Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (33 page)

A Leadership Desert

Successful political leadership is about consistently telling the hard, cold, and very often unwelcome and disturbing truth. In post-Reagan America we seem to have deliberately bred this trait out of our leaders and increasingly out of the students in our university system. As John Adams, perhaps the most perceptive of the Founders on the subject of human nature’s foibles, told a jury, “Facts are stubborn things.” Adams was right of course, but in contemporary America we have solved the problem by collectively deciding to ignore inconvenient facts. Blatant bribery and payoffs in the funding of election campaigns becomes a form of First Amendment–protected “free speech,” and historically unacceptable and destructive behavior in civil society is abetted by claims that America must encourage the growth of a “diverse and multicultural society.” The astounding zest of contemporary Americans for disguising stark facts can be seen in the attribution of the term
music
to much of what is heard today on the radio. In the domestic sphere, U.S. political leadership today consists mostly in building a vocabulary that will allow our elite to disguise as modern, sophisticated, and humane the “stubborn facts” that are eating away the core of America’s civil and political society.

In foreign affairs, leadership also is about telling the truth, and it is also about discernment. In the war that bin Laden declared in 1996, we have had neither from our leaders. Not once in that decade has any U.S. political leader stood up and talked to Americans about what our foes are claiming this war is about from their perspective. They have taken no steps to ensure that words of our Islamist enemies are available for Americans to read, study, and consider; ten years on, the only verbatim text of a bin Laden speech easily accessible to Americans is the one he delivered on the eve of the 2004 presidential election.
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The goal of making this material available would not be to cultivate empathy or sympathy for the Islamist perspective—it would not be to propagate an “Oh, poor Muslims!” syndrome, as some of the conservative media claims
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—but to help Americans understand the threat their country faces, their enemies’ motivation, and the debilitating lies about both that their bipartisan political leaders have foisted on them for the last decade. As always, for America to function and survive as a republic—and protect itself from what John Jay called the “weak and the wicked”—its population must be educated in ways that permit an understanding of the world and, perhaps more important, that allow them to assess the arguments, reasoning, and justifications presented to them by their elected leaders.

So here is the dilemma that Americans face in the leadership realm in as unvarnished a form as I can present it: Americans are not being led, they are being lied to. The lies are causing them to (a) underestimate the threat posed by bin Laden and his allies; (b) not recognize that the current U.S. foreign policies in the Muslim world are pushing toward Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations; and (c) realize that our governing elites will never adequately protect America unless they are forced to do so by their countrymen. On the latter point, Americans will have to decide whether these men and women are illiterate fools or cynical self-servers who value office over U.S. security—these are the only two options in explaining their behavior.

In this context, there is room in America for a leader who cares about his country more than his office; who is willing to do the hard work of protecting Americans over the easy task of perpetuating failed policies; and most of all who is willing to tell the truth that the price of America’s defeat by the Islamists will be that Americans, for the first time, would have to live as they must and not as they aspire to. What America needs, in a sense, is an Osama bin Laden of its own. Our Saudi foe’s appeal comes not only from his eloquence, strategic vision, patience, combat record, and managerial skills, though he has all of those in ample measure. The astounding breadth and durable appeal of bin Laden and his message also owe much to the near-absolute lack of popular and credible leaders in the Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia. In a crowd of dictators, absolute monarchs, effete princes, and coup-installed generals, bin Laden was like the unexpected cream that gradually but inevitably rose to the top of Islam’s bottle of fat-free milk.

Sadly, there is a similar opportunity for the rise of a bin Laden–like leader in the United States. In an American polity dominated by the uninspiring Harry Reid, the flip-flopping Hillary Clinton, the quick-tempered bully-boy John McCain, the ambulance-chasing John Edwards, and a raft of other no-discernible-talent politicians, the dire need for truthful, credible leadership is obvious. In just five presidential terms America’s political elite has squandered the opportunities left for them by Ronald Reagan’s annihilation of the Evil Empire. The political pygmies who inherited that amazing gift simply dragged it to the edge of the abyss. At this point it seems far more likely that the path ahead will lead over the edge and not, as in the past, to safety by the almost providential emergence of a leader of the caliber of Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. Self-inflicted defeat by the befuddled vacuity and moral cowardice of our leaders, and not victory, appears today as America’s most likely fate.

Al-Qaeda and Its Allies Take Stock

In all of America’s wars, the enemy has had a viewpoint that is based on his cultural and historical perspective, and through this lens he sees wartime events and assesses the state of his war effort. This, of course, is a truism. But in contemporary America that truism is accepted intellectually but spurned in reality and viciously attacked if it is spoken in public. When, for example, Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) said in a May 2007 debate in South Carolina among Republican presidential candidates that the Islamists’ motivation for attacking us on 9/11 was our foreign policy and its impact in the Muslim world, he was immediately smashed verbally by Rudy Giuliani (speaking for the obsessive U.S. interventionism that is dogma in both parties) for even suggesting such a thing.

Notice that Giuliani focused on Rep. Paul’s phrase “we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years” and ignored the Texan’s core argument that America is being attacked by Islamists because “we are over there.” The tough but ignorant cop Giuliani simply denounced Paul and, in essence, warned him never to say such an “absurd” and—implicitly—un-American thing again. After the debate Michael Steele, the Republican Party’s spokesman, said that Paul should probably be excluded from future debates because of what he said about U.S. foreign policy.
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Rep. Paul, to his credit and in America’s interests, did not retract anything, and continues to publicly oppose unnecessary U.S. intervention abroad.

Mr. Giuliani’s reaction to Rep. Paul’s remarks reflects the U.S. governing elite’s reliable, knee-jerk rejection to the idea that the enemy has a different perspective from our own and that, to win, Americans need to understand it. To take on that threat to understanding, the tone and voice of this chapter is more in the first person than its predecessors and successors. The change is deliberate and is meant to underscore the difficulty any American faces when trying to present a Rep. Paul–like, nonmainstream analysis of how Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their allies assess the progress of their war against the United States. It is easy to present an assessment of al-Qaeda’s estimate if an author uses—Giuliani-like—prevailing mainstream assumptions: Islamists hate Americans for how they live, think, and vote, not for what their government does; al-Qaeda et al. are the Muslim’s world lunatic fringe; the U.S.-Israel relationship is not a severe handicap for U.S. national security; America’s dependence on foreign oil is not a danger; and U.S. support for Muslim police states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, etc.—does not foment universal Muslim anger. Analysis based on these assumptions finds that America and its allies are winning the war.

When an American disagrees with or dismisses these assumptions as analytically unsound and dangerous for U.S. national security, however, the epithets begin to fly. Suggest, for example, that hundreds of millions of Muslims support or sympathize with the Islamists’ goal or that unqualified U.S. support for Israel is costing American blood and treasure—and will cost much more of each—and an author is defamed as a defeatist, an appeaser, an America-hater, or that most powerful and debate-silencing epithet, an anti-Semite.

In this chapter my intention is to defy the epithet-slingers, especially the pro-Israel American citizens—the Israel-firsters—who for too long have hurled the anti-Semite slur and successfully suppressed a frank and comprehensive debate on the content and conduct of U.S. national security policy in the Islamic world.

The chapter is divided into two parts. The first deals with my own experience with the Israel-firsters. I do not intend to defend myself in this section; my past work and its pretty consistent accuracy speak for themselves. I do, however, welcome the animosities the Israel-firsters have expressed for the chance they give to display their speech-limiting intentions and to argue the importance for Americans to ignore childish name-calling and begin voicing their views in a national debate that keeps no foreign policy issue—Israel, energy, or Arab tyranny—off the table. A good day for Americans, and for their families’ safety, will be the day when the Israel-firsters hear nothing in response to their slanders except the perfectly appropriate childhood chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

The chapter’s second part bends to the limits on public discourse about U.S. foreign policy displayed in the exchange between Rep. Paul and Mr. Giuliani. It offers an estimate of how al-Qaeda and its allies assess the status of their war against the United States, and it underlines the justifiable confidence they now have in the progress they have made as well as in ultimate victory. This section is seen through our enemy’s eyes and is written from his cultural and historical perspective. It is an assessment that I believe is both authentic and compelling, one that should be mulled over by Americans. Our Islamist enemies are more lethal, numerous, pious, sophisticated, patient, and modern than most of us have thought. They are motivated by what the U.S. government does—as Rep. Paul said, “because we are over there”—and not by how Americans think, vote, or live. This reality comes through clearly in the voice I have given al-Qaeda, a voice which is necessary only because of the debate-suppressing power of the Israel-firsters and those others—like Mr. Giuliani, his coterie of neoconservative advisers, and the bulk of both parties’ presidential candidates—who see no need for changing the U.S. foreign-policy status quo that is pushing America toward military defeat and economic disaster.

When I resigned from the Central Intelligence Agency in November 2004, my intention was to speak and write about the failure of the U.S. government and the American people to understand the nature and severity of the threat posed to the United States by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their other Islamist allies. I thought then—and believe more strongly now—that America’s governing elite had almost completely underestimated the threat and, indeed, had done so deliberately for the sake of domestic political ease. This deliberate misunderstanding has disguised a situation where, in early 2008, al-Qaeda and its allies stand just as Mr. Lincoln saw the political strength and military forces of the Union in 1864—stronger, more vigorous, and increasingly numerous as compared to the start of the war. “We judge,” the U.S. Intelligence Community concluded just before the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, “[that] the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic terrorist groups and cells, especially al-Qaeda.”
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My post-CIA intention was simply to stick to the facts as they were presented in the words of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the essays published by al-Qaeda’s theologians, commentators, strategists, and allies. For me, these words presented a compelling and consistent story of a growing group of Islamist militants bent on driving the United States from the Middle East and the Islamic world generally in order to remove U.S. protection—military, economic, and political-diplomatic—from Israel and incumbent Muslim regimes so that they can be destroyed. On review, those words also left the strong impression that these men were intelligent, patient, calculating, ruthless, hard-working, and driven by genuine religious motivation, an always dangerous combination of attributes in any enemy. Their multiple successful attacks against the interests of the United States and its allies between 1992 and 2004, moreover, tended to confirm both their intent and their ability to wage a destructive and geographically widespread war against America.

By sticking to these facts, I thought it would be a fairly straightforward task to accurately explain the nature of the Islamist threat and the motivation of those prosecuting it. I likewise believed that Americans would be relieved to learn that the Islamist threat was not the nihilistic and apocalyptic one described by their leaders—the annihilation of American society, all Christians and Jews, Western civilization, etc.—but rather a much more limited one that focused not on U.S. culture and society but almost exclusively on what the U.S. government did in the Islamic world. Better for Americans to know, I thought, that they faced a smart, thinking enemy, with limited war aims, and not the irrational, inchoate foe President Bush described: “They hate Christianity. They hate Judaism. They hate everything that’s not them.”
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My message, then, had nothing whatsoever to do with promoting empathy or sympathy for America’s Islamist enemies. My goal was to more precisely define how the enemy thought, his motivation and war aims, and the nature of the threat he posed. Having a solid handle on these issues is the indispensable grounding that is necessary before we can do what we must do—utterly destroy America’s Islamist foe.

Well, it did not turn out to be as easy a task as I thought. Republicans and their media advocates decided that, by explaining what bin Laden and al-Qaeda were up to and motivated by, and why U.S. efforts to defeat them were not yet nearly adequate to the job, I was a Bush-basher, an America-hater, a liberal-appeaser, and a mole who worked for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign from inside the CIA. From the Democratic side, I was identified as a war-monger, a strident nationalist (apparently American nationalism is hate speech for Democrats), an isolationist, and an unreconstructed Reaganite. (They had me cold on the last one.) The one thing that both sides agreed on was that I was indisputably a rank anti-Semite who wanted to abandon Israel. On this issue, American-citizen Israel-firsters led the charge, and their work was given a certain gravitas by
Commentary
’s senior editor, Gabriel Schoenfeld. The latter wrote an article that would have been lawsuit-worthy except that the anti–hate speech laws are written to exempt from protection any individuals the Israel-firsters target for public scourging as anti-Semites, which is their long-standing and only real talent. A small sampling of this reasoned and mature criticism of my work follows, none of which, of course, contained a single point that demonstrated any substantive value America derives from its relationship with Israel.

What the foregoing texts by Americans clearly say is that their fellow Americans cannot be patriots if they use their right to free speech to question any aspect of the U.S.-Israeli relationship; that U.S. citizens should not be allowed to work at CIA—or presumably elsewhere in the U.S. government—if they are not Israel-firsters and a pogrom is needed to remove critics of Israel from federal employment; and that any American who claims that the impact of unqualified U.S. support for Israel in the Muslim world is unreservedly damaging to U.S. interests is a “sniveling weasel,” an “idiot,” a person with “demonstrable mediocrity of mind and unhinged views,” and that old-reliable epithet of the Israel-firsters’ scourge-machine, a
Mein Kampf
–reading Nazi.

Besides the authors listed above, other distinguished U.S. citizens are reliable Israel-firsters. These men, for example, fairly swarmed to attack Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer when they published an article critical of the influence that pro-Israel groups are allowed to have on U.S. policies.
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On this occasion, the list of U.S. citizens acting as Israel’s thought police was impressive: James Carroll, Max Boot, Steven Simon, Alan Dershowitz, David Gergen, Christopher Hitchens, Marvin Kalb, and Eliot Cohen.
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These authors claim or imply that criticism of Israel by U.S. citizens is anti-Semitism, and some have such contempt for their fellow citizens that they practice the Big Lie by asserting definitively that there is no such thing as an “Israeli lobby.”
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Among these writers are found the
takfiris
of contemporary American politics, men who, with delicious irony, mirror Muslim
takfiris
in taking it upon themselves to decide who is and who is not a “good American,” then mete out punishment to those of their countrymen who do not make the grade.
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