Know your enemy. It's a classic military tenet. It's also one that retired CIA analyst Michael Scheur says we're ignoring in our approach to al-Qaeda. Scheur, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, for six years led the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden.
On Monday, Scheur gave an interview to Radio Free Europe. Here are portions of the transcript that are well worth reading:
"Well, [bin Laden] is certainly the symbol of a war, a war that really had very little to do with terrorism. American political leaders on both sides of the aisle have really not come to grips yet, five years later, with what this war is about. They continue to say that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and its allies are focused on destroying America and its democracy, its freedom, [its] gender equality. And really this war has very, very little to do with any of that. It has to do with what the West and the United States do in the Islamic world.
"And so because of our misunderstanding of the enemy's motivation and his intent, we have greatly underestimated the difficulty of attacking him and destroying him before we get attacked again.
"Well, I think the whole war effort so far has been a mistake, in the sense that we're slowly becoming [like] Israel, in that the only options we have open to ourselves are military and intelligence operations.
"Bin Laden has never been focused at all on Western civilization, as such. His ability to rally Muslims to his side is dependent almost solely on the perception in the Islamic world that Western foreign policy is an attack on Islam and the followers of Islam.
"...we just don't have leaders with the courage to stand up and understand that it's our presence more than anything else in the Islamic world that motivates the enemy, and Iraq was really a turning point in the war on Al-Qaeda and its allies.
Scheur was asked whether al-Qaeda will strike again in the US on a scale of the World Trade Centre bombings. "Oh, I think greater than 9/11. I don't think it will happen in Europe, but I do think it will happen in the United States. Bin Laden has been very clear that each of Al-Qaeda's attacks on America will be greater than the last, and I think the only reason we haven't seen an attack so far is that he doesn't have that attack prepared. But when he does, he will use it. And try to get us out of the way, which of course is his main goal.
"America is not his main enemy. His main enemies are the Al-Saud family in Saudi Arabia, the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and Israel.
"The primary goal of Al-Qaeda and the movement it has tried to inspire around the world has been to create Islamic governments in the Islamic world that govern according to their religion. And bin Laden's view on this is that those governments -- the government of Egypt, the government of Saudi Arabia, the government of Jordan, Algeria, right down the line -- only survive because the United States protects them, and Europe protects them. Either with money, diplomatic and political support, or military protection.
"And bin Laden's goal has been to simply hurt the United States enough to force us to look at home, to take care of things here, and thereby prevent us from supporting those governments, which he -- and I think the vast majority of Muslims -- regard as oppressive police states.
"Once America is removed from that sort of support, Al-Qaeda intends to focus on removing those governments, eliminating Israel, and the third step, further down the road: settling scores with what the Sunni world regards as heretics in the Shi'ite part of the Islamic world. So his vision for the world, and the vision they're pursuing, is a very clear and orderly one, at least from their perspective.
"The book [From Pandora's Box: America and Militant Islam after Iraq] is written because I think we're defeated in Iraq. I think we're simply looking for a way to be graceful about the exit, but it's going to be very clear to our opponents in the Islamic world that they've defeated the second superpower.
"They defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; they've defeated us in Iraq; and it looks very likely that they'll defeat us in Afghanistan. And so Iraq, for all intents and purposes, as far as our enemies are concerned, is over.
Scheur explained why he left the CIA. "I resigned because I thought the 9/11 commission had thoroughly failed America by not finding anyone responsible for anything before 9/11. The amount of individual negligence and culpability at the highest levels of the American government was completely whitewashed by the 9/11 commission. And I resigned because I wanted to speak out on those issues."
No comments:
Post a Comment