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

by Scheuer, Michael

  38.Since 2001 Islamists have made strong gains in elections in Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, and Bahrain. For summary articles on this trend, see Roula Khalaf and William Wallis, “Rising Islamist Tide Redefines Middle East’s Political Canvas,” Financial Times, January 27, 2006; Jonathan Last, “One Last Thing—Democracy, of Itself, Is Not a Solution to All Problems,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 6, 2006; Hassan M. Fattah, “Democracy in the Arab World, a U.S. Goal, Falters,” New York Times, April 10, 2006; and Dan Murphy and Joshua Mitnick, “In Mideast Elections, Militants Gain,” Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 2005.

  39.Ironically, America’s wartime allies and U.S. officials also authorize prisoner releases that contribute to the Islamists’ manpower. Afghan president Karzai and Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki have both been forced by domestic political pressures to release large numbers of men captured on the battlefield. Karzai, for example, has been attacked by the Afghan media for declaring an amnesty for “thousands of Taliban and their terrorist guests” who almost immediately “regrouped against the government and security of Afghanistan. They have mocked the good will of the Afghan government and have made efforts to expand and aggravate aggression and warfare in Afghanistan.” On the American side, the U.S. military has released Saudi, Pakistani, Chinese, Yemeni, European, and Afghan Islamist fighters. The release of Afghan Pakistani prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, in particular, has repeatedly backfired. Many of the freed Afghans and Pakistanis have rejoined the Taliban-led jihad in Afghanistan, and some have been subsequently killed or recaptured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. See “The Son of a Wolf Will Be a Wolf,” Cheragh, October 24, 2004; Fayiz al-Maliki, “Mazhar: Saudi-U.S. Talks for the Release of 124 Saudi Detainees in Guantanamo,” Al-Watan (online version), October 18, 2004; James Gordon Meek, “Freed, Many Rejoin Taliban,” New York Daily News, February 13, 2004; “Ex-Detainee Leading Pakistani Militants,” Washington Post, October 13, 2004, A-14; and John Mintz, “Released Detainees Rejoining the Fight,” Washington Post, October 22, 2004, A-1.

  40.Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Multiculturalism in History: Ideologies and Realities,” Orbis 43, no. 4 (Fall 1999), 538. Those in American political life who ahistorically insist that U.S. society and culture is no better than any others and that it is exportable to the world at large despite immense cultural differences, would do well to consider Dr. Fox-Genovese’s conclusion that “the United States ranks as the primary example of a democratic multicultural society, and it has owed its success to distinctly Western values and institutions, including individualism and democracy.”

  41.Fouad Ajami, “Where U.S. Power is Beside the Point,” New York Times, October 17, 2000.

  42.Since leaving the CIA, I have been involved in teaching intelligence analysis to junior U.S. military personnel—lieutenants, captains, and NCOs. Most of these men and women are on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan, many of them for the second or even third time. In late 2006 one young sergeant offered me an example of how difficult it is for U.S. soldiers and Marines to eliminate the threat they face. This sergeant said that his unit’s camp came under mortar fire from Iraqi insurgents, and his squad was sent out of the camp to try to find and destroy the mortar and its crew. The squad worked around to the flank of the mortar position and found that its insurgent crew had fired the last of its rounds and was breaking down the mortar to leave the area. The squad leader radioed this information back to his unit and asked permission to attack. His request was denied because the insurgents were no longer in the act of attacking Americans, and so they were allowed to move off with their mortar, presumably to attack U.S. forces again another day.

  43.“A recent conference of British and American experts at Ditchley Park in England,” Dr. Nye wrote in early 2007, “concluded that while a hard-power response is necessary against the identified hard core of terrorism, this might not amount to more than 10 or 20 percent of the whole defense effort [against militant Islamism]. A larger effort should be devoted to public communication with mainstream Muslims.” Nye suggests that using soft power and dropping the term “war on terrorism” are keys to winning “the generational struggle to win hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims and hinder al-Qaeda recruiting.” Again, Dr. Nye and the soft-power advocates press ahead with their advocacy despite polls that show that “mainstream Muslims” hate U.S. foreign policy as much as al-Qaeda does, and that while they are attracted to America’s values, they are increasingly repelled by its neopagan popular culture. In this context, a complete reversal of U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world and the re-Christianization of America would be needed to enable U.S. soft power. Harvard would never approve. See Joseph S. Nye, “Just Don’t Mention the War on Terrorism,” International Herald Tribune, February 8, 2007.

  44.Quoted in Wright, Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations, 368, 372.

  45.Quoted in Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005), 336.

  46.Fareed Zakaria, “Why the War Was Right,” Newsweek, October 20, 2003.

  47.Fareed Zakaria, “The Radicals Are Desperate,” Newsweek, March 15, 2004.

  48.Fawaz Gerges, “A Change of Arab Hearts and Minds,” Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 2004, and “Al-Qaeda Represents a Security Nuisance, Not a Strategic Threat,” www.bruneitimes.com.bn, November 17, 2006.

  49.Three recent books suggest that the Islamists, Sunni and Shia, are attracting many of the Muslim world’s educated young. See Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005); Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Dr. Sageman is particularly good in using statistical research to deflate the West’s inexplicably durable myth that terrorists are bred by poverty, unemployment, and illiteracy. On the issue of employment, for example, Dr. Sageman writes:

  The popular wisdom on terrorists suggests that they were desperate people, with little economic opportunity or without a decent occupation. In this sample, I collected occupational information on 134 people [identified as Islamist terrorists]. At the time they joined the jihad, 57 were professionals (physicians, architects, preachers, teachers), 44 had semi-skilled positions (police, military, mechanics, civil service, small business, students) and 33 were considered unskilled. So only a quarter of the whole sample could be considered unskilled workers with few prospects before them. These unskilled terrorists were heavily concentrated in the Maghreb…The rest of the sample showed the same type of upward mobility found in terms of educational levels. An argument can be made that, far from being a product of falling expectations, the jihad was more a result of rising expectations among its members. (78)

  50.Fareed Zakaria, “Terror and the War of Ideas,” Washington Post, April 10, 2004, A-15.

  51.Mansoor Ijaz, “Terrorism’s New Operating System,” National Review Online, September 17, 2005.

  52.While there is no end of bad advice and guidance from individuals such as these, a good deal of sound advice from Muslim commentators in Europe and the Middle East goes unheeded. An example comes from the pen of Rami G. Khouri, editor at large of Beirut’s Daily Star. “My conclusion,” Khouri wrote in 2005,

  after this rich week of travel and conversation [in the United States] is that sensible middle class Americans want to get on with the hard work of making a living in challenging times, while their federal government conducts a foreign policy based more on make believe perceptions and imaginary realities.

  Bush’s speech at the National Endowment for Democracy last week reaffirmed to me that Washington’s policy to fight terrorism is a mish mash of faulty analysis, historical confusions, emotional anger, foreign policy frustrations, worldly ignorance, and political deception all rolled into one.

  He completely igno
res the impact of American, Israeli, and other foreign policies on the mindsets of hundreds of millions of people in the Arab-Asian region.

  What Mr. Khouri misses is that President Bush’s foreign policy is essentially the consensus foreign policy of the U.S. governing elite, spiced with more pungent rhetoric but plagued by the same self-inflicted failures and disasters. See Rami G. Khouri, “Bush’s Fantasy Foreign Policy,” www.tompaine.com, October 11, 2005.

  53.Benjamin and Simon, The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right (New York: Times Books, 2005), 225.

  54.Baker III and Hamilton, The Iraq Study Group Report, xvii. Like the 9/11 commissioners, the Study Group’s members were served by an excellent and highly qualified staff. The published study seems to me to bear the same stamp of political expediency as the published 9/11 Report, suggesting that the research and analysis done by the Study Group’s staff was not fully exploited.

  Chapter 5. And the Islamists’ Fire Quietly Spreads

  1.The only senior U.S. official who has urged Americans to take seriously what bin Laden et al. say has been President George W. Bush. Mr. Bush did so explicitly in the fall of 2006 and in the 2007 State of the Union Address. Not surprisingly, however, Mr. Bush told Americans that if they read bin Laden’s words, they would learn that the Islamists hate Americans for who we are, not for what we do. To read, it seems, is not always to learn, but President Bush at least has taken the first step. See “Press Conference of the President,” www.whitehouse.gov, September 15, 2006, and “Our Enemies Are Quite Explicit About Their Intentions,” Boston Globe, January 24, 2007.

  2.The distinguished scholar of Islamic law Khaled Abou El Fadl has explained that bin Laden and his allies are waging a defensive jihad, the justification for which is solidly based in Islamic jurisprudence, and he notes that they have not argued that they are waging an offensive jihad to reestablish the caliphate. “But it is important to note,” Dr. El Fadl has written,

  that the notion of defensive jihad is well rooted in the classical juristic tradition, and that contemporary Islam has not had a problem adopting the idea of defensive jihad…Even Muslim fundamentalists insist that they are fighting either to defend the integrity of Islamic sovereignty or to regain occupied territory. On no occasion in recent memory have Muslims pursued a jihad to convert the world.

  See Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Holy War versus Jihad,” Ethics and International Affairs, 14 (2000), 138.

  3.In an incisive essay that the neoconservatives must have forgotten to erase from the record, Dr. Lewis has suggested that the current Muslim dictatorships imported their fascism from Europe, and traditional Islam contains materials from which a form of democracy could be constructed.

  The kind of dictatorship that exists in the Middle East today has to no small extent been the result of modernization, more specifically of European influence and example. This included the only European political model that really worked in the Middle East—that of the one-party state, either in the Nazi or communist version, which do not differ greatly from one another…

  The traditions of command and obedience are indeed deep-rooted, but there are other elements in Islamic tradition that could contribute to a more open and freer form of government: the rejection by the traditional jurists of despotic and arbitrary rule in favor of contract in the formation and consensus in the conduct of government; and their insistence that the mightiest of rulers, no less than the humblest of his servants, is bound by the law…

  The study of Islamic history and the vast and rich Islamic political literature encourages the belief that it may well be possible to develop democratic institutions—not necessarily in our Western tradition of that much misused term, but in one deriving from their own history and culture, and ensuring, in their way, limited government under law, consultation and openness, and a civilized and humane society. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experiences of the Muslim people on the other to provide the basis for an advance towards freedom in the true sense of the word.

  See Bernard Lewis, “Democracy and the Enemies of Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2003. Interestingly, Osama bin Laden’s critique of the al-Saud family’s rule is consonant with Lewis’s suggestion that there is an Islam-based alternative to the European fascism of Arab rulers. “Governing,” bin Laden wrote in 2004, “is a contract between the Imam [ruler] and the people who will be ruled by him. This contract contains rights and obligations for both parties. It also has provisions for cancellation and making it null and void. One of the provisions which nullify the contract is betraying the Deen [religion] and the Ummah. And that is exactly what you [the al-Sauds] have done. This is of course if we assume that the contract was a valid one to begin with. But we all know that you have forced yourself upon people without consulation or acceptance.” See “Osama bin Laden’s December 16, 2004, Statement to the Saudi Rulers,” http://jihadunspun.com.

  4.Ian Buruma, “Ghosts of the Holocaust,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2007. The Islamic world’s historic lack of a fixed and consistent interest in “Christendom” is well and concisely discussed in Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), 36–55.

  5.The urban legend that Osama bin Laden is a Muslim-come-lately in his focus on the Palestine-Israel war is often stated but not supportable. In his 1996 declaration of war on the United States, for example, he refers to the Palestine-Israel war on seven different occasions, and throughout his public remarks he refers to the motivation he has derived to attack the United States from Israel’s attack on Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra, Shatila, and Qana in Lebanon. See bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans”; John Miller, “Talking to Terror’s Banker,” www.abcnews.com, May 28, 1998; Peter Arnett, “Osama bin Laden: The Interview,” www.cnn.com, May 12, 1997; and “Mujahid Osama Bin Laden Talks Exclusively to Nida’ul Islam About the New Powderkeg in the Middle East,” Nida’ul Islam, January 15, 1997.

  6.Bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans.”

  7.For bin Laden on the proper per-barrel price for oil, see “Osama Bin Laden’s December 16, 2004, Statement to the Saudi Rulers,” www.jihadunspun.com, and Hamid Mir, “Interview with Osama Bin Ladin,” Pakistan, March 18, 1997.

  8.“‘Islamists win’ in key Saudi poll,” www.new.bbc.co.uk, February 11, 2005; Steve Coll, “Islamic Activists Sweep Saudi Council Elections,” Washington Post, April 24, 2005, A-17; and Faiza Seleh Ambah, “Saudi Crackdown on Dissenters,” Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 2006.

  9.Jordan is the linchpin of Washington’s efforts to secure a Palestinian-Israeli settlement, and so rising Islamist militancy is a significant problem for its efforts. See Rana Sabbagh-Gargour, “Jordan Carefully Measures Its Democratic Openings,” www.daily star.com.lb, December 12, 2006; “Jordan Turns Its Sights on Muslim Brotherhood,” Financial Times, June 22, 2006; Suleiman al-Khalidi, “Jordan Says Islamist MPs Face Incitement Charges,” Reuters, June 12, 2006; “Jordan Detains Islamist Deputies,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, June 12, 2006; Borzou Daragahi, “Jordan’s King Risks Shah’s Fate, Critics Warn,” www.latimes.com, October 1, 2006; and Jamal Halaby, “Jordanian Elections,” Associated Press, August 1, 2007.

  10.“Mubarak says Brotherhood Are Threat to Security,” Reuters, January 11, 2007; Dina Abdel Mageed, “Analysis: Egypt’s Cat and Mouse Game with the Brotherhood,” www.metimes.com, January 28, 2007; and Jonathan Wright, “Egypt’s Mubarak Defends Constitutional Changes,” Reuters, March 24, 2007.

  11.On the nationalist motivations of Hezbollah, see Pape, Dying to Win, 129–39.

  12.Roger Hardy, “Thailand: The Riddle of the South,” BBCNEWS.com, February 15, 2005.

  13.William F. Buckley, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” National Review, December 30, 1991.

  14.David Gergen, “There is No Israel ‘Lobby,’” New York Daily News, March 26, 2006.


  15.John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books, March 23, 2006, also available at www.imemc.org

  16.Those in the West seeking to downplay the threat posed by bin Laden do so in the very Western way of pointing to results of personality polls, and there is no doubt that the al-Qaeda chief’s personal popularity has dropped since 9/11. I would argue, however, that the truly telling polls are those that measure attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy across broad sections of the Muslim world, and those polls have consistently shown increased negatives for U.S. policy since 9/11, especially since the invasion of Iraq. I would speculate that another al-Qaeda attack in the United States would restore bin Laden’s personal poll numbers—and then some—because of the deep hatred of Muslims for U.S. government actions in their world. For details of the University of Maryland poll, see Tony Blankley, “A Rising Tide of Fury,” www.Real ClearPolitics.com, May 3, 2007, and for the argument focused on bin Laden’s personal popularity, see Ed Johnson, “Muslim Support for Osama bin Laden Is Falling, Researchers Say,” www.bloomberg.com, July 25, 2007.

  17.Michael F. Scheuer, “A Fine Rendition,” New York Times, March 11, 2005.

  18.In the hours after 9/11 CIA’s bin Laden unit was tasked to define several operations that could be quickly run to strike back against al-Qaeda and its supporters. One of the most lucrative ideas suggested was to ask each country to raid an Islamist NGO on its territory and seize whatever electronic media and hard-copy data there was on hand. We were well aware that Islamist NGOs—especially those sponsored by Saudis and Kuwaitis—had been essential in the growth, disguise, and geographic dispersal of the international organization of al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups. The suggested raids would have netted far more relevant data on how the NGO-al-Qaeda-Islamist system worked than we ever had before. The raids, of course, could do nothing about 9/11, but the thought was that they might produce information allowing us to stop the next attack. The White House rejected the idea because they were concerned it would offend Muslim opinion.