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Los Angeles Times commentary - July 2, 2004
Seeing Islam through a lens of U.S. arrogance
Our national mind-set may be leading us toward defeat: CIA expert
By Anonymous:
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" à 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." …..
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."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-anonymous2jul02,0,4759385,print.story?coll=la-news-comment
Washington Post - June 26, 2004
“U.S. has misjudged
Muslims' concerns and intentions”
By Walter Pincus
A new book by a senior CIA analyst who headed the agency's task force on Osama bin Laden sharply attacks the Bush administration's approach to Islamic terrorists, sternly criticizes the decision to invade Iraq and chides officials for trying to create a Western-style democracy in Afghanistan.
The author, who writes under the name "Anonymous," argues it is not dislike of freedom, democracy and Western culture that led bin Laden to wage war against America, but rather his disdain for U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world, particularly America's relationship with Israel.
Senior U.S. leaders, the book argues, mistakenly urge Americans to believe that the Islamic world is offended by the nation's philosophical emphasis on personal rights and liberties, and "that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than for what we do."
"The focused and lethal threat posed to U.S. national security arises not from Muslims being offended by what America is, but rather from their plausible perception that the things they most love and value -- God, Islam, their brethren and Muslim lands -- are being attacked by America," he writes in "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror," which was just published by Brassey's.
The book contends that bin Laden has rallied support among Muslims by convincing them that Islam is under attack from the United States and that it is their responsibility to defend their faith: "Once Islam is attacked, each Muslim knows his personal duty is to fight."
The author's solution to the problem and forecast for the future are grim, based partly on his view that training camps have turned out not thousands of terrorists but perhaps "a hundred thousand or more insurgents."
"As long as unchanged U.S. policies motivate Muslims to become insurgents," he writes, the United States will have to "kill many thousands of these fighters in what is a barely started war."
The book's author is a 22-year veteran of the CIA who occupies a senior position in counterterrorism. He did not publish the book under his name because of his role at the agency, and has asked news organizations not to reveal his name for security reasons.
He served as chief of the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, a time when, he complains, senior leaders "downplayed intelligence" and "ignored repeated warnings" about the dangers approaching from Islamic terrorists.
The author condemns the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, saying that "preemptive actions" were needed, but against the "imminent threat of bin Laden, al Qaeda and their allies," not Saddam Hussein.
He describes the invasion of Iraq as "an avaricious, pre-meditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages." He compared it to the 1846 U.S. war against Mexico.
Oil, the author contends, is at the core of U.S. interests in Muslim countries, leading the United States to support "the Muslim tyrannies bin Laden and other Islamists seek to destroy."
The Bush administration's policy on Afghanistan is described as a failure because it hinges on producing a Western-style democracy with religious tolerance and women's rights -- all of which he characterizes as an "anathema to Afghan political and tribal culture and none of which has more than a small, unarmed constituency."
In a broader critique, he said, "U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious: we are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency -- not criminality or terrorism -- and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6669-2004Jun25.html
New York Times – July 9, 2004
CIA officer critiques terror policy
By Michiko Kakutani
Imperial Hubris," the scalding new book by a current Central Intelligence Agency officer - who was able to publish the book on the condition that his real name not be revealed - is an assessment of America's war on terror that is bound to provoke large heapings of controversy, on both the right and the left, among hardliners on Iraq and critics of the administration alike. Readers will doubtless contest some or many of the things Anonymous has to say, but he pulls few punches in this book and gives us a fascinating window on America's war with Al Qaeda - at least as framed by one senior analyst, who seems to have put all bureaucratic niceties aside.
It is a book that not only slings all manner of arrows at America's political, military and intelligence establishment (going back to the mid-70's, with the qualified exception of President Ronald Reagan and his C.I.A. director, William J. Casey), but a book that also calls for a complete re-evaluation of the nation's foreign policy toward Muslims and the Middle East.
In its pages, prescient analyses of recent developments in the Persian Gulf and Middle East (informed by the author's experience in the mid-1990's as head of a C.I.A. unit assigned to tracking Osama bin Laden) jostle for space with incendiary calls for a Shermanesque exercise of American military power in a potential war with the Muslim world; maverick assessments of Islamic attitudes toward the United States, with shrill exhortations for America to adopt a neo-isolationist stance based on narrowly defined self-interest.
If the country's foreign policy remains status quo, Anonymous warns, "America's military confrontation with Islam" will broaden "with escalating human and economic expense." He predicts that Al Qaeda "will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction."
In addition, Anonymous accuses United States leaders, elites and media of being in denial about the nature of the Qaeda threat and the balance sheet on the war on terror: he argues that America must stop using the terrorist paradigm for Al Qaeda and accept "the fact" that the group is "leading a popular, worldwide, and increasingly powerful Islamic insurgency," and he asserts that United States victories against Al Qaeda have thus far been tactical ones that have failed to slow "the shift in strategic advantage toward al Qaeda."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/books/09BOOK.html
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