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Seeing Islam Through a Lens of US Hubris |
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by Anonymous
(No verified email address) |
05 Jul 2004
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Our National Mind-set may be Leading us Toward Defeat, a CIA Expert Says |
On the one hand, Americans are told daily by the media, newsmakers and government officials that the West is winning the war that began on Sept. 11; that we've taken the fight to the terrorists and rolled back their networks, and that the majority of Al Qaeda's leadership has been captured or killed.
But if you listen closely, you can also hear sharp disconnects. The directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI warn periodically that Al Qaeda is as dangerous now as it was in 2001. And, if you dig even deeper into the newspaper, you'll find stories claiming these gentlemen are incorrect — Al Qaeda actually is more dangerous today than it was before what Osama bin Laden calls the "blessed attacks" of 11 September.
Periodically, the Department of Homeland Security has raised the threat-warning indicator from yellow to amber — or is it amber to yellow? — on a tacky traffic-light-looking device. Adjusting the streetlight-of-death is meant to portray the DHS judgment that the threat to U.S. interests from someone, somewhere in the world has increased. The warnings are then complemented by advice urging citizens to quickly buy a "disaster supply kit," which includes duct tape and plastic sheeting to make their homes airtight, WMD-proof fortresses.
To say the least, Americans are getting mixed and confusing messages from their leaders. Are we headed toward a victory parade, Cold War bomb shelters or simply straight to the graveyard? Do repeated warnings of an Al Qaeda-produced disaster mark a genuine threat, or have federal bureaucrats learned to cover their butts so they will not have another "failed-to-warn" Ă la 9/11? Are Bin Laden-related dangers downplayed to nurse the on-again, off-again economic recovery and the presidential prospects of both U.S. political parties? Are we to reach for champagne or a rosary?
I believe the answer lies in the way we see and interpret people and events outside North America, which is heavily clouded by arrogance and self-centeredness amounting to what I called "imperial hubris." This is not a genetic flaw in Americans that has been present since the Pilgrims splashed ashore at Plymouth Rock, but rather a way of thinking that America's elites acquired after the end of World War II. It is a process of interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.
"When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy," Lee Harris explained in the August/September 2002 issue of Policy Review, "our first instinct is to understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us." Thus, for example, Bin Laden is a criminal whose activities are fueled by money — as opposed to a devout Muslim soldier fueled by faith — because Americans know how to beat well-heeled gangsters. We assume, moreover, that Bin Laden and the Islamists hate us for our liberty, freedoms and democracy, not because they and many millions of Muslims believe U.S. foreign policy is an attack on Islam or because the U.S. military now has a more-than-10-year record of smashing people and things in the Islamic world.
Our political leaders contend that America's astoundingly low approval ratings in polls taken in major Islamic countries do not reflect our unquestioning support of Israel and, as such, its "targeted killings" and other lethal high jinks. Nor, they say, are the ratings due to our relentless support for tyrannical and corrupt Islamic regimes that are systematically dissipating the Islamic world's energy resources for family fun and profit, while imprisoning, torturing and executing domestic dissenters. The low approval ratings, we are confident, have nothing to do with our refusal to apply nuclear nonproliferation rules with anything close to an even hand; a situation that makes Israeli and Indian nuclear weapons acceptable — each is a democracy, after all — while Pakistan's weapons are intolerable, perhaps because they are held by Muslims. And surely, if we can just drive and manage an Islamic Reformation that makes Muslims secular like us, all this unfortunate talk about religious war will end.
Thus, because of the pervasive imperial hubris that dominates the minds of our political, academic, social, media and military elites, America is able and content to believe that the Islamic world fails to understand the benign intent of U.S. foreign policy. This mind-set holds that America does not need to reevaluate its policies, let alone change them; it merely needs to better explain the wholesomeness of its views and the purity of its purposes to the uncomprehending Islamic world. What could be more American in the early 21st century, after all, then to re-identify a casus belli as a communication problem, and then call on Madison Avenue to package and hawk a remedy called "Democracy-Secularism-and-Capitalism-are-good-for-Muslims" to an Islamic world that has, to date, violently refused to purchase?
This is meant neither to ridicule my countrymen's intellectual abilities nor to be supportive of Bin Laden and his interpretation of Islam, but to say that most of the world outside North America is not, does not want to be and probably will never be just like us. And let me be clear, I am not talking about America's political freedoms, personal liberties or respect for education and human rights; the same polls showing that Muslims hate Americans for their actions find broad support for the ideas and beliefs that make us who we are. Pew Trust polls in 2003, for instance, found that although Muslims believed it "necessary to believe in God to be moral," they also favored what were termed "democratic values."
I'm saying that when Americans — the leaders and the led — process incoming information to make it intelligible in American terms, many not only fail to clearly understand what is going on abroad but, more ominous, fail to accurately gauge the severity of the danger that these foreign events, organizations, attitudes and personalities pose to U.S. national security and our society's welfare and lifestyle.
In order to make the decisions and allocate the resources needed to ensure U.S. security, Americans must understand the world as it is, not as we want — or worse yet, hope — it will be.
I have long experience analyzing and attacking Bin Laden and Islamists. I believe they are a growing threat to the United States — there is no greater threat — and that we are being defeated not because the evidence of the threat is unavailable but because we refuse to accept it at face value and without Americanizing the data. This must change, or our way of life will be unrecognizably altered.
The author is a senior counterintelligence official at the CIA who served from 1996 to 1999 as head of a special unit tracking Osama bin Laden. The CIA allowed publication of his forthcoming book, "Imperial Hubris" (Brassey's, 2004), in which the author is identified as "Anonymous."
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Book by CIA’s “Anonymous” Reflects Analyst Outrage |
by Ray McGovern
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Jul 2004
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The book has an apt title: “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.” And the author spells out “why.” We are losing because of the misguided war on Iraq and the upsurge in terrorism it has engendered.
Sadly, that conclusion was validated last week by the widespread, coordinated attacks by the Iraqi resistance—attacks that brought Vietnam to mind and, specifically, the country-wide “Tet” offensive by Communist forces in early 1968 that made Walter Cronkite and many other Americans realize we had all been badly misled into thinking that that war was winnable.
The final week of formal US occupation of Iraq was a bad one. And the last thing the Bush administration needed was publication of the challenging judgments of a CIA analyst who devoted 17 years to tracking al-Qaeda and other terrorists. That analyst (let’s call him Mike) wrote that the Iraqi adventure was “an unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat.” He emphasized, “There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.”
Mike added that the US has “waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-US sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of al-Qaeda and kindred groups.”
Asked yesterday to comment on these biting charges, National Security assistant Condoleezza Rice refused on grounds that she did not know who Anonymous is. Did she not think to ask the CIA? If I had no trouble finding out, certainly she should have none.
Worse still for the administration, during an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on June 23, Mike rubbed salt in White House wounds, subjecting to ridicule the dumbed-down bromide that what motivates bin Laden and his Muslim followers is hatred of our “freedom,” our “democracy.”
It’s the Policy, Stupid!
“It’s not hatred of us as a society, it’s hatred of our policies,” Mike insisted. He gave pride of place to the neuralgic issue of Israel. With candor not often heard on American television, he emphasized “It’s very hard in this country to debate policy regarding Israel,” adding that bin Laden’s “genius” is his ability to exploit those US policies most offensive to Muslims—“Our support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian peninsula, in Afghanistan and Iraq, our support for governments that Muslims believe oppress Muslims.”
Asked how bin Laden views the war in Iraq specifically, Mike said bin Laden looks on it as proof of America’s hostility toward Muslims; that America “is willing to attack any Muslim country that dares defy it; that it is willing to do almost anything to defend Israel. The war is certainly viewed as an action meant to assist the Israeli state. It is…a godsend for those Muslims who believe as bin Laden does.”
Mike drove home this general message again Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” He argued that it is US policies that “drive the terrorism,” and said failure to change those policies could mean decades of war. Only if the American people learn the truth can more effective policies be fashioned and implemented, he added.
What Sets Mike’s Teeth on Edge
Here is where Mike’s understated outrage shows through most clearly. The undercurrent in both interviews is that his analysis was offered well before the war but, as he told NBC, “senior bureaucrats in the intelligence community (were unwilling) to take the full truth, an unvarnished truth to the president…Whatever danger was posed by Saddam…was almost irrelevant…The boost that (the war) would give to al-Qaeda was easily seen.”
Many experienced intelligence analysts will find it easy to identify with Mike’s frustration. Put on your analyst hat for a few minutes and put yourself in his place. You have studied the issue with painstaking professionalism for 17 years and have acquired an expert view of the forces at play and the likely result of this or that policy. You warn, you warn, and you warn, as Mike did. And yet, because of wooden headedness, stupidity, or sycophancy, your superiors disregard your views and you are reduced to looking on helplessly as a calamitous course is set for the country.
Adding insult to injury, you hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld confess, as he did on June 6 in Singapore, that “The troubling unknown is whether the extremists…are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them. It is quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this.”
For self-confident analysts, all this creates powerful incentive to publish their own analysis. Once published there is always a chance it might have some resonance—perhaps even influence. In any event, they will be able to tell their grandchildren: Don’t blame me; this is what I tried to get them to understand.
Many of us have been there, done that—including me during the sixties when I had a ringside seat at the crafting of US policy toward Vietnam, while serving as principal CIA analyst of Soviet policy toward Vietnam and China. As US forces got bogged down in the quagmire of Vietnam, senior officials in Washington began to indulge the wishful thought that the Soviets could be pressured or cajoled into “using their influence” to help the US find a graceful way out—and that, until then, we had to “stay the course.”
Though a relatively junior analyst at the time, I had already become convinced that the Soviet Union, in fact, had precious little influence with the Vietnamese Communists, mostly because it had sold them down the river at the Geneva Conference in 1954. If US policymakers thought differently, it was important to send them our own analysis and try to dialogue with them. My conclusions, however, were thought to be unwelcome among policymakers, and so an earlier generation of “senior bureaucrats” refused to send those judgments downtown.
Going Public
In early 1967 I drafted an article in which I documented my case for the judgment that “the USSR’s voice counts for little in Hanoi…when it comes to North Vietnam’s conduct of the war.” After receiving clearance from CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB), the article was published in the scholarly journal, “Problems of Communism.” Like me, Anonymous Mike received PRB clearance with no changes required.
While understandable, speculation that clearance of Mike’s book betokens an intent by senior CIA officials to take a swipe a those responsible for US mistakes on Iraq and terrorism does not ring true. It is not as unusual as press reports suggest for a serving CIA official to publish a book, although Mike’s was, because of the subject, bound to be highly controversial.
In my view, there is good news in the approval he obtained. It is a sign that there remain pockets of professionals at the CIA who are determined to honor their responsibility to protect First Amendment and other constitutional rights of CIA employees.
I regret to admit that I was not certain this was still a sure thing, in view of the way senior CIA officials have played fast and loose with the Constitution on even more consequential matters. Two summers ago, CIA Director George Tenet was a willing co-conspirator in the successful effort by the Bush administration to use counterfeit “intelligence”—including a known forgery—to deceive Congress into ceding its Constitutional power to declare war.
It is a safe assumption, though, that serious CIA analysts are glad to see Mike’s book out on the street. His judgments are congruent with what substantive analysts there have been saying for years about Iraq and terrorism—without much sign that policymakers were listening. Perhaps Dr. Rice and other senior officials will get the book and read it. That might help someone like Secretary Rumsfeld, for example, who often refers to the fact that some key factors are “unknown” and/or “unknowable” and complains that he frequently encounters a lack of “situational awareness.”
Embarrassed for Rumsfeld
I was embarrassed for Rumsfeld when he was on ABC’s “This Week” months ago and tried to field a question about how to reduce the number of terrorists. “How do you persuade people not to become suicide bombers; how do you reduce the number of people attracted to terrorism? No one knows how to reduce that,” he complained.
Again, it’s the policy. Well before the war in Iraq, CIA analysts provided an assessment intended to educate senior policymakers to the fact that “the forces fueling hatred of the US and fueling al-Qaeda recruiting are not being addressed,” and that “the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist.” The assessment cited a Gallup poll of almost 10,000 Muslims in nine countries in which respondents described the United States as “ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked and biased.” Again, that was before the attack on Iraq.
Too Little, Too Late?
Over the weekend former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke echoed many of the points made in Mike’s book. Clarke said the invasion of Iraq was an “enormous mistake” that is costing untold lives, strengthening al-Qaeda, and breeding a new generation of terrorists. “The hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations,” he added.
Which reminded me: With all due respect—and respect is indeed due the likes of Clarke, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil, and Anonymous Mike, who broke fraternity rules in speaking truth—why did they not do so before the war? One of the most depressing facts of the whole experience is the dearth of serving officials who were willing to speak out about the lies while it might have done some good.
Is it legitimate to ask Clarke, O’Neil, and Mike why they waited so long, when—just conceivably—earlier outspokenness might have made a difference? Surely they did not choose to put their publishers’ preferences as to timing before the cost of “untold lives.”
As for intelligence officers, the only ones to blow the whistle publicly before the war were Katherine Gunn of the UK and Australian intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie. In contrast to the timidity prevailing in US intelligence circles, three US Foreign Service officers, without direct access to the adulteration of intelligence, nonetheless were able to smell the rotten fish and summon the courage to follow their conscience. Without consulting (or even knowing) one another, Brady Kiesling, John Brown, and Mary Ann Wright all realized what they had to do. They quit the Foreign Service in protest—as loudly as they could, given the domesticated US press. And they did it before the war.
It saddens me that of the scores of US intelligence officers with inside knowledge regarding the abuse of intelligence and other indignities regarding the underpinnings of US policy on Iraq, not one—serving or retired—not one proved willing to risk his/her neck, career, friendships, or serene retirement in an attempt to stave off our country’s first major war of aggression.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst for 27 years, is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
This article first appeared on TomPaine.com
http://www.TomPaine.com |
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