Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

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

George Tenet has a story to tell. With his appearance tonight on “60 Minutes” and the publication of his new memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” the former director of central intelligence is out to absolve himself of the failings of 9/11 and Iraq. He’ll sell a lot of books, of course, but we shouldn’t buy his attempts to let himself off the hook.

My experience with Tenet dates to the late 1980s, when he was the sharp, garrulous, cigar-chomping staff director of the Senate intelligence committee and I was a junior CIA officer who briefed him on covert action programs in Afghanistan. Later, I worked directly for Tenet after he took over the CIA and I became the first chief of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit. We met regularly, often daily. It’s impossible to dislike Tenet, who is smart, polite, hard-working, convivial and detail-oriented. But he’s also a man who never went from cheerleader to leader.

At a time when clear direction and moral courage were needed, Tenet shifted course to follow the prevailing winds, under President Bill Clinton and then President Bush — and he provided distraught officers at Langley a shoulder to cry on when his politically expedient tacking sailed the United States into disaster.

At the CIA, Tenet will be remembered for some badly needed morale-building. But he will also be recalled for fudging the central role he played in the decline of America’s clandestine service — the brave field officers who run covert missions that make us all safer. The decline began in the late 1980s, when the impending end of the Cold War meant smaller budgets and fewer hires, and it continued through Sept. 11, 2001. When Tenet and his bungling operations chief, James Pavitt, described this slow-motion disaster in testimony after the terrorist attacks, they tried to blame the clandestine service’s weaknesses on congressional cuts. But Tenet had helped preside over every step of the service’s decline during three consecutive administrations — Bush, Clinton, Bush — in a series of key intelligence jobs for the Senate, the National Security Council and the CIA. Only 9/11, it seems, convinced Tenet of the importance of a large, aggressive clandestine service to U.S. security.

Like self-serving earlier leaks seemingly from Tenet’s circle to such reporters as Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward, “At the Center of the Storm” is similarly disingenuous about Tenet’s record on al-Qaeda. In “State of Denial,” Woodward paints a heroic portrait of the CIA chief warning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored. Tenet was indeed worried during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission.

“I was talking to the national security adviser and the president and the vice president every day,” Tenet told the commission during a nationally televised hearing on March 24, 2004. “I certainly didn’t get a sense that anybody was not paying attention to what I was doing and what I was briefing and what my concerns were and what we were trying to do.” Now a “frustrated” Tenet writes that he held an urgent meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, to try to get “the full attention of the administration” and “finally get us on track.” He can’t have it both ways.

But what troubles me most is Tenet’s handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence. “We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin’s whereabouts,” Tenet now writes. That of course is untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if an attempt to get bin Laden failed. None of this excuses Clinton’s disinterest in protecting Americans, but it does show Tenet’s easy willingness to play for patsies the CIA officers who risked their lives to garner intelligence and then to undercut their work to avoid censure if an attack went wrong.

To be fair, Tenet and I had differences about how best to act against bin Laden. (In the book, he plays down my recommendations as those of “an analyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations.”) The hard fact remains that each time we acquired actionable intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all, al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice declared war on America. I did not — and do not — care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden’s men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. “You can’t kill everyone,” he would say. That’s an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team.

Then there’s the Iraq war. Tenet is now protesting the use that Rice, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials have made of his notorious pre-war comment that the evidence of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction programs amounted to a “slam dunk” case. But the only real, knowable pre-war slam dunk was that Iraq was going to turn out to be a nightmare.

Tenet now paints himself as a scapegoat for an administration in which there never was “a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion,” insisting that he warned Bush, Cheney and their Cabinet about the risks of occupying Iraq. Well, fine; the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause — spreading bin Ladenism, spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.

But as with Rice and the warnings in the summer of 2001: Now he tells us. At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet’s book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats’ ideal Republican). Tenet’s attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith; their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

They’re all culpable, of course. But Tenet’s attempts to shift the blame won’t wash. At day’s end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he’s saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

Powell has also been blasted for being a good soldier during the march to war rather than quitting in protest. The Bush administration would have been hurt by Powell’s resignation, but it might not have stopped the war. But Tenet’s resignation would have destroyed the neocons’ Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that “proved” Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda. After all, the compelling briefing that Powell, with Tenet sitting just behind his shoulder, gave the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 could never have been delivered if Tenet had blown the whistle.

Of course, it’s good to finally have Tenet’s side of the Iraq and 9/11 stories. But whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter’s Wilsonian militarism. Sadly but fittingly, “At the Center of the Storm” is likely to remind us that sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence.

Michael F. Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, is the author of “Imperial Hubris” and “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes.”

Published: The Washington Post

While the war in the Levant continues apace, Americans ought to focus for a moment on the near-pathetic ignorance of the bipartisan governing elite that directs their nation’s foreign policy. This vacuity was again highlighted last week by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Democratic Party chief Howard Dean. Sen. Schumer boycotted Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s address to Congress, and Mr. Dean described Maliki as an anti-Semite. Why? Well, because Maliki had damned Israel’s activities in Lebanon but failed to condemn Hezbollah’s actions.

Now it is no surprise that the Democrats Schumer and Dean — along with President Bush, Sen. McCain, and most Republicans — would side with Israel no matter what the cost to U.S. interests, lives, and society (witness events in Seattle). That is the venal and security-sapping given of contemporary American politics. No, the surprise is that any educated American could have anticipated any other judgment from Prime Minister Maliki. To the great dismay of our bipartisan, democracy-pushing political paragons, the democratically elected leader of Iraq merely stated the obvious: Iraqis regard Israel as an illegitimate, colonizing, land-and-water thieving state that routinely murders large numbers of Muslim men, women, and children. The hard but obvious reality is that Maliki was speaking for his constituents, and, to be honest, for most of the Muslim world.

Is Maliki right or wrong? For Americans, that is the wrong question, and, in any event, the answer will eventually be decided on the battlefield of a war that is — to say the least — peripheral to U.S. national security interests. What should be of interest to Americans is that their political leaders in both parties expected to create a successor government to Saddam’s in Muslim Iraq that would not be Israel’s foe. If Saddam spoke for Iraqis on any issue, it was on Israel. An expectation that Maliki would deviate from that foreign-policy orientation could only have been hatched in the muddled minds of those in the executive branch who promised a cakewalk, casualty-free war, and the subservient Congress that eagerly went along for the democracy-installing ride.

When Woodrow Wilson injected the toxic concept of self-determination into international politics, he believed that the product of the self-determination process would always be benign: Nifty little democratic governments that would protect the lives and rights of their citizens and live in peace with one another. Instead, it has produced nearly a century of unrelenting bloodletting.

Reality was never Wilson’s strong suit, and his successors are no closer to reality. While it is commonplace to say that today’s neoconservatives are Wilsonian in their policies, analysis, and expectations, it is truer to say that Wilsonianism is the common view of America’s governing elites — thus we find Schumer, Dean, Bush, and McCain on the same team of addled politicians. To be blunt, America’s democracy is not an exportable commodity; it is unique to the United States and the product of 800 years of heroes and villains, war and civil war, racial strife and racial reconciliation, and foolishness and common sense. As the Founders knew, it is grounded in Britain’s political experience, Scottish commonsense philosophy, British common law, Calvinist Protestant Christianity, and the absolute requirement of an educated populace to evaluate — and when necessary check — the policies, ambitions, and greed of elected officials. Parenthetically, the failure of Americans to rise up to scorn and terminate the Bush administration’s (Democrat-supported) plans to install American-style democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq suggests the country may be wanting in the Founders’ educated-populace category.

To condemn Prime Minister Maliki for being anti-Israeli is, in essence, to reject the way that democracy and self-determination have so far worked out in Iraq. Indeed, America’s bipartisan democracy-mongers have made a consistent habit of rejecting or ignoring the results of all the “democratic” elections that have been held since 2000 in the Middle East. Each vote has yielded results that reflect the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli views of Muslim electorates, either by producing actual governments — Iraq and Palestine — or the marked political advance of Islamists in Egypt, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. That our leaders are surprised by these results can be explained by one of only two factors: their surprise is feigned and therefore deceitful, or they are ignorant of the history of both America and the Middle East.

Last week’s condemnation of Maliki reveals with stark clarity that the Muslim world remains terra incognita for U.S. governing elites. Nearly 60 years after President Truman recognized the state of Israel to win the domestic pro-Israel vote for the then cash-strapped and vote-needy Democrats, Schumer and Dean have stayed true to that cynical mission, a mission the Republicans have also signed on to heart and soul. More important, the failure of America’s elites to see that no genuine U.S. national interests are at stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict and that our model of democracy has little or no relevance in the Islamic world except — as the Founders foresaw — as a symbol, has put Americans in harm’s way at home and abroad. Indeed, their reality-free foreign policy has made America a target for the hatred of increasing numbers of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.

Published: Antiwar.com

One of the preoccupations of the authors of the American constitution was defining the danger posed to the new body politic by political, social, and economic factions. “By faction,” James Madison, the Constitution’s father, wrote in the justly famous Federalist No. 10,

“I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent interests of the community.”

Now, one must presume that Mr. Madison never imagined that the two houses of the United States Congress and the federal executive branch could conceivably combine with what today is called a “private interest group” — namely AIPAC — to be exactly the sort of faction that would threaten both “the rights of other citizens” and “the permanent interests of the community.” And yet today, that is precisely the spectacle we behold as the Bush administration and both houses of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — continue a bipartisan, three-decade-old policy of supporting Israel without qualm or stint, and without the least concern about what such support means for the welfare and security of American citizens and their families.

In the last week, Americans have seen their president, his advisers, and their elected representatives behave as a pack of well-groomed Pavlovian dogs, while exhibiting equivalent IQ power. Not unlike automatons, Mr. Bush and Secretary Rice spoke the traditional mantra: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Then, the popularly elected protectors of American interests passed resolutions repeating that mantra with majorities strikingly similar to those Cold War communist rulers could always count on receiving from their so-called parliaments. Finally, this two-branch, AIPAC-funded, mid-term-election-minded faction agreed on the weekend to very publicly dispatch large consignments of U.S.-made precision weapons to fill the recently depleted stocks of the Israeli military. All of these actions were, of course, played out against a backdrop of editorial screeches, claiming “Israel is bravely and nobly fighting America’s and/or the West’s war,” from the likes of such noted U.S.-interests-be-damned voices as Ann Coulter, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page, William Kristol and the Weekly Standard’s crew of certifiable zanies, and the reliably hysterical FrontPageMag.com.

Well, I think no one — least of all myself — will deny the basic truth that Israel has the right to defend itself; indeed, our own Constitution captures the spirit of the British jurist Blackstone’s argument that the right to self-defense is “the first law of nature” — advice Washington too often ignores when the need arises to protect its own citizens. Moreover, Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon serves the decidedly useful purpose of graphically portraying for Americans the type of war that must be waged when a nation has only its intelligence and military services in its self-defense tool box. Clearly, Israel has no credible diplomatic, public diplomacy, ideological, or economic tools to complement or moderate its use of force. This object lesson is particularly pertinent for Americans, for the bipartisan faction outlined above is very close to putting the United States in the same predicament.

No, the real question of moment is not the red-herring of Israel’s right to defend itself, but rather what possible U.S. national interest is at stake that requires America to put its security at risk on Israel’s behalf. National interests, after all, are properly defined as that limited number of issues that are life-and-death concerns for a country; they are matters of survival. Access to energy resources, freedom of the seas, the flourishing of our domestic democracy, control of borders, internal security, securing the Soviet nuclear arsenal, economic stability — these are definite national interests for contemporary America. These are all items that we must be prepared to expend time, thought, treasure, and, if necessary, lives to ensure.

Israel, realistically, does not fall into the category of a life-and-death national interest. It is, at most, a national emotional interest, and therein is the problem. In the past 30 years, and especially during the post-Cold War Clinton regime, our definition of national interest has expanded to include a lengthy list of nice-to-have but unessential ephemera, which are at the moment costing us lives and treasure. Forcing Iraq and Afghanistan to reserve parliamentary seats for women and efforts to install democracy abroad at bayonet point are just two instances of our bipartisan governing elites’ inability to differentiate national-security from national-emotional interests.

Most Americans, including myself, probably hope that Israel eventually proves itself a viable, prosperous, non-theocratic, nuclear-armed state. But it is not remotely imaginable that Israel is a national-security interest of the United States that requires the U.S. government to unquestioningly endorse, fund, and arm all Israeli actions and thereby earn the same enmity Israel earns from a billion-plus Muslims. Indeed, it is painfully clear that such support undermines several of the genuine national-security interests listed above: namely, the issues of energy, internal security, and — given the torrent of bigoted, debate-closing hate speech directed at professors Mearsheimer and Walt — the free-speech component of a flourishing domestic democracy.

So, how to explain the extraordinary power of America’s tiny but dominant pro-Israel faction? In the context of the enduring alliance between the executive branch, the Congress, AIPAC, and their media acolytes, Alexander Hamilton’s warning in Federalist No. 6 that in the pursuit of private and selfish interests men are “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” is a good place to start.

Published: Antiwar.com

As Israel and Hezbollah again prove racial and religious hatred are the core, irremediable traits of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the international media focuses on each side’s weaponry and the evacuees, Osama bin Laden is smiling and praising Allah in his mountain fastness. Again, as after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, bin Laden and his far-flung lieutenants can have no doubt about which side God is on.

The battle raging in the Levant has fixed the attention of the world’s eight most powerful leaders, each of whom foolishly thinks that the Arab-Israeli conflict is solely about Israel’s security, and willfully ignores the fact that it fuels the much more dangerous bin Laden-led war against America and the West. Their long-standing aversion to this reality can be seen in the failure of even one of these leaders — or anyone in the mainstream media, for that matter — to note that Israel and its Western supporters are doing bin Laden’s work for him, thereby undercutting their own security to an extent Hezbollah could never even dream of.

As Lebanon burns, bin Laden’s words will reinforce and harden Muslim perceptions — including the views of Muslims in Europe and North America — that the U.S.-led West is warring on Islam and its followers. Bin Laden’s claims that Arab regimes cannot protect Muslims and are the West’s apostate lackeys were underscored when Arab kings and dictators acted through the Arab League to condemn Hezbollah. Nothing better proves bin Laden’s consistently made point than the juxtaposition of the Arab leaders’ damning of Hezbollah — heretofore always a “legitimate resistance group” in their rhetoric — and their implicit acquiescence in Israel’s leisurely razing of Beirut.

And what Muslim in his or her right mind can now doubt bin Laden’s claim that Washington and its allies have given Israel carte blanche to do what it will to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Muslim civilians? The G-8 grandees called for mutual restraint but assigned sole culpability to Hezbollah and Hamas; Prime Minister Blair and Secretary-General Annan call for undefined diplomatic efforts that might, someday, lead to UN peacekeepers; and Secretary of State Rice said she really does hope to find time in her busy schedule to visit the region. Muslims will see this lack of enthusiasm for ending the fight for what it is — the West’s forelock-tugging deference to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert’s estimate that his military still needs a week or so to finish off Hezbollah and Lebanon.

This supine indulgence of Olmert, moreover, suggests Western leaders suspend common sense when dealing with Israel. Olmert’s claim that Israel will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Hezbollah is nonsense, as only Israel’s occupation and virtual annexation of Lebanon could raise this goal even to the level of a slim possibility. Olmert and his cabinet know this and are relying on the cowardly fear Western leaders have of their pro-Israeli voters — aren’t there U.S. congressional elections in about 90 days? — to give Israel’s military a free hand for as long as possible.

Most damaging for G-8 leaders will be this week’s validation for Muslims of bin Laden’s assertion that the West considers Muslim lives cheap and expendable. They will see that three kidnapped Israeli soldiers and several dozen dead Israelis are worth infinitely more to the West than the thousands of Muslims held for years in Israel’s prisons, the hundreds already killed in Lebanon, and the eradication of Lebanon’s modern infrastructure.

So bin Laden wins without lifting a finger. The G-8 leaders, their Arab allies, and Israel have behaved in a way that will burn bin Laden’s words deeper into Muslim perceptions and push more to accept jihad as the only recourse. Western leaders can argue forever that they are honest brokers but, because perception is reality, it will be bin Laden’s words, not theirs, that echo long and tellingly in Muslim ears.

The impact of this Israel-Hezbollah round will not stop with the inevitable truce that will be declared after Israel ruins Lebanon. While temporary order may return to the Levant, America, Britain, and the West should not fool themselves. They have again gratuitously picked sides in a fight between two inconsequential nations; the survival of neither is a genuine national security interest for any G-8 state. Led by Washington’s absurd, 30-year obsession with the minimal Shia threat to America, and blind to the hatred generated among Muslims by their foreign policies, the G-8 have mightily strengthened the enmity, durability, and resolve of the Sunni extremist movement that bin Laden leads and personifies.

Published: Antiwar.com

Covert action is much talked about and little understood. At its most basic level, covert action is a set of intelligence operations undertaken by a specific state’s intelligence agencies to advance its national interests. They are executed in a manner that limits the visibility of that state’s hand in whatever is done. Ideally, covert actions cannot be traced back to their sponsor. Most people take the term covert action to mean violent actions of one kind or another: kidnapping, assassination, support for insurgents, etc. While violence can certainly be part of a covert-action campaign, the more insidious — and often more effective — arm of covert action is called “political action,” whereby one state seeks to influence the public opinion of another by speaking through the mouths of that country’s citizens. And let me stress, there is nothing wrong or immoral about covert political action. America used political action worldwide in the Cold War; Britain used it in the United States to accelerate neutral America’s entry into both world wars; the Saudis pay untold amounts to retired senior U.S. officials to speak admiringly of the anti-American desert tyranny; and Israel uses it today against America to ensure unlimited and unquestioning U.S. support. It is a legitimate foreign affairs tool, and the leaders of any nation who choose not to engage in such activity are certifiably negligent fools.

For years — even decades — U.S. citizens have been the subject of a political action campaign designed and executed by Israel. Currently, Israel’s campaign is part steady-as-she-goes and part improvisation to neutralize an unexpected and — for Israel — worrying development. So far, Israel’s covert political action is succeeding hands down. Americans are gradually being indoctrinated to believe Islamists are today’s Nazis and that there is no “Israeli lobby” in America. Simply put, Israel is conducting a brilliant covert political action campaign in the United States, a campaign any intelligence service in the world would rightly be proud of.

Part one of Israeli’s political action consists simply of using that old standby debate-suppressor, the four-letter word “Nazi.” Newspapers in Israel, of course, have long used the word to describe Israel’s Muslim enemies. Recently, for example, the Jerusalem Post ran an article in which al-Qaeda is described as “yet another Nazi knockoff.” This sort of language is the stuff of Israeli journalism, and not of much concern to Americans. If the Israeli press wants to teach their readers to underestimate the Islamist threat, so be it.

But now the word “Nazi” is being gradually fed to Americans as a scientific definition of our Islamist enemies. Headlines such as “Hamas Uber Alles,” “Hitler’s Heirs in Damascus,” and “The Nazi Correction to Islamic Terror” are increasingly common in U.S. media publications found in the news files Googled daily by Americans. U.S. politicians, too, are eager to jump on the call-them-Nazis bandwagon, with Secretary Rumsfeld recently saying that leaving Iraq early would be like returning postwar Germany to the Nazis, and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) comparing the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra to the burning of the Reichstag by the Nazis.

The goal of using the Nazi analogy is to suppress any realistic debate about the pluses and minuses of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and to make sure any American raising questions about U.S. support for Israel is seen as siding with the “Islamofascists,” the heirs of Nazism. Any person who knows the least bit about Islam — and the Israelis know a great deal — knows it is not Nazism, yet the Internet is rife with such titles as “A Manifesto Against Islamofascism” and “Islamofascism’s Creeping Coup in Turkey.” The best capsule description of the threat posed by Islamofascists is provided by Frank Gaffney in a recent issue of The Intelligencer, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Listen to Mr. Gaffney, and you will almost hear Muslim jackboots striking the pavement.

“We are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World. This is a fight to the death with Islamofascists, Muslim extremists driven by a totalitarian political ideology that, like Nazism and Communism before it, is determined to destroy freedom and the people who love it.”

The drive to make Islamofascist the term of choice in describing America’s Muslim enemies is meant to still U.S. debate about Israel and, indeed, to limit questions about any aspect of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world. After all, why would anyone in their right mind care what people think, unless they are blindly and unthinkingly opposed to Islamofascism?

The second part of any nation’s covert political action plan is to be ready to exploit or redress unexpected developments within the target society. Last month, Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt provided such an environment when they published a lengthy study showing the strong influence the Israeli lobby has on the crafting and application of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world. If American society had its head screwed on right, the collective response of the citizenry would have been, “DUH!” — signifying that the near-determinative nature of Israeli influence is so clear that no academic analysis of that fact is necessary.

Instead, the reaction from American elites has been that of Captain Renault in Casablanca — they are shocked, shocked, that anyone could even think that there is such a thing as an Israeli lobby. The elites demand that Americans believe there are no such things as Israel-suborned American-citizen spies stealing U.S. national security secrets, pro-Israel U.S. media publications routinely savaging any American questioning the perfect and eternal mesh of U.S. and Israeli interests, and U.S. politicians from Pelosi to McCain to DeLay to Rice groveling at AIPAC’s annual conference, each willing to compromise U.S. security if they can garner pro-Israel votes and pockets stuffed with cash from pro-Israel contributions.

In the specific case of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, prominent pro-Israel Americans have been quick off the mark to limit the damage caused to Israel’s interests caused by the paper’s candor and truthfulness. From Marvin Kalb to David Gergen to Max Boot to Alan Dershowitz, these folks have brazenly defied reality by insisting there is no “Israeli Lobby” and that Mearsheimer and Walt are dead wrong, poor scholars, paranoid conspiracy peddlers, or reborn Elders of Zion. Eliot Cohen’s essay in the Washington Post epitomizes the Israel-Firsters’ goal of defaming Mearsheimer and Walt to convince the citizenry that they are crazy and ranting anti-Semites.

The attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer are the stuff that the dreams of political action planners are made of: The apparently spontaneous response by target-country citizens voicing all-out support for the covert-action-sponsoring country. Such a response deep-sixes any chance for a substantive debate on the issue at hand, and submerges it in a blizzard of hate speech directed at the authors from prominent Israel-Firsters, those paragons of virtue who are the chief proponents of First-Amendment-destroying laws against hate speech.

So at day’s end, one can only say: Astoundingly well done, Israel, good for you! The impact of your covert political action activities in America are all that you could have hoped for: Truth is negated, dissent is suppressed, and opponents are intimidated and defamed, and all this is done by prominent U.S. citizens. The only competitor you have is the Saudi lobby, an organization just as damaging as yours to genuine U.S. national interests, a reality you and we would see if the bloodied but hopefully unbowed Mearsheimer-Walt team decides to analyze the corrupt and corrupting Saudi lobby.

Finally, I forgot to mention at the start that covert political action campaigns are almost always directed by one nation against another nation that it considers an enemy or whose leaders it judges to be gullible, venal, none too bright, unreliable, or all four. That surely gives one pause for thought, but it truly is the way the world works.

Published: Antiwar.com

While Terrorism Focus previously examined al-Qaeda’s strategic and tactical doctrine (February 28, March 14), this article looks at the type and purpose of the non-military training that is given to the individual al-Qaeda fighter or mujahid. Based on al-Qaeda sources (see notes for complete listing), this training appears to be common to both the organization’s insurgents and their special forces, and is intended to produce fighters who are pious, disciplined and unity-minded, fatalistic, and cognizant of the requirements and attitudes of those they are defending.

Piety

When training each mujahid, al-Qaeda’s doctrine declares that the first priority must be “spiritual preparation … because it is necessary to attain victory.” The key to this preparation is two-fold, al-Qaeda’s Ma’adh al-Mansur explained. First, each fighter must completely accept the fact that God has promised victory to the Muslims if they obey His word. Second, the fighter must recognize that victory has not yet come because most Muslims love life and hate death, and thus have strayed from God’s path, most specifically from the path of jihad. As a result, al-Mansur directs that each trainee be taught that “God has set the infidel nations against them [the Muslims] to inflict on them humiliation and lowly status. This is an inevitable and ordained punishment that befalls those who abandon jihad.” For this degraded status, each Muslim man should be deeply ashamed, and should “die of grief if he does not ward off the calamities inflicted on his fellow Muslims and Kinsmen.”

In other words, al-Qaeda doctrine does not argue that the current predicament of Muslims is the fault of what Al-Faruq al-Amiri calls “the campaign and reality of the crusader enemy.” Rather, that predicament flows from the refusal of Muslims to resist the infidels’ attack. The commonly held Western view that al-Qaeda and its followers blame the West for all of Islam’s woes — an understanding most stridently advocated by Bernard Lewis — thus falls by the wayside. Al-Qaeda trainees are taught that the humiliation God has inflicted on Muslims for their failure to obey Him can only be lifted by Muslims accepting God’s word and “returning to jihad.” If they do so, they will win victories like those the Prophet Muhammad and his companions won in the battles of Badr and The Trench in Islam’s first years of existence. “Although the Muslims [with Muhammad] were few and had scanty military means, and the infidels were many and well-equipped,” al-Mansur reminds today’s mujahideen, victory was in the hands of God.”

Discipline and Unity

If an al-Qaeda trainee is not thoroughly inculcated with the discipline of the Shariah, Abu-Hajar Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin warned, “[he] will turn into an outlaw.” Abu Jandal, bin Laden’s former bodyguard, noted that each trainee must learn that his “mission in life is to protect the ummah,” and that this is the “cause” all fighters “carried in our hearts wherever we are able to go.” Reflecting on his own training, al-Muqrin recalled that he and his colleagues, “the sons of the Arabian Peninsula,” came to the Afghan training camps with much to learn. We were “not used to military order and discipline,” al-Muqrin wrote, and found “many things full of restrictions and difficult.” After receiving what al-Amiri called intense training for “faith, spirit and heart,” however, al-Muqrin said that he and his comrades became mentally “tough and arduous” and knew that they “must fear no one but God and must be ready to sacrifice everything for upholding God’s word.”

While Shariah instruction develops a disciplined, focused mindset, al-Qaeda doctrine acknowledges that unity of belief does not automatically yield a consistently united organization. Of the other factors impacting unity, al-Qaeda doctrine focuses most on eliminating animosities between trainees, or groups of trainees, that are based on national origins. Abu Jandal, for example, said that in the late 1990s he was often called on by al-Qaeda leaders to travel to camps in Afghanistan to settle disagreements between different nationalities, most commonly Saudis and Egyptians. Al-Qaeda is unique for a number of reasons, but most of all because it is the only Islamist insurgent organization that has been able to remain cohesive and effective despite a heterogeneous membership drawn from several dozen Muslim and non-Muslim states. Abu Jandal has written that bin Laden has long contended that to successfully confront the United States and its allies al-Qaeda fighters “needed to entrench amity among ourselves and eliminate regional rivalries.” Part of the training regimen is to ensure, according to Abu Jandal, that “the issue of nationalism was put out of our minds, and we acquired a wider view than that, namely the issue of the ummah.”

Fatalism

“What does a mujahid seek from jihad?” Shaykh Yusaf al-Alyiri answers his own question: “He seeks one of two happy endings, either victory or martyrdom. He will be victorious when he achieves either of them.” Of all the non-weapons training an al-Qaeda trainee receives, this seems the most simple and straightforward. The mujahid, al-Muqrin concludes, “must be eager to enrage God’s enemies and he must believe that God’s victory is certain, as promised.” He must not worry about the future. “Whatever is going to happen to you,” al-Muqrin instructed would-be insurgents, “will not miss you, and whatever is going to miss you will not happen to you; if it were your fate to be killed, taken prisoner, or wounded, then this would be your fate, and caution will not save you from fate.”

Area awareness

Al-Qaeda’s training in piety, discipline, unity, and fatalism is designed to produce a mujahid who is part of an elite vanguard organization that is deployed in multiple areas of the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda doctrine tells each mujahid that he is “fighting for the whole [Islamic] nation to preserve its religion, sanctities, the blood, honor, and property of the [Muslim] people, and to repulse injustice and aggression.” That said, the doctrine notes that al-Qaeda fighters may not encounter a fully supportive population when they first arrive in the theater of fighting. This is because the mujahideen themselves are outsiders as far as the locals are concerned, and they have not yet proved they can protect the local population. In many instances, therefore, the most the mujahideen can expect is passive assistance. “The mujahideen,” al-Muqrin explained, “must pay attention to the fact that most people are busy with life and pursuing their own livelihood. If the mujahideen keep this in mind they will realize that in many circumstances they will not get great support unless God wishes otherwise.”

Since this situation will be common across the Muslim world, the mujahideen must be disciplined and behave according to the tenets of their training. To turn passive support into active support, al-Muqrin claims, each mujahid must “be known for his nobility of character, ethics, and loyalty to the believers.” He continues:

“The troops must be marked by their good manners and conduct. A mujahid must serve as a beacon to lighten the road for the people and a model for other colleagues to follow. He must be careful not to be like those whom God referred to as: ‘Do ye enjoin right conduct on the people, and forget [to practice it] yourselves?’”

Conclusion

For national militaries and insurgent groups military doctrine is a set of ideals that cannot be perfectly applied during the unpredictable course of a war. Clear, demanding and repetitive doctrinal training probably is the best means of ensuring the fullest possible application of doctrine in war situations. The fact that al-Qaeda has remained a united and disciplined fighting force in a war against the world’s greatest military power, and continues to be welcomed in multiple Muslim countries in which insurgencies are underway or being kindled, suggests the inculcation of its training doctrine for individual fighters has been largely successful.

Notes

1. Ma’adh al-Mansur, “The Importance of Military Preparation According to the Shariah,” al-Mu-askar al-Battar, January 3, 2004.
2. Yusaf al-Alyiri, “The Illumination on the Path of Jihad. The Road to Battle,” Sawt al-Jihad, November 1, 2004.
3. Al-Faruq al-Amiri, “What is our duty toward our ummah?” al-Mu-askar al-Battar, August 17, 2004.
4. Ibid.,”God is your refuge, Al-Fallujah,” al-Mu-askar al-Battar, November 10, 2004.
5. “Interview with Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin,” Movement for Islamic Reform, October 13, 2003.
6. Abu Hajar Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, “The Second Stage: The Relative Strategic Balance,” Mu-askar al-Battar, January 15, 2004.
7. “Interview of Bin Ladin’s Former Body Guard, Abu Jandal,” Al-Quds al-Arabi, August 3, 2004 and March 15, 22, 24, and 25, 2005.

Publication: Terrorism Focus Volume: 3 Issue: 12 (Jamestown Foundation)

• Whose side is the U.S. on?

These days Osama bin Laden must fear that Muslims will begin to believe the United States is his sponsor, and that Washington is doing all it can to ensure al Qaeda’s victory. The foreign-policy performance of the Bush administration since bin Laden’s Jan. 19 statement has been a godsend for al Qaeda. So bad for U.S. interests has been Washington’s diplomacy that a summary of it falls into what radio host Don Imus calls the “you-couldn’t-make-this-up category.”

First, even before all votes were counted in Palestine, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, the president, the neoconservative pundits, and sundry members of both parties in Congress — some of whom clearly aspire to be Knesset members — rejected dealing with the democratically elected Hamas government unless it abandons its pledge to defend Palestine against Israel, presumably a chief reason Palestinians voted for it.

Almost before this dictum was fully announced, Washington and Tel Aviv jointly announced they intend to financially strangle the Hamas regime, cleverly creating a situation where Hamas will seek funding from Shi’ite Iran and thereby force America’s Sunni “allies” in the Persian Gulf to make up Western funding or be disgraced by Shi’ite Iran assisting Sunni Hamas.

As the smoke clears from this U.S.-foreign-policy train wreck, the dominating image must be that of Osama bin Laden’s shy and wry smile. America, once again, has validated the al Qaeda chief’s decade-long and ongoing lesson for Muslims: America supports democracy only if its agents are elected; America will destroy any regime that threatens Israel; America will not allow a country to be ruled by Islamic law unless it has vast oil resources; and, for America, Muslim blood is cheap, it has no qualms about cutting funds used to feed Muslim children.

Second, the Bush administration, the Democratic Party and its Hollywood masters, and their Western European associates have confused — assuming they ever knew — the difference between liberty and license, and have made the controversy over the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad into a battle between the pure defenders of free speech and the evil Muslims of medieval mindset. America’s founders and the early Supreme Court, of course, never equated free speech with blasphemy, and did not judge the latter to fall within the purview of protected speech. It is only the enlightened minds of contemporary America — especially the Democratic Party’s Harvard-bred, libertine legal acolytes — that have raised blasphemy to the rank of fine art, minds so nimble that they seem able to conjure the image of Patrick Henry passionately telling the Virginia’s House of Burgesses: “As for me, gentlemen, give me the liberty to submerge a statue of the Virgin Mary in a vat of urine or give me death.”

America, bin Laden has argued these 10 years past, is out to destroy Muslims and Islam via its foreign policy. He has wisely refrained from justifying jihad because of the way Americans live, think and vote — Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini took that route to jihad and hit a dead end. Now, bin Laden finds America and its allies stepping in to teach Muslims to hate more than just U.S. foreign policy. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Pol-i-Charki; the destruction of the Koran; the burning of dead Taliban soldiers; and now the defense of the Muhammad caricatures are doing what no Muslim leader has done: They are persuading Muslims to hate Americans for being Americans.

Third, Mr. Bush’s just-completed trip to South Asia is a triumph for bin Laden and his allies. Pakistan is the absolute key to the U.S. war against al Qaeda; it is growing more important as U.S. bases in Central Asia become problematic; and its president, Pervez Musharraf, is risking his life to help America by doing things that harm Pakistan’s national interests and stability — such as sending the Pakistani army into the country’s border provinces after al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Faced with this reality what do the geniuses around the president do? They send him first to visit Afghan President Hamid Karzai, America’s follower-less, anti-Pakistan satrap in Kabul; second, they send him to India — Pakistan’s eternal and mortal enemy — where America’s promises to support India’s nuclear capability and make it a “strategic ally”; and third they sneak the president into Pakistan, where he stays just long enough to lecture Gen. Musharraf on how he must do more against al Qaeda, and then departs, refusing to assist Pakistan’s nuclear program and leaving Gen. Musharraf to face a coup-minded general staff seething over the net U.S. payment for Pakistan’s aid: domestic instability and a greatly strengthened India.

For the past two months of U.S, foreign policy, Osama bin Laden can only be reciting “Allahu Akhbar” — “God is great.” For Americans the question must be “Whose side are these guys on?”

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran with the CIA, created and served as the chief of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He is also the author of “Imperial Hubris.”

Published: The Washington Times — Sunday, March 12, 2006

America’s Sunni Islamist opponents must be ever more strongly sensing that Allah truly is on their side. Currently, this perception is due not only to the recent victory of the Islamist party Hamas in Palestine’s parliamentary elections, but more especially because of the U.S. reaction to that success. That reaction probably has polished off any remaining belief in the Muslim world — assuming there was any — that the United States is sincere about building democracy in the Middle East. The reaction likewise has validated Osama bin Laden’s repeated warning that the hypocritical West supports democracy only if elections further its plans to dominate and secularize the Islamic world.

The Palestinian election could have been the break in the Middle East that America has needed, but so far Washington’s bipartisan governing elite has kicked that gift horse squarely in the chops. The from-all-reports fair and democratic election of Hamas should have been a U.S. propaganda triumph, as well as a chance for Washington to exit the morass of Palestinian-Israeli affairs. An aged, incompetent, and putridly corrupt PLO was democratically defeated by Hamas, an organization well-versed in delivering many government services. In this scenario, the United States had a golden opportunity to show respect for a culturally compatible democratic process in the Muslim world and to detach itself from the snare of an endless war in which it has no interest. After 30-plus years of America exposing itself to steadily increasing danger and expense because of the infantile inability of Israelis and Palestinians to live together, we had a chance to walk away and let the cards fall where they may. True, it surely would not have been fair to both sides to do so; after all, the Israelis have a conventional army and a large, undocumented array of weapons of mass destruction, while the Palestinians have AK-47s, the less-than-mighty Qassim missiles, and a steady supply of martyrs and rocks. Life is always tough, however, and the elimination of one or both sides would have no discernible impact on life in North America.

Sadly, the opportunity went a-glimmering because of the three standby myths that dominate what passes for thought among America’s bipartisan foreign policy, academic, and governing elites. The first holds that the survival of Israel and/or a Palestinian state is a central national-security interest for the United States. The second argues that all states have a “right” to exist. The third is that no state is “legitimate” if it refuses to accept the existence of a second state or argues that the second state should be destroyed. The three myths amount to a comprehensive attack on the common sense of the average American, as well as on U.S. national interests.

The first myth is insupportable in terms of the correct definition of national interests: that is, issues that are matters of life-and-death for a nation. If our elites’ favorite analytic frameworks of saintly-or-evil Israelis, or saintly-or-evil Palestinians, is avoided, and an effort is made to write down a list of the genuine U.S. national interests — not emotional, religious, or ethnic interests — that are at stake in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the result would be a completely blank sheet of paper. This little exercise simply shows that if both the Palestinians and the Israelis erased each other from the face of the earth tomorrow, it would have no notable impact on America. Indeed, that result would save a lot of U.S. money and get a lot of Americans out of harm’s way.

The second myth is goofier than the first. No state — Palestine, Israel, America, or Belgium — has any sort of a God- or man-given right to “exist.” States exist because they can defend themselves against predators, produce a viable economy, and prevent terminal, internal societal rot. If every state had a “right” to exist, the West would have kept the Soviet Union alive and would be working feverishly to resuscitate such long-gone states as Siam, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, Sparta, and the Italian city states of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa.

The third myth is an absurdity of more recent vintage: A government is only legitimate, and can only be dealt with, if it renounces violence and recognizes the right of all states to exist. In practice, this means that Palestine’s new Hamas government must unilaterally disarm in the face of a demonstrably brutal enemy — backed by the unqualified support of the world’s only superpower — and willingly turn its back on a duty (jihad) that it believes derives from God’s word. In commonsense terms, this sort of voluntary national suicide and mass apostasy seems a bit much to ask and, even more, to realistically expect to achieve.

For the United States, moreover, these demands are nothing short of nonsense in terms of our nation’s historical experience. What American, for example, has not seen the film of a premier of the Soviet Union pounding his desk with a shoe and stridently vowing that the USSR would ultimately “bury” the United States? As if this denial of America’s right to exist was not clear enough, all Americans knew that that particular Soviet leader — as well as his predecessors and successors — believed in the “science” of Marxism-Leninism, which long-ago determined that America and all capitalist states would be annihilated. Faced with such a foe, as I recall, America did not demand that the Soviets unilaterally disarm, renounce their Marxist-Leninist faith, and avow America’s right to exist and flourish. Instead, we accepted the reality of the USSR’s existence as a mortal foe, armed to the teeth, and dealt with Moscow in a way that protected U.S. national interests and led eventually to the demise of the Soviet Union.

As U.S. history shows, we are seeking to impose on Israel’s foe unachievable conditions that we have never sought to impose on our own enemies. Insistence on these unattainable conditions — along with demands based on the other two myths — will only serve to prolong the conflict and involve America ever more deeply in what is, for the United States, the distinctly peripheral Israeli-Palestinian issue. It also will eventually elevate Hamas to what it has not been and is not now — a threat to the United States.

Published: Antiwar.com