Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by "Anonymous."
I've mentioned this book (which is now known to have been written by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer) before, in a brief comment about one of its many flaws, but got hung up on writing the review, I think because I wanted to write the mother of all scathing indictments, but was honestly too infuriated and exasperated by this whole book to be able to sustain any coherent writing on it.
But time heals! I find, looking it over again, that a response I posted in another forum to a query about Scheuer a long while ago will do as a review. The questioner had seen Scheuer among the talking heads on tv commenting on the 7/7 London bombings, and was flummoxed by his "provocative yet ultimately mystifying talking points," and asked if anyone knew what was up with that.
I replied: I didn't hear what Scheuer was saying last week, but I have read his book. His basic argument is: nearly all Muslims in the Middle East are secretly Islamists, no matter what they try to tell you. Our policy options therefore are: 1. To withdraw entirely to fortress America (no more oil-buying or any other kind of trading relationship with any regime in the Middle East, and no support whatsoever for Israel or any other nation in the region and indeed no diplomatic relationship with anyone of any kind there, no more pc environmentalism preventing full exploitation of our own oil resources, no more pc civil-rights concerns preventing full defense of the homeland) or 2. Go on a total war footing, in which we understand that our purpose is to kill as many Middle Eastern Muslims as possible, or at least sufficiently to fully subjugate and terrify any survivors (hence, the book has chapter titles like "Get Good At And Used to Killing.") Pull completely out or kill 'em all, basically.
To Scheuer, in other words, the uber-fallacy is to believe that there are any Muslims in the Middle East who do not secretly want to overthrow their governments and install Osama bin Laden as their caliph in a Talibanesque Islamic state. The neocon agenda is therefore delusional, since the establishment of such a caliphate would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Muslims to vote. A right-wing militaristic response is delusional to the extent that it continues to attempt to minimize civilian casualties and be somewhat selective in regards to targets. A left-wing negotiation response is delusional because there is no negotiating with this basic antipathy to our very existence; there can be only stupid good faith on our part and lying for temporary advantage on theirs.
It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of his error here. (Although the bibliography to his book offers a partial explanation of it; Scheuer does not read Arabic nor has he made any effort to read about any of these issues from a Muslim or Arab perspective in English or English translation. His whole reading diet from the Middle Eastern perspective has apparently been propaganda missives from al Qaeda and a handful of fellow-travellers as provided by CIA translators, and from the Western perspective various iterations of conservative national defense punditry, plus the literature that has grown up around the "clash of civilizations" theory as applied in the Middle East.) But his argument for it is: Condemnation of Israel and U.S. support for Israel is nearly universal in the Middle East; al Qaeda condemns Israel and the U.S. on the same basis; therefore support for al Qaeda must be universal in the Middle East. This is a little like saying: Nearly all Americans condemn terrorism on their own soil; Bush condemns terrorism also; therefore nearly all Americans must be Bush supporters. Whereas of course we know that all significant political actors in the U.S. condemn terrorism; the competition among them is not about whether to be against terrorism, but about what to do about it. And in fact the same is true of the Middle East (though for equivalency in at least numbers read "Pat Buchanan" supporters for "Osama bin Laden" supporters); all political actors in the Middle East have condemned Israel and U.S. support for it to varying degrees since 1948; the question of which group is best able to mobilize and maintain support for itself based on its approach to the issue is the highly variable and contigent one. And all of this is trivially obvious from even a cursory glance at Middle Eastern history or at the very small amount of public polling data available.
I found myself worrying a lot more about the quality of foreign policy analysis at the CIA than about the Iraq War after reading this book. Some of his criticism of U.S. policy is quite correct, and his knowledge of al Qaeda itself at the operational (but not ideological) level is very useful. But the underlying perspective is just warped and flat-out wrong.
Another commenter asked if I thought any of this theory could be based on ancient views of warfare, when people believed that the only way to successfully assimilate another culture was to kill all the men and take all the women for the conquerors, and also, " … what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?"
I replied: I haven't read any of theory of warfare type books that were listed in his bibliography, but it wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of them went into the kind of discussion you're talking about and might have influenced his own take on things. IIRC the specific historical example he used to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was WWII, or specifically the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, to make the point that the post-WWII occupations were much easier to handle than either of the current ones because such a large portion of the civilian population as well as the military had been killed already in the war; the Germans and Japanese were totally beaten down and hence docile at war's end in this view.
I mean, what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?
Cowering and awaiting instructions, presumably. So would the occupations of Germany and Japan lead one to believe. Of course there was little else they could have done at the time, the idea of international terrorism by nonstate actors not having been thought of yet, and not as easily done anyway with the available technology. But this is where his notion of fortress America comes in, I suppose.
The original questioner commented that Scheuer had indeed given off a bit of a "crackpot" vibe, and that perhaps he was intentionally a little cagey about what he was actually saying, since being too clear might well put him on the "do not call back" list.
I replied: I think he manages to sound reasonable enough even in most of his book. It's common enough, after all, to point out the differences between the German and Iraqi occupations as I mentioned below. But to most people this is just a difference in the outcome of two very different approaches to warfare in which the latter version is vastly preferable on its own hook; the point of bringing it up is just to recognize the difficulties that seem to follow comparatively low casuality warfare and propose ways to address them, or to critique Dubya for failing to plan for them in advance, etc. I think Scheuer is probably the only commentater I've encountered who thinks the correct answer would have been to have gone all Dresden on Iraq in the first place. I'm guessing he just doesn't include the crazy part when he's talking on tv.
