Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

• If we want to defeat our enemies, we have to be willing to use lethal, overpowering force.

In this age of mindless phrases, such as “out-of-the-box thinking” and “a time for change,” another silly phrase — favored by presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush — is causing America’s defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The phrase is “small, light and fast,” and it refers to the kind of military that they think we need to have.

“Small, light and fast” means not your grandfather’s Army — far fewer heavy weapons and far less of the ground infantry that made up the conventional forces the United States has always relied on in major wars. Instead, its proponents believe, the U.S. military should rely more on covert operations and special forces to fight counterinsurgencies and irregular wars.

To varying degrees, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama want this as well. Obama, for example, recently called for “more special operations resources along the Afghan-Pakistan border.”

But this approach cannot work. One lesson of the last decade is that our leaders’ efforts to win wars with the CIA-led clandestine service and U.S. Special Forces in the lead only delivers defeat. We cannot fight a worldwide uprising of radical Islamists with the type of forces once thought most appropriate to suppress rebels on tiny Caribbean islands.

Afghanistan is the best example of this reality. U.S. covert forces performed superbly there, winning the first battles against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11 — but they lacked the personnel and firepower to annihilate the enemy, against whom we are now losing the war.

This should not be surprising. The clandestine service and special forces were never designed to be war winners; they are meant to complement the application of America’s overwhelming conventional forces against U.S. enemies. Anyone who reads works on the recommended book lists of the Army chief of staff and the Marines Corps commandant — books by such writers as Stephen Ambrose, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Dwight Eisenhower — will find little indication that wars can won by clandestine and special forces. Only Max Boot and his brethren at the Weekly Standard, Commentary and the National Review preach such nonsense as gospel.

I know something about the limitations of these kinds of operations because I managed CIA covert operations aimed at Al Qaeda and Sunni Islamists for 15 years. It is clear to me that the most that covert forces can do is to hold the ring until conventional forces arrive to destroy the foe. The CIA was suggesting this back in 1997 — see Page 349 of the 9/11 commission report — and it remains true.

Simply and callously put, covert forces cannot kill the number of enemies that require killing.

But if that is the case, then why have recent presidents advocated so consistently for this losing way of war?

The sad truth is that Washington’s increasing over-reliance on clandestine and special forces to fight our enemies is the result of our political class’ terror of condemnation by the media, academia, the just-war theorists and the European elite if it uses America’s full military power. Notwithstanding the murderous war in the Balkans and the Rwandan genocide, U.S. leaders have bought into the ahistorical assertion that human nature and war today are radically different from and far less bloody than they were in the eras of Alexander and Caesar.

Unwilling to apply full conventional military power against our enemies, American officials instead hope that light forces, counterinsurgency tactics and precision weapons will beat our foes with few casualties, little or no collateral damage — and no bad publicity.

Well, bunk. Victory is not possible if only covert forces are employed, and presidents from both parties have lied about their effectiveness because they will not tell Americans the politically incorrect truth. The fact is that in this global war against non-uniformed, religiously motivated foes who live with and are supported by their civilian brethren, and who are perfectly willing to use a nuclear device against the U.S., victory is only possible through the use of massive, largely indiscriminate military force.

The knee-jerk reaction to calls for applying massive military force is an anguished cry of “oh, but we will lose the battle for hearts and minds!” That is an utterly false claim because the United States has already lost the “hearts and minds” war — up to 80% of Muslims worldwide share Osama bin Laden’s belief that the goal of U.S. foreign policy is “to weaken and divide the Islamic world,” according to a poll by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. More military force could only drive that number up marginally.

While McCain, Obama, and Clinton attend services of their choice on Sunday, all worship at the shrine of intervention-that-spurs jihad the rest of the week. Just in the past month, all three have pushed an interventionist agenda in Pakistan and Kosovo, and, notwithstanding claims by Obama and Clinton, to a great extent in Iraq. At day’s end, each is ready to intervene abroad to champion abstractions such as democracy rather than U.S. interests; each is ready to spend the lives of soldiers and Marines to do so; and each advances the Islamist cause by failing to see that Muslim hatred is motivated by U.S. interventionism more than any other factor.

In Pakistan, we are seeing the last stage of the destruction of our most important anti-Islamist ally, Pervez Musharraf. Here is a man who helped us destroy his nation’s ally, the Taliban; caused al-Qaeda to mark him for death; and brought his nation near to civil war by sending Pakistan’s army into the tribal region. True enough, he has received billions in return and at times duped us, but what other U.S. ally has done so much that is counter to its national interests? The answer is none; most of our allies have deserted the Iraq and Afghan coalitions.

As thanks, Washington strengthened Pakistan’s Indian enemy, hectored Musharraf for not doing all of America’s dirty work, and generally blamed our coming defeat in Afghanistan on his refusal to destroy his nation to help us. McCain, Obama, and Clinton endorsed all this, and they were as aggressive as President Bush in demanding Musharraf reestablish democracy via an election that further eroded stability and will open the country’s treasury to Pakistan’s biggest thieves, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zadari. This “success” will force America to spend more money and lives in Afghanistan, because we neutered a vital ally for an abstract, unachievable goal — a secular Pakistani democracy. Only al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their Pakistani allies benefit.

And then there is Kosovo. Again, McCain, Obama, and Clinton joined Bush in gleefully applauding Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia. And what has that action yielded? It lit the fuse burning toward a new Balkan war because America’s bipartisan political class wants to peddle its version of democracy even if it means stripping the most politically sacred portion of Christian Serbia and giving it to a Muslim regime that will be a magnet for support from al-Qaeda, other Islamists, and America’s jihad-supporting Arab Peninsula allies. Bush and the three candidates have committed America’s prestige in a region where no U.S. interests exist. These interventionists will eventually waste the lives of U.S. troops in a bloody attempt to protect “U. S. credibility” by trying to stop Serbia’s inevitable Russian-backed recovery of Kosovo and the attendant slaughter of Muslim Kosovars. When the Balkans’ smoke clears, only the Islamists will be victorious.

And finally, Iraq. Bush’s stay-the-course doctrine is stridently echoed by McCain and rhetorically opposed by Obama and Clinton, but the difference is more apparent than real. Moqtada al-Sadr has extended his cease-fire surge for another six months; the U.S. military can now continue killing Sunnis so Sadr will have fewer to kill later. Sadr’s brilliant, Machiavellian surge keeps U.S. casualties down, gives a false sense of increasing Iraqi stability, and allows McCain to rattle his saber while permitting Obama and Clinton to begin hedging their demand for withdrawal to avoid appearing as lefty surrenderistas this fall.

Flash ahead to Inauguration Day, 2009. Now in power, the new president — be it McCain, Obama, or Clinton — will begin seeing “nuances” that require America to stay in Iraq: to fight terrorism; to prevent civil war; to continue the Awakening; to plant deeper democratic roots. The list of mitigating nuances given Americans will be both endless and false.

What the new president will find is that three decades of U.S. intervention in other peoples’ wars — in this case the Arab-Israeli conflict — has locked us in Iraq because leaving would undermine Israel’s security. As I recently argued in the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus, al-Qaeda has secured its goal in Iraq, a base to project influence and terror into the Levant and Israel and is already doing so. If America leaves Iraq, al-Qaeda’s base will solidify and Israel’s security will deteriorate; pro-Israel American campaign funders will demand McCain, Obama, or Clinton defend the Jewish state by staying in Iraq no matter the cost; and each will do so because each operates under the delusion that U.S. and Israeli national-security interests are identical. And the Islamists will have another win.

So vote as they will, these candidates offer Americans no chance of a foreign policy that accurately gauges the Islamist threat, let alone defeats it. Indeed, the debate over which candidate is experienced enough to be commander in chief is farcical; each candidate is an interventionist and will simply abide by the dogma kept in place by America’s political class for 30-plus years. After all, it takes no experience whatsoever to follow a script whose pages are now discolored by both age and the blood of America’s soldiers and Marines.

And on Inauguration Day, 2013, Americans will find our ruling interventionists — Republican or Democrat — have U.S. forces fighting in Iraq; have more forces fighting in Afghanistan; have committed forces in places like the Balkans and Darfur; and have motivated millions more Muslims to join the jihad by their policies’ impact. For bin Laden and the Islamists, McCain, Obama, or Clinton equals precisely the same thing — game, set, and, perhaps, match.

Published: Antiwar.com

On Feb. 5, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda is regrouping, not retreating — and boosting its capacities to launch another attack inside the United States. So how does the war on terrorism look these days through our enemies’ eyes? Here’s an informed — albeit fictional — guess.

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate —

Brothers, I write to give my view of how far we have, with God’s help, traveled since declaring war on the United States in 1996. Al-Qaeda has today become all that we hoped for when we formed it in 1988: a vanguard organization whose main mission is not fighting, but rather inciting and inspiring young Muslims to arm themselves and defend Islam from the American crusaders, their Zionist offspring and their agent regimes in the Muslim world, especially the House of Saud. We must thank God for the steady flow of young Muslims to our ranks, men who now make the forces of al-Qaeda and its allies larger, more intelligent and more pious than ever.

By God’s grace, al-Qaeda’s incitement has met with wondrous success; Western polls show that hundreds of millions of Muslims now believe that U.S. foreign policy aims to undermine or destroy Islam. Ironically, Washington itself has become a major inciter of Muslim hatred for the United States, simply by maintaining policies — slaughtering the innocent in Iraq, propping up the House of Saud and Hosni Mubarak’s tyranny in Egypt, blindly backing the pretender state of the Jews — that drive Muslims into our ranks. Not all these Muslims are ready to take up arms, but even the limited number who are now fighting have proved more than enough to stymie U.S. plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and to support the jihad in Algeria, Lebanon, Thailand, Somalia, Gaza and Europe.

And so, even with limited numbers, al-Qaeda appears to Muslims as a huge, rising and conquering army. Just as important, Americans have been taught by their leaders to see al-Qaeda behind every rock and tree, ready to pounce. American leaders, in effect, now terrorize ordinary Americans, making Washington appear to be the enemy of its own people’s civil liberties.

This all gives us confidence in our plan to defeat America — by bleeding it into bankruptcy and tempting it to spread out its forces.

Brothers, the amount of money that Washington spends on wars to murder Muslims and on pointless “homeland security” measures is staggering, with no end in sight. The war in Iraq alone is costing $12 billion per month. Bush is also burning money to deploy troops to Africa, under a new Pentagon command created to steal the continent’s oil. And after America’s Iraq “surge,” U.S. generals cannot scrape up the few thousand troops they would need to fight our Taliban brothers in Afghanistan because Washington’s NATO allies refuse to send reinforcements.

Thanks be to God, brothers, America is hemorrhaging money and ruining its military by trying to fight al-Qaeda’s mujahideen wherever they appear — or, more accurately, wherever U.S. officials imagine they appear.

Our military and media operations have advanced the ultimate goal of our grand strategy — restoring Islamic rule to the Muslim world. We have a winning formula:

• Driving the United States from the Middle East;
• Destroying Israel and the region’s Arab tyrannies; and
• Settling scores with the heretical Shiites.

Frankly, brothers, things had to get much worse for Muslims before they could get better. We had to goad America into sending a larger, more vulnerable presence into the Muslim world before we could bleed its forces and treasury. The mujahideen’s 9/11 raid did just that; the inexplicable U.S. decision to invade Iraq vastly expanded the American presence. (Only God could grant such a miracle!) Al-Qaeda and the groups we have inspired are now exploiting both the triumph of 9/11 and the hornet’s nest in Iraq that the Americans so foolishly kicked over.

But to win this war, our strategy’s three parts must be pursued in order: First, drive America from Arab lands, then finish off Israel, Mubarak and the House of Saud, then deal with the Shiite apostates. But we risk defeat if we simultaneously fight the Americans, the Zionists, the corrupted Arab regimes and the Shiites.

When the Americans occupied Afghanistan after 9/11, we were confident that we could defeat them there, which would start their retreat from the region. When the Americans madly invaded Iraq, we grew more confident, perhaps cocky. Brothers, we lacked humility for these gifts from God, and now we are on the edge of a setback — one that could disrupt our grand strategy.

Military success came too fast in Iraq. The Iraqi mujahideen are not ready to unite in an Islamist government to replace the U.S. agent, Nouri al-Maliki. Part of this failure is al-Qaeda’s fault. We allowed the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may God accept him as a martyr, to remain al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq for too long. He was consumed by hatred for Iraq’s Shiites and struck them murderously, angering Shiite and Sunni alike. His excesses helped create what, for now, is an unbridgeable split between the two sects, and he raised the specter of civil war in Iraq. Such a conflict would hurt our ability to keep the world’s Muslims focused on the Crusaders and Zionists and allow the apostate Arab regimes to pose as Islam’s protectors by supplying guns, money and fighters to Iraq’s Sunnis in their battle with the Shiites.

Al-Qaeda and its allies in Iraq are laboring to repair the damage left by our martyred Abu Musab, and have had some success. But Saudi preachers and spies are deepening the hatred for Shiites among Iraq’s Sunni insurgents faster than we can heal the wounds. As in post-Soviet Afghanistan, the perfidious House of Saud is stealing the fruit of Islam’s military victory by preventing the emergence of a united Sunni front through bribery, false religious guidance and efforts to stoke intra-Sunni fighting.

We must face this reality, brothers, and be ready to retake the initiative in 2008. While U.S. forces are in Iraq, the mujahideen will focus on them, but after they retreat — and a new U.S. president could leave quickly — the chance of civil war increases. If such a conflict erupts, the mujahideen might focus on Iraq, not America.

For this reason, I urge you to consider two military options for al-Qaeda to have in hand if needed:

1. An attack on a major oil-production plant in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques, which suffers under the rule of the House of Saud, to greatly disrupt the world’s oil supply and compel U.S. forces to rush into the kingdom to protect the undamaged facilities and rebuild the others; or
2. A raid greater than 9/11 in the United States, an option that could do graver and graver damage as the U.S. economy deteriorates.

Brothers, we can execute either operation. Each would make Washington overreact, again unleashing the Americans’ military ferocity. Such a response would have only a minor impact on the dispersed forces of al-Qaeda and our allies in jihad, but America’s vengeance would kill many, many innocent Muslims — and, perhaps, with the approval of the despised House of Saud, find the Americans again desecrating the holy soil of Arabia near Mecca and Medina. These results would focus the wrath of the world’s Muslims on America, delay a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq and keep our grand strategy viable.

Brothers, think about these ideas, and join me in praying for God’s guidance.

Michael Scheuer was chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999. His latest book is “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.”

Published: The Washington Post

What, one wonders, can possibly inspire the neoconservatives’ hate for Americans, their history, their traditions, and their ideas? In the context of this question, George Weigel’s new book, Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism: A Call to Action, is more troubling than Norman Podhoretz’s viciously anti-American World War IV. The Long War Against Islamofacism because of Mr. Weigel’s reputation as a brilliant Catholic scholar, confidant of popes, and commentator on Catholicism’s role in America. In Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, however, Mr. Weigel reveals himself as just one more America-hating neoconservative; he is a clone of Mr. Podhoretz and his acolytes, and, like them, can barely constrain his contempt for his countrymen, saying, for example, that it is the “sovereign prerogative” of these fools to elect non-neoconservative candidates who are incompetent, naive, and clueless. [p. 142] The book’s one redeeming feature is the validation it gives to Sister Mary Lawrence’s frequent admonition to my third grade class that “evil can be a contamination caught from evil companions” and that “you shall be known by the company you keep.” The dust-jacket on Mr. Weigel’s book is endorsed by: R. James Woolsey, Fouad Adjami, William Kristol, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and — of course — Norman Podhoretz. If she was still alive, and may God rest her soul, Sister Mary Lawrence could use the dust-jacket as irrefutable evidence that she knows of what she speaks in regard to the threat posed by keeping evil companions.

The first thing the reader will note in Mr. Weigel’s book is that it is not a work of scholarship. In the book’s endnotes the great majority of citations refer to the work of other neoconservatives — David Frum, Max Boot, Mr. Woolsley, Joshua Muravchik, David Gerlertner, Efraim Karsh, Charles Krauthammer, various Wall Street Journal editors and writers, etc. — or such neoconservative idols as Bernard Lewis and Benjamin Netanyahu. The book amounts to one neocon reading the work of others, and then summarizing their ideas and his for the praise of that same closed circle. Indeed, so frequent are citations of Professor Lewis’ work that Mr. Weigel may be angling for sainthood for Lewis, although it is thankfully hard to see even a Mr. Weigel-influenced Vatican conferring sainthood on the scholar-turned-patron of a clique of anti-Americans.

Given the company Mr. Weigel keeps, it is no surprise that he determines that America’s war with the Islamists is entirely based on those crazed and nihilistic Islamists, men “whose primary motivation is the overthrow of our very way of life — our civilization.” [p. 8] Right, our foes have neither any legitimate complaints about U.S. policies or actions, nor even any basis for perceiving those policies and actions as a threat to their faith. They are simply mad individuals who love to kill. In this nonsense, Mr. Weigel is at one with neoconservative dogma: Islamists and other Muslims hate us because of a “defective theology” [p. 56] and because of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, Budweiser drafts, Christianity, women’s rights, and civil liberties. And how does Mr. Weigel know this? Well, because others in the neoconservatives’ closed-circle tell him so. Because David Gerlertner says, “Our enemies in this war seem varied but share one common doctrine … all agree on death. They believe in and cultivate death; they are the party of death” [p. 155]; and because the Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus says, “Jihadism is the religiously inspired theology [which teaches] that it is the moral obligation of all Muslims to employ whatever means [are] necessary to compel the world’s submission to Islam” [pp. 35-6]; and because the Australian scholar Michael Casey says jihadism is “the totalitarian variant of political religion” [p. 49]; and, most of all, because Mr. Weigel himself claims it is a logical extension of the Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s thought to say, “contemporary jihadists believe that the murder of innocents is not simply morally acceptable, but morally required, if such murders advance the cause of Islam.” [p. 48]

In Mr. Weigel’s book one will look long, hard, and fruitlessly for any hint that he has studied the statements, books, and interviews produced by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their lieutenants and allies. It is, after all, less taxing intellectually to define the enemy’s motivation and war aims on the basis of what your own philosophy demands of the foe it lusts to fight, than to listen to the enemy and then match his words to his deeds.

Questionable scholarship aside, the main goal of Mr. Weigel’s book — like that of Mr. Podhoretz’s — is to harangue, condemn, and damn Americans because they do not see the world as do the neoconservatives, and because they find nothing consistent with America’s history, interests, character, or ideals in the type of country and foreign policy Mr. Weigel advocates. And there is no room for debate in Mr. Weigel’s new world order, which is to be dominated by something he calls the U.S.-led “freedom project,” apparently to be patterned on current Iraq War. [p. 117] Americans who disagree with him — and, of course, the aspiring-to-sainthood Bernard Lewis and his ilk — are not real Americans, they are rather members of the “Unhinged Left and the Unhinged Right” [p. 137 ], men and women who do not now “deserve” victory in the war against the Islamists [p. 109-10]. For Mr. Weigel and the neoconservatives, therefore, Americans must be perfected by being put through a giant re-education process — to use the term employed by another group bent on perfecting man, the Khmer Rouge. Among the lessons Americans are to learn are:

• There is just too much press freedom — “western media acquiescence to Muslim complaints about western, American, Christian, or papal ‘Islamophobia’ should stop.” [p. 61] Mr. Weigel adds that the media must “call things by their right names [that is, neocon-approved names] murderers in Iraq are murderers and terrorists, not insurgents or sectarians….” [p. 62]
• Only Muslims who renounce jihadism, jihadists, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial can be granted “the admission ticket” to dialogue with “western religious or intellectual institutions.” [p. 68] In other words, if all you Muslims perfect yourselves as neocon-approved Muslims — that is become Christians or Jews, or at least non-Muslims — we will deign to talk to you.
• History does not apply to the United States. “Efforts to accelerate change in the Arabic world by the administration of George W. Bush were shaped by a realistic assessment [read: history-ignorant assessment] of the situation after 9/11. … To attempt to accelerate the transition to responsible and responsive government in the Middle East was neither an exercise in cowboy apocalypticism nor in Wilsonian romanticism. It was a realistic objective….” [p. 78]
• The invasion and occupation of Iraq was not a disastrous, historically ignorant idea, it was just mismanaged by the Washington-based Master Interveners in world affairs. Washington: “miscalculated” how quickly Iraq would “become a battlefield in the wider war against jihadism” [p. 82]; “badly miscalculated” the economic damage Iraq accrued under Saddam [p. 85]; allocated “inadequate financial and human resources … for post-Saddam reconstruction” [p. 86]; and “failed to devise an effective hearts-and-minds strategy for post-Saddam Iraq.” [pp. 88-9] In other words, only Washington’s bureaucratics were wrong, Iraqis and other Muslims really loved the idea of an unprovoked infidel invasion and occupation of the second holiest place in the Islamic world.

Once Americans learn all of this and graduate from re-education camp — and are thus all right-thinking automatons — Mr. Weigel says they can be allowed to join the “Coalition of Those Who Understand” [p. 146] and assist in the “freedom project.” As members of the freedom-project team, each re-educated American will have “the obligation to press history in a more human direction…. History must be made to march in the direction of genuine human progress” [pp. 15-16] — as long, of course, as the content of “genuine progress” is defined by Mr. Weigel and his colleagues. And what is the engine of the freedom project? Not surprisingly it is never-ending U.S. intervention in the Muslim world, and presumably all other parts of the world. U.S. foreign policy, for example, must make “the promotion of religious freedom a priority,” [p. 126] as long as the religion in question is on Washington’s approved list. America must also intervene to help in “making the world safe for diversity [No hint of Wilsonianism there!] by helping Islamic countries develop the capacity for diversity within themselves.” [p. 129] Presidential power should be increased and the “[c]ore elements of the old U.S. Information Agency ought to be brought out of mothballs and made part of the Executive Office of the President” along with a “new White House office of public diplomacy.” [p. 150] Americans and their congressional representatives also “must develop and nurture the virtue of patience” [p. 143], presumably to allow the super-empowered president time to perfect the world as President George W. Bush has done. Finally, Washington must be unrelentingly interventionist, ready to stand at Armageddon and battle for the neoconservative’s god — who appears to be named Mars. Why? Well, in this case the Catholic Mr. Weigel sounds much like a Calvinist predestinarian. America must intervene, Mr. Weigel asserts,

“because there is no alternative to U.S. leadership in the war against global jihadism. … [I]t seems likely that only the United States can summon the coalition capable of then resisting, and then reversing, and then defeating the jihadist tide: not only because the U.S. has the resources for the job, but because the United States is, or ought to be, the repository of the ideas, drawn from both faith and reason, that must shape the struggle.” [p. 154-55]

There you have it; the utter, carved-in-stone, good-as-biblical truth. “Americans must understand all of this — for our own sake, and for that of the world,” Mr. Weigel says in his concluding dictat to his as-yet-unperfected countrymen, “… there is no escape from the burden of American leadership.” [p. 157]

Well, Mr. Weigel is wrong and — for our children and grandchildren — lethally so. There is an escape from the endless wars that are ensured by the interventionism advocated by Mr. Weigel, Mr. Podhoretz, Professor Lewis, and their war-loving band of neoconservative brothers, as well as by their — and Osama bin Laden’s — favorite presidential candidates, Mr. Giuliani and Senator McCain. (NB: To be fair, all the current U.S. presidential candidates except Representative Ron Paul are perfectly acceptable to bin Laden as they will maintain the U.S. policies that ensure al-Qaeda’s eventual success.) The escape route from neoconservatism is marked by two realities. First, the timeless accuracy of the Founding Fathers’ belief that our republic will survive and flourish so long as Americans are wise enough to wage war only if genuine national interests are at stake, and otherwise avoid engaging in other peoples conflicts — especially other peoples’ religious conflicts — and absurd attempts to install America’s unique republican institutions outside North America. And, second, to acknowledge the validity of the Founders’ certainty that man is not a perfectible creature. Mr. Weigel pays lip service to this fact is his book — he urges “a robust skepticism about schemes of human perfection” — but then immediately exempts his book’s perfectionist scheme, the freedom project, and the wars it will cause, by saying that such skepticism “must always be complemented by confidence in human creativity’s capacity to affect the course of history for the better.” [p. 77]

As Paul Craig Roberts often has written in these pages, the neoconservatives are today’s Jacobins, bent on perfecting the world in their priestly caste’s image no matter what the cost in lives and treasure to the Americans they hate or how much they have to knowingly distort or ignore American history’s hard-won lessons. Mr. Weigel’s Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism. A Call to Action, is a clearly Jacobin manifesto, and it should be read by Americans so they know what Mr. Weigel, his colleagues, and the political candidates they support intend to do in their name.

But they should read it only after first reading two other passages. They should first memorize the words of the brilliant historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who argued in The Roads to Modernity that for America, “it was precisely a belief in human imperfectability, and the civic and political arrangements deriving from that belief, which sustained the country — a united country — through all the turmoil of its history.” [p. 229] Second, they should memorize the words of South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney who, during the 1787 constitutional convention, described the proper role — at home and abroad — of America’s new republican government:

“We mistake the object of our government, if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable abroad. Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought not ever to be the object of republican systems. If they [the republic’s leaders] are sufficiently active and energetic to rescue us from [foreign] contempt and preserve our domestic happiness and security, it is all we can expect from them, it is more than almost any other Government assures its citizens.”

Readers of Mr. Weigel’s book will see that he and most other neoconservatives will not seek guidance or even quote from Pinckney or the Founders. This avoidance is based on their certainty that the Founders, while ever prepared to fight for genuine national interests and independence, damned those who advocated anything akin to Mr. Weigel’s Wilsonian “freedom project” as men out to destroy American liberty and independence. And who, at this date, could deny that the neoconservatives, by pursuing a foreign policy of “conquest or superiority,” have earned America, as Mr. Pinckney predicted, “contempt” abroad while undermining “domestic happiness and security”?

Published: Antiwar.com

Christmas morning broke clear and cold here in Virginia and before my children woke I got to thinking about the opportunities that would lost by anyone who decided not to vote for Dr. Ron Paul in the primaries. Perhaps it was because I got chilled and cranky as I walked down to the road to get the paper, but the more I thought, the more I doubted if Americans really understood what they would be voting for if they chose another candidate.

Of course one need not agree with all of Dr. Paul’s views to recognize the chance he presents for Americans to begin to alter the disastrous status quo policies — foreign and domestic — being advocated by the other presidential candidates. I strongly disagree with Dr. Paul, for example, on the issue of preemptive military action; in our war against Islamist insurgents, preemption will serve America by keeping our foes bleeding and off-balance, as we begin, as Dr. Paul has said, to disengage from other peoples’ wars. But because I do not support Dr. Paul on this point, would it make sense for me to vote for Senator McCain, who wants to send our soldiers and Marines to die in the howling wastes of Darfur; or for Mr. Giuliani and his coterie of neoconservative advisers who are fairly aglow with a lip-smacking lust for an even broader Hobbesian war against Muslims than that waged by George W. Bush; or for whatever foreign policies Mr. Huckabee and his evangelical colleagues cook-up after their daily chats with God; or for Senator Clinton who is advised by a self-confessed felon and who believes U.S. and Israeli interests are identical and that Israel’s wars are America’s wars? No, such a vote would be senseless and only help the status quo to triumph. While I disagree with Dr. Paul on preemption, his position and prudence on this and other foreign policy issues are a sounder starting point for an American debate than the other candidates’ cheerful willingness to leap from the frying pan into the flames and dragging our country into the fire of wars that do not need fighting or that rightfully should be fought without U.S. involvement.

One can also dislike the views of Dr. Paul and other Libertarians regarding Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and other great figures in American history. I frankly admit that I cringe and get angry when I hear Dr. Paul criticize Mr. Lincoln, who I consider the greatest American, next to George Washington. But Dr. Paul and his colleagues have reasoned, fact-based arguments for their views, and though I think their arguments are often wrong, and at times scurrilous and historically obtuse, they at least have a firm grip on the fact that there was an America before the 1960s, and that broad knowledge of where the United States came from is an essential prerequisite for shaping policies to ensure its survival. This sort of historical literacy surely is not to be found in Mr. Giuliani, whose knowledge of the world seems to date from 9/11; in Senator Clinton and most other Democrats, who are ashamed of where America came from and are doing their best to coerce by federal mandate the country’s remaking in their own elitist and multicultural image; or in the rest of both parties’ candidates, who are so ignorant of U.S. history, and that of other peoples and nations, that they believe what Americans have struggled, fought, and died to create in North America over the past 400 years can be put on a CD-ROM and transferred to other cultures.

At base, then, a person need not agree with Dr. Paul on each and every issue, but only on the most important issue: America’s future economic viability and its sovereign independence as a nation. On this issue, Dr. Paul puts U.S. economic, constitutional, and national security interests first, and he does so in a frank, clear, and unflinching manner. And so what would a non-Ron Paul ballot tell us about the voter casting it?

• If a person chose not to vote for Dr. Paul, he or she would have to be content with the staggering debt Washington is incurring for this and future generations. While it has become a commonplace to say that our grandchildren will pay for this generation’s profligacy, it is nonetheless troublingly true. And the debt we have incurred is not one that finds us owing ourselves, but rather it is one in which Americans have knowingly indebted themselves to their enemies — the Chinese and the Saudis. There is, so far as I can tell, no candidate other than Dr. Paul who says that America should return to its pay-as-you-go traditions, and argues that it is clearly lacking in foresight, prudence, and commonsense to provide rivals and enemies with the ability to detonate a financial weapon of mass destruction that could, by simply calling in our debt, slay America’s economy and standard-of-living. Indeed, so oblivious to this danger are Dr. Paul’s fellow candidates — or so abjectly willing are they to court future economic ruin if it means electoral victory now — that they want to borrow many billions more from our foes to fund universal health care, additional foreign military adventures, college-educations-for-all, and more foreign and military aid for their overseas buddies in Egypt, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Saudi Arabia.
• A person not voting for Dr. Paul would be further validating the reality that America is fast becoming a country of men — and women — and not of laws. Making issues more complex than they are is, of course, the time-honored way in which most U.S. politicians ensure that the status quo in which they are elected and reelected remains unchanged. The best examples today of this complexification process are border control and immigration. Our bipartisan governing elite and its non-Paulian spawn running for president have so encumbered a straight-forward law-and-order issue like immigration with the entangling considerations of human rights, refugee rights, citizenship rights and other non-pertinent issues that nothing is being done to halt the flood of undocumented aliens that is entering the country and eroding national security. Save for Dr. Paul the message from the other candidates on this issue is “Damn the law and U.S. security, I need the Hispanic vote.”
• And perhaps most inexplicably, ballots cast for one of Dr. Paul’s rivals — especially Senator McCain and Mayor Giuliani — would show that many American parents are content to raise their children and then have them pointlessly killed abroad while serving as cannon fodder for the democracy-mongering interventions of their governing elite and wars that our elite start but never intend to win. From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to protecting far-off borders by endlessly expanding NATO, to the civil strife of Darfur, to picking fights with the Russians, to democratizing Pakistan into anarchy, Dr. Paul’s fellow candidates fairly salivate at the prospect of getting America involved in ever more bloody democracy-installing campaigns overseas. These adventures will of course require far greater numbers of soldiers — but not from the families of the elite of course — and will inevitably force them to reinstitute universal conscription, notwithstanding their pledges to the contrary.

So what does it mean to vote for a candidate other than Dr. Paul? To so vote means that one is knowingly voting for a man or a woman who does not intend to do what he she has pledged to do. Whether it is on the issue of budgetary restraint, abortion, trade, overseas intervention, borders, taxes, jobs, or foreign aid, there is no reason to believe that any candidate other than Dr. Paul would alter the policy status quo more than superficially. Each of the other candidates is the clone of those who have governed America for the past twenty years: These are men and women who ignore the law, spend and borrow mindlessly, and consistently spend the lives of our children by involving America in other peoples’ wars through their unrelenting interventionism. They will do what they must to win office, and can be relied on to abandon any and all campaign promises if they find such a jettisoning can help them keep office.

And it is on the point of reliability that Dr. Paul’s candidacy rightly has roused so much interest among everyday Americans, and particularly among younger people. In all of the voluminous and often scare-mongering criticism of Dr. Paul and his ideas that has flowed from his fellow candidates and much of the media, no one has yet suggested that Dr. Paul would not try to do precisely what he says he will try to do. They have ridiculed what he intends to do if elected, decried its supposed impracticability, and called it simple-minded isolationism, but they have not once questioned his resolve to try to get it done.

My own guess, for what it is worth, is that the reason Dr. Paul is attracting the interest and support of Americans lies in the sense they have that the Texan intends to do precisely what he says he will do. Also spurring interest in Dr. Paul is the fact that he is the only presidential candidate intent on shattering the structure of the incestuous, privileged, self-serving, bribe-taking, and above-the-law country club in which our bipartisan governing elite dwells and hob-knobs with much of the media. For these reasons, Dr. Paul is attracting the attention of men and women who know in their minds and hearts that the other candidates’ promises of change are worthless, and if any is elected Americans would inevitably find themselves in 2012 with the same disastrous economic, foreign policy, and law-and-order status quo that is untenable in 2008.

The chance to see America benefit from a leader who strives to do what he has promised, while simultaneously thumping America’s self-serving political elite and camp-following media are two of the best of the many excellent reasons to vote for Dr. Paul.

Amidst the cacophony of everyday events around world, people outside the United States ought to cock an ear toward America States and listen closely for the quiet but resonant voice of a Texas gentleman named Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is a retired obstetrician, a 10 term Republican congressman from the 14th district of Texas and a Republican candidate in the 2008 race for the US presidency. And if you listen closely to Dr. Paul, you will hear the only authentic American voice in a field of nearly twenty presidential candidates from both parties.

It is, these days, both trite and inaccurate to say that u201CAmerica is a nation of laws and not men.u201D Since 1945, for example, U.S. presidents routinely have involved the United States in wars that Congress does not declare, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution’s clear mandate that only Congress can declare war. For more than thirty years, successive U.S. Congresses and presidents have refused to enforce border control and immigration laws already on the books, thereby abetting the deterioration of America’s social cohesion, social and educational services, and national security. And for just as long, presidents, congressman, and senators of both parties have ignored the interests of everyday Americans to earn donations and retirement sinecures — both, really, barely disguised bribes — from the U.S.-based military industry, the multinational oil companies, and foreign lobbies flush with money, such as those representing Israel and Saudi Arabia. The foreign lobbies are particularly despicable because American parents pay for U.S. politicians’ kowtowing for money to these foreign entities with the lives of their soldier-children and their savings. Sadly, therefore, it is a bad joke to say that America is today a country of laws not men.

But that is why Dr. Paul’s voice is important and, increasingly, is being listened to by Americans. It also the reason that the slander machines of the Democrat and Republican parties, U.S. military-related industries and their financiers, and the foreign lobbies are working overtime to discredit and ridicule Dr. Paul. These self-appointed elites know that Dr. Paul’s voice is not only the authentic voice of Americans and their historical experience, but also potentially the voice of their doom, because impotence, shame, and drastically less war-profiteering will be theirs if the rule-of-law endorsed by Mr. Paul is reestablished in the United States.

Mr. Paul places his faith in the Constitution of the United States and the legacy left to Americans by their founding generation. The republican government created by America’s revolutionary generation was meant to be the agent of an expanding domain for freedom, liberty, prosperity, and equal opportunity at home. It was never intended to be the militarized installer of those attributes abroad. u201CWherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [the United States’] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be,u201D said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821, in words that Americans are today being reminded of by Dr. Paul.

But she does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

Dr. Paul speaks in the tradition of Secretary Adams, and in plainer words he speaks against — indeed, he damns — the bipartisan American governing class which, since 1945, has u201Cinsensibly chang[ed] from liberty to forceu201D the spirit of the American nation and people. In his campaign, Dr. Paul draws attention to the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan that have resulted from U.S. interventionism, and from the U.S. elite’s arrogant and foolish determination to be the u201Cvindicatoru201D of avaricious and ambitious foreigners who conceal their lust for arbitrary power behind the words of the American founders. He accuses and rebukes the bipartisan U.S. elite for having involved America in endless wars — especially religious wars — in which no genuine U.S. interest is at stake, and for having brazenly reached into the pockets of Americans and stolen their money to support and/or protect states — Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, etc. — that have drawn America ever more deeply into wars that are none of our business or concern.

If you listen to Mr. Paul you will hear a man devoted to his country’s welfare and his countrymen; knowledgeable about and respectful of its history; realistic about the increasingly barbaric world in which it exists; and, most of all, fully aware of the fragility of America’s republican experiment and its absolute dependence on the constant nurturing provided by the rule of law. If elected, Mr. Paul would reshape America in a direction that would be in America’s best interests.

• Going to war would once again require a formal, constitutional declaration by the U.S. Congress; the world would see America involved in far fewer wars, and none started by the whim of a single man and the foreign-influenced ideological clique around him. And when war was declared, America’s foes would absorb an application of U.S. military force that would both utterly destroy them and their supporters, and serve as a warning to other miscreants bent on doing America harm.
• Immigration and U.S. borders would re-subjected to the rule of law, and America would get the flow of immigrants it needs in an orderly manner and based protecting national security and, only then, on the needs of the country’s society and economy.
• Foreign aid would be eliminated and defense spending better targeted to real threats so as to end the tax-tyranny of a perennially spendthrift federal government; reduce the amount of debt held by foreigners, especially that held by regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia; and encourage the reemergence of the traditional but long dormant pay-as-you-go thriftiness of individual Americans and their families.
• Most important, the world would see a massively reduced U.S. voice, presence, involvement in events that have no conceivable impact on U.S. national interest. Other nations would have to begin looking out for themselves; they will have to amicably settle their religious, ethnic, tribal, and territorial spats or fight each other to the death — no U.S. cavalry will be riding to the rescue.

As you listen to Dr. Paul, you will hear his opponents describe him as an evil isolationist, but neither Dr. Paul nor America has ever been isolationist. Indeed, the term u201Cisolationistu201D is merely a deceptive slur that America’s bipartisan elite hurls at those citizens who prefer not to waste their wealth or children’s lives in other peoples’ wars. Since its inception, the United States has been a trading nation and a country fully involved in economic, scientific, educational, and commercial affairs around the world. At its best, America has been sturdily non-interventionist, recognizing both that it has more than enough to do to expand liberty’s domain and the equality of opportunity at home, and that non-essential foreign adventures can only slow or even undo liberty and opportunity for Americans at home.

In an America led by the non-interventionist Dr. Paul, the world would see a more confident and less aggressive nation; a nation more humble, prosperous, and equitable; and a nation willing to let all other nations and peoples work out their own destinies, peaceably or violently, as they wish. America would get back to its own business and interests, and the rest of the post-Cold War world’s nations would be left alone to try, at long last, to grow into responsible adults.

“Too soon old and too late smart.” That saying was one of my Dad’s favorites, and one he used when one of us in the family re-made a past mistake, having not learned from the first error. I am guilty of that in regard to the current game being played by Commentary’s Gabriel Schoenfeld and his Goebbels-wannabes at the National Review, the American Thinker, and other organs of the Israel-first media. Mr. Schoenfeld has accused me of leaking information to the media about an Islamist fighter/ideologue who was rendered to Egypt from Croatia in 1995. On the basis of this supposed action on my part, Mr. Schoenfeld compares me to Philip Agee and argues that the accused Israeli spy Larry Franklin did nothing worse than I did. Even for Commentary, the sweep of this “Big Lie” is impressive.

Now, let us settle first things first. Even a mediocre former CIA officer — and I like to believe that I was at least that — will do a Google search to find out what is available in the open-source world on the subject a journalist wants to speak to him or her about. This is especially true when the journalist is a European who, these days, is likely to be anti-American, especially on the subject of rendition. The Google search I did on the 1995 rendition in question, turned up all of the information that is contained in the article that has Mr. Schoenfled and his acolytes in their current let’s-hang-Scheuer-to-clear-Larry-Franklin snit. A few examples follow from a quick search using Google News.

• “Talaat Fouad Qassem, 38, a known leader of the Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), an Egyptian extremist organization, is arrested and detained in Croatia as he travels to Bosnia from Denmark, where he has been been living after being granted political asylum. He is suspected of clandestine support of terrorist operations, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also allegedly led mujahideen efforts in Bosnia since 1990. In a joint operation, he is arrested by Croatian intelligence agents and handed over to the CIA. Qassem is then interrogated by US officials aboard a US ship off the Croatian coast in the Adriatic Sea and sent to Egypt, which has a rendition agreement with the US. An Egyptian military tribunal has already sentenced him to death in absentia, and he is executed soon after he arrives. [Associated Press, 10/31/1995; Wash Post, 3/11/02, A01; Mahle, 05, pp. 204-205; New Yorker, 2/8/05]” (CRHC)
• “A second and more sophisticated form of cooperation aims at impeding Islamist activity in Western countries, and using legal means to track down fugitive activists with the minimum of fuss. The third form of security cooperation involves the collaboration of Egyptian and Western security authorities in executing sensitive operations, including the tracing or arrest of Islamists, possibly across international borders, as in the case of Talaat Fouad Qassem.” Al-Ahram Weekly, 22-28 October 1998, Issue No.400.
• “With Bosnian war hostilities drawing to a close in September 1995, Anwar Shaaban and his Italian-based Al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya cohorts were free to turn their attention and resources to issues of “more critical” importance. In late September, one of the most important Al-Gama’at al-Islamiyya leaders hiding in Europe — Abu Talal al-Qasimy (a.k.a. Talaat Fouad Qassem) — was captured by Croat HVO forces as he attempted to cross through Croatian territory into Bosnia-Herzegovina. Within days, the Croats quietly rendered al-Qasimy through U.S. custody into the hands of Egyptian authorities. At the time, a government official in Cairo noted, “[Al-Qasimy’s] arrest proves what we have always said, which is that these terror groups are operating on a worldwide scale, using places like Afghanistan and Bosnia to form their fighters who come back to the Middle East… European countries like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, England and others, which give sanctuary to these terrorists, should now understand it will come back to haunt them where they live.” By, Evan F. Kohlmann, The Afghan-Bosnian Mujahideen Network in Europe, (04)

There are a dozen or more other pre-2007, open-source descriptions of this operation available (citations on request), so we can safely assume that nothing new has been revealed in 2007, and Mr. Schoenfeld, et. al are either unaware of the Google news search capability, or they are playing for bigger game than a creaky and unimportant former CIA officer like me.

The truth is, of course, that Mr. Schoenfeld and his allies are not dumb people, they are simply anti-American. Their tarting-up of the rendition operation described above is just part of their ongoing attempt to discredit the case and to try to convince Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are identical, and so spying on America for Israel — and suborning American citizens to commit treason — is really an okay and even admirable activity. Time will tell what the final verdicts will be, but Mr. Schoenfeld, et. al are clearly guilty of trying to create an environment in which the U.S. public accepts the idea that engaging in espionage against their own country on Israel’s behalf is consonant with the duties of American citizenship.

Finally, I wish to directly refute Mr. Schoenfeld’s claim that I “cast aspersions on American Jews.” I do not cast aspersions, I forthrightly damn, and pray that God damns, any American — Jew, Catholic, Evangelical, Irish, German, Hindu, hermaphrodite, thespian, or otherwise — who flogs the insane idea that American and Israeli interests are one and the same. The nation-state of Israel is an intolerable burden to the treasury and security of the United States, and Washington’s current relationship with Israel — sanctioned by the AIPAC-funded political leaders of both parties — is one of several factors that are leading to full-scale American participation in other peoples’ religious wars, religious wars that David Horowitz’s recent “Islamofascist Awareness Week” manifestly wants to bring to the streets of the United States.

Published: Antiwar.com

World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
Norman Podhoretz
Doubleday, 2007
240 pp.

Norman Podhoretz’s new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order. Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives’ views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. Patrick Buchanan, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sir John Keegan, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and many others are all targets of Podhoretz. These men are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige. Podhoretz is particularly vicious toward Buchanan because he knows that Buchanan sees through the neoconservative fantasy with the most unrelenting acuity. Buchanan’s frank voice and non-interventionism — not isolationism — are genuinely American characteristics, so Podhoretz must go all out to discredit Buchanan as an anti-Semite, lest Americans listen to Buchanan’s advice not to get their children killed fighting other peoples’ wars, be they wars for Israelis or Muslims or anyone else.

And who are the heroes of the story? Why, Podhoretz and the familiar roster of the only real Americans and Israel-firsters, of course: Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, Victor Davis Hanson, John R. Bolton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, and a few others who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel’s defense. Podhoretz and his chums are the men responsible for the lethal mess America now faces in the Muslim world, and they have also done more than any other group — Hamas and Hezbollah included — to undermine Israel’s long-term security. In short, the influence and arrogance of this gang has been an unmitigated and accelerating disaster for the two nations they claim to love most. I will leave it up to those who read the book to decide which country they obviously love best, but I bet you can guess before turning a page.

Podhoretz is big on pinning the Islamofascist label on our Islamist enemies. The phrase has nothing to do with reality, of course, as the Islamists are far from fascists, though they clearly are the most dangerous threat America now confronts. But Podhoretz does not care about understanding the enemy’s real motivation and attributes in order to annihilate him as quickly as possible. By using the term Islamofascist he seeks only to block any debate on the neoconservative agenda by ensuring that its critics are identified as pro-fascist, therefore anti-American, therefore pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Semitic. Other notable men have described this tactic as the Big Lie, and it is a neocon specialty and trademark.

And if this Big Lie is not enough for you, try another of Podhoretz’s on for size. This one is so ahistorical and deliberately misleading that it is hard to even begin to comment on its mendacity. Podhoretz focuses on one of the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s rants damning the United States as “the murderers of humanity,” considering it divine revelation that Arafat did not mention Israel in the single paragraph quoted in the book. “The absence of even a word here about Israel,” lectures Podhoretz to Americans he obviously sees as mindless cattle who will believe any lie thrown their way, “showed that if the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as the embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs considered evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel was in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism, rather than the reverse.” (91) How many major American military conflicts with Arabs can Podhoretz name that occurred prior to Israel’s establishment?

Clearly, Podhoretz and his heroic band want the Islamist enemy to stay in the field so that the war he and the Israel-firsters wanted and now have will go on and on and on. Like the sickest and most addled of bloodletting Wilsonian interventionists, Podhoretz quotes the puerile position of George W. Bush that U.S. security depends on building mirror images of America abroad: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know that the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.” (182) And what is the endgame of standing with those who stand for liberty? Quoting President Bush again, Podhoretz says U.S. military forces must “drain the swamps” of the Islamofascist world and replace incumbent regimes with elected governments that will “fulfill the hopes ‘of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.’” (135) This effort, Podhoretz adds, is “marked by more than a touch of nobility.” (212)

In Podhoretz’s hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man’s willingness to distort history for political advantage. Again using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues “that history had called America to action and that it was both ‘our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.’” (215) Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people — not all others, of course, only Muslims — vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion. Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections? Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : “By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low.” (110)

History also gets in the way of Podhoretz’s worldview, so we get another con. We are not, he argues, trying to impose democracy and neuter the religion of a 14-century-old Islamic civilization and 1.4 billion Muslims, but merely trying to repair a political order that was inappropriately arranged by the Western powers a hundred years ago. “But here again,” Podhoretz argues,

“[T]he so-called realist [view of U.S. foreign policy that opposed the Iraq war] ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Mohammed. … Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman Empire in World War I. Their boundaries had been drawn by the victorious British and French with a stroke of an often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples were handed over in due course to one tyrant after another.” (144-145)

This is another absurd argument that again reduces to nonsense, to wit: The French and British tried to dictate the organization and political system of an ancient Islamic civilization and cocked it up, but we are much smarter — and implicitly purer — than they were, so we can build the perfect Muslim world. This smug attitude does capture in a nutshell, however, a good part of the basic un-Americanism of the neoconservatives; they are a foreign and, I think, malign influence in our body politic. America is a republic founded on the principles and insights derived from what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described in her brilliant work The Roads to Modernity as the American Enlightenment, fundamental to which is a profound belief in the utter imperfectability of man. Podhoretz and his all-knowing and stern-minded gang of neoconservative warmongers, on the other hand, are the heirs of the French Enlightenment’s faith in man’s perfectibility, the principles of which have brought the world the bloody horrors and mass murder conducted by the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and any number of others who attempted to create a perfect society. There is no sane reason to believe that neoconservative-led efforts to “perfect” Muslim society would yield less bloodshed, much less to imagine that it would increase security for the United States.

The other part of the fundamental un-Americanism of Podhoretz and his brothers lies in their use of the ideas and heroes of American history only if they further their “enlightened” foreign policy; all others they ignore or misrepresent. Picking and choosing from the words of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, Podhoretz tries to infer that fighting a “world war” against the Islamofascists is identical to fighting world wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. This sounds good if you say it fast, but the selective use of our presidents’ words by Podhoretz is just another of his inaccurate assertions.

Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz’s lethal lie that the Islamists are “the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization” and are, “like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand.” (14-15) Actually, America’s war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by “our virtues as a free and prosperous country.” (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home — and America’s defeat.

Podhoretz’s final con comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan’s words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives’ endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: “To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.” (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade “to beat back the ‘implacable challenge’ of Islamofascism as the ‘greatest generation’ of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III.” (217)

This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), “On American Principles.” In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams’s non-interventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those

“that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams’ response to similar problems so many years ago — his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called ‘the benign sympathy of our example.’ To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication ‘in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.’ Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?”

Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country’s history and traditions and its peoples’ character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew. At one point in his book Podhoretz quotes W.H. Auden’s description of the 1930s as “a low and dishonest decade.” (188) There is no better overall description for Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism than “low and dishonest.”

Published: Antiwar.com

In reference to coercive British rule, Tom Paine once told Americans that there is something absurd about the idea that the entire continent of North America should be forever ruled by the little island of Great Britain. Paine, as always in his work, was trying to make Americans think for themselves and, in this case, to see that their own geographic size, rising wealth, and potential power made it ridiculous for them to forever acquiesce to rule from London.

Paine’s lesson is apt today in regard to both Syria and Iran. Since I was a young man — now a fading memory — I have heard U.S. politicians warn of the threat presented to America by Syria. There is, of course, something superficially plausible about this. We know that Syria is another of the Muslim world’s family-run dictatorships — most of the others are U.S. allies — and that the Assad boys are murderous autocrats and thugs. Likewise, our Israeli friends and their Israel-first American supporters have long harped on the idea — and thereby have misled Americans — that Syria is a military threat to the United States.

But look at the map. Syria is a tiny country, dirt poor except for weapons, and ruled by a dentist. It also is being slowly undermined by the Islamists who the Assads have foolishly tried to co-opt. It is an insignificant dot on the map that poses no threat whatsoever to the United States. If Damascus allows Islamist fighters into Iraq to attack coalition forces, America should take steps to end that situation. But as much as we talk about the issue, we do nothing about it, probably because the inflow from Syria is not as large as the inflow from our great and good ally Saudi Arabia. Besides, allowing the inflow from Syria to continue gives Senator Lieberman — the current poster boy of America’s Israel-firsters — the ability to beat the war drum against the supposedly mighty Syrians. Surely, if Senator Lieberman truly believes the Syrians are a threat to America, the people of Connecticut have sent — hopefully unwittingly — someone akin to the agent of a foreign power to the U.S. Senate. Syria might be a threat to Israel, but the idea that it is a threat to the United States, that the armored Syrian horde may sweep across the Bronx, occupy Manhattan, and lasciviously ogle New Jersey, should be met with the most appropriate response possible — convulsive and derisive laughter.

And then there is Iran. How does one explain the U.S. governing elite’s fear of Iran? Here we have a country that admittedly is led by one of the world’s more histrionic politicians, but one that also is ringed by U.S. military bases and surrounded by an overwhelmingly more numerous Sunni world that hates Shi’ites far more than it hates Westerners. Iran‘s Islamic regime, moreover, is helplessly watching the final stages of the march of its energy resources toward oblivion, and preparing for the impoverishment and resulting internal political instability that event will usher in.

So where in this portrait is the threat to the United States? While Iran is a threat to Israel, there is surely no threat to America in Iran’s less-than-impressive military forces, nuclear development program, or unattractive public diplomacy. No, the threat to the United States comes from two sources. First, the relentless “Iran is the new Nazi Germany” propaganda pushed by Israel and the American citizen Israel-firsters, and, second, the multi-decade failure of the U.S. Congress to seriously address the national-security issues of energy, borders, and immigration.

As in the case of Syria — although for fewer years because Iran’s previous tyrant was on America’s side until the Mullahs seized power in 1979 — most American adults have grown up with the idea that Iran is a dire threat to U.S. national security. Sparked mainly by memories of the U.S. embassy hostages held for 400-plus days while President Carter diddled, Americans have been ripe for the delusions induced by the periodic visits of Binyamin Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, and their well-staged rants that equate the creaky, mostly foreign-purchased, and slightly more than tin-pot military machine of the Ayatollahs with Hitler’s Wehrmacht, the product of an extremely modern industrial economy, a united populace ready for revenge against its conquerors, and the Germans’ apparently genetic talent and taste for war. To say that Netanyahu, other Israeli politicians, and their American Israel-first supporters are being disingenuous in pushing the Iranian threat would be incorrect. They are consistently and blatantly lying.

No, the threat to the United States from Iran is not military, it is rather from America‘s most dangerous home-grown terrorists — the U.S. Congress. Iran threatens America economically because it has the capability to disrupt oil production in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province. Such an Iranian effort would be a casus belli for the United States only because the U.S. Congress has done nothing more substantial than advance Daylight Savings Time by three weeks since the Saudi-led embargoes of the 1970s. Thirty-five years of the Congress’ utter failure to address energy security as a top priority national interest has made Iran a threat to America that it otherwise could not be.

Likewise, the terrorist threat from Iran — which is genuine — must be labeled by the U.S. Congress. Neither Iran’s government or its Revolutionary Guard Corps, or their Lebanese semi-surrogate Hezbollah are going to launch a terrorist first strike in the United States. All of these entities are rational actors and they know a first-strike from their side would earn them a catastrophic response. But the rub comes for America from the fact that each of the just-mentioned entities have a terrorism infrastructure established in North America — in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — that could and would be used in response to a U.S. or Israeli first strike on Iran. And that response would be effective inside America because — thanks to the Congress’ knowing failure to control borders and immigration — no level of U.S. law enforcement has anything near a complete handle on the size, intentions, capabilities, and targets of our potential Iranian attackers.

So perhaps its time for Americans to reread Mr. Paine, begin thinking for themselves, and recognize the expensive and potentially war-causing absurdities that have been foisted on them regarding the “threat” from Syria and Iran by their bipartisan governing elite and its deserving-to-be-indicted co-conspirators, Israel’s government and its American Israel-first acolytes. If viewed with a realistic eye rather than one clouded by propaganda, the claims that two decaying blotches on the map named Syria and Iran constitute severe national-security threats to the United States would earn the dismissive scorn they so richly merit.

Published: Antiwar.com

America’s bipartisan governing elite never expected their common interventionist foreign policy to be damned by a man who has long worked among that august group. But Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) proved himself not only a political maverick, but one of the few elected federal officials who still prizes — indeed, treasures is a better word — his status as an American citizen. Rep. Paul does not view himself as a citizen of the world who deems unrelenting U.S. intervention abroad as the acceptable price the world demands of America for this higher form of citizenship. Rep. Paul rejects that price, which is, of course, enormously expensive in monetary terms, as well as in terms of the blood of American kids, most of whose parents and other kin are seldom if ever found in the country’s governing elite.

In the Republican debate in South Carolina, Dr. Paul had the unmitigated gall to tell his fellow candidates the exact truth: America was attacked by Islamists on 9/11, and untold other times since Osama bin Laden declared war on us in 1996, because of the United States government’s foreign policies and their impact in the Muslim world over the last thirty-five years. Dr. Paul then consigned to history’s trashcan the motivations assigned to bin Laden and his ilk by the Bush and Clinton administrations; the nine other Republican candidates; the eight please-don’t-ask-us-about-what-Ron-Paul-said Democratic presidential candidates; most of the media; and the think tanks, left, center, and right. Quite correctly, Rep. Paul deep-sixed — hopefully forever — the idea that our Islamist enemies are attacking us because of our freedoms, liberties, elections, freedom of speech, and gender equality.

In response to Rep. Paul, Rudy Giuliani — is there a more unctuous, ill-informed, and arrogant man in American politics? — dismissed the idea that we were attacked for being “over there” as, in his opinion, “absurd.” Giuliani added that he had never before heard such an analysis, demanded Dr. Paul retract his words, and clearly implied that Dr. Paul was unpatriotic. In other words, Giuliani applied the usual crude denigration reserved for any American citizen who dares question the establishment’s self-serving interventionism.

Sadly for Americans, Giuliani probably was telling the truth, both for himself and the American governing elite. None of the elite’s denizens appear to have heard, read, or even sensed anything that runs counter to the Muslims-hate-us-for-our-freedoms dictum that became revealed scripture on 9/11 and which, in truth, has governed the elite’s perceptions of and actions in the Muslim world for decades. Dr. Paul is right, our governing elite are obsessed with searching abroad for dragons to destroy, especially Islamic dragons; they thereby ignore the Founders’ clear warning that such activity all but assures the ruin of our republic.

Soon after the debate, the bone-deep interventionism of both parties focused on by Rep. Paul was underscored for Americans by the spending bill for the Iraq war passed by Congress and signed by President Bush. The bill allowed the intervention in Iraq to continue until at least September and showed there is no real difference between the two parties; the Republicans want to continue pursuing the military option, while the Democrats argue the military option has failed and there must now be a U.S.-dominated political solution. Neither party wants to leave Iraq; each just has its own view of how the intervention should be managed. And they cynically have stage-managed the next three months so that each will have ammunition — in the form of dead U.S. military personnel — to support their agendas when the next Iraq spending bill is debated. The Republicans will argue that the “surge” has been costly in lives but is succeeding and cannot be given up; the Democrats will argue the surge has failed and the high number of U.S. dead show that we must find a political settlement. Odds are the next spending bill will be signed and leave the situation substantially unchanged because no one — save Rep. Paul — really wants to get out of Iraq. Indeed, there is every chance that the next presidential election will come and go and we will still be in Iraq because the gentleman from Texas is the only presidential candidate who is not a rank interventionist.

Faced with this reality, the struggle to make Americans face facts on foreign policy must be fought now and the spark struck by Rep. Paul fanned into a fire. Make no mistake, the United States is fighting and losing a growing war against al-Qaeda and its allies. And our evolving defeat is not the result of military weakness on our part, or any God-is-on-the-side-of-the-Islamists factor on al-Qaeda’s side. We are losing because we have underestimated the enemy’s strength and motivation thanks to the belief of Mr. Giuliani and our bipartisan elite that Mr. Paul’s assessment of the Islamists’ motivation is “absurd.” That belief — which can now be called the “Giuliani Doctrine” — is al-Qaeda’s only indispensable ally and its maintenance is the Islamists only hope for victory.

Our Islamist enemies are motivated by the U.S. policies that have produced America’s military presence in the Muslim world; approval for the repression of Muslims by Russia and China; exploitation of Muslim oil resources; unqualified support for Israel; and a half-century of protecting Arab police states. No American, of course, has to agree with Muslim perceptions of U.S. policies. But perception always is reality, and there is no doubt that most of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims — even those opposed to bin Laden — perceive U.S. foreign policy as an attack on their faith, lands, and brethren. Thus, while our bipartisan governing elite fight a non-existent threat — the freedom-haters and the liberty detesters — the threat fueled by hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy grows broader, deeper, and more visceral among Muslims.

What to do? Take Rep. Paul up on his idea of debating the components of U.S. foreign policy that are at issue, not to denigrate their authors and upholders, but to allow Americans to assess whether the policies are doing the only thing they must do — protect America. In this nation there should be nothing too dangerous to talk about; energy, Israel, and our tyrannical Arab “friends” ought to be on the table for thorough, even vitriolic debate. An honest, wide-ranging debate would do two things: (1) It would destroy the myth that Muslims hate us for who we are and how we think and live, and (2) it would help Americans see that U.S. foreign policy has consequences, good and bad, and that Washington’s current policies ensure war with the Islamists for the foreseeable future, and probably much longer.

Might I suggest, therefore, that the next Republican and Democratic debates focus on a single proposition, and that proposition be taken from the finest book on the history of U.S. foreign relations published in the last quarter century, Walter A. MacDougall’s, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776. In the debates, the proposition before the house for discussion — to adapt the words of Dr. MacDougall — should be:

“Foreign policy defines what America is at home and is the instrument for preserving and expanding American freedom at home. Foreign policy conducted in the form of crusades for democracy or other ideologies abroad belie America’s ideals, violate its true interests, and sully its freedom. The Founders never intended foreign policy to impose their values beyond America’s own land and waters. None of the Founders perceived a mortal conflict between morality and the national interest; indeed, foreign policy is moral when it is in the national interest.”

Initially, such a debate would amount to Dr. Paul against all comers, but Dr. Paul would be quickly joined by tens of millions of Americans when they hear the fatuous, theory-stuffed attempts by the seventeen other candidates to justify the profligate waste of American lives, treasure, and security for exactly the kind of ideological crusading — democracy, freedom, human and women’s rights, etc. — the Founders not only warned against, but damned. At debate’s end it would be clear to Americans that their self-appointed, inbred emperors have no clothes. And the way then would be clear to think about a foreign policy that protects American liberty at home and genuine U.S. interests abroad, and one that is not the republic-destroying play thing of our elite interventionists and the interest groups, foreign lobbies, and domestic military industries that fund their election campaigns.

Published: Antiwar.com