Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes author Michael Scheuer, a former senior CIA official, tells Glenn Beck that the America’s only hope is for Osama bin Laden to detonate “a major weapon” here to get a “grass roots movement” going.

Words fail me.

I’ve long noted the irony that neo-conservatism is the furthest thing from conservatism. In fact, it is the logical successor to Woodrow Wilson’s imperialistic vision.

John Ikenberry uses the just-past 150th anniversary of Wilson’s birth and impending 88th anniversary of his 14 Points speech to reflect on the legacy of the 28th President of the United States. He observes that,

George Bush is only the most recent president to simultaneously draw upon and push off against the Wilsonian vision. Depending on who you listen to, Bush is either a direct heir of Woodrow Wilson or the ultimate anti-Wilson. Bush’s neo-con advisors have been described as “Wilsonians in boots.” But the Bush administration has had no use for international law and collective security which is the heart of Wilsonianism.

Then again, as noted foreign policy expert Matthew Yglesias observes, “George W. Bush perfectly authentically represents the first, imperialistic version of Wilson and Wilsonianism.” Indeed, one suspects Wilson himself would have long since recognized the practical futility of international organizations affecting his international vision. As Ikenberry observes, “Wilson used military force in an attempt to teach [constitutional government to] Southern republics, intervening in Cuba, the Dominion Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.”

The impulse behind those interventions and the Iraq War are similar. They were theoretically and morally sound yet overly ambitious in practice. There’s simply no serious debate but that representative democracy is conducive to peaceful international relations and human rights. Historically, however, armed intervention by foreign powers has yet to prove an effective means of establishing it.

While most supporters of Wilson and Bush would quickly declaim any notion that their foreign policy vision are similar, it’s hard to discount the parallels.

Via Andrew Cochran, I see that the Bush administration’s terrorism policy is getting endorsement from two incredibly unlikely sources.

Former CIA bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer, whose Imperial Hubris made him the darling on leftist critics of the Bush and his Iraq War policy (granted, mostly those who hadn’t bothered to read the book) argued in Wednesday’s Washington Times that a win for the Democrats in November is a win for al Qaeda.

But what will bin Laden and his Islamist allies think? Well, if Republican defeat comes to pass, they will first thank the Almighty — “Allahu Akhbar!” or “God is the greatest!” — for tangible proof of approaching victory. In Spain, Thailand, and Britain — where Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered the fate of Messrs. Aznar and Thaksin for the same reason, but is leaving gracefully — al Qaeda and its allies see politicians winning power who argue: “The military option has been tried and it has failed. We must seek other-than-martial means to defuse the Islamists’ appeal and power.” As in Europe and Thailand, this has been the refrain of Sens. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jane Harman, and a swath of Republicans who value their seats more than U.S. security.

If Americans vote for what sounds like sweet reason from the Democrats, bin Laden and company will rejoice. What they will hear is the death knell for any prospect of effective U.S. military resistance to militant Islam. With the Republicans out, the Islamists will be confident that Democrats will deliver the best of both worlds: less emphasis on military force and a rigid maintenance of U.S. foreign policies that are hated with passion and near-unanimity by 1.3 billion Muslims. If Osama approved of music, he would be whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again!”

This is interesting coming from a man who argued that invading Iraq was the best gift we could have given to bin Laden. But he’s certainly right that leaving with our tail between our legs at this point would be perceived (for good reason) as a victory by al Qaeda.

Then again, despite his very public disagreements with the Bush administration, Scheuer is at heart a conservative:

What the enemy thinks is not the sole reason on which to base a vote. I will vote for Republicans, as I always do, because some know unborn babies are human beings who should not be murdered with the Democrats’ joyful zeal. Enemy perceptions are worth remembering, however, because if Americans elect Democrats believing them likely to defeat al Qaedaism, history suggests they will be wrong.

Peter Bergen isn’t. He agrees:

The French saying, often attributed to Talleyrand, that “this is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder,” could easily describe America’s invasion of Iraq. But for the United States to pull entirely out of that country right now, as is being demanded by a growing chorus of critics, would be to snatch an unqualified disaster from the jaws of an enormous blunder.

[...]

A total withdrawal from Iraq would play into the hands of the jihadist terrorists. As Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, made clear shortly after 9/11 in his book “Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner,” Al Qaeda’s most important short-term strategic goal is to seize control of a state, or part of a state, somewhere in the Muslim world. “Confronting the enemies of Islam and launching jihad against them require a Muslim authority, established on a Muslim land,” he wrote. “Without achieving this goal our actions will mean nothing.” Such a jihadist state would be the ideal launching pad for future attacks on the West.

[...]

Another problem with a total American withdrawal is that it would fit all too neatly into Osama bin Laden’s master narrative about American foreign policy. His theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from Lebanon and President Bill Clinton’s decision nearly a decade later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness among his jihadist allies.

Bergen, naturally, stops short of endorsing Republicans in the upcoming elections. Effectively, though, one can’t argue that we should, to coin a phrase, stay the course in Iraq and simultaneously vote for Democrats.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum argues that we’re in a lose-lose situation where withdrawal is our least bad option. He has a point, although I still think it’s possible to salvage something worthwhile from the Iraq debacle. If/when that’s no longer possible, then he’s right.

The National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the Iraq War has spawned a new generation of terrorists.

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

One would be remiss for failing to note that these are the same intelligence agencies who failed to predict the Iranian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the war in the Balkans, Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the 9/11 attacks, London bombings, Madrid bombings, and other major events. Or that they opposed the Iraq War to begin with and that this finding vindicates their position.

Still, there’s not much doubt about the broad conclusion here. Michael Scheuer argued in Imperial Hubris that fomenting an American-led invasion of an Arab Muslim country was beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest dreams when he launched the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda was hoping for a second rallying event like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to gin up enthusiasm for the cause and turn latent anti-Western hostility into more troops for the cause. Others made similar arguments and few doubted that as a likely effect.

The primary terrorism-related rationale for the Iraq War was that creating a model Arab democracy was the path to changing the culture that makes the recruitment of suicide bombers possible. Whether that will happen in the longer term is unknown but there’s little evidence to date that it’s happening.

A rationale never advanced by the administration but embraced by numerous online analysts in the run-up and early days of the war was the so-called “flypaper strategy.” Basically, it’s the “don’t throw me in the briar patch” side of the NIE assessment: Terrorists would flood into Iraq where they’d be killed in droves by America’s professional soldiers. The ultimate game of “fight them over there rather than here at home,” if you will. This has certainly happened but without the intended strategic outcome. We’ve killed or captured hundreds upon hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists, including scores of their senior leaders around the world. Thus far, unfortunately, they’ve responded in hydra-like fashion.

Most observers agree that Al Qaeda itself is far weaker than it was on 9/11/01. So far, at least, it appears that the overall jihadi cause is stronger.

The question remains, however: What now? If the Iraq War has increased the number of terrorists, does it follow that leaving Iraq in its current state would decrease the number of terrorists? Doubtful.

While Osama and company managed to attact large numbers of troops to fight the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan, they gained far more out of the fact that the Soviets left Afghanistan in defeat. Similarly, it’s quite likely that an American withdrawal from Iraq without accomplishing the barest part of our mission–a reasonably stable, democratic society–would embolden the jihadists. Afghanistan. Lebanon. Somalia. Each of those displays of weakness convinced the jihadists that the infidel was weak and could be defeated. Forcing the Americans to leave Iraq would be a far, far bigger prize.

Jim Henley believes a recent post of mine was too dismissive of Andy Rooney’s foreign policy analysis.

Joyner: “Andy Rooney explains why the [9/11] tragedy was really our fault:”

Americans are puzzled over why so many people in the world hate us. We seem so nice to ourselves. They do hate us though. We know that and we’re trying to protect ourselves with more weapons.

We have to do it I suppose but it might be better if we figured out how to behave as a nation in a way that wouldn’t make so many people in the world want to kill us.

Henley:

James, in typical Republican fashion, simply notes that this constitutes “blaming America” and moves on, without pausing to consider whether, maybe, five years constitutes a decent interval after which some introspection is in order. Because, really, what are the odds that, if most of the world’s attitudes toward your nation ranges from passive resentment to active hostility, that it’s because your country is just too good for this awful, fallen world?

First, by definition, saying that the reason people attack America is because we have earned their anger constitutes “blaming America.” Second, I’ve never argued that our enemies attack us because we’re “too good” or even the trite nonsense about how they “hate us because we are free.”

While most of the world likes the United States and most of its people would instantly leave their present circumstances for a chance to live here, many nonetheless resent our policies. To some extent, that’s an inevitable fact of being The World’s Sole Remaining Superpower^TM but it’s also a consequence of our asserting the right to intervene anywhere, anytime we deem our interests to be served by so doing. Unlike traditional Great Powers, we do not seek merely to dominate a natural geographic sphere of influence but to shape events around the world.

As I noted in a September 2004 review Imperial Hubris, Michael Scheuer points out that the grievances that led al Qaeda to hate us do not require us to engage in any Roonian contemplation. Their goals have been frequently enumerated by our enemy since their first declaration of jihad against us in 1996:

· The end of U.S. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of that state;
· The removal of U.S. and Western forces from the Arabian peninsula;
· The removal of U.S. and Western military forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim lands;
· The end of U.S. support for the oppression of Muslims by Russia, China, and India;
· The end of U.S. protection for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera;
· The conservation of the Muslim world’s energy resource and their sale at higher prices. (Scheuer, 210)

Essentially, we should abandon Israel and stop trying to influence events in the globe’s eastern hemisphere. Is that a reasonable price to pay to appease al Qaeda? And would doing so at this point earn further enmity, given that they might reasonably think we’d backed down? Those are questions we can debate, I guess.

President Bush argues that, if we take bin Laden at his word, he’s unappeasable:

Osama bin Laden has called the 9/11 attacks, “A great step towards the unity of Muslims and establishing the righteous [Caliphate].” Al Qaeda and its allies reject any possibility of coexistence with those they call “infidels.” Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: “Death is better than living on this earth with the unbelievers amongst us.” We must take the words of these extremists seriously, and we must act decisively to stop them from achieving their evil aims.

Matt Yglesias says that, while bin Laden might say that, he doesn’t really mean it. Or, at least, while he’d like that outcome, he’s reasonable enough to see it as a dream rather than a short-term goal around which to organize. That may well be. For that matter, as I argued yesterday, I don’t see the establishment of a new Caliphate as viable regardless of their intention.

Still, while Rooney, Henley, Yglesias, Bush, and I would all agree that we can do a better job of both explaining our actions to others and thinking through their big picture implications beforehand, that’s a very different thing than saying that we essentially had the 9/11 attacks coming because we were such busybodies.

Henley again:

Where I’d disagree with Rooney is just who “us” and “we” and “the nation” are that matter. It’s not me and Andy and James Joyner: it’s the people in power. It’s the US government.

Actually, it is Andy, Jim, and me–along with about 300 million other folks. While I often don’t agree with our elected representatives, even those for whom I voted, they operate, as the anti-war bumper sticker put it, in my name. Those four planes that hit five years and two days ago weren’t aimed at President Bush but at America.

The CIA has quietly shut down its bin Laden hunting unit.

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice “dead or alive.”

The realignment reflects a view that Al Qaeda is no longer as hierarchical as it once was, intelligence officials said, and a growing concern about Qaeda-inspired groups that have begun carrying out attacks independent of Mr. bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Agency officials said that tracking Mr. bin Laden and his deputies remained a high priority, and that the decision to disband the unit was not a sign that the effort had slackened. Instead, the officials said, it reflects a belief that the agency can better deal with high-level threats by focusing on regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals. “The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever,” said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. “This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus.”

[...]

Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was. Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken. “This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda,” he said. “These days at the agency, bin Laden and Al Qaeda appear to be treated merely as first among equals.”

[...]

In his book “Ghost Wars,” which chronicles the agency’s efforts to hunt Mr. bin Laden in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Steve Coll wrote that some inside the agency likened Alec Station to a cult that became obsessed with Al Qaeda. “The bin Laden unit’s analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their C.I.A. colleagues uncomfortable,” Mr. Coll wrote. Members of Alec Station “called themselves ‘the Manson Family’ because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising Al Qaeda threat.”

Of course, they were right to be alarmed. Still, this move strikes me as reasonable enough. If bin Laden and Zawahiri were killed today, it would be cause for celebration but probably have relatively minor effect. Our enemy is not a single man at this stage but a movement.

Noam Scheiber has an engaging piece at TNR today looking at how the organizational culture of the CIA has evolved over recent years to the point where ex-employees are now constantly speaking out against administration policies. He points to the cases of retired analyst Ray McGovern, head of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, who famously got into a shouting match with confronted Don Rumsfeld at a lecture recently and Michael Scheuer, who has made a second career as an author and talking head with Through Our Enemies’ Eyes and, especially, Imperial Hubris.

There was a time when seeing a former CIA man publicly dress down a top administration official would have caused jaws to drop. In an earlier era, the spook-turned-gadfly would have been declared persona non grata by his erstwhile colleagues and expelled from the brotherhood of spies. But, in a stark break with tradition, today’s CIA officials are seamlessly moving on to second careers as authors of polemics, crusading pundits–even bona fide activists.

[...]

As Evan Thomas writes in The Very Best Men, his account of the CIA’s early postwar years, spymasters like Frank Wisner focused their recruiting efforts on Ivy League colleges to find men pre-equipped with an “old-school” ethos. And, of course, the virtue the old CIA hands prized above all else was discretion. True to their Skull and Bones pedigree, most CIA men were loath to acknowledge they even worked for the Agency, much less disclose what they did there. Perhaps the most vivid personification of this code was Richard Helms, a longtime Wisner deputy who became CIA director in the mid-’60s. While testifying before a Senate panel a decade later, Helms refused to come clean about the CIA’s role in undermining the Chilean government–and was eventually prosecuted for withholding information from Congress. But, following his sentencing, Helms returned to the CIA fold a hero. A roomful of retired operatives greeted him with a standing ovation–and even passed around a basket to pay his $2,000 fine.

The flip side of this mentality was swift punishment for anyone who aired the Agency’s dirty laundry. In 1978, a former Angola station chief named John Stockwell published a book flaying the CIA for its brutal tactics against the country’s rebel groups. Stockwell tried to distinguish between the hardworking rank and file, whom he respected, and the Agency as a whole, which he deemed out of control. But former colleagues ostracized him nonetheless. “He was perceived as an acidic critic,” recalls former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro. “People thought it was in poor form.”

[...]

The end of the cold war eroded the CIA’s code of silence in two important ways. First, it dampened some of the urgency CIA hands felt in their workaday lives. During the cold war, “the danger to agents and people operating overseas was clear,” says Dick Kerr, the CIA’s deputy director in the early ’90s. “Today’s world is more cloudy, ambiguous.” Second, the aftermath of the cold war brought political considerations closer to the CIA’s doorstep. The embarrassment of the Aldrich Ames espionage scandal, congressional scrutiny of the Agency’s shady friends, and a general impatience with government secrecy all nudged the CIA toward greater transparency.

[...]

[W]hile the early, Ivy-dominated CIA really was a bastion of liberalism (albeit one tempered by devout anti-communism), the demographics of the Agency shifted dramatically between the late ’60s and the late ’70s. The churning over Vietnam made cold war liberals a dying breed; in their place came a generation of New Left types skeptical of the CIA’s shadowy m.o. “For my generation, the last thing in the world you would do … is join the CIA,” says Bob Baer, who arrived at the Agency from Berkeley in 1976. “The view was that it was out assassinating people. … I wouldn’t dare tell some of my liberal friends.”

Increasingly, the CIA has been populated by a kind of nonideological moderate–a figure too square to be caught up in any countercultural zeitgeist, and not so ambitious as to frown on a government payscale. “I was raised by a Marine, educated by Jesuits all my life,” says Scheuer. Probably the easiest way to summarize the reigning worldview within the CIA these days is pragmatic, heavily empirical, and tending toward foreign policy realism.

Theoretically, of course, professional bureaucracies are not supposed to have agendas; in reality, though, they all do. A strong preference for pragmatism and foreign policy realism, while quite mainstream for highly educated foreign affairs experts, is hardly a non-ideology.

In Dr. Joyner’s post about former government officers becoming pundits, I had a bit of a disagreement with him in the comments section. Perhaps part of that is protecting my own “rice bowl” as I’m a former State officer and now comment about my areas of interest/specialization. That I’m not among the talking heads constantly on CNN doesn’t really affect the issue.

I draw a clean line between speaking while you’re still a government official and when you’ve retired/resigned. In the former, you are sworn to support the Administration–no matter the party, no matter the incumbent. If you can’t do that, you have options, the foremost among them being to resign. Government bureaucrats indeed may know more than the political appointee whose setting policy; that’s often the case. But that’s a big “so what.” Government bureaucrats were not elected to set policy; they were given jobs–or sometimes even commissions–to do a job to the best of their abilities in order to support whomever is in the White House.

That does not infringe upon their consciences, though it may very well inhibit their freedom of speech. That’s part of the job; if you don’t like that, you need to find another employer. Foreign Service Officers are, in fact, commissioned officers, same as in the military. We swear the same oath to defend and protect the Constitution. We have military-equivalent ranks that are important only in inter-agency matters. We even get to join USAA for our insurance needs!

But freedom of speech is limited for FSOs as much as it is for the military, perhaps more so. We are taught from the early days of our Junior Officer Training that we may have opinions, but we are restricted in where and how we may offer them in public. Because we spend a good portion of our careers overseas, we are seen as voices of the American gov’t, whether the setting is official or private. It simply does not work to have divergent voices explaining US foreign policy. Sometimes, as during the Cold War, that’s simply a security risk. Anytime, it shows an incoherence in getting the message across. That doesn’t mean that we have to ignore dissident voices, however. We only have to make sure that our explanations are accurate and do support the policy.

Post-employment, different rules apply. There are limitations about what can be said about classified matters, naturally. Books written by former FSOs, as former CIA officers, need to go through official vetting if the subject matter is germane to the area we worked in to ensure that no classified materials get out inadvertently.

But post-employment writing offers a great temptation–and platform–to get even. It’s a terrific opportunity to show how much smarter the writer is than the knuckleheads who held the top positions. It’s a way to disclose the petty unfairnesses that intrude in any work environment. Everybody has a beef; not everybody writes about it.

Even this getting-even can have a positive reaction, as was the case of female officers who were institutionally disadvantaged in terms of promotions or hot assignments. I might argue that the cure was excessive, but that’d be my beef, not necessarily right or wrong. Putting it in print, though, makes it public, makes it fair game to be used (or abused) by any who choose to do so.

Former officials who choose to go into print need to recognize that once their opinions are published they have lost control of them. That may call for reappraisal or not. There are certainly those with such a visceral hatred of any given administration that they will be happy to have their writings used to promote anti-administration activities [Paging Joe Wilson!]. Others, though, do try to be balanced and circumspect. Dr. Joyner’s comment about how the media cherry-picks what they report, as in the case of Scheur, is absolutely to the point: the writer loses control of the message.

This comes down to a matter of responsibility to a large extent, though motivation often overrides that. If one thinks that a policy is wrong-headed, then s/he’s free to argue. After resigning or retiring. There is no right to argue, outside the office, while still employed.

If there’s an egregious wrong being committed, there are channels to express that dissent. State even has a special cable channel dedicated to dissent. Every cable sent through that channel is moved immediately to the 7th Floor (where the Secretary of State sits). If that isn’t enough, then FSOs (and CIA officers) have a right to petition their congressional representatives. In a strongly polarized time, that can be good or bad depending on where you stand on the issue. There is no constitutionally protected right, however, to bring it into the public arena.

I’ve had to support policies that I thought really sucked, were wrongheaded, or were not based on reality. But none of them was so egregious that I felt impelled to resign. Mileage for others obviously differed. I still have my beefs against State, still think they’ve got the wrong end of the stick on many issues, from personnel policies to foreign policies. But I don’t try to impugn motive. Stupidity explains so much more than conspiracy…

Guillermo Christensen argues that the recent trend of retired and retiring CIA officers entering the public debate will diminish the long-term credibility of the Agency. The latest example is a piece by Paul Pillar in the current Foreign Affairs which Christensen rebuts.

More important than the content of these books and op-eds, though, is the message it sends to policymakers.

Paul Pillar was right in the thick of the process and substance that reached those conclusions. Had he actually written a warning to the administration against going to war before the war, his conclusions could not have rested on any of the CIA’s intelligence analysis, but instead on his own political views against the administration–something which he has made no bones about in discussions with think-tank audiences long before he left the agency. This, incidentally, is prohibited behavior according to the professional practices of the CIA, the equivalent of betraying attorney-client confidentiality.

Not merely content to have played a leading role in the Iraq intelligence failure, Mr. Pillar is now following in the footsteps of others like Michael Scheuer, in undermining whatever credibility and access the CIA still may have with policymakers. By violating his confidences, Mr. Pillar is ensuring that those who succeed him–those who are, I hope, trying to fix the many problems facing the CIA–will be even less likely to see any real impact from their work because the president and his advisers will be loath to trust them.

For decades, there has been a common understanding that CIA analysts play a role roughly analogous, for policymakers, to experts whose opinions are sought in confidence, such as lawyers or accountants. Presidents and their advisers have felt comfortable in relying on analysts, in theory at least, for unbiased information and conclusions–and for keeping their mouths shut about what they learn. Presidents, secretaries of state, and others have given the CIA access into the inner sanctum of policymaking in the belief that the CIA would not use the media or leaks to influence the outcome.

For a CIA officer to discard this neutral role and to inject himself in the political realm is plain wrong. It will end up making the CIA even less relevant than it is today–if that is possible.

While this is overstated a bit, Christensen is right in saying that the politicization of a bureaucracy will harms its ability to have its expertise taken seriously by the White House. This happened long ago to the State Department.

State’s Foreign Service Officers are some of the best and brightest minds America has to offer and their combination of education and practical experience is unmatched. Unfortunately, State has earned a reputation as left-leaning and willing to actively undermine administration policies it disagrees with. Starting with Dwight Eisenhower, presidents, Republican presidents in particular, have felt the need to take their foreign policy decision-making in house to the National Security Council. This has resulted in a great gain in trust but a great loss in depth of expertise, not infrequently with disastrous consequences.

Unfortunately, arrogance is an occupational hazard of elite bureaucrats like FSOs and CIA officers. For good reason, they think they know more than presidents and their political appointees about the matters under their jurisdiction (and not infrequently, everything else). I hasten to add that the same is often true of “experts” in general, including PhDs.

I am always leery of retired experts, including military flag officers, who start careers as television bloviators. Audiences naturally assume that they speak for their former agency and with all the expertise that comes with it. Further, they often have contacts with former subordinates who are quick to dish information about battles they are losing within the bureaucratic jungle.

Scheuer, Pillar, Peter Brookes, Reuel Marc Gerecht and others have every right to make a living after their service. Often, they provide valuable insights to the public discourse. They may well undermine the credibility of their agency, however.

Update: As I’ve noted in discussions in the comments section, there is a distinction to be made between officers who have retired and those still in active service. The problems that Christensen addresses is especially egregious when it comes from the latter. Indeed, I do not understand why it is allowed.

Update 2: Former FSO John Burgess offers his thoughts.

________

Related Stories:

• Pillar: Bush ‘Misused’ Intelligence to Make Case for Iraq War, Brookings Institution.
• “Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq,” by Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, Feb. 10, 2006.
• “Key Figure: Intelligence Downplayed in Iraq Policy,” featuring Paul Pillar, on NPR’s All Things Considered, February 10, 2006.
• “Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq”, by Paul R. Pillar, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

See also OTB’s Imperial Hubris archives for more discussion of Scheuer, his books, and his punditry.

Stephen Schwartz asks the titular question, “Why American Muslims Stay Silent.” The column under that headline is interesting but only obliquely answers the question.

Four years after September 11, 2001, numerous non-Muslim Americans repeatedly ask, “Why do American Muslims stay silent in the face of extremism and terrorism? Why do they not act to cleanse their religion of the reputation it has acquired?”

Paradoxically, Muslims in the US and Great Britain are, today, far more dominated by Islamist extremism than their counterparts in various Muslim countries. In many lands where the majority follows Islam, a struggle is underway between mainstream moderates and radicals inspired by the ultra-Wahhabi preachers of Saudi Arabia, the agitators of the Muslim Brotherhood in various Arab countries, and the virulent and volatile adherents of Pakistani jihadism. In some places, from Bosnia-Hercegovina to Indonesia and from Morocco to Mozambique, the moderates are winning. Yet the Islamic communities of the U.S. (dominated by the Saudis) and Britain (run by radical Pakistanis) suffer under a totalitarian regime of thought-control.

What happens when ordinary Muslims rebel against radical domination in America? They are ostracized, thrown out of mosques, and subjected to extraordinary public insults and threats. I myself was harassed in a Long Island mosque in 2003, as noted in this article. Shia mosques are excluded from “Sunni,” i.e. Wahhabi-controlled bodies, and numerous incidents of expulsions of individual Shias from Sunni mosques in the U.S. have been reported to the Center for Islamic Pluralism, which I have established.

That Muslims in the United States tend to be more radicalized than those in preominantly Muslim societies is not surprising. For one thing, radicalism is a luxury of those with enough to eat and quite a bit of free time. For another, the major sponsors of Islam in the United States are the Wahhabist Saudis and the Nation of Islam.

Schwartz’ answer does not seem to be, however, “Because the silent majority of American Muslims think Osama bin Laden is a hero.” Rather, he seems to be arguing that the majority of American Muslims are cowards who lack the gumption to stand up to the “Wahhabi Lobby.” Neither of those are particularly satisfying answers.

Update: Schwartz responds extensively in the comments below. Much of what he says is in reaction to comments but two things are in direct response to my rather glib post. Let me clarify briefly.

The fact that I do not credit American Muslims with loving Bin Laden and therefore being silent is not a matter of being oblique, but of rejecting such a claim.

I didn’t mean to imply that he does. Michael Scheuer, of Through Our Enemies’ Eyes and Imperial Hubris fame, does make the argument that a preponderence of Muslims idolize OBL and I was tossing it out as the most obvious answer.

[A] person who has been intimidated by a powerful machine of money and thuggery is not a coward. He or she puts his family’s security first. There is nothing wrong with that.

Perhaps “coward” is too strong a word, although people who will not stand up to be counted when horrible things are being done in their name are not exactly brave. Schwartz’ point that there is concerted pressure, including violence, mitigating against bravery is well noted, however.

The New York Times fronts a Douglas Jehl report contends that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a high level al Qaeda prisoner used as a major source by the Bush administration in its attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, was previously identified as unrealiable in a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency document.

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Suspicions

A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible” evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

[...]
The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence.

[...]

Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.”

[...]

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to another portion of the D.I.A. report, which expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence agencies but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims. “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,” the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”

It may well be the case that Libi was a “fabricator.” But there is simply no question that Saddam had a long history of dealings with Islamist terrorist groups, including those he could not “control,” going back to the 1980s as part of his campaign to establish himself as the logical successor to Gamal Abdel Nasser. As I documented in a Strategic Insights essay in July 2004,

[T]he fact that Saddam Hussein actively supported Islamic terrorists has been an article of faith since the Carter Administration. Indeed, Iraq was one of the original five states (along with Iran, Libya, Syria, and Cuba) on the first “Patterns of Global Terrorism” list compiled by the State Department in 1979. Saddam was a major sponsor of various terrorist groups, including the PLO, HAMAS, Mujaheddin e Khalq, and the Abu Nidal Organization long before al Qaeda was founded. There is credible evidence that Saddam actively backed the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center[5].

The paper trail for the al Qaeda connection is more difficult to establish given the cellular nature of that organization and its recent provenance. Losing bin Laden author Richard Minter observed last September that,

[M]any of those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside Iraq. And many of bin Laden’s men were in Iraq prior to the liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record — from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers — attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam going back to 1994[6].

Minter outlines-with twenty-three bullet points-details of proven contacts between senior al Qaeda leaders and Saddam Hussein or his representatives. Stephen Hayes notes that the Clinton Administration[7] and many seasoned professionals of both parties[8] believed Saddam and al Qaeda were connected. American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Ledeen, an opponent of the Iraq War, asserted in 2002 that “a relationship with bin Laden is as close to certain as you can get in the world of clandestine operations[9].”

“Anonymous,” the senior CIA counter-terrorism official whose forthcoming Imperial Hubris has been widely anticipated by critics of Bush Administration[10], details this tie in his first book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. Not only did the Iraqis participate in military training but there was active cooperation in the effort to obtain CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) capability:

Bin Laden’s first moves in this direction were made in cooperation with [National Islamic Front] leaders, Iraq’s intelligence service, and Iraqi CBRN scientists and technicians. He made contact with Baghdad through its intelligence officers in Sudan, and by a [Hassan al-] Turabi-brokered June 1994 visit by Iraq’s then-intelligence chief Faruq al-Hijazi; according to Milan’s Corrier della Sera, Saddam, in 1994, made Hijazi responsible for “nurturing Iraq’s ties to [Islamic] fundamentalist warriors.” . . . . Turabi’s scheme for an overall strategy was not achieved, but there is information shiowing that in the 1993-1994 period bin Laden began work with Sudan and Iraq to acquire a CBRN capability for al Qaeda.

. . . . A Sudanese military engineer named Colonel Abd-al-Basit Hamza . . . reportedly manages “a group of companies. . .run by the NIF in cooperation with Iraq and bin Laden. The operation of this program is led by Iraqi scientists and technicians, led by Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Mubaruhah, and by Asian and foreign experts.” The New Republic quotes a Sudanese military defector as saying that “up to 60 Iraqi military experts rotate through Sudan every six months, and that some of these experts are involved in some kind of munitions development” at the MIC. In addition, Sudanese oppositionists–not the most unbiased sources–claim Iraq’s technicians are helping Sudan build chemical weapons at MIC facilities in Khartoum and , in return, Iraqi chemical weapons have been hidden by Sudan at the Yarmuk Military Manufacturing Complex in Sheggara, south of Khartoum[11].

As is made clear elsewhere in the book, the relationship between MIC and al Qaeda during this period was symbiotic, making distinction between cooperation with one or the other both difficult to discern and irrelevant.

Apparently surprised by the furor over their report, the 9-11 panel’s co-commissioners finally weighed in to quiet it down. Chairman Thomas Kean, interviewed on PBS’ Newshour, noted

[T]here were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there. But as far as any evidence that Saddam Hussein was in any way involved in the attack on 9-11, it just isn’t there[12].

Former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton, responding to a question about Vice President Cheney’s continued insistence[13] that there were indeed ties between Saddam and al Qaeda, said

I must say I have trouble understanding the flak over this. The vice president is saying, I think, that there were connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government. We don’t disagree with that. What we have said is … we don’t have any evidence of a cooperative, or a corroborative relationship between Saddam Hussein’s government and these al Qaeda operatives with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me the sharp differences that the press has drawn, the media have drawn, are not that apparent to me[14].

This effort was to little avail, with pieces such as a widely-publicized New York Times op-ed by New America Foundation fellow Peter Bergen continuing to flow[15].

The cooperation between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda was of no minor consequence, especially as it pertained to the pursuit of CBRN weapons. As Anonymous argues, “What al Qaeda wants, simply, is a tool to kill as many non-Muslims . . . as possible in one stroke. . . . What al Qaeda wants is a high body count as soon as possible, and it will use whatever CBRN materials it gets in ways that will ensure the most corpses[16].”

While links between Saddam and al Qaeda are long established, evidence of Saddam’s involvement in the 9-11 attacks has always been sketchy at best.

See the original piece for the footnotes.

I learned yesterday from former colleague Christina Davidson that Imperial Hubris author Michael Scheuer had an op-ed in yesterday’s NYT defending the practice of sending terrorist suspects overseas for possible torture. He points out that the policy was spearheaded during the Clinton Administration by “National Security Director Samuel Berger and his counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke” who lauded its successes.

I know this because, as head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden desk, I started the Qaeda detainee/rendition program and ran it for 40 months. And in my 22 years at the agency I never a saw a set of operations that was more closely scrutinized by the director of central intelligence, the National Security Council and the Congressional intelligence committees. Nor did I ever see one that was more blessed (plagued?) by the expert guidance of lawyers.

For now, the beginning of wisdom is to acknowledge that the non-C.I.A. staff members mentioned above knew that taking detainees to Egypt or elsewhere might yield treatment not consonant with United States legal practice. How did they know? Well, several senior C.I.A. officers, myself included, were confident that common sense would elude that bunch, and so we told them – again and again and again. Each time a decision to do a rendition was made, we reminded the lawyers and policy makers that Egypt was Egypt, and that Jimmy Stewart never starred in a movie called “Mr. Smith Goes to Cairo.” They usually listened, nodded, and then inserted a legal nicety by insisting that each country to which the agency delivered a detainee would have to pledge it would treat him according to the rules of its own legal system.

So as the hounding of C.I.A. and the calls for its officers’ blood continue, a few things must be made clear – all the more so if the government is really considering the renditions of many detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. First, the agency is peculiarly an instrument of the executive branch. Renditions were called for, authorized and legally vetted not just by the N.S.C. and the Justice Department, but also by the presidents – both Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush. In my mind, these men and women made the right decision – America is better protected because of renditions – but it would have been better if they had not lacked the bureaucratic and moral courage to work with Congress to find ways to bring all detainees to America.

Second, the rendition program has been a tremendous success. Dozens of senior Qaeda fighters are today behind bars, no longer able to plot or participate in attacks. Detainee operations also netted an untold number of computers and documents that increased our knowledge of Al Qaeda’s makeup and plans.

I agree with Scheuer that, if we’re going to do this, we should have the moral courage to do it openly and within the scope of the checks and balances of our political process. While it contradicts my general impression of the effectiveness of torture in gaining useful intelligence, I’ll defer to his far superior expertise that the program has in fact been immensely helpful.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, though, I remain quite leery of the practice. This is odd, since I have no qualms about killing terrorists by the bushel. Still, torture seems so uncivilized and contrary to the American ideal. If Scheuer is correct, though, the price of such queamishness may be high, indeed.

Thomas Joscelyn has a piece today at the Weekly Standard website about a recent appearance by Imperial Hubris author Michael Scheuer at the Council on Foreign Relations.

According to Scheuer, the tiny nation of Israel is not a valuable ally in the Middle East, but instead the author of a vast conspiracy to hijack the direction of American foreign policy. Scheuer explained to the CFR crowd that Israel dictates the course of its relationship with the United States. He explained, “we can no longer afford to be seen as the dog that’s led by the tail.” Scheuer further warned, “I don’t think we can afford to be led around, or at least appear to be led around by them.”
[...]
In Imperial Hubris, Scheuer endorsed the view that widespread Muslim hatred of America is an outcome of American policies that are perceived as anti-Islamic and not the result of Muslim hatred of western ideology or culture. In advancing this argument Scheuer ignores the role that state-controlled propaganda plays in shaping popular opinion in the Middle East. He also ignores the argument that U.S. foreign policy has been, on balance, ostensibly pro-Muslim and pro-Arab.

The piece is long and worth taking a look at. Deacon pronounces Scheuer “goofy” and Cori Dauber wonders, “how many of the eager media figures who made such a point of interviewing him (his image darkened, while he was still “Anonymous,”) had actually read the book, as opposed to the publicist’s blurbs.”

Having devoted a whole string of posts and an academic book review to analyzing Scheuer’s two books, I’m hard pressed to disagree with Deacon or Dauber on those points.

However, Joscelyn’s analysis is a bit misleading. Scheuer isn’t an apologist for the Islamists, merely an analyst of their mindset. There’s little doubt that Scheuer is right in his assessment of where our enemies are coming from. While bin Laden’s pronouncements on the subject are partly propaganda, they also reflect a genuine (if, in my view, entirely irrational) rage at Western encrouchment into the Muslim world. I agree with Joscelyn that our foreign policy has often been quite pro-Muslim and with Scheuer that our support of Israel has often seemed ideological rather than purely steeped in our national interests.

More importantly, though, Joscelyn does Scheuer–and the debate on counterterrorism in general–a great disservice by accusing him of anti-Semitism for daring to discuss the issue. He quotes Scheuer:

You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find–I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

Responds Joscelyn:

[This] claim, however, mimics the type of anti-Semitic propaganda that emanates from state-controlled media monopolies in the Middle East every day. Arab propagandists often accuse “the Jews” of winning “world sympathy by playing on the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities.” This is a recurring motif, for example, in Saudi state-owned newspapers. It appears that, in Scheuer’s view, Israel uses the Holocaust Museum as a way to curry favor by making people feel sorry for world Jewry.

Now, Scheuer’s formulation is rather odd, to be sure. Perhaps even, to use Deacon’s term, a bit “nutty.” But anti-Semitic? And to say that someone’s arguments are necessarily wrong simply because the Saudis make the same argument is absurd. It’s a variant of the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy.

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Imperial Hubris author Michael Scheuer has a column in today’s LAT explaining, “Why I Resigned From the CIA.” It has several interesting observations:

I do not profess a broad expertise in international affairs, but between January 1996 and June 1999 I was in charge of running operations against Al Qaeda from Washington. When it comes to this small slice of the large U.S. national security pie, I speak with firsthand experience (and for several score of CIA officers) when I state categorically that during this time senior White House officials repeatedly refused to act on sound intelligence that provided multiple chances to eliminate Osama bin Laden — either by capture or by U.S. military attack.

***

The 9/11 commission report documents most of the occasions on which senior U.S. bureaucrats and policymakers had the chance to attack Bin Laden in 1998-1999. It is mystifying that the American public has not been outraged over these missed opportunities.

Note the dates here. His tenure was entirely during the Clinton Administration, during which Richard Clarke was the White House terrorism advisor. While the Left consistently focused on Scheuer’s critique of the Bush Administration’s response to 9/11, especially the Iraq War, it is worth noting that Scheuer was equally frustrated with Bush’s predecessor.

Referring to Clarke and others, Scheuer fumes:

Each of these officials have publicly argued that the intelligence was not “good enough” to act, but they almost always neglect to say that they were repeatedly advised that the intelligence was not going to get better and that Bin Laden was going to kill thousands of Americans if he was not stopped.

***

Perhaps a starting point is for Americans to ask why no member of Congress’ Graham-Goss investigation or the Kean-Hamilton commissioners ever directly asked Clarke, former national security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, CIA Director George J. Tenet, former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, former Secretary of State [sic] William S. Cohen* or any of the rest of the witnesses why they never erred on the side of protecting Americans; why international opinion was ultimately more important than the Americans who leaped from the World Trade Center; and why the intelligence was “good enough” to save the life of an Arab prince dining with bin Laden, but not “good enough” to cause the government to act on behalf of Americans.

I would note, however, that Scheuer undermined his own efforts somewhat by the tone of Imperial Hubris** and some of his comments to the press during its publicity tour. By focusing so much on the Iraq War and the Bush Administration–all the better to generate a huge buzz from an anti-Bush, anti-war press corps–he took attention away from what he now rightly notes is the more important issue.

Further, it’s rather ironic that Clarke and Scheuer are such intense rivals. They both suffer from the “if only they had listened to me” plight of the aggrevied functionary. Even if one presumes that Clarke and Scheuer are absolutely correct in their presentation of past events, it is understandable that those above them in the chain of command took al Qaeda less seriously than they did. It is a virtual tautology that the specialist thinks those above him fail to appreciate the importance of his work.

*Cohen was, of course SecDef, not SecState, a position held by Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright during the period in question.

**See my review of Imperial Hubris in Strategic Insights for more discussion of this point.