Although in many ways an irritating, even dangerous, book, Scheuer´s attack on recent American policy in regard to terrorism and the Middle East raises many issues that need to be seriously addressed.
He calls into question the labeling of the fight against al-Qaida as a war against terrorism. I have questioned the use of the phrase “war with terrorism’ on many occasions, but his critique is quite different. He thinks we are definitely at war, sometimes implying that the war is with “Islam’ and at other times with extremist or Jihadist Islam and at other times with the al-Qaida organization. He is certainly correct in his belief that “terrorism’ does not capture what we face, although his use of “insurgency’ as an alternative term also does not seem to capture the situation. I am left with the feeling that we will have to restructure our vocabulary to meet the challenge. “Terrorism’ is a way of fighting. We cannot have a “war’ with it, for a war is something that can be won (or lost) and terrorism will always be with us. We are also not in a bitter struggle with most of the terrorists that periodically rise and fall throughout the world. Our struggle today is with a particular group or group of groups. What we are facing is also not an “insurgency’ as this word is generally used. An insurgency is against a particular regime in a particular place, while as Scheuer emphasizes ‘Ussama bin Ladin does not intend to replace the American government or its control over its people. In Saudi Arabia his movement may be an insurgency, but its strikes against us are something else.
Scheuer places an emphasis on this issue because he believes one of our major mistakes is in treating the struggle with bin Ladin as a matter of law enforcement. We consider our enemies to be criminals that need to be brought to justice. This individualization leads us to assume that by capturing and eventually trying a few individuals in court we will be putting down our opponents and eventually destroy the organization as with have managed to do with the Mafia over the years. This approach also leads us to take a legalistic approach to what we need to do in Afghanistan and Iraq. By labeling the struggle a “war’, on the other hand, Scheuer can use his many maxims from the Civil War by such as Sherman to justify a massive bloodletting as the only road to victory. He thinks that we should have gone into Afghanistan with many more troops and killed many more Afghans right away, both civilian and combatant. He seems to have no patience with the Geneva Conventions or the idea of getting international organizations and Coalition partners involved in the war. In the desperate fight he imagines, we should not be encumbered by such concerns.
The author devotes many pages to showing that Ussama bin Ladin is a rational and capable leader with clear objectives. He wants a world in which Muslims live by Islamic codes in Muslim countries, He is asking us to leave that world and threatening to beat us over the head until we do. His main demands are (1) that we stop supporting the tyrannical secular princes and other authoritarian leaders of Muslim states and (2) that we stop our one-sided support of Israel. He believes that bin Ladin is right on both counts and that we should leave and stop support for Israel. But since we do not, and since in a democracy the people are evidently not prepared to force their leaders to act in this way, then Americans must be prepared to fight the war that bin Ladin has initiated.
He sees bin Ladin as building an almost irrefutable case against the West in the eyes of most Muslims. And in many ways, the more we do to oppose bin Ladin (without changing our policies), the stronger his movement will get. Scheuer sees our efforts in Afghanistan as pitiable and hopeless. He tells us we lost the battle from the first, evidently by letting the Northern Alliance do our fighting for us. He thinks the invasion of Iraq was the best boon we could have ever granted to Ussama bin Ladin. It has become an easily reported proof of our evil intentions in the area (as most Muslims are bound to interpret what they see us doing on their TVs). As such, Iraq has become a recruiting ground for legions of future warriors in the way of Islam.
Scheuer attacks from several vantage points the foolishness of the present American Administration and the intelligence they have been using to support their policies. His main thesis is that before action against an enemy, one must understand that enemy. Few in the American government or military has had the ability or the will to make this effort, and unfortunately many who should have helped them to understand what they faced failed to accept the responsibility. They should have known, for example, that taking Afghanistan was a major undertaking and that holding it would be almost an impossibility. They should have known that Iraq would be even more difficult. They should have known that democracy in our sense is a pointless dream in the area for the foreseeable future. This leads us to the “hubris’ of the title. Americans think they can do anything and do it easily that they do not need to study what they are facing before they attack. (Many would have placed the “hubris’ in the context of ignoring the opinions of major allies, but this is not at all what Scheuer has in mind.)
The author makes a good case against two aspects of the way in which Washington currently does business. First, he points out to the climate in which serious leaks of information have repeatedly hurt the American cause. In case after case, he recites how a leak has been damaging. To take a particularly egregious example, it was reported two weeks after the attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that we had “reaped a bonanza from intercepted terrorists´ radio and telephone calls’. The terrorists did not use the phone again. Scheuer assumes that the reason for the leaks are rivalries within the government, carelessness, and simply showing off to reporters or others. He also thinks that one of the greatest crimes in Washington is that those who know the truth about situations and options do not speak up when they should. He traces much of this back to the fact that highly placed military and intelligence officers, as well as others in the top reaches of government have come to expect years of high paying jobs in the private sector after they leave government service. This has become so standard an expectation that they start thinking about these possibilities years before retirement. As a result they avoid making those kind of statements that might hurt their reputation in the eyes of future possible employers. It all builds up to a quiet but massive conspiracy that ignores the public interest. His solution is to guarantee full salaries in retirement for people in such positions and allow no private jobs of this kind after retirement. The policy would cost quite a bit on the surface, but save much more later on. This seems to be an excellent idea.
The main quarrels I have with the book lies in its black and white and ridiculously self-confident approach to the world. While I would disagree with much of what happened in Afghanistan, I think there is a good chance that Karzai and company can work out a future for the country that is much more in our interest that what went before. The situation in Iraq is tougher, but I also think that the self-interest of the majority of the people could help us come through this situation with a much more positive outcome than Scheuer imagines.
His approach to war, foreign policy, and international alliances demonstrates even more hubris than he ascribes to his targets. We need to work with the world, no matter how messy that might be. We cannot do everything. If we cannot, then we must let others have a say and must welcome their help wherever possible. We cannot, then, follow a Sherman approach to all our military actions or our treatment of prisoners. There is a world opinion to deal with and we would be well advised for the world´s sake and ours to pay attention to it. It might in many cases, such as Iraq and Israel, improve the choices that we finally make.
Finally, his understanding of Islam, Jihad, and the wells of Islamic sentiment that Ussama bin Ladin is tapping is not nearly as good as he believes. It is true that bin Ladin evokes a great deal of support when he points out that those who rule Islamic countries are not good Muslims in a legalistic sense. Yet what Scheuer fails to remember is that this has been the case since the first four caliphates. Although Islam as a theory does not recognize the separation of church and state, indeed seems often to think of them as parts of the same enterprise, in actual fact the church and state have been at least as separate historically in Islam and they have been in the West. Khomeini´s rule in Iran was remarkable in that it was one of the first times in the history of Islam that the sacred and the secular had been brought together to establish a theocracy. Khomeini made the atrocious claim that monarchy had no place in Islam, a claim that flew in the face of the fact monarchs had ruled Islamic countries throughout history. Many of these monarchs had also been playboys and consumers of alcohol. In fact, the mixture of rulers and systems ruling Islamic countries today is not too different from the historical mixture. History is on the side of assuming that yet another claim to return to the purity of early Islam will in the end be rejected by the great majority of Muslims that have other and more pressing concerns. Bin Ladin may be able to recruit many more to his cause, and cause more havoc than he has so far, but it is certainly not inevitable that he will be able to turn the world of Islam against the West.