Adding to the vitriol and hatred of this general sentiment was a group of northerners who behaved in the same manner as those who have used Dr. Lewis’s book as a comprehensive condemnation of Islam and Muslims. The ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his supporters chose the wholesale denigration of southerners and their society as the means for defining the antislavery cause as a confrontation between goodness and enlightenment on one side, and wickedness and medieval obscurantism on the other. While Garrison’s strategy did not cause the Civil War, it contributed mightily to the hardening of southern attitudes toward the North and the ultimate termination of debate on sectional compromise in favor of war. “But if Garrisonian abolitionism was not the original cause of sectional conflict over slavery,” the eminent U.S. historian Don E. Fehrenbacher has tellingly argued, “it nevertheless had a critical influence on the temper and shape of the conflict.”
Out of passionate conviction, but also as a deliberate choice of strategy, the new [Garrisonian] abolitionists set out to destroy slavery by direct, personal attack upon everyone associated with the institution and everyone acquiescing in its existence. Their campaign of denunciation lacerated southern feelings as never before. The primary target, of course, was the slaveholder, whom they convicted of criminality, atrocity, and so on. The language had the effect of degrading and dehumanizing the slaveholder, even as he was said to be degrading and dehumanizing his slaves.36
And the cumulative negative impact of this constant denigration? Well, perhaps it was the production of a significant contribution to the coming of the war—the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. In his recent study of President Abraham Lincoln and Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born chief justice of the Supreme Court, the distinguished legal scholar James F. Simon details Taney’s rising anger and resentment over the North’s constant antebellum denigration of southerners as inferior both as human beings and in their culture and way of life. Simon assesses Taney’s pre–Dred Scott career on the Court as one of sound, well-documented, and Union-preserving constitutional reasoning and decisions. But Simon notes that even years before the Dred Scott case, Taney had begun to resent “northern humiliation” of the South and to worry that its continuation would push the South toward secession, a tragedy that was being made more likely by “the condescending attitude of northern politicians toward the south and their assumptions of moral superiority.” By 1857 Taney apparently had had enough. In drafting the Court’s majority opinion in the Dred Scott case, Simon argues, Taney was “influenced by his southern heritage,” and in the decision’s substance it “seemed as if the deep reservoir of southern resentment over the slavery issue suddenly poured out.” Chief Justice Taney “was a proud member of his region’s aristocracy,” Simon writes, “and when his class was attacked, he vehemently defended it. He bristled at the charge that slavery made the South morally inferior to the North.”37
In the Dred Scott case, Taney’s “bristling” not only overpowered the steady and talented mind that produced a career of prudence, good sense, and sound decisions, but also helped to bring on a civil war in which more than 600,000 Americans died. And several of the themes of the North’s denigration of the South are heard today in what is verging on a blanket Western condemnation of Muslim society: the Prophet Muhammad and Islamic society are “degenerate”; Muslims are in revolt against modernity and progress; secular Westerners are “morally superior” to pious Muslims; and Muslims are inferior because they oppose the separation of church and state. At bottom, the impact of such denigration is hard to quantify, but like Taney sharing and defending the proud southerner’s view, all Muslims share the heritage of Islam, tend to spring to the defense of their faith, society, and brethren, and bristle at the “humiliation” they perceive in Western criticism. Today, in fact, many millions of Muslims likely share the conclusion reached by the antebellum senator Judah P. Benjamin (D-Louisiana)—who later was a Confederate cabinet secretary—that “the heart of the matter was not so much what the abolitionists and Republicans had done or might do to the South, as it was the things they said about the South—and the moral arrogance with which they said them.”38 Thus, the shaping of Western thought and rhetoric toward wholesale denigration by the popularization and perhaps distortion of Dr. Lewis’s what-went-wrong thesis further reduces the already slim chance that any U.S. hearts-and-minds arguments will get a fair hearing among Muslims, radical, conservative, moderate, liberal, or otherwise.
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.39 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 claims40—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 f
irst 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.
CHAPTER 7
“O enemy of God, I will give thee no respite”
Al-Qaeda and Its Allies Take Stock
The important fact remains demonstrated, that we now have more men than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in the process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely.
Abraham Lincoln, 1864
The better rule is to judge our adversaries from their standpoint, not from our own.
Robert E. Lee, c. 1870
Over and over again this individualism of theirs [the Arabs]…has gravely weakened them; yet over and over again they have suddenly united under a leader and accomplished the greatest things. Now it is probable enough that on these lines—unity under a leader—the return of Islam may arrive.
Hilaire Belloc, 1938
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.
Rep. Paul: Have you ever read the reasons why they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years. They don’t come here to attack us because we are rich and free. They come here to attack us because we are over there.
Mr. Giuliani: That is an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through 9/11, that we invited the attack because we were bombing Iraq. I don’t think I have heard that before, and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he really didn’t mean that.1
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.2 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 v
oice 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.”3
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