threatening attacks on France. I am sure many pundits will insist this week’s bin Laden threat and today’s explosives-and-aircraft events are unconnected. They will be wrong, and the tune they sing in making the argument is simply another part of their best-known melody, “Whistling Past the Graveyard.”

On 27 October 2010, Al-Jazirah Television broadcast a new audiotape by Osama bin Laden meant to exploit the Muslim world’s growing anger toward France specifically, and against Europe generally. Defending the recent kidnapping of five French nationals in Niger, bin Laden said the action was an appropriate response to France’s ongoing intervention in the affairs of Muslims in North and West Africa; its persecution of Muslim women in France via its ban on burqa wearing; and the presence of nearly 4,000 French troops in Afghanistan. Bin Laden warned Paris it is foolish to think that France’s anti-Muslim actions will go unanswered by al-Qaeda and other mujahideen. “The equation is very clear and simple,” bin Laden said, stressing, as he always does, the justice of reciprocal treatment in wartime, “the fault lies with the one who initiates [the hostilities] … as you kill, you will be killed; as you abduct, so shall you be abducted; as you ruin our [Muslim] security, so shall we ruin your security.”

The new message is vintage bin Laden in several ways. With the United States and Britain, France has always been high on al-Qaeda’s target list because of its discriminatory treatment of French Muslims; its support Algiers against the Algerian insurgents; its military aid to West African regimes; and its presence in Afghanistan. In addition, since 2006 bin Laden and al-Qaeda have highlighted their intention to bring the jihad to the Niger-Nigeria-Gulf-of-Guinea area to “liberate” the region’s Muslims from the anti-Islamic policies that Europe’s governments force their “agent regimes” in West Africa to apply. And as he has done regarding the Arab Peninsula’s energy resources, bin Laden notes that the oil, uranium, and other natural resources of West Africa are the property of the Muslim ummah and that the mujahideen intend to end the West’s control of them.

While using familiar themes, the timing of bin Laden’s message is meant to exploit several current realities that favor al-Qaeda and other jihadis:

• France and most western European states are on a high state of alert because of credible intelligence that bin Laden has authorized Mumbai-like attacks in their cities. With this threat already on the table, bin Laden is trying to enhance fears among publics, politicians, and security services and force them to continue high levels of counter-terrorism spending.
• Bin Laden intends the message to praise and spur on fighters who make up al-Qaeda’s forces, and those of its allies, in North and West Africa. The past few years have seen al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM) continue its insurgency in Algeria, as well as expand its operational reach in Mauritania, Mali, and elsewhere in West Africa. Al-Qaeda also has gotten a pledge of loyalty from a growing Islamist militant group in Nigeria known as Boko Haram. Bin Laden’s message signals al-Qaeda’s support for these groups’ activities; stresses its intention to continue inspiring jihadist activities in West Africa and across the continent; and bears witness to al-Qaeda’s growing martial capabilities in West Africa.
• Bin Laden also highlights NATO’s deteriorating position in Afghanistan and reminds France and other NATO states that they will all pay a price for occupying a Muslim country. This aspect of the talk is fully in keeping with bin Laden’s quite successful post-9-11 effort to strip away countries from the coalitions Washington led into Iraq and Afghanistan. In this message, he refers to the latter “Bush‘s accursed war.”

And while bin Laden does not focus on the United States in this message, its release six days before U.S. mid-term elections is not a coincidence. Bin Laden’s words are meant to remind U.S. voters that he is still alive and al-Qaeda is quite viable; that the Obama administration is, like Bush’s, losing the Afghan war; and that the war — with the Iraq war — has pushed the United States to “the verge of bankruptcy in all major areas, and soon it will go back beyond the Atlantic Ocean, Allah willing.”

Less noticeable to the public, but surely most worrying to U.S. policymakers is the message’s clear indication that al-Qaeda’s presence and strength is growing in the oil-rich Gulf-of-Guinea region, from which America will be importing 20-percent of its crude in the next several years.

Finally, for those who argue bin Laden is irrelevant, French Defense Herve Morin unexpectedly said on 28 October 2010 that “our troops may leave Afghanistan next year … we can transfer responsibilities to the Afghans in 2011.” This positive response to bin Laden’s threat is even quicker than the Spanish government’s cave-in after the Madrid bombings.

Have you noticed that with ten days to go until the mid-term elections everything is coming up roses in Afghanistan? Yes, on the eve of the vote, General Petraeus’s Afghan surge is suddenly and magically producing positive results. He and other senior U.S. and NATO officials are pumping out stories about: “We know bin Laden is living in a house and is not on the run;” the “success of drone strikes;” “promising peace negotiations” with the Taliban; and the “unstoppable Kandahar offensive.”

Now, the question is: Can this be a true case of coincidence, or is it all manufactured and transparent hooey meant to keep the Afghan war off voters’ minds until after November 2nd? My guess is that it is the latter.

• The announcement that Osama bin Laden is living safely in a house in Pakistan — which misleadingly suggests NATO has his location — is important only because it destroys the deception long practiced by presidents Bush and Obama which claims that because of U.S.-NATO pressure bin Laden is running from rock-to-rock and cave-to-cave and so cannot communicate with and command al-Qaeda. This has always been untrue; if bin Laden was frequently moving, he would have been killed or captured long ago because constant movement under pressure produces mistakes that yield precise targeting data.
• The drone strikes are killing Islamist field commanders because there are far more drone attacks than ever before and because the insurgent commanders lead from the front, not from bunkers in Tampa or Qatar. (NB: It always seems astounding that when missiles are fired from 20,000 feet into enemy-controlled territory, the military is instantly able to tell the media precisely which important commander was killed and exactly how many casualties were inflicted.)
• Regarding “negotiations” with the Taliban and other insurgents, the Taliban are talking — if they are talking — because they have seen the U.S.-led coalition run from Iraq without victory, and because they sense Afghan victory as they see Washington and the U.S.-NATO coalition preparing to leave once Obama gets past the mid-terms and begins preparing for the 2012 presidential election. At day’s end, the U.S. and NATO are seeking terms from the Taliban and its allies, not the other way about.
• The U.S.-NATO Kandahar offensive is a “success” because generals McChrystal and Petraeus gave the Taliban eight months warning that the offensive was coming and so insurgent commanders moved fighters and ordnance out of the way. Worth noting also is that Petraeus delayed the offensive’s start for six weeks so his Potemkin campaign would give mid-term voters a Clintonesque “don’t worry, be happy” feeling about the Afghan war.

Also adding to the idea that the “positive” Afghan trend my not be mere coincidence is that it sounds familiar to what happened in Iraq before the 2008 presidential election. Petraeus used his much ballyhooed counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) to produce enough security in Iraq to get that war off 2008’s political center stage because neither Obama nor McCain wanted it to be a central issue.

As we are seeing today, the COIN approach did little in Iraq except delay U.S. defeat and ensure Shia supremacy. Petreaus and his COIN theorists took temporary advantage of the anti-al-Qaeda sentiment produced in Sunni Iraqis by the indiscriminate killing conducted by al-Qaeda forces under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. U.S. forces deftly hired, trained, and armed these anti-al-Zarqawi Sunni fighters and teamed with them to reduce violence.

But the success was tactical and, as we are seeing, transitory. The U.S. military has been directed to abandon its former “allies” in the what was called the “Sunni Awakening,” and in the wake of that abandonment the Sunnis see civil war ahead as they watch U.S. combat forces withdraw; U.S. diplomats help install a Shia regime; and Iran’s clear intent to aid Iraq’s Shias against Sunni Iraqis. And, naturally enough, Iraq’s Shia regime would be crazy to maintain or absorb an armed Sunni force as it is preparing to exact vengeance from Iraq’s Sunni community after U.S.-led forces depart.

In addition, after al-Zarqawi was killed, bin Laden sent new, more politically adept, and less bloodthirsty leaders to rebuild al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, as well as to begin mending ties to Sunni “Awakening” fighters who fought al-Zarqawi. Even though the replacement for al-Zarqawi was killed in 2010, he and other al-Qaeda commanders have put the group on the road to recovery in Iraq; this success, of course, was helped by a pro-Shia U.S. policy that makes Iraq’s Sunnis amenable to taking aid from any quarter. Indeed, so successful is this comeback that both Iraqi officials and U.S. generals admit al-Qaeda is again an effective component of the Sunni insurgency and is operating in rural and urban environments.

Quite predictably, therefore, Petraeus’s so-called COIN “success” in Iraq is fraying and appears headed down the road to ultimate collapse and sectarian civil war. But the Iraq surge did do its job: It allowed Obama to avoid appearing as a “surrenderista” during the presidential campaign, and permitted McCain to avoid too frequently reminding voters that his party started and lost the insane Iraq war. And all this “political success” cost America was tens of billions of U.S. dollars, thousands of U.S. casualties, and ultimate defeat.

If recent events in Afghanistan are staged and not coincidental, they may well produce — at the same costs as in Iraq — a similar “political success” in Afghanistan. If this comes to pass, Petraeus will again have done what was demanded by his political masters, and our soldiers and Marines will once again have played a part Bob Dylan long-ago described as being “only pawns in the game.”

Since publication of Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars the pro-Obama media have claimed U.S. generals “boxed in” the president in terms of sending additional troops to Afghanistan. Neil Sheehan (washingtonpost.com, 3 October 10), Tom Ricks (foreignpolicy.com, 4 October 10), and Melvin Goodman (consortiumnews, 5 October 10) have all portrayed poor ol’ Barack as being surrounded by big bad generals who want to continue the Afghan war on an ever larger scale. On the basis of what actually is in Woodward’s book, this is nonsense. Indeed, Woodward amply demonstrates that Obama bases his Afghan policy on what is good for his political fortunes, and that his concern for U.S. lives and security is nil.

Let us deal with the U.S. generals first. There is no doubt that this generation of U.S. generals is not the stuff from which legends — or victories — are made. With exception of one Army and one Marine general, Woodward’s book describes generals who know they are losing in Afghanistan; know that the three levels of troop reinforcements being debated — 40,000, 30,000, and 11,000 — are inadequate; and know that even the high end, tabled-but-never-discussed option of 85,000 troops would be insufficient. Rather than “boxing in” Obama, the generals appear to cower in his presence and refuse to speak frankly; they instead compete with each other to tell Obama what he wants to hear, which is: “We can make do with whatever number of troops you decide, Oh Genius Leader.” In other words, they throw the welfare of their soldiers and Marines to the wolves to please Obama and the political jackals who surround him, a crew of conspiracy-loving men led by the new National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon who quickly decide the U.S. military is Obama’s enemy. (pp. 81, 121-22, 195, 197, 313-15, and 319-21)

The generals peopling Woodward’s book appear as calculating civil servants and not soldiers, and, counter-intuitively, this is most true of generals who belong to the Special Forces or other elite military units. Indeed, these men — especially Petreaus and McChrystal — seem to have no real grasp on what they are doing; no real concern about what the enemy is doing, motivated by, or how many of them U.S. troops confront; and no idea of how idiotic it is to imagine an infidel occupier can win the hearts and minds of a conservative and tribal Islamic people. One lesson of Woodward’s book is that America’s elite soldiers are equipped with too much theory and social science; too little reality and history; and too much moral cowardice to lead American armies in the field. That job ought to be left to traditionally trained generals who know wars are won by killing, and lost by the application of social-science experiments.

But in Woodward’s book it is Obama who runs the show, and he makes it clear from the start that he wants no part of the Afghan war and would prefer to simply withdraw from it. The reason he does not do so has nothing to do with being “boxed in” by generals (p. 281), but by his concerns about the coming mid-term and 2012 elections.

Woodward makes clear that Obama cares neither for U.S. security nor for the men and women serving in Afghanistan. Whatever I do, Obama twice tells Senator Lindsey Graham, it cannot be something that costs me support in the Democratic party. (p. 336) In other words, Obama places his party’s hold on political power over U.S. national security.

Now if these were the only two occasions in Woodward’s book where Obama said his Afghan policy is meant to hold political power, not to defeat America’s enemies, it could be attributed to slips of the tongue. But they are not.

President Obama, throughout Woodward’s book, browbeats the military into a number of reinforcements for Afghanistan that will protect his Democratic base and will allow him to campaign in 2010 and 2012 on the claim that he did his best to prevail in Afghanistan. The number of troops Obama decides will meet these goals is 30,000, this after learning that even 85,000 more troops would “protect” only 60-percent of Afghans, which is the key to his administration’s policy. Oddly, Obama and his advisers never discussed how many troops would be needed to meet this central policy goal.

Having thus made his administration’s goal unattainable by choosing a reinforcement package of 30,000 troops, Obama proceeds to make it clear that he is ready — in order to protect his political future — to deliberately orchestrate a disaster for the United States in Afghanistan.

After the 30,000 figure is agreed, for example, Secretary of Defense Gates continued to seek to augment that number, which Woodward’s book shows Gates thought inadequate. Obama reacted with multiple warnings that if Gates and others continued seeking more troops he would make sure America lost in Afghanistan.

—”Referring to Gates and the uniformed military [trying to get more troops], he [Obama] said, “They [the military] think its the opposite [that he would not send fewer than 30,000 troops]. I’d be perfectly happy …” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Nothing would make Rahm [Emmanuel] happier than if I said no to 30,000. … Rahm would tell me it’d be much easier to do what I want to do [domestically] by saying no,” the president said.” (pp. 303-04)

—”Can you support this [the 30,000-troop addition]?” Obama asked [Gates]. “Because if the answer is no, I understand it and I’ll be happy to just authorize another 10,000 troops and we can continue to go as we are and train the Afghan national force and just hope for the best.” (p. 309)

—”If you [Obama is speaking to his senior advisers on Afghanistan] have any personal misgivings or any professional doubts about what were about to do [authorize 30,000 troops], tell me know, because I need to hear it, he [Obama] said. ‘If you don’t think this is the right approach, say so now. the only alternative is just to go with the trainers’ — the 10,000 to 11,000 option that in the military’s judgment carried the most risk.” (p. 326)

—”Even with a narrower [Afghan] mission and resourcing, there is [,Obama said,] still no appetite here for doing this [sending 30,000 troops]. So there cannot be any dogfights between you [McChrystal], Petreaus, Mullen, and Biden, and that includes you, Karl [Eikenberry, U.S. ambassador in Kabul].” Addressing Eikenberry, he [Obama] said, “If this is not the case, I will go with” the 11,000 trainers only.” (p. 230)

Obama is nothing if not consistent. Having never considered a troop augmentation big enough to have even a chance of securing U.S. interests, he constantly threatened the military with scrapping the inadequate 30,000 number and replacing it with a defeat-ensuring 10-11,000 total. It is hard to see how Obama’s complete unconcern for U.S. interests amounts to the generals boxing him in.

Finally, Woodward reveals the best evidence of Obama’s unconcern for the lives of U.S. troops and all other Americans. Since his election, Obama and his senior advisers have known the location of a large network of facilities in Pakistan used by the Islamists to train fighters to kill U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and to attack in Europe, the United States and elsewhere. Per Woodward:

—”Priority one for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and now [after his election] Obama, had to be the ungoverned tribal regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda network, and branches of the extremist insurgent Taliban had nested 150 training camps and other facilities.” (p.3)

And what have Obama and his national-security team done about these 150 camps. Nothing. Again, Woodward:

—”The United States military did not have “war” plans for an invasion of Pakistan. Instead, it had and continues to have [when Woodward’s book was published in September, 2010] one of the most sensitive and secret of all military contingencies, what military officials call a ‘retribution’ plan in the event of another 9/11-like attack on the U.S. by terrorists based in Pakistan. Under this plan, the U.S. would bomb and attack every known al-Qaeda compound or training camp in the U.S. intelligence database. Some locations might be outdated, but there would be no concern, under the plan, for who might be living there now. The retribution plan called for a brutal attack on at least 150 or more associated camps.” (p. 46)

There you have it. Since Obama’s election, he and his advisers — military and civilian — have maintained a list of 150 or more facilities at which Islamists are now being trained to kill Americans and their allies. Faced with a war Bush and Obama have chosen not to win, Woodward points out that Obama has a plan to retaliate after — repeat after — an unknown number of Americans are killed by al-Qaeda inside the United States.

Yes, you have got it straight. Those 150 camps and facilities are now producing the men who are defeating us in Afghanistan and those who will kill Americans at home, and Obama is not hitting them because he wants to have targets to attack after al-Qaeda demonstrates he has utterly failed. And now, thanks to Obama’s jackals leaking this “retribution” plan for Woodward to write about and al-Qaeda and the Taliban to read, the camps and facilities will be moved and there will be no targets to strike after al-Qaeda slaughters Americans in the United States.

At the end of his book, Woodward quotes Obama as saying he thinks “that we can absorb a terrorist attack.” (p. 363) Sadly, Obama clearly and deliberately has created the circumstances that will allow his thesis to be fully tested.

Last evening I finished reading Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Woodward’s book is very similar to the first of his trilogy on the Bush administration’s reaction to 9/11, Bush at War, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Each books underscores the utter sameness and ignorance of Democrats and Republicans in regard to the war being waged on the United States by increasing numbers of Islamist fighters at home and abroad. Read Woodward’s Bush and Obama books and two things become immediately obvious.

1.) For any person not in the bipartisan U.S. political elite — a caste which includes not only politicians, but court historians like Woodward and the U.S. military’s general officer corps — publication of either Obama’s Wars or Bush at War, would result in multiple felony indictments for publicizing highly classified national intelligence reporting, collection methods, and programs. But so far above the law are Woodward, his publisher, the Republican and Democratic politicians who eagerly lined up to spill the beans to Woodward, and the generals who leak secrets, play politics artfully, but cannot win a war, that none of them have any fear or moral qualms about revealing information that benefits not only the Islamists we are fighting but such nation-states as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Woodward blithely describes the senior Obama officials who gave him copies of secret documents; spent multiple hours allowing their classified divulging to be tape-recorded; and provided him with “National Security Council meeting notes, personal notes, memos, chronologies, letters, PowerPoint slides, e-mails, government cables, calendars, transcripts, diaries, and maps.” (p. xii) Having digested this illegally disclosed material, Woodward then arranged — as he did with Bush — to conduct a long interview with Obama in order to check his facts. On clear display in Woodward’s books on Obama and Bush is the limitless contempt the bipartisan U.S. political elite has for the law and security of America.

2.) The spice added to Woodward’s Obama book by disclosing highly classified data is desperately needed because — as in the Bush book — discussions among the president, his advisers, Democratic and Republican leaders, and the military never, ever rises above the banal. Indeed, the characters who populate Woodward’s Obama and Bush books can only be described as exceedingly well-educated men and women who are perfectly ignorant of the problem they are addressing. In the Obama book, for example, the following items can be found:

“His [General Petraeus’s] primary insight was that the U.S. could not kill its way out of the war.” (p. 15)

Why, then, were we driven from Iraq and are being driven from Afghanistan because the enemy is killing our troops?

“But he [Afghan President Karzai] had been diagnosed as a manic-depressive, according to intelligence. Karzai was on medication and had severe mood swings.” (p. 65)

Why, then, are the American people being told that Karzai is a leader who is steady and reliable enough to build a “new” Afghanistan and so justifies the price America is paying in lives and money?

“Do you understand [asked Secretary of State Clinton] what the alternative would be if we don’t stick to this [waging the Afghan]? she asked. The gains for women will evaporate and the UN would be driven out” [p.102]

So, our soldiers and Marines are dying and being crippled in Afghanistan so Mrs. Muhammad can vote and abort, and so the UN can continue wasting U.S. taxpayer money?

“We are not [,said Defense Secretary Gates,] going to defeat the Taliban.” (p. 220)

Then why in the world did we send 30,000 more troops to fight a war our military chief, and his president, claim we cannot win?

“The president [Obama] wanted to move the Pakistanis to bring some semblance of law and order to the ungoverned tribal areas….” (p.285)

Why, at this late date, doesn’t the president know that the disaster in and threat from Pakistan’s tribal area is the direct result of what he and Bush asked Islamabad to do; that is, to send the Pakistan army into the region, which caused a civil war? Why doesn’t Obama know that the equation for Pakistan — as it is for the United States — is: More intervention equals more war?

These are just a few of the tens of examples of the rampant ignorance manifested by the leading actors-felons in Woodward’s Obama’s Wars. If you do not have time to read the whole book and look for them, but are sure that I am mistaken, just look up ten items in Woodward’s index that are unquestionably pertinent to understanding the Afghan problem:

1. Islam;
2. Afghan tribalism: nature and impact;
3. jihad;
4. Afghan minorities: diversity, animosities, and conflict;
5. Afghan history: uniting impact of and unrelenting war on foreign occupiers;
6. Pashtun tribes: history of their political dominance and hatred of Afghan minorities;
7. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states: continuing aid to the Taliban and al-Qaeda;
8. Pakistan: Islamist Afghanistan key to national security;
9. Afghan Islam: ever more Arab-like since 1979;
10. Prophet Muhammad: Muslims’ duty to drive infidel invaders off Muslim land.

Oops! I just looked and found that none of these terms is in the index. I guess neither Woodward nor those he interviewed realized they did not have a clue about what they were discussing.