A spook speaks out
In "Imperial Hubris," a not-so-anonymous senior CIA officer says that bin Laden isn't an apocalyptic evildoer who "hates our freedom" -- he and his followers have real grievances that we must address by changing our failed Mideast policies.
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By Mark Follman
July 13, 2004 | "It is hard, maybe impossible, to fight a war if the cause is viewed as bankrupt," wrote journalist Chris Hedges in his acclaimed 2003 book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." If Hedges is right, the Bush administration's war on terror is in serious trouble. The failure to find Iraqi WMD, the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison, discredited intelligence reports linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and ongoing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have seriously eroded public support for Bush's war. And now, his crusade in the name of defending freedom is coming under fire from a provocative new book by a senior intelligence officer at the nerve center of U.S. counterterrorism, which warns that unless we change the U.S. policies that led Osama bin Laden to attack us, all-out war against Islam may be our only remaining option.
"Imperial Hubris" is shot through with the acid politics of the battle raging in Washington over the future of the U.S. intelligence system. Its anonymous author -- who was recently identified by the Boston Phoenix as senior CIA analyst Michael Scheuer -- argues that U.S. leaders have failed to recognize that bin Laden and his followers are not the evil, apocalyptic terrorists the Bush administration claims they are, but practical warriors with a specific and limited set of policy goals. Theirs is a worldwide religious insurgency that many of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims see as a "defensive jihad" justified by the Quran. America's Islamist enemies, Scheuer asserts, do not hate America because of "who we are" or "our freedom," as Bush and his advisors are fond of repeating, but because our policies have devastated the Muslim world. In particular, Scheuer cites the United States' unqualified support for Israel, its coziness with tyrannical Arab and Asian regimes, its exploitation of Middle East oil resources, and its armed presence on Muslim soil -- the latter grievance profoundly exacerbated by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
This argument is essentially indistinguishable from that made by leftists like Noam Chomsky after 9/11 -- for which they were immediately demonized as appeasers and out-and-out traitors. What's peculiar about "Imperial Hubris," however, is that Scheuer is also, murkily and problematically, a hard-line hawk. With admiration he cites "brilliant" über-hawks such as Ralph Peters, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, as well as clash-of-civilizations scholar Samuel Huntington. Scheuer stakes out a double position: He argues that we must change our policies to remove Muslim grievances, but in the meantime we must hit our Islamic enemies much harder than we ever have if we are to survive an escalating global conflict with them.
The problem with this double-pronged thesis is that it contains tensions and contradictions that Scheuer appears unaware of, or simply glosses over. Unleashing the full force of the U.S. military may win a battle, but it can also lose the war. Scheuer clearly understands this -- it is, in part, why he opposed the war in Iraq -- but he fails to explore its implications for his own position. He argues convincingly that in Afghanistan the U.S. should have immediately crushed al-Qaida and Taliban forces -- it had the intelligence to do so, he says -- rather than rely on proxy armies whose leaders have a long history of turning against their imperialist patrons the instant the geopolitical winds of war shift. It would have made sense for the U.S. to have accepted high casualties and engaged in a decisive battle at Tora Bora, from which it is widely believed that bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida escaped.
But would it have made sense to crush Fallujah, Iraq? This is a prime example of the kind of blowback dilemma that Scheuer doesn't touch. Most observers with firsthand knowledge of Iraq believe that an all-out assault on the city, with thousands of civilian casualties, would have further fueled the anti-American insurgency across Iraq and enraged the Arab world -- the kind of strategic error that Scheuer decries. Yet the very right-wingers whom Scheuer praises called for such an assault. Military historian Victor Davis Hanson has even argued that U.S. operations haven't caused enough collateral damage to Saddam's Iraq: Only total devastation, he says, would allow the phoenix of democracy to rise from the ashes.
We never learn what Scheuer thinks about Fallujah. His tone aims for brutal realism, but his two-pronged polemic ends up feeling schizophrenic, like Susan Sontag piloting a B-52.
The other peculiar disconnect in "Imperial Hubris" is Israel. Scheuer cites bin Laden's own words to show that U.S. support for Israel and against the Palestinians is one of bin Laden's prime grievances -- a fact that the media has downplayed. And Scheuer is extraordinarily harsh on the Jewish state, America's unqualified support for it, and the enormous pressure commentators are under not to criticize it.
"The American political and social landscape is littered with the battered individuals who dared to criticize Israel ... Surely there can be no other historical example of a faraway, theocracy-in-all-but-name of only about six million people that ultimately controls the extent and even the occurrence of an important portion of political discourse and national security debate in a country of 270-plus million people ... Washington yearly pumps more than three billion taxpayer dollars into a nation that defiantly proclaims itself 'the Jewish State' and a democracy -- claims hard to reconcile with its treatment of Muslims in Israel, its limitations on political choice for those in the occupied territories, and the eternal exile it has enforced on those camped in the refugee diaspora across the Levant."
Yet incredibly, the same author who writes this also consistently praises the likes of Ralph Peters, Victor Davis Hanson, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes -- all die-hard supporters of Israel. Essentially, Scheuer cherry-picks from their tactical, hard-line militarist paradigm while completely rejecting their pro-Likud, anti-Palestinian beliefs. We must change America's foreign policies, he says, but because some of them are sacrosanct and fundamental change is at best far on the horizon, we need to kick some supreme ass in the meantime.
It's a position that may be theoretically justifiable, especially against stateless enemies. But attacking stateless groups like al-Qaida inevitably means dealing with fragile, nuclear-armed states like Pakistan, which could implode if the U.S. launched a massive assault on its lawless Northwest Territories. Or, to take another example: It is certainly plausible to argue that the U.S. should carry out more targeted assassinations of terrorists, as it did in November 2002, killing six alleged al-Qaida leaders in Yemen with Hellfire missiles fired from an unmanned Predator aircraft. But as the blowback from Israel's use of such tactics in the occupied West Bank and Gaza indicates, they also carry a price. Because Scheuer doesn't spell out specific guidelines for when the U.S. is supposed to get tough, his prescription often rings empty. |
