Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (34 page)

These are all dangerous men who, in my judgment, are seeking to place de facto limitations on the First Amendment to protect the nation of their primary attachment. They are the type of individuals about whom General Washington warned his countrymen, noting that the success of such men in limiting free speech would cause disaster for America. “For if men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of mankind,” General Washington told his officers in 1783, “reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”
¹²

Let me pause here to say, first, that the Israel-firsters’ attempts to silence criticism by Americans of the manner in which their government conducts the U.S. relationship with Israel are now leading the U.S. lamb to the slaughter; and second, that I have never accepted and will forever reject the idea that to intensely dislike the nature of the relationship the U.S. government has fabricated with Israel, and to believe that that relationship is not only a burden but a cancer on America’s ability to protect its genuine national interests—which I do believe—equates to either anti-Semitism or a lack of American patriotism. Indeed, my own view would be that those Americans who are quickest to wield the debate-silencing anti-Semitism sword are either the most suspect in the realm of loyalty or are simply resolute liars who champion the fantasy of identical U.S. and Israeli national interests.

Let me be clear: 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 nations are important only insofar as they can benefit America, and our relations with them should be predicated on that consideration and not on emotion, irrational guilt, Pollyanna-ish ideas about democracy, or the political influence bought by corrupt and corrupting lobbies, be they supporting Israel, Saudi Arabia, Armenia, Greece, or Lebanon. America should associate with those nation-states that benefit America, steer clear of those that do not, and run as fast and as far as possible from those that seek to involve us in fights in which we have no stake, particularly fights between religions. The only exceptions to this general rule should be Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to each of which we owe a debt of honor due to our collective, bloody, and successful efforts to prevent the triumph of tyranny in the twentieth century. In sum, let me bluntly say to the Israel-firsters, in the words Franklin Roosevelt used to defy the New Deal opponents he called Economic Royalists: “They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
¹³

Now back to the business at hand. The lesson I learned after resigning from the CIA was that sticking to the facts was not going to do the trick, and if I wanted to get a hearing and give Americans a chance to discern the prevarications of their governing elite, I would need to find a vehicle that did not raise hackles and cause vitriol to spurt the minute the message began playing. Then over the summer of 2005, I happened to be listening to a course on CD-ROM called
Tocqueville and the American Experiment
,
¹⁴
presented by William R. Cook, a historian from the State University of New York at Geneseo. The entire course was excellent, but specifically Dr. Cook’s lectures on Tocqueville suggested the reason why my arguments had so angered virtually the entire American political spectrum. Writing after his tour of America in the 1830s, Tocqueville said that he had found,

Well, okay. Tocqueville, I think, was right, thus validating Walter A. McDougall’s witty but starkly perceptive contention that “complete objectivity about America is a characteristic only of God and Alexis de Tocqueville.”
¹⁶
Americans do not like to be criticized by foreigners, and so perhaps it is not unnatural that Americans do not want to be taken to task and are irritated by the words of a foreigner named Osama bin Laden. I share this feeling whenever I hear criticisms of America from bin Laden, Jacques Chirac, Hugo Chavez, or some of the American politicians who seem endlessly foreign to me. But here I am, an American by birth, talking to other Americans about a life-and-death threat to our common country. Why should that effort draw such vitriol? Not surprisingly, Tocqueville has an answer for that too. As much as Americans hate hearing foreigners criticize their country, the Frenchman writes, they hate the same sort of criticism coming from American mouths even more. In America, Tocqueville explained, “as long as the majority is doubtful, one speaks;

Right, that explains it. President George H. W. Bush, President Clinton, and President George W. Bush, their political lieutenants, and their media and academic supporters drew and then retraced and blackened what Tocqueville called the “formidable circle” around the current consensus view of America’s war with al-Qaeda and other Islamists. That consensus? Simple: America is being attacked because of its liberties, freedoms, elections, and gender equality, and not for what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world. Like the issues of Social Security and Israel, this mantra has become another, increasingly venerable third rail in American politics, one that fits perfectly into the Cold War paradigm of defending the “Free World” against tyranny, this time the tyranny being Islamofascism. To question the mantra, therefore, reliably earns epithets but not a fair hearing.

Since resigning from the CIA, I have had the enormous good fortune and honor to teach a short course on al-Qaeda to U.S. military personnel, mostly junior officers and NCOs working on the collection and analysis of human intelligence. For this class, it is not appropriate to criticize serving political leaders, and so I decided to play the role of al-Qaeda’s intelligence chief in the United States. In this guise I present to the class an assessment—addressed to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri—of the status of al-Qaeda’s war against the United States based on what I believe would likely be al-Qaeda’s perspective. I chose this means of instruction for two reasons. First, bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and their lieutenants have produced an enormous corpus of statements, speeches, and interviews. These materials provide a clear understanding of how our enemies see and think about their world, and highlight their goals, priorities, and motivations; they allow the construction of an analysis grounded in primary sources that display our foe’s most intensely held convictions. Second, the bipartisan criticisms I outlined above came after I spent twenty-plus years attending briefings for intelligence and military officers presented by senior Democratic and Republican administration officials and their media and academic associates. I felt certain, therefore, that many men and women in my little audiences would have heard such speakers extol U.S. strategy and discuss the weapons systems, manpower, allied countries, and propaganda plans that would be used to utterly defeat an enemy. I was also sure that they had heard little or no hint from such speakers that a living, breathing, thinking, talented, pious, and adaptable Islamist foe sits across the table from America. I therefore designed my talk to try to remedy that shortcoming.

What follows then is an assessment of the war written from al-Qaeda’s perspective. The format roughly follows a reporting format that is used by CIA station chiefs overseas to provide senior officials in Washington with an overall assessment of where things stand in their country or region. They are designed to give Washington a frank and realistic view of how things look to the senior U.S. intelligence officer on the ground, and—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—how likely U.S. interests are to be impacted either positively or negatively. These reports are generally closely held, initially going to the DCI and his senior lieutenants for both reading and a decision about further distribution. Many of these reports are sent to the president, cabinet-level officers, and their deputies.

Here, then, is what I believe to be a reasonable estimate of how al-Qaeda’s intelligence chief in the United States—and we can be sure there is one—would assess the status of the Islamists’ war against America eleven years-plus after his boss declared war on the United States. That is, it shows al-Qaeda talking to al-Qaeda about al-Qaeda problems, failures, and successes; it is an effort, in other words, to follow General Lee’s rule of judging the enemy from his standpoint, not our own. I would add that the assessment is without the justifying citations from the Koran and the Prophet’s sayings and traditions that an Islamist would surely use but that are beyond the ken of a mackerel-snapping Catholic like me. Unlike U.S. intelligence officers, the al-Qaeda chief here had the distinct advantage of drafting his assessment in the context of the clear and plausibly attainable war aims that bin Laden has established. Those aims are captured in two terse phrases: “Bleed America to bankruptcy” and “Spread out American forces.”
¹⁸
Finally, American readers will notice that Al-Qaeda’s chief writes in a very personal and informal manner that reflects Islam’s enduring egalitarianism. The outside-CIA readers of the same kind of CIA reporting format, of course, would expect—nay, demand—significantly more forelock-tugging.

TO: Al-Qaeda/Headquarters
FROM: Al-Qaeda/Washington
SUBJECT: Assessing the Jihad Against America

1. In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.

2. Brothers Osama and Ayman: First, I give all praise and thanks to Allah for His grace and mercies, and then to our Prophet, peace be upon him, for the soundest advice and truest guidance. Next, Brothers, I give thanks for your messages this past year to the American people, especially Brother Osama’s recent speeches offering Americans another chance to embrace Islam.
¹⁹
Your statements are clear and practical; you spoke directly to Americans and not to their arrogant leaders. You warned them that our al-Qaeda brothers are nearly ready to again attack inside the United States, and that they will do so unless U.S. policies in the Islamic world are changed. And you have clarified your words of warning in their own language through the English speeches of our mujahid American brother, Azzam al-Amriki.
²⁰

3. Brothers, all Muslims now know that you have gone many extra miles to warn the American people, and thereby you have fully obeyed the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and followed the honorable practices of Saladin, Islam’s first great defender against the medieval Christian Crusaders.
²¹
But sadly, dear Brothers, I do not believe the Americans will heed your words. Though you spoke directly to them, they have heard President Bush and Vice President Cheney describe your warning as “words of desperation” and contemptuously reject your truce offer by flippantly proclaiming: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists, we put them out of business.” And amazingly, after Brother Osama’s recent speech, President Bush’s homeland security advisor told the media al-Qaeda is “all but impotent,” apparently forgetting she was responding to our challenge and that America is losing two wars to the “impotent” mujahedin.
²²
Brothers, many Americans are going to die because of their leaders’ arrogance and, while regrettable, this arrogance is, all thanks to Allah, good news for al-Qaeda and its allies. It means the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation still does not understand the motivation of the mujahedin, the goals for which we fight, or God’s promise of victory that makes us steadfast.

4. Because of your speeches, Brothers, and because it is eleven years since you sent me to America as al-Qaeda’s intelligence chief, and more than six years after the blessed September raids, I thought I should send you my appraisal of where al-Qaeda and its allies stand in regard to America’s understanding of what motivates our movement and what it is trying to do. I also write because the results of the November 2006 U.S. congressional elections and their aftermath have shown—as you predicted, Brother Osama—that the Americans have neither the will, patience, political cohesion, nor ruthlessness to continue their war against us. Their will is cracking, Brother, and even President Bush’s father’s friends—the Iraq Study Group—told him that the mujahedin are beating America in Iraq.
²³
Brothers, Bush has rejected the group’s conclusion and disregarded its advice. He has now sent five more brigades to Iraq. Fifty brigades would have been a problem for the mujahedin, but five will make no difference; the Americans will fight more, bleed more, but still will have to leave Iraq in defeat. For this all thanks are due to Allah. And thanks also are due to the Almighty for the surge of support and confidence our victory in Iraq will earn from the Muslim masses. That support will be as great as and perhaps greater than that which arose when Allah imposed defeat on the Red Army in Afghanistan through the rifles of the mujahedin. And when the Americans leave Iraq, many of our brothers will go to Afghanistan again to drive the American-led infidels to their doom as they did the atheist Russians.