Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series)

by Scheuer, Michael

  Currently, it is best to let federal officials babble lies about “greatly improved Homeland Security” and act instead at the state and local levels to protect Americans by taking hold of the responsibility for domestic security that Washington long ago abdicated. This means that state and local governments must effectively defy the federal government by working together; this is the only means by which U.S. domestic security can begin to be protected. At times this defiance will take the form of state governors using the same state-government powers they invoke when man-made or natural disasters occur; at other times, defiance will require blatantly refusing to obey Washington’s edicts. But in either case state governors must for now be the leading agents of this defiance. If America is to be protected, the governors must work across party lines and focus solely on the security of their citizens and nation.

  The governors should exert their control over the military reserve units that fall under state jurisdiction and refuse to transfer control of them to the federal government. The governors should then mobilize and deploy these units to staff and administer state-mandated, border-control regimes to stop the flow of illegal immigration. Of course all governors do not have a border-control problem, but all governors do suffer from the adverse consequences derived from those who do. If extra military manpower is needed by the governors on the front lines of this federally mandated and protected immigration debacle—such as those in California, Arizona, Washington, Texas, New York, Michigan, and New Mexico—the governors of interior states who do not have contiguous borders with negligent, apathetic, or ill-intentioned foreign powers should provide it. If federal authorities threaten legal or physical action against the states, the governors must defy them. Washington will quickly find that the electorate, in time of war, will rally to governors who act to protect them when the federal government will not. At this point Washington also would find itself impotent: can any American imagine a U.S. soldier shooting a fellow citizen for defying the federal government in an effort to protect all citizens?

  The governors can also use their control over military reserves to begin to rein in the president’s unilateral and unconstitutional war-making ability. Nothing in our Constitution is clearer than the requirement for Congress to declare war. In Federalist 69 Alexander Hamilton stressed that the U.S. Constitution ensured that the president’s ability to make war would not equal that of the British king. The president’s power to make war “would be nominally the same with that of Great Britain,” Hamilton wrote, “but in substance much inferior to it” because the powers to declare war and raise and regulate military forces “all which by the constitution…appertain to the Legislature.”7 Our first and greatest president respected this limit on his power. “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress,” George Washington wrote, “[and] therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”8 The U.S. military’s reserve forces, including those commanded by state governors, are key components of America’s war-making ability; without them large, long-duration wars overseas are not possible. Because the federal legislature since 1941 has allowed the president to effectively abrogate the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war, the governors must begin to deny the federal government this vital military manpower for use overseas unless Congress has formally declared war, thereby negating the ability of a president to take America to war simply because he or she is so inclined. There are, after all, few better definitions of a tyranny than a state where the decision to go to war rests with one individual. By retaining state military units under their command, the governors will provoke a long-needed constitutional confrontation between the electorate and the federal government that may at last return constitutional sanity to the issue of making war. Such actions would not, of course, be meant to make America vulnerable or render it unable to wage war abroad. Rather, they are meant to help destroy an unconstitutional power that has been assumed by presidents and to make domestic security certain and reliable, without which winning victory over our enemies overseas is, in any event, an illusion.

  Unfortunately for Americans, the state governors cannot do all that must be done. Although it does not at first blush appear to be a matter of domestic-security policy, the securing of the Former Soviet Union’s (FSU) nuclear arsenal must be a top homeland-security goal if the continental United States is to be protected. As noted, sixteen years after the fall of the USSR, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (1991) for securing the FSU’s nuclear weapons is less than half complete and has been reduced in personnel and funding during the tenures of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This is horrifying and unconscionable. A nuclear attack in the United States by our Islamist foes would cause untold human casualties, catastrophic economic and environmental damage, and requirements for rescue, quarantining, martial law, and reconstruction on a scale that could be addressed only by the resources of the U.S. military, thereby constraining the ability of those forces to operate overseas. Harvard’s Graham Allison has desribed such an attack in the United States as “the ultimate preventable catastrophe,” but so far Washington has not even done the minimum to reduce the chance of such a calamity to as near to zero as possible.

  Additionally, only the federal government can lead the Manhattan Project–like effort that is required to release the United States from energy dependence on governments who are our enemies, who cannot control their own territory and ensure reliable energy production and export, or who would be tempted to disrupt our economy for religious reasons—such as, respectively, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. That we are in this dependent state is a fact; that we must stay in that condition is not. Energy policy must become a priority national-security issue because it is quite clearly a life-and-death issue for our economy and lifestyle at home, as well as for our ability to conduct a foreign policy of our choosing—one that gives us options—and not one ultimately controlled by foreigners. The exploitation of oil and natural gas reserves in the Arctic and coastal waters, higher miles-per-gallon requirements for automobiles, the greatly increased use of nuclear power, the development of alternative and renewable energy sources, and conservation programs at all levels of government will need to be included in the drive for as large a measure of energy self-sufficiency as it is possible to attain.

  The exact provisions of a national energy policy are beyond my writ—and wit—but the urgent need for such a policy is starkly apparent to all who see energy as a national-security issue and not just an aspect of economic policy. Those, like Daniel Yergin, who argue for letting the free market, increasing global integration, and the “great bubbling all along the innovation frontier” work out energy supply problems9 miss the point that the United States, in terms of ensuring its national security, is no longer operating in the nation-state-dominated Cold War era. If the threat came only from nation-states like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, it would be manageable. To a great extent, self-interest will drive the activities of nation-state oil-producers, and presumably none would want to create a situation where the United States would simply have to take control of their oil resources and production facilities. But that is not the whole picture. Today al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations are focused on disrupting the supply of oil to the United States as a means of achieving their war aim of driving America from the Muslim world by bleeding it to bankruptcy. “This [energy] vulnerability isn’t lost on Islamic terrorists,” the incisive energy analyst Gal Luft has explained. “They have identified the world energy situation as the Achilles heel of the West and have made attacking it a central part of their plan.”10 The ability of these groups to significantly disrupt U.S. oil supplies has not been proven, but their failed attacks have caused prices to spike. It would be short-sighted and negligent in the extreme to plan U.S. energy policy on the basis of a best-case scenario that assumes the Islamists cannot do so. Energy self-sufficiency, like
border and immigration-control and securing FSU nuclear devices, is a measure of self-defense against a nonnation-state enemy whom we cannot deter by the prospect of military retaliation, who has no qualms about using any weapon he can acquire and exploit, and against whom our military power cannot always be delivered in an annihilating manner.

  And Abroad—Hold Tight, Then Disengage

  After the process of securing the home front has become irreversible, Washington can, over time, begin unshackling the United States from its failed policies in the Muslim world. In this context, achieving energy self-sufficiency is again pivotal. In the conduct of foreign policy, the degree of energy self-sufficiency America attains will be the degree to which it can begin to aggressively disengage from the problems, hatreds, and wars of the Muslim world in which it has a stake only as long as U.S. energy supplies are insecure. Put bluntly, as progress is made toward U.S. energy self-sufficiency, it will become obvious that there is no U.S. national interest in the Arabian Peninsula that is worth the life of a single U.S. Marine.

  Disengagement clearly will take a number of years and again is not possible without progress toward energy self-sufficiency. But by gradually breaking the energy shackle, Washington will reacquire the option of making policy changes aimed at redirecting—deflecting, if you will—the anger and violence of the al-Qaeda–led Islamist movement back against its primary enemy: the Muslim tyrannies that rule much of the Islamic world and Israel. Currently, the activities that Washington undertakes to facilitate the success of its current foreign policies in the Muslim world succeed only in digging a deeper hole for the United States. U.S. intelligence operations, for example, that help the Mubarak and al-Saud regimes survive and continue oppressing their domestic populations validate the claims of bin Laden and his ilk that Washington’s championship of democracy is rank hypocrisy and that America prefers that Muslims be ruled by tyrants. For the Islamists, the visible, often-televised impact of a U.S. policy that protects and prolongs the existence of Muslim dictatorships is an invaluable asset. This point is often very hard for Americans to see because U.S. policy does help to maintain a superficially stable and orderly, if brutally authoritarian, political environment in much of the Muslim world, and because U.S. leaders never deign to tell them how much danger Washington’s life-support program for Arab tyrannies has caused for U.S. security, and how much more pain for Americans is stored up for the future.

  Thus, the reality is that the United States is becoming, and in some cases is now, identified by Muslims as the cosponsor of the tyrannical systems of government they live under. It is a common belief in many Muslim countries that U.S. financial, military, political, and diplomatic aid ensures that tyrannies remain in power. This belief in turn assists bin Laden in persuading Muslims that the key to overthrowing their rulers is to drive the United States from the region and thereby weaken the ruling regimes to the point where they can be destroyed by the mujahedin. Whether bin Laden is correct in this strategic assumption is an open question, but the fact is that his argument has won the agreement of millions of Muslims over the past decade. More important, it has won significant support among Sunni militants, as best exemplified by al-Zawahiri’s fundamental shift of focus from trying to destroy Mubarak’s regime to working to bankrupt Mubarak’s U.S. government financiers. And from a justifiably narrow U.S. national-security perspective, what price are Americans going to pay for their government’s unqualified support for Israel when the day arrives—and it surely will—when the Palestinians conclude that Israel cannot be driven from Palestine until its soft and indulgent U.S. patron is hurt badly at home? We fail to see this trend at our own peril, especially given the size of the Palestinian diaspora in the United States. If there is one hard-and-fast rule in U.S. national security, it should be that U.S. leaders must never adopt policies that tend to bring other peoples’ conflicts, especially religious wars, inside the United States. Washington’s current policies in the Muslim world are open invitations to others to bring their religious wars—Arab-vs.-Israeli and Sunni-vs.-Shia—to America.

  I want to stress that the foregoing is not a purist’s argument against any U.S. support at any time for an authoritarian or tyrannical government. Because human beings are hard-wired for war and lesser conflicts, the United States will inevitably and repeatedly find itself in wartime situations where our interests will mandate such an association. We should have no moral qualms about working with any regime that can further U.S. security; these kinds of relationships, however, should be kept to the necessary minimum and the ties should be transitory, with disengagement becoming a priority once the wartime situation has ended. Most of our current relationships with Muslim tyrannies do not meet that criterion. The billions of dollars we annually pay to the Egyptian regime to pretend it does not hate Israel, for example, earn America nothing but a diplomatic mercenary in a peace process that will never come to fruition, and the hatred of common Egyptians who daily feel the wrathful whip of Mubarak’s U.S.-funded security services. I will leave it for the American people to decide whether they believe the Founders would have, for even a moment, endorsed the federal government taking money from its citizens’ pockets to pay a massive annual bribe to a Muslim dictatorship to pretend to be friends with the near-theocracy in Israel that American taxpayers also are lavishly funding.

  So the first step toward American security after Iraq and the drive toward energy self-sufficiency is a thoroughgoing revision of U.S. policy in the Islamic world in the direction the Founders intended: noninterventionist, commerce-oriented, nonideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and undergirded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars. Now, before the hyperventilating begins, let us hand out oxygen supplies to the any-change-in-U.S.-foreign-policyis-appeasement-or-surrender-to-the-terrorists crowd. And bring lots of oxygen because this crowd includes most of the U.S. governing elite. So pervasive is this no-change sentiment that at times you would swear that U.S. foreign policy was not drafted by fallible humans but rather arrived in the Rotunda, hand-etched by the Deity on stone tablets. It did not. The first thing most military and intelligence officers learn is to never, ever reinforce defeat; if a plan on execution lands you in a no-win situation, get out of the mess as cleanly as possible and go back to the drawing board. Our elite, however, invariably and perversely shows resolve only when it defends and reinforces policies that have America being defeated on every front. For example, the Muslim world’s anti-American hatred was raging in July 2006 because Washington and its G-8 partners were standing by and letting Israel gut Lebanon’s economy and infrastructure. Okay, what do we do? Right, publicly announce that the U.S. military is urgently sending large shipments of precision weaponry to assist Israel in making the gutting more destructive. Where is the sense in that? Enough. America is the greatest economic and military power the world has ever seen. What on earth do we have to be afraid of if we change foreign policies that are palpable failures and detrimental to U.S. security? Foreigners will think we are weak? Our allies will doubt our constancy? Domestic lobbies will retaliate in the next election? Churchill would never surrender? So what. We are the superpower, the policies are ours for the changing, and if other peoples and countries do not like the changes—tough. We are in business as a country to please and protect ourselves, and it is truly stupid, not altruistic, to stubbornly stick to status quo policies and bleed blood and money because our self-image might suffer if we admit to being wrong and thereby earn the criticism of others.

  U.S. foreign policies are not addenda to the Ten Commandments; changing our policies is a sign of common sense, not weakness; and protecting America is infinitely more important than seeking to avoid driving Europeans and Arab royals into a snit. Foreign policy success can be measured only by the extent to which it preserves and expands freedom and liberty domestically. As Walter Lippman wrote, foreign policy is the “shield of the republic”; it is not the agent of planting the republic or clone
s thereof outside North America. The right path for America, therefore, is nonintervention and a studied aloofness from affairs outside the United States that have no bearing on our national interests. Nonintervention is not isolationism; the former is a policy, the latter is a slur used by America’s governing elite to quiet any voice that asks, for example, why are you dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Serbs who never attacked or even threatened the United States? To ask such a commonsense question is to be labeled by the elite and the media, right and left, as a Luddite isolationist who thinks America can hide behind its oceanic frontiers and have no truck with the outside world. Well, no, there is nothing explicit or implicit in the question “Why are you bombing the Serbs?” that suggests a desire to hermetically seal America. The question asks only what it asks: “Why are you intervening in the affairs of a people and a region who have done nothing to threaten or harm you and of whose politics, culture, and history you know next to nothing?” To respond by saying, “Be gone, you ignorant isolationist!” is not an answer, it is an arrogance that says, “We know so much more than you about the complexity of world affairs and—here it is again—the ballet of international politics and, in this case, the nuances of Balkan politics, that you must accept our analysis and actions as correct. Please go home, be quiet, and watch television.”

  This modus operandi ought not to wash with Americans, but it does far too frequently, and our elites are today running a foreign policy in the Muslim world that has left the United States with no options in the ongoing war and that, if left as is, will ultimately destroy America. U.S. foreign policy neither protects Americans at home nor brings much benefit, let alone democracy to anyone abroad. Indeed, it is an absolute mystery as to why our elites believe that any American should give a tinker’s damn, much less a son or daughter, about whether any foreigner ever has a chance to vote in a democratic election. Mimicking President Woodrow Wilson, President George W. Bush has implanted more of this nonsense in the American political lexicon. “We are led, by events and common sense to one conclusion,” President Bush said in January 2005. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”11