Boy, you just can't beat a former CIA agent for stunning cultural insights about foreigners, can you? "Afghans didn't need training in murder. They learned that when they crawled out of the crib." Oh tell me more, Robert Baer, former agent, author of See No Evil and Sleeping With the Devil, man of the world and sooper genius.
On 9/11, when all the news websites were down and spotty reports from co-workers with radios just weren't enough, I logged onto my favorite society and politics discussion forum (Hissyfit forums, RIP), read news updates from participants with tvs, and posted this link, to a worrysome article I'd read back in 1998 about the CIA's complete and ongoing failure to develop and maintain any kind of real human intelligence pretty much anywhere in the world. I believe I said something like, well, at least they'll have to do something about this now. Well, silly me. Dubya doesn't like to fire people, it turns out. But actually it's not clear that firing a few people at the top would have helped anyway; according to the article, the CIA's problems are deep and institutional and cut across administrations. And according to a PBS documentary and online report (and reportedly also according to the 9/11 Commission report, which I haven't read yet), the FBI response to terrorism has similarly been hampered by its institutional culture. (And even beyond its law enforcement mindset; John O'Neill's problems with FBI higher-ups apparently began because they didn't like his flashy suits.) It now appears that whoever wins the election in November will have to implement at least some of the 9/11 Commission recommendations. I am hopeful but not sanguine, unless one of the recommendations is: Fire everybody at CIA, start over with completely different people. That would probably work; the U.S. created a pretty good intelligence agency out of pretty much nothing during WWII, though it did take a year or so. But the 9/11 Commission recommendations don't seem to contain anything as drastic as that.
And another reason to doubt that the CIA will get the spanking it deserves is the emergence of the agency over the last year in the unlikely role of champion of the American people, in what has become the default narrative of approximately a third to a half of the electorate, in opposition to a domineering and dishonest White House. The BUSH LIED theory has an unfortunate tendency to obscure just how badly the CIA punted on the question of WMD in Iraq. The CIA may have wanted to add more admission of uncertainty to intelligence reports to be presented to the public about WMD's, which makes them closer to right than Dubya was, but at the same time they had absolutely no clue as to what was actually going on in Iraq. The causes and nature of this massive intelligence failure is presented I think most concisely and accurately in Kenneth Pollack's post-mortem. And as Christopher Hitchens has noted, the Plame affair has led left-of-center types to bizarrely treasure the self-serving aspects of the agency's secrecy in a way they never did before.
It's a big, big mistake to forget to mistrust the CIA, not least because the CIA never learns to mistrust itself, not even a little bit. Lately I've been slogging through Robert Baer's Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, and the hubris is just astonishing. Whenever I pick up another book about the Middle East and Islamism, the first order of business is to determine the author's agenda and try to correct for it to the extent that I can; the competition to capture the representation and interpretation of any given event in this area tends to be fierce and political, just as you would expect. With Baer it's becoming clear that the agenda is not so much a political one (though the title seems aimed at catching a particular political wave, and may well have been the publisher's decision) as a personal, self-aggrandizing one. Robert Baer's basic thesis is that the CIA was blinded by its preoccupation with the Soviet Union to the danger posed by rising Islamism, which is all too true. But, he also wants to argue that they could have overcome these difficulties by giving real men like Robert Baer a freer hand, instead of acting like a bunch of grandmas (or "AARP bluehairs" as he puts it). So though he poses as a critic of the CIA, he must leave its basic legitimacy and efficacy (if run aggressively enough) unchallenged if he's to argue how he might have acted more effectively within it. So far as I'm able to tell, his bias here is pretty much unconscious.
Once you get past the basic "The CIA knows nothing; trust me to know everything because I was in the CIA" contradiction (and many people presumably have; the cover to the paperback edition proclaims bestseller status, and Amazon consumer reviews are appallingly glowing), you're ready to be sucked into the Soviet preoccupation story. The story has the advantage of being true, but, the fact that Baer presents this as a "dirty little secret" which he is uniquely qualified to share with the reader (as opposed to an obvious phenomenon that has been duly noted by nearly everyone who's ever written anything about U.S. history in the Middle East) lends a completely unearned credibility to the rest of his theory. Because while Baer is mocking the CIA for its Soviet-influenced preconceptions, you might not notice that the Cold War wore a pretty important groove in his brain too. I had been attributing his habit of ignoring all kinds of distinctions and making all kinds of sloppy connections without showing his work (real men don’t need bibliographies or footnotes, apparently) to maybe an attempt to "dumb it down" for a general audience, and his emphasis on Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood to the exclusion of all other relevant actors to a desire to exaggerate the importance of his own work, since these are apparently the areas he happened to be focusing on as a CIA man, and indeed it seems the Muslim Brothers are the sole Islamist organization with which he managed to make one (possibly imaginary, IMHO*) contact. But it may also be that Baer is not merely sloppily implying that Saudia Arabia is behind the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood is behind all Islamist terrorism, but that he actually believes that, perhaps as the result of a Cold-War-influenced institutional comfort level with having a single tentacular actor as an enemy.
Most of what he says is, so far as I know, reasonably close to true, so far as it goes. But it is so selective that it amounts to looking at the situation from a pinhole. You would never know, reading this book, that the Muslim Brotherhood has episodically operated above-ground as a legitimate social organization, that it has openly participated in elections, that its slogan "Islam is the solution" means different things to different people, and that a great deal of its ability to function as a legitimate organization depends on its ability to distance itself from terrorism. You would never know that it is not the only Islamist organization to establish chapters in different countries (the Jamaat Islamiyya, for example, originating from Pakistan and beholden to Mawdudi rather than the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb as an intellectual father, is another big one, and IIRC actually more successful at grass-roots organizing throughout the Middle East than the MB has been). You would never know that there have been genuine disagreements over tactics among Muslim Brothers, that sub-groups have splintered from the MB many times, that Muslim Brothers insist that the assassination of Sadat was carried out by a splinter group from the MB rather than the MB itself, and that it has never been proven that the alleged MB assassination plot against Nasser was anything more than a pretext to legitimate Nasser’s brutal suppression of the MB. You would never know that there are hundreds of local Islamist organizations throughout the Middle East that have no connection to the MB whatsoever (or, at most, have some individual members who passed through the MB at some time in the past), and you would especially never know, due to Baer’s relentless cherry-picking, that there have ever been acts of Islamist terrorism that were not associated with the MB. He can’t ignore 9/11, obviously, since it is the incident that he wants to argue the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia has been leading up to all this time; about a third of the way through the book he simply asserts that 9/11 was "the Muslim Brotherhood through and through," even though the Taliban are actually Soviet-Afghan War orphans educated in Pakistani Islamist schools, and no operational connection between 9/11 and the MB has been found (so far as I know; feel free to enlighten me if you’ve heard otherwise).
I’m no apologist for the MB, but it’s absurd to think everything traces back to them somehow, even ideologically. Baer’s James Bond villain characterization (all-powerful, relentless, fiendishly clever) of the Muslim Brotherhood and denial of a whole spectrum of competing Islamic and Islamist organizations above all obscures why any of these movements exist in the first place, and periodically resort to terrorism. Islamism is above all an idea, not an organization, and one that seems to address the political and economic dysfunction of the post-colonial, partially Westernized Middle East from within its own cultural and religious framework. It cannot be killed by killing some random portion of those who carry its message. The single-actor approach ignores the deep political implications of the rise of Islamism and the broad social phenomenon of cultural "Islamization" across the Middle East and Muslim world.
And it does so in a way that validates the CIA way of looking at the world, a highly "pragmatic" and amoral worldview in which shadowy actors move leaders and weapons and money around like pieces on a chessboard. (Except in free and democratic nations like those in Western Europe, in which CIA operatives are for the most part cruelly reduced to the role of mere observers, poor things.) In advocating a more aggressive role for the CIA, Baer never pauses for a moment to consider that the very susceptibility of despotic regimes to the kind of internal and external manipulation and gamesmanship he so treasures might be part of the problem, and he completely glosses over how many CIA and State Department misfires have contributed materially to the rise of Islamism. He is quite correct to point out that Saudi Arabia pursues multiple and sometimes contradictory agendas with respect to Islamists despite its status as a U.S. ally. But so does everybody else we deal with in the Middle East. He does mention in passing that the CIA funded Islamist jihadis in Afghanistan (a crucial part of the Soviet preoccupation story), but fails to mention that this happened because CIA funds were funneled through our ally Pakistan’s security services, which then as now were riddled with Islamist sympathizers. In mocking the Carter and Reagan administrations for their "overfocus" on Iran (because, really, it’s not like Iran ever did anything to attract so much of our attention), he omits to mention that Iranian revolutionaries took U.S. hostages because they interpreted the granting of asylum to the Shah in the U.S. as a sign that we intended to restore the Shah power in Iran, and that they believed that because the CIA had done precisely that 30 years before, the last time Iran had a revolution against this very same Shah. In fact the entire history of the causes of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is completely ignored here, presumably because CIA cock-up + plus Shi’a (rather than Sunni and therefore putatively MB) Islamists** = no good for Baer’s story at all.
So what’s a good, practical approach to containing terrorism according to Baer? We might be able to gather a thing or two from his discussion of Hafez al-Asad. Baer describes how, following an assassination attempt in 1980, Asad had all suspected Muslim Brothers then being held in Syrian jails, some 500 hundred of them, shot in the head on a single afternoon. In 1982, when MB members seized control of the town of Hama and began executing government officials, Asad ordered his army to shell the town until everyone in it, 20,000 men, women, children altogether, were dead. Quoth Baer:
Asad wasn’t happy to go down in history as the butcher of Hama or the man who destroyed a world-class historic city, but it was either that or run for it, along with one million other Alawites [the minority Muslim sect that forms the ruling class in Syria]. The Brothers would never again pose a serious threat to Asad.
Poor little Hitler Jr, what else could he do? And, hey presto, no more jihad! Pay no attention to the supposedly non-existent Syrian jihadis who poured over the border in their thousands 20 years later to aid in the "resistance" to the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the start of the war. And there is of course absolutely no relationship whatsoever between state persecution and the gradual escalation in Islamist violence, both in frequency and choice of target, over the last 50 years.
Baer’s discussion of the Saudi royal family, Wahhabism, Islamism and terrorism is too muddled and incoherent to discuss at length here; sometimes he seems to understand aspects of it, sometimes he seems to misunderstand those same aspects, and there are a lot of things he never really explains at all. He does understand that the Saudi royal family has funded terrorism in the past; he doesn’t seem to understand that this is bribery (or protection money, as the American mafia would call it) rather than enthusiastic sponsorship, or that the recent increase in terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia is probably an indication that they have at least temporarily suspended this practice (though who knows, maybe they’re in on it and bluffing us). Flipping ahead, it looks like he thinks the U.S. should just go ahead and seize the Saudi oil fields. Awesome!
I see in this month’s Atlantic that yet another CIA man, "Anonymous," has published a book on the subject of containing terrorism called Imperial Hubris; the reviewer lauds Anonymous’ advocacy of a policy called "neo-Isolationism", which would involve "a less multilateral approach to national-security policy and a far more ruthless use of military power than the Bush Administration embraces." Wow, that sounds pretty awesome too!
I haven’t read Anonymous’ book, and I probably should, if only because it sounds like just the kind of thing that general readers might seize upon as the real, inside dirt. But I do wonder if Anonymous, unlike Baer, has noticed that decades of neglect of human intelligence recruitment and practice at CIA have left us utterly dependent on the security services and intelligence provided us by foreign "client" nations, and that as a result a "CIA expert" may very well have abolutely no idea what he’s talking about, and not even know that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Because I know next to nothing about any of this, really. We’re talking about a movement with hundreds of years of relevant historical context spanning over a dozen countries and multiple tidal shifts in forms of governance and political movements in the last hundred years. I don’t speak any of the relevant languages, I’ve never read the Koran, reading up on this stuff has been just a hobby of mine over the last year and a half or so, not my job, and it is not even my only or most time-consuming hobby. Yet I’ve learned enough to be able to spot errors ranging from subtle to spectacular on nearly every page of a book written by a former CIA agent who spent 20 years in the Middle East as an intelligence officer. If you’re not laughing you’re crying, I guess. Except when they’re pushing "solutions" that can only duplicate past errors because they can’t even imagine maybe losing the chessboard set-up that makes all their bullshit possible in the first place, then you’re pretty much back to crying.
*His anecdote involves a Sufi Shari’a Court judge in Sudan, who happened to be an old friend of his who was educated in the U.S. Baer is shocked when he attends the court and finds his old friend handing down harsh punishments for violations of Shari’a. Because of this apparent fundamentalism, Baer asks the judge if he is a Muslim Brother. The judge says no, how can I be when I am a Sufi? Baer thinks this answer is disingenuous. One day the judge disappears from his home, and there’s a story in the paper that the Sudanese government had rounded up Islamist opposition leaders the night before. Baer concludes, Aha, he was a Muslim Brother! This particular anecdote and the "proof" it provides that Baer once knew a real live Muslim Brother in person involves a whole cascade of false assumptions. 1) Fascist dictatorships always confine their persecutions to the truly deserving, and always tell the truth about what they have done in their state-controlled media.(This doozy permeates the entire book, particularly with respect to Nasser and the MB in Egypt). Whereas in fact the judge would not necessarily have to be directly involved in any sort of Islamist activism to be perceived as a threat to the regime; Shari’a courts, like mosques, represent religious power structures that have traditionally served the central government, whatever it might be, but can sometimes act to undermine it as well. A threatened regime would not necessarily have to have specific information about a particular judge to include him in a round-up if an Islamist movement appeared to be gathering strength. 2) Sufis are not Islamists; the judge would have to be MB rather than Sufi to be involved in any way in Islamist activities. Except the Islamists who currently rule Sudan are in fact Sufis. Sudanese Muslims have always been primarily Sufi, and Sudan was home to an intriguing precursor to the Islamist movement, in which a Sufi mystic declared himself the Mahdi, and led his ecstatic followers to drive out Egyptian colonialists and establish an Islamic state, back in the 19th Century. Hassan al-Turabi, who ascended to rule after the coup d’etat that established Sudan as an Islamist state in 1989, had indeed established a local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood as a student at the University of Khartoum, but within a few years shaped it into a specifically Sudanese and Sufi movement called the National Islamic Front. Most of the Islamists operating in Sudan at the time Baer visited are more likely to have been local Sufi NIF than MB. 3) The judge’s answer was disingenuous, because obviously a Sufi would never run a Shari’a court in a fundamentalist vein. Whereas Sufis have often been as conservative as Sunni Muslims with respect to application of Shari’a; defining differences are more about other theological issues. (This varies by place and time, and there are what we would call liberal versions of Sufism, the most liberal variant being the one that has been most successfully popularized on the fringes of the Muslim world and among Westerners).
**Not that he necessarily recognizes the latter distinction anyway; at one point he implies that Yassir Arafat, a Christian, is a Muslim Brother.
CORRECTION: A reader questioned whether Arafat is really a Christian, and indeed it turns out he was at one point a Muslim Brother at least. According to this bio, Arafat:
1948: Flees Palestine, after the establishment of Israel. He settles in Cairo, where he starts to study engineering at University of Cairo.
1952: He joins the Muslim Brotherhood and Union of Palestinian Students, where he becomes president.
That’s what you get for calling other people ignorant, I guess. Now I have to go find out which and why other sources say he’s Christian. The PLO has generally been criticized by Islamists for being too dominated by Christians; maybe this is a "slander" against him on the pretext of his having a Christian wife (not that there’s anything wrong with that in Islam) that has been picked up uncritically by some commentators? (Or maybe he did convert at some point?)
MORE CORRECTION: Arafat is definitely a Muslim. I can’t remember exactly where I read that he’s a Christian, but I’m sure I’ve seen that many times, and it turns out that if you Google "Arafat is a Christian" you get all kinds of sources. An unnamed Palestinian activist, a Weekly Worker contributor taking another to task on the finer points of the Palestinian struggle, posters on an Islamic message board, posters on a discussion board for vaguely leftish Westerners, a guy twitting other commentors on some kinda Christian conservative blog, etc.
It’s an urban legend!
It may originate from the fact that Aarafat’s wife is a Christian, or because of his sometimes publicized attendance at Christian churches (or banning from same, as the case may be) on Christmas Eve (which he might do either because he attends with his wife, or because he’s making an interfaith gesture as the leader of an organization that includes Muslims and Christians; the news item doesn't explain), or from some other source I don’t know about. The idea seems plausible because quite a few highly-placed or well-known PLO officials are in fact Christian. It seems to serve a couple of purposes in the way people tend to bring it up: 1) To argue with the idea that Muslims or Islam are inherently or uniquely bloodthirsty in some way (because Christians can be terrorists too); 2) To point out how ignorant Westerners are about religious and ethnic diversity in the Arab and Muslim worlds, since Arafat’s putative Christianity is obviously never mentioned in Western media. Saying that Arafat is a Christian packs a bigger punch on both counts than it would to note truthfully, for example, that Hannan Ashrawi is a Christian, since she’s just that nice lady who discusses Palestinian issues with Tom Brokaw sometimes instead of a man who’s been denounced and vilified for years in Western media.
So Baer was right and I was wrong. Except, typically, even when he’s right he still manages to be wrong, because it’s still completely off to imply that Arafat currently is a Muslim Brother or that the MB is behind him in some way. Arafat came of political age when secular Arab nationalist politics were ascendant; Morris notes that his formation of Fatah was inspired by the successes of the Algerian FLN (which had an Islamic wing) and Nasser in Egypt. The relationship between an Arab identity that cuts across religious affiliations and an Islamic identity that cuts across ethnicities and how those identities have been deployed politically over time in the Middle East is necessarily complicated and often too slippery for outsiders to easily get much of a handle on (trust me). But, broadly speaking, when Arafat was a University student, Islamic political organizations were more or less subordinate to secular nationalist ones, and tended to understand themselves more as a variant of nationalism than as their own revolutionary movement. The pattern was for Islamic movements to lend their organizing power to nationalist movements and then get screwed over in the event of success; the Islamic wing of the FLN was crushed by the predominant secular and military wing of the organization when it gained power, and Nasser had every Muslim Brother he could get his hands on in jail by the mid-50’s, even as he legitimized his economic program as "Islamic Socialism." (The historical experience of secular nationalist ascendancy in revolutionary politics in the region perhaps explains why Iranian secular leftist intellectuals who participated in the Islamic Revolution were so surprised to see "their" revolution "hijacked" by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini). The relationship has flipped in the Palestinian movement (as with opposition politics everywhere in the Middle East), which was "Islamized" around the time of the Intifada. So it is possibly stretching a point to include Arafat’s joining the MB alongside his heading of the Palestinian Student’s Union as a student then as a sufficiently significant event to include on a biographical timeline of his life now. Arafat is not an Islamist and never has been; to exaggerate the importance of his connection to the MB has a lot more to do with back-projecting the organization’s eventual importance across its entire history than about understanding anything about Arafat as a political actor.
