printSays John Brennan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, in an interivew with CNN’s Gloria Borger: “We have made quite a bit of progress this year in degrading the capabilities of Al Qaida organization. We’ve taken the battle to them. We have eliminated a number of their senior leaders and operatives. But that doesn’t mean that they still don’t have a capability of carrying out attacks. And that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to look for ways and vulnerabilities in our system to get their operatives either here to the United States or in other places to carry out these attacks.”
Replies MICHAEL SCHEUER, the chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999: “Mr. Brennan is blowing smoke. You have some dead bodies — I agree with that; it’s all to the good — but no impact on the overall organization. … I think it’s stronger than it was at 9/11, certainly because the support and opposition across the Muslim world to American foreign policy is far greater today than it was in 9/11.”
I’ve covered Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, favorably: “When I think of a libertarian-leaning patriotic warrior, I think of Michael Scheuer. The chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer is also the man behind the enhanced interrogation methods, which the hard-left and their friends on the libertarian left would have you believe are as heinous as the war crime at Hiroshima.”
Still, I’m not sure what he’s advising.
“Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral home,” Scheuer comments. “More Yemenis than any Arab nationality fought against the Soviets. There would have been more Yemenis in the 9/11 attacks, except they couldn’t get visas as easily as the Saudis.”
And he recommends that, “We stop depending on surrogates. We stop depending on Pakistan. We stop depending on Yemen and use our own strong right arm. There is no — there’s no clause in the Constitution that says President Obama can delegate the defense of America to a Yemeni dictator.”
I don’t know what that means. Do you? Gloria doesn’t inquire. Like most journalists today, she possesses very little intellectual curiosity.
Update (Jan. 4): Is there a reason to so carefully distinguish “Islam” from “Jihadist Islam”? The latter is a redundancy. Jihad is part of Islam.
Scheuer often has some smart things to say but I take them with a grain of salt. He has at times fingered a certain Zionistic Entity as the source of all the mess. And he exonerates the CIA for everything – good organization man. I’m not sure there is all that much coherent about his attitude on torture, war, undeclared “operations”, tribunals, etc. It seems that just allowing “CIA professionals” to do as they please with ad hoc arbitrary rules has not solved things any better than “liberating” nations Bush-Obama style.
Young Democrats, demonstrate against free speech, G-20 conventions, and global warming because they are idealistic and given a target by liberal professors and leftist leaders. Young Republicans, join the military because they are idealistic and the Republicans/Democrats point them at a target. Young idealistic Muslims join Al Qaida, for the same reasons. They are ‘cannon fodder.’ for political agendas. Conventional thinking is to use our cannon fodder to defeat their cannon fodder, through terrorism and counter terrorism and win peace. The U.S. appears to think using massive amounts of money in foreign aid, military aid and large groups of troops against a few individuals hiding in the population, with a smart bomb or two is the answer. The so-called leaders of Al Qaida, Mr. Brennan alludes to being eliminated are at best ‘middle management’ and someone received a quick promotion before the dust settled. Perhaps Michael Scheuer has a better idea. If so, I’d like to hear it; but, I haven’t heard an original idea from the Beltway yet. In my opinion, until someone or thing removes the behind the scene instigators, we are not going to have peace with Al Qaida. Worldwide peace with the ‘other religion, forget about it.
Our problem seems to be an inability to decide whether we’re fighting a war or conducting a criminal investigation. During the Second World War, we killed Germans and Japanese indicsrimately, as they would have done to us had they been able. We didn’t avoid killing some of them because they might have disapproved of things that their governments did in their name. We didn’t try to capture the individual pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor or the crews of particular submarines that sank ships off our coast. We did whatever was necessary to deprive our enemies of the means to make war on us.
In the so-called War on Terror, we allow enemy aliens to enter the United States willy nilly. We foolishly assume that most of the terrorists’ countrymen disapprove of their actions, and take no reprisals against them. We’re making no attempt to deprive them of the means (e.g., oil revenue) to make war on us. Obviously, we’re going to lose.
By the way, the only rule in warfare is the Golden Rule in reverse, and the winners decide whose cause was just.
[Have you undergone a neocon conversion?]
For “indicsrimately” please read indiscriminately. I’m not as good a touch typist as I think, and it’s difficult to proofread in this little box.
[I read your previous post; it was about waging Total War. Very neocon.]
Muslim opposition to American foreign is greater than it was before 9/11. So what? Unlike our present political, military and cultural leadership I don’t think American foreign policy should be concerned with whether or not the Muslims agree. The Muslims are enraged. So what? They’re always enraged. Maybe we’ve made our mistakes, but what country hasn’t. The Muslims want to kill us. Why is that so hard for weenie Americans to understand?
Neocon? Moi? For one thing, I’ve never been a liberal. Actually, I would have preferred to avoid all this mess by withdrawing U.S. support from Israel, thereby placating the wild Muslims. We could have done this at any time before 9/11/01. It never made sense to intervene in a foreign conflict on behalf of a country that has no oil to sell us.
As things are, we’re at war. Worse yet, the government refuses to identify the enemy properly. We should recognize that we’re at war with Islam, and that all Muslims are the enemy. We really shouldn’t allow them to skulk around our home base. Neocons blanch at the idea of expelling the enemy from our midst.
If we’re going to fight a war, then we should fight to win by denying the enemy the means (i.e., oil money) to wage war upon us. Our present efforts are far too reminiscent of Viet Nam. The neocons running this fiasco prefer to expend American lives for no purpose.
Of course, all of this is moot anyway. The millions of Muslims who run loose in our country can easily defeat us by attacking our unguarded infrastructure. Eventually, even they will figure that out. As I said, we’re going to lose.