I have my problems with Michael Scheuer. “Michael Scheuer served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004; he served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999.” I don’t think he is an honest man. I think he has put a lot of disinformation into the pipeline. But, let me ask you if what he has to say about our foreign policy sounds familiar? I think you’ll find it indistinguisable from what I have been writing for over a year.
1. We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?
On balance, more vulnerable. We’re safer in terms of aircraft travel. We’re safer from being attacked by some dumbhead who tries to come into the country through an official checkpoint; we’ve spent billions on that. But for the most part our victories have been tactical and not strategic. There have been important successes by the intelligence services and Special Forces in capturing and killing Al Qaeda militants, but in the long run that’s just a body count, not progress. We can’t capture them one by one and bring them to justice. There are too many of them, and more now than before September 11. In official Western rhetoric these are finite organizations, but every time we interfere in Muslim countries they get more support.
In the long run, we’re not safer because we’re still operating on the assumption that we’re hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we’re hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There’s our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we’ll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn’t recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We use the term “Islamofascism”—but we’re supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state. We don’t have a strategy because we don’t have a clue about what motivates our enemies.
Why is it so hard to get people to understand this?
