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

by Scheuer, Michael

  It is fashionable in these days to regard Washington—and America’s other Founders, who will be cited periodically throughout this book—as irrelevant, as dead white men, as antiquated, and as morally abhorrent because some of them owned black slaves. This attitude is a mistake for any American to take. The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers. The Founders’ eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the “political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature, informed by scripture, informed by Christian apologists, informed by philosophers.” 5 The Founders’ wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.

  Let me pause here to note that my attitude toward Israel—and almost all other nations—turns solely on its usefulness, or lack thereof, to the United States. I always have argued that Israel should and must do whatever it believes is necessary to protect its citizens and territorial integrity from its Muslim enemies. I have no quarrel with Israel’s actions; nor am I arrogant enough to make recommendations for policy changes for the Israeli people. My criticism is not for Israel but for U.S. governments that have knowingly put America at risk on Israel’s behalf. Nothing in America’s relationship with Israel rises to the level of a U.S. national interest as defined above. Given this reality, it is dangerous and ultimately self-defeating to confuse the tremendous emotional attachment some U.S. citizens and most of the American governing elite have for Israel—with the campaign contributions of many of the former often cementing the support of many of the latter—with the actual existence of a genuine U.S. national security interest in the survival of Israel. No such interest exists, and what substantive ties do exist hardly justify the contribution they make to what is becoming an endless war between the United States and the Muslim world.

  Much of the unreality in U.S. attitudes toward Israel is the result of ahistorical arguments that Israel has “the right to exist.” Clearly, no nation has the “right” to exist; Darwinian logic applies to nation-states as well as to the other components of the animal kingdom. If there was such a right, the nations of the world would be working to resuscitate the Soviet Union, Sparta, Hannibal’s Carthage, and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Nations exist as long as they can defend themselves, contain internal societal rot at nonfatal levels, maintain economic viability, and do not gratuitously make a constellation of more powerful enemies. This truism applies equally to all: the United States has no more right to exist than does Israel, Palestine, Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, or Russia. “You form your country, and you take your chances” is a pretty good synopsis of history over the past several millennia. In regard to Israel, the U.S. governing elite—especially its neoconservative and liberal elements—have compounded the right-to-exist doctrine with a demand that Israel’s enemies accept that right to exist before there can be talks or negotiations. The fairly and democratically elected Hamas government therefore must accept Israel’s “right to exist” before talks between the two can begin and before Hamas can receive Western economic aid. In other words, Hamas must renounce a large part of the basis for its election—a willingness to fight and defeat Israel—and accept Israel’s right to exist to avoid being economically strangled by the West. In this context, it is clear that the recognition of a state’s “right to exist” is based not on a right at all but on one side’s ability to coerce abject surrender from the other. Supporting Israel’s “right to exist” is especially ahistorical when it is advocated by Americans, as it is a “right” they have never insisted on for their own nation. If they had, we would have never talked or negotiated with the Soviets after Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised that the USSR would “bury” the United States—surely a failure to acknowledge America’s right to exist if there ever was one.

  The second great challenge faced by the United States in 1973 was the oil embargo imposed by Saudi king Faisal to damage the U.S. economy in retaliation for Nixon’s all-out support for Israel against the Arab armies. Although the rise in 1973 pump prices seems distant and inconsequential compared to the inflated prices in 2005–7, the shock to the U.S. economy and Americans’ confidence thereon was nonetheless substantial. If common sense had prevailed or had even been in the general neighborhood, the embargo would have ignited a massive, federal government–led financial and brainpower investment in domestic oil and gas deposits, alternative energy sources, the design and manufacture of much more efficient automobile engines, and the development and proliferation of safer nuclear-power plants.

  Sadly, as in the case of Washington signing up for automatic war when Israel is at war, neither common sense nor General Washington’s guidance was anywhere to be found. Nearly thirty-five years after the first Saudi oil embargo, we have the same energy dependence, a reality that is made worse by lingering memories of ill-heated federal buildings and by the irritating recollection of President Jimmy Carter wearing Captain Kangaroo’s cardigan while whimpering about the malaise in which American citizens were mired. No national energy policy has been forthcoming, although such a policy has been much talked about whenever prices at the pump begin to creep up. Whenever anyone has had the political courage to say that energy supply is an issue of national security as much as or more than a matter of economic policy and so should not be left to the crapshoot of market forces, he or she was shouted down by two groups. Both political parties’ gun-for-hire economists, especially from the Republican side, would babble some economic jargon about oil being a “fungible commodity,” the supply of which would be adequately allocated by international cooperation and market forces.6 Any rejoinder arguing that unless the United States greatly reduced its energy independence, Americans would be in the economic thrall of foreigners and would eventually fight wars to ensure oil supplies, was greeted with contempt and derision: “Does the speaker not know that our close and loyal friends, the Saudis, would make sure America has adequate oil supplies?” Few seemed to recall that it was a Saudi king who authored the 1973 embargo, and fewer still seemed to recall the words of General Washington—words that hauntingly warn against decisions that make U.S. security dependent on so-called friendly nations. With relevance as strong today as in 1796, Washington warned his countrymen that wisdom lies in

  constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and of yet being reproached for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.7

  The other attack on the advocates of increased energy independence came from America’s ultimate elitists—the environmentalist purists, whose fanaticism undermines the ability to promote reasonable and much-needed environmental-protection measures in America. Phoning their congressmen from Volvos plastered with Ralph Nader and save-the-whale bumper stickers, these folks let it be known that they were all in favor of energy conservation and independence, as l
ong as no Arctic hare was disturbed, and exotic shrimp and ferns could multiply in peace and comfort atop forever-untappable energy deposits on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. In essence, the environmentalist elite much prefers to have U.S. Marines killed in overseas wars for oil—as is happening today—than to lose a species of aquatic plant life or a potentially succulent candidate for a tasty plate of shrimp scampi.

  U.S. national security, therefore, suffered two enormous and slowly accelerating defeats in 1973, the cost of which would become increasingly clear in succeeding years, especially after 9/11. While rescuing Israel in 1973 might have made sense for the United States in Cold War terms, there seems to have been no sober second thought in Washington after the Yom Kippur War ended; no one asked the question, “What is America’s real interest in an alliance with Israel?” One would have thought that the near-sinking of the U.S. naval ship Liberty by the Israeli air force might have caused someone to ask what sort of ally we were aligning ourselves with, but such was not the case. And if the near-destruction of the Liberty did not prompt the question, King Faisal’s embargo clearly should have, by its display of both the depth of Arab-Israeli hostility and the potential price the Arabs had the capability to exact from Israel’s supporters. But wariness and smarts in Washington were in short supply, and the Nixon administration signed up America on both sides of a religious war-to-the-finish between Israel and the Arab states. By cementing the U.S. relationship with Israel and turning the other cheek to King Faisal’s attempt to destroy the U.S. economy, Washington made itself the abject servant of two unforgiving masters. Henceforth the political party in power in Washington gave Israel free rein to do as it liked because of the domestic political disaster that pro-Israeli Americans could inflict on politicians who did not equate the protection of Israel with that of America, and it genuflected toward the Arab tyrants in Riyadh and elsewhere in the Gulf to ensure the steady oil supply that the U.S. economy needed to prosper and that, in turn, kept pump prices low and helped them to hold office.

  Thus 1973 saw the start of a series of decisions that ran directly counter to one of the chief goals of any country’s foreign policy, that of keeping open the greatest number of options so that the government maintains flexibility when the time comes to confront unexpected events. And no 20/20 hindsight is needed to draw this conclusion. The decisions Washington made regarding Israel, Saudi Arabia, and oil voluntarily gave strategic hostages to fortune and that was clear at the time; shortsightedness, negligence, and stupidity were and are blatant in Washington’s decisions to tie U.S. national security to that of another nation-state, and to acquiesce in ceding to the anti-American Saudis control over U.S. access to the strategic commodity of oil. On and after 9/11, it would become clear that Washington’s 1973 decisions on Israel and oil left the George W. Bush administration with virtually no room to maneuver in the Muslim world, though it must be said that the ideological rigidity and close oil-industry ties of Bush and his cabinet were such that they may have perceived no need for maneuverability. These shackles constricting America launched Uncle Sam into bin Laden’s well-laid trap. “It is easy to make acquaintances,” General Washington wrote in 1783 in words applicable to America’s relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia today, “but very difficult to shake them off, however irksome and unprofitable they are found, after once we have committed ourselves to them.”8

  1982: Watching the Mujahedin Assembly Line

  While the U.S. defeats of 1973 resulted from conscious if ill-considered decisions and then their blithe perpetuation, 1982 ushered in an era of non-decisions in which the U.S. government and its major allies would simply stand by and idly watch the growth of a worldwide infrastructure of paramilitary training camps that specialized in training young Islamists as insurgents and terrorists. I chose 1982 as a starting point not because the first camps were organized in that year—Yassir Arafat’s PLO and other secular, non-U.S.-threatening groups in the Muslim world and elsewhere had opened camps before then—but because Lebanese Hezbollah was formed in that year and soon thereafter began building its training camps in Lebanon’s Biqa Valley. These camps became the world’s flagship training installations for religiously motivated Shia militants. The Hezbollah camps were internationally known; they were condemned and threatened from every political rostrum in the United States and Western Europe; and they were left absolutely undisturbed. In the years after 1982, similar and often better-quality training camps began to be built for Sunni militants in places like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kashmir, Mindanao, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Diverse Islamist groups, adhering to differing versions of Islam, received various kinds of military training in these camps. The camps themselves, moreover, ranged widely in quality from facilities that were the equal of camps used by nation-state militaries to ones that resembled home-made obstacle courses. The one commonality of all of these camps was that they operated without hindrance from the United States.

  Washington and its European allies were watching the camps, however. In the decades since Hezbollah’s birth, for example, mutiple components of the U.S. Intelligence Community have used their collection capabilities to annually assemble a review of all the known terrorist training camps in the world. The community also drew heavily on open-source material that surprisingly contained a good deal of detail, much of it provided by fighters who attended the camps. It seems frivolous to call this report a “yearbook,” but in essence that is what it was. Growing in length with each passing year, these annual reports contained a separate section on each camp’s attributes. The sections were updated each year (few camps were ever closed), and new sections were written to cover any new camps that had been discovered or built since the last issue of the yearbook. We could never be certain that we knew about all the camps that existed, but from Iraq’s Salman Pak camp to Afghanistan’s al-Faruq and Khaldun camps, to the bevy of camps run by Sudan’s Popular Defense Forces, the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence Community kept a steady, inquisitive, and increasingly knowledgeable eye on these facilities.

  The work of the CIA, its sister U.S. agencies, and foreign intelligence services, alas, proved to be an exercise in counterterrorist voyeurism; we collected intelligence for the sake of collecting intelligence. Until the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, neither the United States nor any of its allies made a serious, systematic, and sustained effort to destroy the camps in even one of the countries in which they were located. Not even Hezbollah’s camps in the Biqa Valley—the targets of immense martial ranting by Western leaders for more than two decades but still operating in 2008—were ever destroyed. Why? Two reasons, really. First, from the 1980s to this day Western governments talk a good game about the threat posed to national security by transnational entities (terrorists, narcotics traffickers, nuclear proliferators, etc.) but seldom demonstrate through their actions that they genuinely believe their own rhetoric. In this attitude the policymakers were often abetted by military officials who dismissed the camps as “jungle gyms” built of “rope ladders.”9 America builds weapons systems, fleets of aircraft carriers and submarines, strategic bombers, sophisticated satellites, and specialized military units to deploy against threats posed by nation-states, but it drafts not much more than angry words to deploy against transnational threats. Between 1982 and 2001 the universe of terrorist training camps was assailed only with harsh words, which did not harm them a lick.

  The second reason terrorist camps lay undisturbed for nearly twenty years is that there were always other “nuances” in international politics that made it inconvenient for U.S. officials to take definitive military or covert action against camps that trained Islamist fighters to kill the citizens of America and its allies. We could not hit Hezbollah’s camps, for example, because it might disrupt one of the always recurring and always false positive trends in Arab-Israeli relations; we could not take out camps on the island of Mindanao because it might complicate negotiations between the Philippine government and one or anot
her of the groups of militant Moro Muslims; and we could not attack Salman Pak camp because Iraq was a Soviet client and an attack might disrupt détente or then perestroika. During my career, no senior U.S. official was better at using the nuance dodge than Richard A. Clarke, the NSC’s longtime chief of counterterrorism. In his memoir Mr. Clarke delivers a perfect depiction of how the nuance argument works, showing how that even after the USS Cole was nearly sunk, Washington found it more important to help the Israelis than to bomb the al-Qaeda camps where some of the 9/11 attackers may well have been training. “Time was running out on the Clinton administration,” Clarke wrote of the weeks after the attack on the Cole,

  There was going to be one last major national security initiative and it was going to be a final try to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. It really looked like the long-sought goal was possible. The Israeli Prime Minister had agreed to major concessions. I would have liked to try both, Camp David and blowing up the al-Qaeda camps. Nonetheless, I understood. If we could achieve a Middle East peace much of the popular support for al-Qaeda would evaporate overnight [sic]. There would be another chance to go after the camps.10

  If you work in the U.S. Intelligence Community, you become very familiar with the “nuance” argument; it comes up almost without fail each and every time an opportunity is developed or chanced upon to use military force or covert action to attack and destroy a threat to American citizens. When intelligence officers produce a black and white option such as “Here is a training camp; it is producing men who will kill Americans; this is how it can be destroyed,” they are more often than not congratulated for fine detective work by senior IC officials and the senior grandees of the National Security Council. These individuals take the information and then wrap themselves in the sophisticated cloak of nuance, arguing that the intelligence is excellent but the officers who gathered it simply do not understand how an attack at this particular time, on this or that specific training camp, would be detrimental to maintaining a balance beneficial to the United States in the “ballet of international politics.” The yield from this process is always the same: the Nuancers emerge victorious, no action is taken, and the final score is nuance 1, American security 0. The net result: the CIA’s archives hold a lengthy shelf of terrorist training camp yearbooks featuring mind-numbing levels of detail on camps that were never attacked.11