Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

“There is nothing too dangerous to talk about.” Spoken by the actor who plays Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island’s member of the Continental Congress, in the musical 1776, I have long thought the phrase should be added to the Great Seal of the United States. Historically, Americans have taken these words as a guide. When they have not, trouble has ensued. Recall, for example, the animosities stirred in the 1840s when a gag rule prevented debating slavery in Congress. The ensuing bitter, daggers-drawn silence deepened sectional animosities and contributed to getting America to the catastrophe of civil war in 1861. So, with the advice of Hopkins in mind, let us talk briefly about America’s interests in the Israel-Palestine issue, and let us use American history as our guide.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence … the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial, else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.”

George Washington, 1796

In the last 25 years, America has begun to shy away from debating several foreign policy and national security issues, in essence determining that they are indeed too dangerous to talk about. Two that come to mind are energy policy and Saudi Arabia, but the most serious debate Americans are not having is over Israel.

The word “Israel” seems to spark fear in America. Experts on U.S. Middle East policy on the Left and the Right speak in catch phrases about Israel: “America’s only ally in the Middle East,” “a tiny, embattled democracy in the Islamic world,” etc. While the phrases are true, they are trite boilerplate, not debate, and are no help in determining how our relationship with Israel is and should be structured.

In part, the lack of debate is due to America’s ingrained empathy for the underdog. This is an enduring part of our national character and often a strength, although the fact that Israel is a nuclear power makes belief in Israel’s underdog persona quite a stretch. Another part of the non-debate is based on a tremendously successful Israeli political action program in the United States. As I wrote in my book Imperial Hubris, history holds few instances where an important area of foreign policy debate in a Great Power has been stifled by a small, faraway, and friendly country. Through magnificent lobbying efforts, suborning American citizens to serve as its spies, the negative impact of dual citizenship, and playing on unjustified U.S. feelings of guilt about the Holocaust — America and its allies, after all, utterly annihilated the Holocaust’s perpetrators — Israel and its American supporters have made discussing the issue of Israel difficult and politically dangerous in the United States. A term that is never defined as “hate speech” is the epithet “anti-Semite,” which is so often hurled at Americans by Americans to preempt debate on the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence of the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people to surrender their interests.”

Washington

Fortunately or unfortunately — depending on how you value frank debate in a democracy — the issue of Israel cannot much longer be avoided in debating future U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world. America cannot abandon Israel — Washington’s record of abandoning allies in the last 30 years is troubling — but it must soon review bilateral ties with an eye toward better protecting U.S. interests. Why? Because unquestioning, unqualified support for Israel among America’s elites has heretofore existed in an environment in which only Israelis and Palestinians were being killed in their war. U.S. relations with Israel were a substantive issue for “diplomatic experts,” but not an issue of much interest in the rest of America, save for admiration for Israel’s masterfully cultivated image as an underdog. Now the Israel-Palestine confrontation has melded into a larger war in which Americans are being killed — at home, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan — by Muslim militants led and inspired by Osama bin Laden. The issue of U.S. ties to Israel has, or soon will, strike into homes across America as U.S. military casualties grow.

What to do? Talk about the issue in America and with Israel soon, frankly, publicly. Face down the slingers of the anti-Semite epithet and recognize that because our Islamist enemies believe the United States and Israel are one and the same, and that America in effect takes orders from Israel, both countries are at increasing risk. Recognize also that the American character remains latently and deeply isolationist and that there is nothing more likely to activate that characteristic across the land than a steady flow of flag-draped coffins and hobbling amputees.

Our only option is to fight bin Ladenism savagely with our military and intelligence forces, and to begin to amend — not necessarily abandon — policies and relationships in a way that limits the now-accelerating growth of support for bin Laden across the Islamic world. The nature of our relationship with Israel is undeniably a key motivating factor for our Islamist enemies, and is thus one of the policies that merits review.

The United States should, as a critical follow-on to the positive Sharon-Abbas meeting and this week’s truce between Abbas’ regime and the Palestinian Islamists, conduct a frank and long-overdue reality tutorial with Israel about the correct nature of a great power’s relations with a minor power. Prime Minister Sharon should be bluntly told that if he wants U.S. support and protection to remain at current levels, now is the moment — and perhaps the final moment — to terminate the endless, feckless peace process and form two states. Identical pressure should be put on President Abbas; he, with our support, will have to face down the Saudi despots and the other Arab tyrants who support him only as long as he blocks peace. These men hold the oil card. They will defy the United States, seek to limit Abbas’ flexibility, and, if necessary, may try to kill him. The U.S. also will have to tell Abbas not to seek refuge and support for delay — as Arafat did — by clothing himself in the praise of those in the American and West European elite who believe that the Palestinians are entirely innocent victims and that Israel has no legitimate national security interests in this situation. Most importantly, both men should be starkly reminded that America has no national security interest — in the old-fashioned but accurate sense of an interest essential to America’s survival — at stake in their endless war, and therefore has little reason to pay any additional price for their half-century of reckless intransigence.

There is no certainty — perhaps not even a 50/50 chance — of success in this endeavor. We cannot make Israel act as we wish; every sovereign state has the right and responsibility to decide what measures best protect its security. Likewise, we may not be able to spur Palestinian compromises because of the ongoing Islamization of the Palestinian movement, and because we have foolishly allowed oil-producing Arab tyrants to hold the energy security of America and the West in their anti-Western hands.

Again, it is the absolute right of both sides ignore our advice. But if they do, all bets should be off. Americans must begin to debate how many more lives and how much more treasure they should expend on this half-century morass. It may soon be time to cut loose from the Palestinians — end the Dickensian strategy of waiting for something to come along — and revamp our current one-way relationship with Israel, a minor, stubbornly defiant, and non-strategic partner. In terms of America’s strategic security, after all, the Palestinians count for little, and the importance of Israel pales before such longtime, geographically vital, and economically powerful allies as Japan and South Korea. Indeed, the current one-way structure of our relationship with Israel, in the context of the war America is waging and losing against Muslim extremism, is a strategic handicap. Differentiating America from an intractable Israel would delete one item from the list of U.S. policies motivating our Muslim enemies. It could be the start of a broader policy-review meant to stem the growth of pro-bin Laden sentiment among Muslims while our military and intelligence services act to kill greater numbers of the irreconcilables.

At day’s end, it may be that U.S. interests and those of Israel and Palestine have ceased to be congruent, assuming, of course, they ever were. If so, the right course would be to return to the early Bush administration’s position of disengagement on the Israel-Palestine issue, and add to it a significant reduction in aid to both sides. In sorrow more than anger, we should stand aside and let the two combatants do what they like to do best, slug it out. We can make it clear to each side that we are ready to help once they have exhausted themselves and are genuinely ready for peace, but until then we are not interested in being a target for the animosity and violence that flows from their willful, 50-year failure to find a way to live with each other in a state other than war.

If possible, America’s relationship with Israel must be restructured to not only maintain America’s ties to an associate of long-standing, but also to emphasize that the United States is the great power, that Israel is a minor power, and that America has neither scrapped its dedication to evenhandedness nor placed its national security in the hands of a minor power. For America’s security and its own, Israel should help foment this debate. It is in neither nation’s interest to delay debate until Americans have begun to evaluate their relationship with Israel through a lens ever more heavily smeared with the blood of their sons and daughters.

Time, therefore, is of the essence; to solve this issue to America’s satisfaction and in her interests, action is needed now. Again, American history is instructive. In April 1865, Union Major General Philip Sheridan cut off Robert E. Lee’s retreat near Appomattox and wired Grant: “If the thing is pressed, I think Lee will surrender.” Reading the cable in Washington, Abraham Lincoln, desperate to end the bloodshed and bring peace, did not wait for Grant’s reply; he wired both men: “Let the thing be pressed.” Once and for all, it is time for America to say to Sharon and Abbas: “Let the thing be pressed.”

Published: Antiwar.com

The word “accountability” is always bandied about in Washington as the solution for the woes brought on America by the current governing generation. Impassioned calls for accountability from presidents, senators, congressman, as well as media, academic, and social elites are heard whenever disaster hits America. The accountability police then swing into gear and invariably fail to find any senior, politically influential, well-paid individual accountable for anything. Generally, junior, politically impotent, just-making-ends-meet officials are found culpable for failure.

In my 22-year federal career, two examples stand out. A junior intelligence community (IC) officer was fired after the mistaken bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade during the Serbian war. Everyone in the National Security Council, the IC, Congress, Congress’ intelligence committees, and the Department of Defense knows only U.S. military commanders order attacks. Several IC agencies suggest targets and provide supporting data, but that information must be vetted by the military for accuracy. The decision to attack is made only when that process is complete. In short, the bombing of China’s embassy occurred because the military failed to vet IC-provided data. Who took the fall? A junior IC officer thrown to the wolves by his superiors.

Flash ahead to the 9/11 Commission and its report. Until the eve of publication, the draft report blamed a junior IC officer for failing to watchlist two of the hijackers. This officer was the only federal government employee the 9/11 Commission was going to find culpable for al-Qaeda’s attack. A score of the junior officer’s colleagues made it clear to their superiors and the Commission that such scapegoating would not stand. The Commissioners, to their credit, dropped the issue.

So now let’s talk about the lack of accountability, but let’s look a few rungs higher and ask some questions. There is no point in making this piece too long, and so — in the Letterman tradition — I append below 10 issues that I, as a former senior civil servant and now a plain old citizen, would like to have our elected leaders explain. The basic question on each is: why they, personally, should not be held accountable and, if culpable, be subject to a process to determine proper punishment. As the reader will see, failures large and small can lead to disaster for America. It seems only fair that the senior-level authors of large and small failures ought to be held responsible. Consider this a preemptive demand for accountability, naming near-certain future failures, identifying the senior officials who will likely be to blame, and hopefully foreclosing more whitewashings by arrogantly oracular blue-ribbon investigatory commissions.

1. Making War

Having been raised by a Marine veteran — all of whom are taught deep respect for the Constitution — and educated by Jesuits, who teach the glories of that document, the Founders, and the Federalist Papers, I am amazed that no one in the media, the academy, or the courts has tried to hold Congress accountable for ceding its war powers to the president. In America’s wars since 1945, the Congress has all but run from protecting the prerogative the Constitution explicitly assigns it — declaring war. Indeed, in the dazzling series of wars initiated by Messrs. Bush, Clinton, and Bush, the Congress has cowardly avoided its Constitutional responsibility with namby-pamby war-supporting resolutions, allowing large numbers of legislators to then turn, like the jackals they are, on the president later and attack him for going to war. The Founders never intended the president to have a war-making power far greater than that held by George III; they wanted that decision to be made by the people through their elected representatives. In essence, congressional cowardice has produced the de facto amendment of the Constitution, transferring the war-making power to the executive branch and making demi-monarchs of our Republic’s chief magistrates.

2. FBI Computers

This is a seemingly mundane topic, but in the age of terrorism, and 10 years after bin Laden declared war on America, the FBI still does not have a computer system that allows reliable, rapid, and secure communications within its own organization or with other IC units. This yields a commonsense conclusion: the FBI does not know what it knows, cannot do research electronically, and cannot assist other IC units in protecting America. It makes a cruel joke of the recent report that the FBI has concluded there are no al-Qaeda sleeper cells in America. How could they possibly know if they cannot talk to each other or to their IC partners? After the next bin Laden attack, the investigators will try to hang an FBI officer on the street. But the truth will be — and is now — that Judge Freeh and Mr. Mueller have utterly failed to find a computer system their officers can use to better defend America, and have presided over the wasting of hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.

3. Immigration

This issue and the failure to control our borders (see below) demonstrate more clearly than any others that no elected official in the Clinton or George W. Bush administrations has been serious about protecting Americans against al-Qaeda and its allies. Americans aren’t urging a nativist immigration policy, a vendetta against this or that immigrant group, or a policy that prohibits immigration entirely. We simply want the president and the Congress to enforce the laws that are on the books — a novel idea these days — find out who is in the country illegally, and deport those who have not played by the rules. Until this is done, Americans should not fool themselves; they are not safer than they were on 9/11. As long as elected officials refuse to enforce the laws they passed, the welcome mat is laid out for our enemies to exploit. Cowardice again rules, however. Note Representative Pelosi’s charming but odd logic in claiming that fully enforcing immigration laws to make Americans safe would tarnish our country’s glow as a beacon of freedom. Are we a country of laws or a country of “glow”? Now, when al-Qaeda strikes again, whom do you think will be held accountable? Ms. Pelosi and her brethren on both sides of the aisle, or the U.S. law enforcement community that is being overwhelmed by the former’s shameful refusal to ensure enforcement of the immigration laws they passed?

4. Dual Citizenship

Dual citizens in America? How could this happen? Does not the Constitution forbid non-native born individuals from being president, on the wise belief that a person cannot serve and be loyal to two masters? And yet we find: (a) U.S. citizens voting in Iraqi, Mexican, Irish, Israeli, and who knows how many other elections and (b) no action being taken by the federal government to terminate this illegal practice. Dual citizens are no less “agents of a foreign power” than those U.S. citizens who take a salary to lobby the U.S. government for foreign states. These latter individuals, however, must register as foreign agents because of the mission they execute. Participating in other countries’ political affairs unavoidably undermines the dual citizen’s loyalty to America. Why is it allowed?

5. The Borders

The failure of our elected officials to control our borders is a surefire nail in America’s coffin. There is no sensible way to defend the current absurd situation of wide-open borders except by the Pelosi method of taking no action to enforce existing laws and singing the praises of “America, the beacon of liberty to the world.” In doing this, the congresswoman and her brethren in both parties are hoping American citizens do not notice that their country is being invaded by narcotics-traffickers, people-smugglers, illegal immigrants, terrorists, and various other threats to national security. Again, federal, state, and local law enforcement officers will be left holding the bag when the accountability police ignore the cowardly Congress and instead search for working folks to hang after the next disaster befalls America.

6. The Military (Except the Marines)

If Americans can learn one thing from the Founders and the Federalist Papers, it should be to fear the dangerous impact on a republic of a large, professional standing army. All of us need to review the Federalist to refresh our memories on this eternal truth. The books that have appeared since 9/11 — by Richard Clarke, Steve Simon, Bob Woodward, Dan Benjamin, Steve Coll, and others — make it clear that General Shelton, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Zinni, as CENTCOM commander, consistently refused requests from President Clinton to take action against Osama bin Laden. Asked by Clinton for plans to use “black-clad ninjas” to take out bin Laden, the generals always came back obsessed with fear of collateral damage, and plans that resembled the invasion of Normandy, plans clearly impossible to implement secretly or promptly. They in effect defied the president’s wishes; shame on them and shame on Clinton for allowing them to do so. Not to be outdone, their successors — General Myers and General Franks — had nothing usable to offer President Bush on 9/11 or the day after. Except for Marine generals, America’s generals are evolving into political players, concerned with protecting their perks, prerogatives, and budgets; avoiding casualties; and deciding what tasks they will accept from elected officials. Who’s accountable? We all are. We have all sat and watched these bureaucrat-generals become self-serving demigods because we are afraid to speak up for fear of being called “anti-military” or “unpatriotic.” We should each take the Federalist to heart and begin pressing our elected representatives to replace these general-bureaucrats with leaders worthy of commanding the American men and women who today form the world’s finest soldiery.

7. 9/11 Commissioners

The utter failure of this august group of fact-proof individuals raises a fascinating question: who holds the accountability police accountable for their deliberate failures? Maybe the ghosts of the 9/11 dead? Or perhaps the ghosts of all the dead who will surely follow them because of the arrogant and deliberate refusal of Messrs. Kean, Hamilton, et. al to find any senior government official responsible for anything that led to the 9/11 disaster. My own bet here is that the next — and larger — batch of al-Qaeda-produced American dead will be avenged by the dozens of IC officers who told the 9/11 Commissioners in detail about the personal failure and negligence of senior IC officials that got our country to 9/11, and who were totally ignored.

8. Energy Policy

Where does one begin on this issue? Thirty years after Saudi King Faisal’s oil embargo, we have, at best, moved in fits and starts toward diversifying our energy options. For the most part, both political parties wheel out the economists whenever energy policy is raised. These bright folks then engage in an arcane discussion of trite truths about how the world’s oil supply is “fungible” and Arab oil producers must sell to the West to survive. The economists are useful obfuscators for the politicians because what needs to be discussed is not energy supply, but energy supply in the context of national security. The question is not whether oil will be available, but how many American soldiers we are willing to spend to secure how many thousands of barrels of oil. That is, how many foreign interventions are we willing to brook to allow our elected leaders to ensure reelection by not promoting domestic production and alternative-source development, which would require raising energy taxes, ignoring environmental preservationists, and alienating oil companies? The truth is that the acquisition/protection of oil currently is a legitimate reason for America going to war; the question is: should it be? We are in this fix largely because presidents, senators, and congressmen for 30 years have hidden behind their economist shills, thereby avoiding the harder, more pertinent issue of how many lives per thousand barrels we, as a nation, want to spend for oil. The good thing about the conduct of U.S. energy policy since 1975 is that accountability is easy to assign. In a few square blocks of Washington, D.C., sit the Capitol and the executive branch buildings. These house the men and women who have put reelection above the lives of our soldiers and have made foreign oil an integral part of the nation’s national security requirements. And what have they done lately to address the problem? Look at the spectacle of New York’s Senator Charles Schumer, who recently asked the president to release umpteen million barrels of oil from the strategic reserve to lower consumer gas prices — and, of course, simultaneously increase our need for external supplies. Well, bless his heart, the good senator has given Americans a solid reminder of where to find those accountable for their dead children when the energy piper’s bill comes due.

9. Iraq

While former Senator Robb’s investigatory commission looks at what went wrong with the analysis the IC provided for the Iraq war, those accountable for that still-unfolding disaster continue to merrily make more mistakes. Mistaking a spate of public demonstrations and rigged elections in Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as “democratic winds of change” sweeping the Islamic world, Messrs. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Cambone, Woolsey, their media acolytes, and general-officer sycophants drive America ever deeper into an unending era of unnecessary warfare in the Muslim world. Perhaps accountability is not possible here, for if these error-spewing ideologues were cashiered for their lethal misadventure in Iraq, most could simply retire on their millions, return to the groves of academe, or go back to working with Benjamin Netanyahu.

10. The Next al-Qaeda Attack

Please refer to all of the above.

Published: Antiwar.com

Mr. Rockwell’s suggestion that I review the reviews of my book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, gives me a unique opportunity to evaluate the success of the book in prompting and influencing debate on the nature of America’s war on Islamist militancy, as well as to survey the range and content of the reviews the book has received.

What the book says

First, let me restate my intent in writing the book. My work was meant to inform Americans about the threat Islamist militancy posed to our country. The book is strongly nationalistic. I do not aspire to be a citizen of the world; being an American citizen is enough honor for one lifetime. The message I wanted to deliver can be summarized in three points.

1. Our Islamist enemies — led and personified by Osama bin Laden — attack America for what we do in the Muslim world, not for what we believe or the way we live. They attack us because they believe America, through its policies and actions, is tying to destroy Muslims and the Islamic faith. Our political leaders from both parties do not understand this, or, if they do, are willfully lying to the electorate. There is no other explanation for their abject wrong-headedness.
2. The war in which America is engaged is a war for survival, not a police action, a regime-changing or nation-building exercise, or, least of all, a law enforcement problem. We cannot talk our way out of this war, and we cannot — and must not try — to appease our way out of it. Indeed, we are faced not by a choice between war and peace, but a choice between war and endless war.
3. Today America is defending itself only through intelligence and military operations. These can hold the ring for a while, but to crush our Islamist enemy — as we must — the lethal power of these services must be complemented by a review of and debate about our policies toward the Muslim world. Not aimed at appeasement, this review, and the debate it engenders, would ensure that our long-in-place policies still serve U.S. national interests. If they do, fine, we will have make do with military and intelligence means. If they do not, we can alter them in a way that protects America’s interests while we simultaneously destroy our foes at every opportunity.

The book’s reception

I think any author would be pleased by the reception my book received. I was not only pleased, but shocked. The book has sold more than 150,000 copies, long excerpts have appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, and it was on those papers’ bestseller lists for several weeks. I have had numerous opportunities to talk about the book and my ideas on television, radio, and in print interviews, and have been asked to present talks in several public venues. With the exception of several sui generis Fox TV correspondents, I have been well treated on all occasions. The best part of this media experience has been participating in radio call-in shows. The eagerness of Americans to seek new information, question my ideas and judgments, and try to pin me down for specifics have reaffirmed my belief that Americans are not the simpletons their political leaders too often treat them as.

Notwithstanding these many positives — for which I am genuinely grateful — I have been disappointed by the failure of many reviewers to understand the book’s intent. This failure speaks either to the murkiness of my prose and the weakness of my arguments, or to the agendas of my reviewers. Likely it is a mix of both.

Reviews from the left

My book has been embraced on the left by those eager to attack President Bush and his neoconservative advisers, especially on the issue of Iraq. I oppose the Iraq war because it made crushing our bin Laden-led Islamist enemies vastly more difficult, and because self-initiated, offensive wars are incompatible with the principles on which the Founding Fathers grounded U.S. foreign policy. This said, the book devotes only a few of three-hundred pages to Iraq, and rarely mentions President Bush. Simply, Imperial Hubris is not about either Iraq or President Bush.

After disgorging their anti-Bush venom, reviewers on the left have consistently referred to the “schizophrenic” nature of the book. The argument they make on this point is that while I claim that our Muslim foes hate and fight us because of what we do in the Islamic world, I also assert that more and more-lethal military and intelligence activities must be undertaken in America’s defense. Well, I am guilty as charged. At a basic level, America is suffering from the postwar mangling of our educational system that allows the inculcation of such errant nonsense as the idea that all wars are evil, as well as from the willingness of our elites to preach the lie that wars can be fought and won with few combatant casualties on either side and even fewer civilian casualties.

As a consequence, since 2001 most of the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Iraqi armed forces escaped America’s daintily applied wrath, went home with their guns, and have lived to merrily fight another day. My point was not schizophrenic, but just this: It does not matter whether Muslims are angered by the simple fact that we intend to kill all those who intend to kill us. What matters, and this point was seldom caught by reviewers on the left, is that we cannot kill 1.3 billion Muslims, that while we must in the short term kill far greater numbers of our enemies, this lethality must be coupled to a policy review aimed at trying to cut into the now steadily growing numbers of Muslims willing to take up arms against America. We cannot stop this growth in its tracks, but we can decide to use all the tools at our command — economic, diplomatic, propaganda, as well as military and intelligence — to slow it over time. It does not seem to me schizophrenic to try to broaden the range of tools available to America by adding non-lethal ones to a more aggressive use of the lethal.

Reviews from the right

For the most part, reviews of Imperial Hubris from the right have been more straightforward and less nuanced. I am simply and variously described as a “liberal appeaser,” an “Islamist fellow traveler,&rdquot; and — my personal favorite — a “rightwing weasel” who always “blames the Jews.” The consensus on the right seems to be that my intention was to “blame America” for the problems we are having at the hands of Islamist militants. The use of these epithets necessarily sets the tone and shapes the content of the reviews. Oddly, the reviews from the right have not noted the sharp nationalistic tone of my book, suggesting, perhaps, that the neoconservatives now in the saddle in Washington are truly more interested in the glories of empire than in the security of America.

There is, in the American context at any rate, nothing “conservative” about a policy of empire-building. Traditionally, as Colonel Ralph Peters brilliantly argues, America has been the killer of empires not their creator. American conservatism has meant regarding war as a last, not a first resort, and going to war only to destroy foes who present a genuine threat to America’s survival. Never has it meant or sanctioned offensive wars of our choosing, and the explicit rejection of John Quincy Adams’s timeless principle that “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

Many of the reviews of my book from the right seem to me — as a Republican diehard, a nationalist, and a moderate isolationist — to be grounded in nothing more than repackaged Wilsonianism, a set of ideological fantasies that have helped to soak the world in blood since Versailles. The traditional principles of U.S. foreign policy — non-intervention, freedom of the seas, avoiding detrimental alliances, being the exemplar not the installer of democracy in the world, not picking fights abroad, etc. — appear as foreign to some of my reviewers on the right as they so manifestly are to the neoconservatives. Many in both categories would not know the difference between an American founder and an Atlantic flounder, although our current foreign policy suggests that the advice guiding it comes from minds similar in quality to the latter not the former.

Summing up

So far, I have failed in terms of what I intended my book to do. I have failed to stir any sort of substantive debate, and the nationalist, America first — not America alone — content of my argument has gone virtually unnoticed. I am responsible for that failure, and will work to clarify my prose and sharpen my argumentation on the chance I am tempted to write a third book on America’s war with Islamist militancy. There is also the chance, of course, that the problem is not my writing, but that I have not changed with the times. I suppose that there must be a chance that our elites are right when they preach casualty-free wars and the efficacy of democracy crusading; that everyday, working Americans really believe that their liberty is safe only if we impose our brand of freedom elsewhere at bayonet point; and that, to do so, American parents are gladly willing to spend the lives of their sons and daughters to ensure foreigners are just like us. Call me stubborn, but if there is anyone in non-elite America who believes this I would like to meet them because, as George Strait sings, I have some ocean-front property in Arizona to sell.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf must have been pleased by the civility of his recent Washington visit. The Bush administration silenced the largely pro-India federal bureaucracy so that America’s main anti-Osama bin Laden ally was not greeted with the usual chorus of condemnation over Pakistan’s Kashmir, nuclear and domestic political policies. Though the State Department’s Christina Rocca will soon be sent to bedevil Mr. Musharraf on his home turf, common sense prevailed during the visit.

President Bush correctly praised Pakistan’s contribution to the war against bin Laden and al Qaeda and avoided asking Mr. Musharraf: “What have you done for me lately?” Again, rare common sense. Mr. Musharraf has, to date: ordered his security services to help the CIA capture al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan; permitted an expanded U.S. presence in Pakistan; given the U.S. overflight rights; challenged the power and anti-Americanism of Pakistan’s religious parties; faced down criticism from Pakistan’s generals for helping the U.S. while Washington builds a “strategic partnership” with India; and — most astoundingly — risked civil war by sending Pakistan’s army into the country’s long autonomous tribal areas. Due to this record, Mr. Musharraf and his nation’s viability are a half-step ahead of the locomotive, as witnessed by two attempts on his life and rising internal sectarian violence.

When Washington’s common sense fades — as it will — voices will ask “Can’t Musharraf do more to help us?” The answer, of course, is yes, but only if he wants to accelerate Pakistan’s destabilization. The hard fact for U.S. officialdom is that Mr. Musharraf has done more to help the United States than anyone had a right to expect. Pakistan’s national interests are not remotely identical to America’s, and much of what Mr. Musharraf has done runs counter to his country’s interest. The destruction of the Taliban; efforts to help America capture bin Laden, the world’s most important Islamic leader; support for a secular, pro-India, pro-Russia government in Kabul; and the courting of civil war in Pakistan’s tribal-dominated provinces — none of these actions serve Pakistan’s national interests, nor, for that matter, Mr. Musharraf’s personal longevity.

So before Musharraf critics find their voices, it is worth recalling that America’s dependence on Pakistan is part necessity and part Cold-War leftover. Necessity because of geography — Pakistan abuts Afghanistan — and leftover because we are asking Pakistan and many other countries to do our dirty work. The Cold War era was pre-eminently one in which America and the Soviet Union had others do their dirty work: We backed the Contras, Moscow backed the brothers Ortega; we backed the South Vietnamese, Moscow, and Beijing backed the north; we supported Jonas Savimbi, the Afghan mujahideen and a collection of Cambodian groups, while Moscow backed their opponents. We committed money and political support, our surrogates contributed blood.

This arrangement suited the Cold War era because it kept nuclear swords sheathed. Today it is a recipe for disaster. The pressures and realities of the Cold War are gone, and with them the accepted parameters in which armed conflict occurs. Cursed with an abject fear of losing the lives of U.S. soldiers, Washington since 1988 has continued to depend on others to do our dirty work. First, Iraqi Shias and U.N. sanctions were to defeat Saddam after we failed to finish the first Gulf war (1991-2003); then the Saudis were going to capture bin Laden so we did not have to risk CIA officers (1998); and then Afghan warlords were going to capture bin Laden for us at Tora Bora (2001). Next, Hamid Karzai and the Northern Alliance were to win the war and install an Afghan democracy (2003-present); then Mr. Musharraf’s Pakistan was going to capture bin Laden for us (2001-2004); and, in the future, a rebuilt Iraqi army is to win the insurgency in Iraq (2003??).

Simply put, the thinking that expects others to do our dirty — and very bloody — work should have died with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If America is to win its worldwide battle with Islamist insurgents and terrorists, it will have to do its own dirty work whenever it has a chance to do so, even at the cost of heavier human casualties than we have suffered to date. This is not to say we do not need allies, for we surely do. What we need, however, is a consistently commonsense perspective that sees that no two nations have identical national interests; that no country will ever do all we want; and that to survive we must act with U.S. military and CIA assets whenever a chance arises, even if supporting intelligence is not perfect. This modus operandi will take a steady application of moral courage at a level unseen in Washington for 15 years.

In weighing the foregoing, readers might ask themselves two questions: 1) How can it be that Pakistan’s military has suffered far more casualties than U.S. forces in the war on bin Laden?; and 2) Whatever happened to the “Major 2004 Afghan Spring Offensive” that the Pentagon’s multi-starred general-bureaucrats leaked news of to the media back in January 2004? At least one answer to each question is that our governing elites are still desperate to find others to do our dirty work.

Michael Scheuer is a recently resigned senior CIA official, former chief of the bin Laden unit and author of “Imperial Hubris.”

Published: The Washington Times — Sunday, December 26, 2004

• A CIA bin Laden expert’s lament

One of the striking things about the Iraq War is the extent to which American foreign-affairs professionals — intelligence analysts, diplomats, and high-ranking military officers — recognize it is a tragically misguided venture. Among the most recent to speak out is the CIA officer formerly charged with analyzing Osama bin Laden. Known [at the time] only as “Anonymous,” he is the author of the new book Imperial Hubris — a scathing look at the way the United States has conducted the War on Terror thus far. TAC editors Philip Giraldi (a CIA veteran with extensive Mideast experience), Kara Hopkins, and Scott McConnell recently visited with the author. Here are excerpts of the conversation.

TAC: You’ve said that Iraq was the best Christmas present that Osama bin Laden could have possibly received …

MFS: Have you seen the movie “Christmas Story,” where the boy wants a Red Rider air gun and his mom says no? Then at the end of Christmas day, when he has opened all his presents, he gets the gun and he thinks, “My God, I really got it. I never thought I’d get it.” Iraq was Osama’s Red Rider BB gun. It was something he always wanted, but something he never expected.

Iraq is the second holiest place in Islam. He’s now got the Americans in the two holiest places in Islam, the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, and he has the Israelis in Jerusalem. All three sanctities are now occupied by infidels, a great reality for him. He also saw the Islamic clerical community, from liberal to the most Wahhabist, issue fatwas that were more vitriolic and more demanding than the fatwas that were issued against the Soviets when they came into Afghanistan. They basically validated all of the theological arguments bin Laden has been making since 1996, that it is incumbent on all Muslims to fight the Americans because they were invading Islamic territory. Until we did that in Iraq, he really had a difficult time making that argument stick, but now there is no question.

It’s also perceived widely in the Muslim world that we attacked Iraq to move along what, at least in Muslims’ minds, is the Israelis’ goal of a greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. While we’re beating the hell out of the Iraqis, Sharon and the Israelis are beating the hell out of the Palestinians every day. So we have an overwhelming media flow into the Muslim world of infidels killing Muslims. It’s a one-sided view, but it’s their perception. And unless you deal with what they think, you’re never going to understand what we’re up against.

TAC: I was interested in your analysis of terrorism versus insurgency …

MFS: I worked on the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and watched the organizational structure and the ability of the Afghan insurgent groups to absorb tremendous punishment and survive, and then I worked for the next period of my career on terrorism, where the groups were much smaller. Their leadership is more concentrated, and if you hurt them to a significant degree, they cease to be as much of a threat. They are lethal nuisances, not national-security risks. Al-Qaeda is not a terrorist group but an insurgency with an extraordinary ability to replicate at the leadership level. When Mr. Johnson was executed in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi authorities killed four al-Qaeda fighters, one of them named Mukrin. Within four hours, al-Qaeda’s media enterprise had issued a statement acknowledging the death of Mukrin, appointing his successor, and providing a brief résumé.

TAC: You suggest that al-Qaeda would be delighted to have George Bush stay in the White House because nothing could be better for their international objectives. How do you see this playing out in terms of — this is totally hypothetical — a potential terrorist incident, somewhat like the bombing in Spain?

MFS: I said that al-Qaeda itself has said that it could not wish for a better government than the one that is now governing the U.S. because, on the policies of issue to Muslims, al-Qaeda believes this government is wrong on every one and thus allows their insurgency to grow larger to incite other groups to attack Americans.

TAC: One of your principal points is that this is a much broader war against Islam. How do you deflect critics who would suggest that Islam is, in fact, a lot more complicated? Countries like Malaysia don’t really fit the Islamist or the fundamentalist profile …

MFS: I don’t know if we have to say we are at war with Islam, but I think it defies reality to say that a growing part of Islam is not at war against us. I am at a loss to understand how this far along into the bin Laden problem we can still be saying that this war has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with religion in terms of the motivation bin Laden, his followers, sympathizers, and Muslims generally feel to fight us.

Bin Laden’s genius has been to focus the Muslim world on specific U.S. policies. He’s not, as the Ayatollah did, ranting about women who wear knee-length dresses. He’s not against Budweiser or democracy. The shibboleth that he opposes our freedoms is completely false, and it leads us into a situation where we will never perceive the threat.

TAC: Unless we believe that bin Laden is rational, we are underestimating him …

ANON: Tremendously. One of the prime examples of our underestimation is the whole discussion of Iraq and al-Qaeda. Bin Laden would not be very likely to deal with the Iraqis, not because he didn’t like them, not because he hated Saddam — both of those are true — but because the Iraqis were a third-rate service. They are ham-handed, clumsy. Most of their terrorist operations result in killing their own people. We have never seen al-Qaeda associate with someone who posed a risk to the security of their organization, operatives, or plan of attack. Al-Qaeda is a first-rate insurgent organization with a first-rate intelligence and counterintelligence service. Bin Laden has shown throughout his career that he deals with equals.

TAC: Can you give us a sense of where al-Qaeda is now in terms of popularity and resonance in the Muslim world?

MFS: We dealt al-Qaeda some serious blows in terms of its people who are designated to attack the United States, but they have been succeeded by others who were understudying before those people disappeared.

In terms of popularity, it would be difficult to underestimate the growth in popular support across the Muslim world. Bin Laden has identified six specific U.S. policies that appeal to the anger of Muslims: our unqualified support for Israel; our ability to keep oil prices within a tolerable range for consumers; our support for people who oppress Muslims, i.e., Russia in Chechnya, India in Kashmir, China in Western China; our presence on the Arabian Peninsula; our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan; and finally our support for Muslim tyrannies from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Bin Laden is a formidable enemy because he has recognized what are deemed by many Muslims, even those who don’t support his martial activities, as threats to Islam.

TAC: You suggest that the situation with al-Qaeda requires two things: an acceptance that this is a war against the major insurgency that encompasses a major part of the earth, and while we are fighting the war, we have to address the policy issues that have made it happen. If you were the czar today, what would you do to make this happen?

MFS: I don’t think we can win this war until we have a debate over what has caused it and recognize that it is in our power to win this war over a period of time or to fight this war forever. This is not a choice between war and peace. It is a choice between war and endless war.

People say we are going to do public diplomacy — magazines for Muslims. Well, as long as Al-Jazeera is broadcasting from Gaza and the West Bank live, 24 hours a day, no one is going to listen to the Americans. We are talking to basically ourselves and to the Europeans, who don’t like us much anyway.

Certainly, I am not smart enough to formulate foreign policy for the whole country, but we must have this kind of debate. We pursued policies for 30 years which have led us to 9/11 and which will lead us to further 9/11s, and unless we decide that we are willing to wage this war aggressively with the military, but also complement it with genuine political movement, we are in a position where we are going to be defeated time and again.

TAC: I don’t understand how the aggressive military part complements the political strategy. Aggressive action would seem to imply a lot of collateral damage, which would undercut political efforts …

MFS: War is what it was when there were cavemen or when Napoleon went into Russia or when we fought World War II. Collateral damage is a natural condition of war, especially when you are fighting an opponent that is uniform-less.

Why do I say we need to be more aggressive? We went into Afghanistan in October 2001, the estimate was 50,000 Taliban fighters under arms and 8-10,000 al-Qaeda. If we give the military intense credit and say they killed 20 percent of that number, 45,000 went home with their guns to fight another day. Why would anyone define that as winning?

It’s a politically correct handicap to think that you can have a war but maintain a position where we don’t want to kill the enemy, we don’t want collateral damage, and we don’t want our people to die. That falls in the category of analysis by assertion. You can say it’s true, but it’s not. It’s never been true. Unless we address the policy issue, we have left ourselves with only the military option.

TAC: But when you have an insurgency that is organized like a terrorist group, it is dispersed and difficult to find. To destroy that group in a conventional military sense goes into the decimation of whole groups of people as a way to get at the terrorists.

MFS: It is a very complex problem, but I have never understood my oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” and care just as much about foreigners as Americans. If I had to choose between the president attacking somebody and killing some civilians to protect my children and not doing it, I think I would support the president.

I am not arguing that we carpet-bomb someplace just for the sake of killing civilians. What I am saying is that if you have an opportunity to hit the enemy, you don’t spend a lot of time discussing if the evidence will make it in the Southern District of New York. Intelligence is not evidentiary material. It is information, and when you get to the level where you think you are not going to get any better, you act. That is something we failed utterly on in the ’90s.

TAC: Do you think we could have pretty much gotten rid of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the end of 2001?

MFS: I think if we had been prepared to act on the day of the attack or the next couple of days, we would have dealt them a very serious blow. Bin Laden had declared war on us in 1996, but the military had absolutely no response ready. When they did respond, they spent a month destroying 30-year-old Soviet junk. From Sept. 11 until Oct. 7, al-Qaeda and the Taliban dispersed. And then when we did get there, we used surrogates rather than our own soldiers.

TAC: How important is getting bin Laden?

MFS: Of decreasing importance as the years go by, but bin Laden has a genius: he has the only organization of its kind in the Muslim world. He has Muslims from multiple ethnic groups and they work together with a lot of friction, but they work together effectively. We’ve watched the Palestinians for 45 years. They are all Palestinians, and they can’t go across the street together. Without bin Laden, al-Qaeda initially will lose some of its cohesiveness because of his very genuine credentials as a leader, but al-Qaeda is now a very mature organization. It is into its second generation of leadership, and the second generation seems to be more professional and businesslike. They’re quieter.

Source: The American Conservative, August 02, 2004