07/23/14 – Michael Scheuer – The Scott Horton Show

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Just click the book in the right margin at ScottHorton.org or TheWarState.com Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our next guest, oh, our first guest on the show today is Michael Scheuer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit and he keeps a website at non-intervention.com.
And he's the author of the books Through Our Enemies' Eyes, Marching Toward Hell, Imperial Hubris and the biography of Osama Bin Laden.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Very happy to have you here on the show.
And listen, something I remember reading in your books and something we've talked about in the past is the role of Israel and their foreign policy in generating terrorist attacks against the United States.
So I guess first of all, could you explain why in the world those things are even connected at all?
Why are they even attacking Russia or Sweden based on what Israel's doing?
And then other, also secondarily, I would have you provide every example you can possibly think of to prove your case.
The relationship between us and the Israelis, at least in the Muslim mind, is the relationship of extraordinary closeness.
The belief today, for example, in the Muslim world is that the Israelis are attacking in Palestine because the Americans said it was fine to do it.
And of course, the Israelis moved in and we've been very vocal in saying that the Israelis can do whatever they want to do.
And Mayor Bloomberg goes to Israel to show American support for them, giving the impression that all of America loves being on the hook for what the Israelis do.
And it's a very widespread, very deeply held belief that we are, Israel is our outpost in the region and we're going to use it to expand into other Muslim countries.
And it's something that is raised constantly by our enemies, by Osama bin Laden in particular.
And it is a fatal association for the United States.
There's nothing good that can come out of it.
From a purely foreign policy perspective, we don't need the Israelis.
There's nothing they have that we need.
There's nothing they have that we want.
They can simply disappear as far as we're concerned and it wouldn't hurt us one bit.
Ditto for the Palestinians.
Two more unimportant countries to the United States than Israel and Palestine are pretty hard to imagine.
From the point of view of the United States government.
From the point of view of the United States interests, I don't think it matters who the government is.
Right.
But you're saying, you know, obviously separate from the sentiment of individual people who don't want to see anybody fight, right?
Well yeah, and individual Americans who are more loyal to the Israelis than to America.
Well, let me ask you this before we get all into the details here, which I really want to do.
What if it wasn't a matter of the occupation?
Because that's the obvious thing, right?
Israel has 20 years plus in occupying southern Lebanon and now what, 45 years in occupying the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem and these periodic, completely one-sided wars.
But what about accepting the Nakba as a fact of life and just within 48 or 67 borders maybe and then try to go from there and make peace from there?
Would America, and America still had its relationship with Israel, would America still suffer terrorist attacks for that?
Or is it a matter of, you know what I mean, just Israel's existence?
Or is it a matter of, you know, really their periodic operations, grapes of wrath or whatever they call them and they go around killing everybody?
I think it's, the relationship is such that they're killing Palestinians with U.S. made weaponry with U.S. funds.
I think that's the problem.
I have no particular interest in the Palestinians.
So many of people who identify themselves as non-interventionists or isolationists believe you have to be pro-Palestinian to be a non-interventionist.
The definition should be to not care one way or another.
I think the Israelis, what they're doing right now is exactly what they should be doing if that's what they believe they should be doing.
They do have every right in the world to defend themselves however they want to defend themselves.
They have no right to exist.
We have no right to exist.
That's just something that was made up by the Israeli lobby and the politicians to, it sounds good if you say it fast, but ultimately it's meaningless.
Or we would be bringing back, you know, Latin Jerusalem and we would be bringing back the Soviet Union.
They all had a right to exist if Israel has a right to exist.
So I think you've got to drop that.
I think for the United States, the beginning of wisdom is just to realize that if we're going to continue the relationship with the Israelis with the way it has been, then that's fine.
If we believe that is key to the United States defense and foreign policy in the region, then we have to do that.
But we also have to be adults.
Every action has a reaction.
The reaction to our unfailing support for Israel is that Americans and the growth of anti-American animosity among 1.4 billion Muslims.
That's just the fact.
There's no other country on earth that could have gotten away with 17 days now or 16 days of unlimited bombardment of civilians.
The whole world is cowed by the memories of the Holocaust and all the rest of the crap the Israelis used to get people to do things their way.
And I just don't think that America merits the punishment that comes from a relationship that at the end of the day means nothing to our national security, economic development, or political well-being.
All right, now, I guess we could talk about the September 11th and Bin Laden, but really the terrorist war against the United States, the post-Cold War terrorist war, did it start with the World Trade Center bombing or I guess the assassination of Rabbi Kane?
But that's not so much terrorism, but this is the same group that did it, right?
But so, if we go back to the beginning of the 90s, was that all about Israel's policy in Palestine?
Ramzi Youssef and the first World Trade Center bombing?
Certainly Ramzi was.
And one of the reasons Ramzi Youssef never joined with al-Qaeda, because he believed al-Qaeda did not have enough emphasis on Israel and Palestine.
The same thing with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
For years, he steered clear of official membership in al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda was not interested or not active enough against the Israelis.
And that's just the way it is.
But since Bin Laden came on the scene and focused the Muslim world on the United States as an enemy, Israel has been one of the top members of the list of grievances they've had against us.
And it's played very, very well.
If you look at the expansion of the Islamist insurgency, the Sunni Islamist insurgency, from 2001 or from 1996 until today, it's an enormous expansion.
It keeps growing and growing and growing.
And it's because Bin Laden focused on substance and not rhetoric, not nonsense like the reestablishment of the caliphate or things like that.
He talked about very specific substantive issues, and the Muslim world has been focused on those since.
And we continue to play the foil.
Al-Qaeda exists.
Al-Qaeda and its allies exist.
The Islamist movement exists because they have us to play the fool.
And as long as we do that, we're going to be on their bullseye.
All right.
So then I guess if we go through, well, I don't know, can you describe, was it Khalid Sheikh Mohammed became friends with Osama because Osama finally said, yes, we want to put a priority on Palestine?
Is that it?
No, I think, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed put in with Al-Qaeda simply because they had the most capability to attack the United States.
Well, surely in 1996, Bin Laden's fatwa against the Jews and crusaders, as it's called, focuses on the Kana massacre and Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon at, you know, some length.
Oh, now the music's playing, Michael.
We've got to take this break.
I'm sorry.
When we get back, more with Michael Shoyer, author of Imperial Hubris, Osama Bin Laden marching toward hell through our enemy's eyes.
He's at nonintervention.com.
We're talking about the role of American support for Israel in generating terrorist attacks against the United States.
Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
Why can't America make peace with Iran?
Because that's not what Israel wants.
And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
Because it's what Israel wants.
Seeing a pattern here?
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the line with Michael Shoyer.
He's formerly the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
And he's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, and many others.
And now, yeah, so I'm sorry, when we were leaving off, I was mentioning about Bin Laden's fatwa of 1996, where he cited Israel in southern Lebanon and, of course, in Palestine.
And then I was also going to, since I mentioned that before the break, I'll add to it that in Terry McDermott's book, Perfect Soldiers, he says that Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin Al Sheib would sit around all day at the Hamburg apartment talking about how Americans should pay for what Israel was doing in Palestine and in Lebanon.
And I guess in Lawrence Wright's book, he says that Atta filled out his last will and testament as a symbolic act, basically joining up the war on their side against us during Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996 in southern Lebanon.
Is that right?
I think that's probably exactly right.
There are those, any number of those anecdotes, but I think the important thing is to look at...
Well, I mean, and he's the lead hijacker, or you're telling me he's the lead hijacker, right?
Yeah.
So it kind of matters.
Well, it does.
It does matter, but it's just common sense in many ways.
If we're backing someone who routinely kills Arabs when they feel it necessary to do so, it doesn't take the anecdotes that you just related.
It doesn't take what Osama bin Laden says to make a person believe that at some point there's going to be a response to that, Scott.
And the service that Osama bin Laden provided was to focus the Muslim world on that, and especially our role in it.
Only after 9-11, the neocons and the pro-Israeli media in this country attacked bin Laden as someone who came to the issue of Palestine only after 9-11, as a Johnny-come-lately, and saying that that could not possibly have been one of his motivations for ordering the attack on us on 9-11.
The reality of it is, if you go to August 1996 and go to his declaration of war on the United States, the issue of Palestine and Israel is mentioned at least a dozen times in the course of a dozen pages.
And throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s, one of the primary focuses of his discussion about how the West treats Muslims as if their blood was worthless was the Israeli massacre of the people at those two refugee camps, Shatila and I can't remember the other one in Lebanon.
Yes.
And so, this is not something we need to...
I think this is not something that we really need to wonder if it's true or if it's false, or how much evidence you can have on either side.
The evidence plainly is overwhelming.
The common sense is plainly overwhelming.
And the problem for Al-Qaeda was not that it didn't want to attack the Israelis, but because it's not a terrorist group, but rather an insurgency, it had no footing.
It had no contiguous territory from which to attack the Israelis, which is now changing thanks to what we did in Iraq.
The Bush's war in Iraq is, for the Islamists, just a gift that keeps giving.
Once Syria goes, then goes Jordan.
And all of a sudden, the Mujahideen now have moved westward a thousand miles from Afghanistan, and not only in Iraq, but they're on the borders of Israel.
And nuclear weapons are very good things to intimidate foreign countries, but they're not much when it comes to border control.
And within the next three or four years, the Islamist insurgency, whether it's Al-Qaeda or any of the other myriad of groups that are out there, are going to be right on Israel's border, on the Egyptian border, and on the other border.
And that's a big problem.
And we're in a spiral now where, ultimately, if we continue this relationship with the Israelis, we're going to have to field troops in that area to help them protect themselves, because the problem is going to become overwhelming for them.
Well, and they've already drawn the line in Jordan that Israel will invade Jordan to protect the Hashemite kingdom there, and of course, America would beat them to it in order to keep them out of it, probably, in that case, right?
Well, we would try to do it, but clearly we have less than 200,000 shooters in our army, Scott.
What the American people don't realize is what Obama and Bush, especially Obama, have done to the American military.
We're going to have 450,000 soldiers in the army.
One in three of them are shooters, so it's much less than 200,000 are going to be shooters.
What are we going to do with those people?
And as soon as the Israelis move against Jordan, the whole concept in the Muslim world that Israel's goal has been this thing called Greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates, as soon as they move into Jordan or into Syria, that becomes activated, and the animosity across the Muslim world toward the Israelis and toward us becomes enormously bigger.
This is a lose-lose-lose situation for the United States.
The only way out of it is to say, good luck to the Israelis and protect American interests first.
This is a cancer.
This is a bleeding wound on the United States.
And eventually, also, we're going to face the problem of what impact our policy toward Israel has on our Muslim population in the United States, and it's not going to be a good reaction.
There's no reason to assume that the young men in the United States, the young Muslims, are not just as influenced as young Muslims in Egypt or Pakistan or Syria are by our unquestioning support for the Israelis.
So far, they travel over there to fight.
The Somali-Americans, that kid from Florida from a few months back, but it's true that that could change.
Well, so now, the last time we talked, it was just a few weeks ago, and yet in the meantime, the caliphate has been declared, the one that you and I were predicting on that show, that this new, the lawless land between Syria and Iraq is becoming, it has a law now.
It's the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and I was saying, and I'm afraid we're going to go back to war against them, because how can the American politicians resist?
Now that that has gone ahead and come to fruition, I mean, you don't really want to field an army there, do you?
I mean, you want to cut off everything, but so what if we can't stop back, you know, politically in America, in real life, we cannot get the government to stop back in the Israelis, but we can get them to not attack ISIS.
You don't want, I mean, anyway, I'm sorry, but obviously, even if we leave ISIS alone and we're still back in Israel, then we're still generating a problem, even though not necessarily as bad a one as if we outright were attacking them.
But anyway.
Scott, we are in almost the same position that we were in when we first talked, which must now be nearly a decade ago.
We still have a political class in this country and a media class that absolutely refuses that anything to believe or to at least say or admit that anything we do in our foreign policy could possibly motivate this enemy against us.
We're still, we haven't taken a step forward.
And until we take a step forward and become adults, we're not going to be able to deal with the problem.
I would say our support for Israel is right up there with our support for a tyranny like the Saudi tyranny, or like the Jordanian tyranny, and our support for the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Egypt and its replacement by a military dictatorship.
Those are all actions which add to the animus toward us.
I'm still not one, you know, you can declare a caliphate all you want.
You may have a government that can run the area in Syria and Iraq at some point in the future, but the idea that there's going to be a worldwide caliphate, given that the leader has to be an Arab, and Arabs are a minority, a small minority, really, in the Islamic world, I think that's not a worry.
That's a hobgoblin that the neocons and the right use to scare people.
I think the real issue for us is accepting that this enemy is out there, and that we motivate it, and we have really two choices.
We can either adjust our foreign policy to discourage their interest in us, and increase their interest in killing each other, Sunnis versus Shias, or destroying the governments in the region and trying to reestablish new ones, or we can maintain the foreign policy that we have and end up having to kill unlimited numbers of those people if we want to survive.
This is an existential threat to the United States, not only in terms of economic welfare, but in terms of our own domestic civil liberties and civil rights, and we've seen that already.
It's because we continue to function on the basis of a refusal to accept the reality that we motivate our enemies.
Yeah, well, and as you say, it's creating what bin Laden called that choking life that he was trying as part of the reaction to his terrorism.
He was trying to impose on us what the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians.
Yeah, exactly.
All right, well, I can see why you titled that second one, that third one, Marching Toward Hell.
Michael, I get it.
I appreciate your time on the show, as always.
That's Michael Shoyer, everybody, former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, author of the biography of Osama bin Laden.
We'll be right back.
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