Anti-terror conundrum

OPINION:

Michael Scheuer’s “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq” is an angry indictment of U.S. counterterrorism policy since the 1970s and a sometimes wild-eyed proposal for policies he believes are required to reinvigorate America’s standing in the Muslim world.

Mr. Scheuer’s portrayal of U.S. counterterrorism measures over the years is presented from an insider’s perspective, but the validity of some of his assertions has been disputed by other equally involved participants in the process. Moreover, his discussion of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, especially Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia tilts toward the jingoistic, propagandistic and one-sided.

At one point he writes, “The only country I care about is the United States. I care not a whit whether or not Israel survives. I likewise do not care if Zambia, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, Papua-New Guinea, Spain or most any other nation survives. Foreign relations are important only in so far as they benefit America.”

Some of his recommended military solutions are also excessive. For instance, he writes that after September 11 the United States should have “fire-bombed Kabul and Qandahar, demolished whatever ruins were left, and sowed salt over the length and width of both sites.” I suspect that Mr. Scheuer actually glories in such controversy, admitting in his “Author’s Note” that “this book is eclectic, impressionistic, and at times idiosyncratic.”

Mr. Scheuer is at his best when he discusses the tradecraft of counterterrorism and the internal battles between the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton and Bush administrations over counterterrorism measures that he claims were not taken, but had they been taken, he believes might have prevented September 11.

Mr. Scheuer was a top official in the CIA’s al Qaeda task force from 1995 to November 2004, when he resigned following the publication of his first book, “Imperial Hubris,” which was a critique of U.S. counterterrorism policy at the time.

In what Mr. Scheuer describes as pre-September 11’s “counter-terrorist voyeurism,” America and its allies talked a “good game” about the threat posed by these transnational terrorists but seldom followed through with meaningful action. This was despite the possession by U.S. intelligence of detailed information about training camps by al Qaeda, particularly in Afghanistan, in which tens of thousands of future jihadists from around the world underwent paramilitary training.

Not only were none of al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan effectively neutralized after the August 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole in October 2000, but the CIA’s proposals for pre-emptive covert action and military strikes against Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s were vetoed by Clinton administration officials.

As a result of such ineffectual retaliatory measures, Mr. Scheuer writes, al Qaeda and its allies learned “they had little to fear from U.S. military retaliation. Long before 9/11, the Islamists had pegged the United States as a super-talker rhetorically and as a super-diddler militarily.”

Mr. Scheuer also criticizes the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, especially America’s failure to focus on defeating the remnants of al Qaeda in that region, instead shifting its attention to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. This has served to vastly complicate today’s counterterrorist campaign against al Qaeda and its militant supporters around the world, he writes.

Mr. Scheuer has tough words for U.S. foreign policy toward the Muslim world, writing that it “has been conducted so as to avoid the issue of the Islamists’ motivation” which he describes as a “perception that U.S. foreign policy is an attack on Islam.” To remedy this perception, Mr. Scheuer advocates a drastic change in U.S. policy that is “non-interventionist, commerce-oriented, non-ideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and under-girded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars.”

However, in order to get the policy prescription right, you need to get the diagnosis right. He often does neither. For example, taking a completely American-centric position in formulating foreign policy is likely to produce ill-conceived measures that will damage U.S. interests both broadly and specifically. The beginning of analysis of any foreign policy case is to understand other nations’ interests and perspectives and to account for them in determining U.S. policy. Mr. Scheuer misses that fundamental point repeatedly.

In addition, as mentioned earlier, he is very casual about collateral damage — fire bombing cities and killing innocents is not only morally wrong, but counterproductive from a policy perspective.

Nevertheless, Mr. Scheuer’s book is worth reading for its insights about a still-ongoing threat.

Joshua Sinai is a program manager for counterterrorism studies at the Analysis Corp.