09/18/14 – Michael Scheuer – The Scott Horton Show

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In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
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Our first guest on the show today is Michael Scheuer.
He's the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, and he wrote the books Through Our Enemies' Eyes, Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism, Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq, and I guess he meant the last Iraq War, and then the biography of Osama Bin Laden.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And I'm very interested in what all you have to say about what's been going on in Iraq since June.
The last time we spoke was, I believe, in April, and I was predicting that America would be re-invading Iraq in order to fight the rise of the new caliphate between Syria and Iraq.
And then it seems like that's exactly what's going on.
And so but I haven't heard from you since then.
So except I saw you speaking with Lou Dobbs on Fox News, and we'll get to that in a minute because there are some interesting things to talk about there.
But I'm not sure where to start.
I think you probably got a better idea of where to begin with what you have to say about America's new Iraq policy, the new Iraq War.
Well, it's, you know, Scott, it's a continuation of the crap we've been doing for the past 15 years or almost 20 years now since Bin Laden declared war.
When you listen to these people, whether it's Boehner or the president or the secretary of the defense or Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, it's the same old song over and over again.
This has nothing to do with Islam.
There's a limited number of these people.
We can beat them with air support and one at a time.
And if you step back and look at the map of the world, they're on four different continents now and in control in a number of places.
We have let this become, from a minor cavity, it has now become a root canal.
And the president clearly and the Republicans clearly don't have an idea of what they've done in terms of causing this war or motivating this war by continuing to intervene everywhere in the Middle East, continuing to support Saudi Arabia and the other tyrannies of Arabs and supporting the Israelis.
This is a world war, Scott.
And you can say we're not waging a war against Islam until you're blue in the face.
And what the truth is, is that every day a greater part of Islam is waging war against us.
And so ultimately we lose if we don't wise up a little.
But I think the odds against us wising up are very, very long.
All right, well, so, I mean, there's a lot to discuss there, but just, you know, basically on the starting point there of the motive of those who fight us, you know, to people who aren't all that familiar with this debate as it's taken place this whole time, maybe the last they heard, you know, they hate us because we're free and because they're Islamic.
And it's such a bad religion, Mike, that it tells people that they have to fight and kill and attack everyone who's not like them.
And so it sounds halfway like that's what you're saying, that this is about Islam and Islam's at war with us.
And you know, what would Frank Gaffney say?
Something along those lines.
On the other hand, you turn right around and you say, intervention over there, support for Israel over there, et cetera, et cetera.
So I know I'm being overly simplistic, but which is it?
How is it both?
Why can't it be both, Scott?
Islam is a religion, just as Judaism is or Sikhism or Christianity was when I was worth a damn.
If your religion is attacked, you defend it.
And the people who are attacking us are attacking us for two reasons, because we have supported for 60 years tyranny across the Muslim world.
And that's the number one thing they're revolting against.
And Israel.
Tyranny in Israel.
They regard Israel as a tyranny also.
When they're responding to their faith, they're indeed being good Muslims.
One of the great, great lies that has been told about people like Osama bin Laden is that they're bad Muslims.
If you look at Islam, they're very good Muslims.
They've taken it upon themselves to defend their brethren, because the kings, the generals and the other tyrants in the Middle East wouldn't.
The second reason, beyond our support for those people, is our deliberate policy of intervening in other people's wars.
Libya is the most recent example.
We've turned that into a hive of Islamists, which are going to be a problem for us into the future.
We supported a free election in Egypt, then overthrew it and supported the military coup that took power.
Our presence is what motivates these people.
Do they hate the kind of freedom we have, the kind of liberty we have, gender equality, elections?
Of course they hate it, but they're not going to fight against it.
Who would blow themselves up because women go to the university?
They blow themselves up because they want us out of their world.
And what we've done is treat them as madmen, few in number, and with a gentle hand in terms of killing them.
And unfortunately, none of it has worked.
We're still at the starting line.
And until we realize that this is preeminently a religious war, a war of a religion defending itself, we can neither understand the depth and the breadth of the motivation among young Muslim men, nor will we understand that there's a way to cut it short and redirect it by stopping this unholy intervention policy we have in the Middle East.
So what about Syria?
You mentioned Libya there, but then it seemed like what was such a big deal about Libya, other than the absolute chaos now, was supporting the Mujahideen, many of them veterans of the Iraq war, where they had fought Americans, against Qaddafi back in 2011.
It turned the place upside down and yet spread into Mali and this and that, but nobody in America anyway really cares that much about what happens in Mali.
But the other part of it was that the Mujahideen and a hell of a lot of the weapons, including Qaddafi's old weapon stores, went for the next phase of the project, which was Syria.
And so when we're not supporting the secular military dictator types, we're supporting revolutions against them.
And I can't shake the idea, Michael, that this is like trying to debathify Saddam Hussein's government, overthrow Saddam and debathify the government and abolish the army.
But if Zarqawi's war had already been going on for a year and a half or two years or three years at that time, how in the world?
People look back on debathifying the army, debathifying the Iraqi state and the army and kicking all the Sunnis out of everything as helping lead to that massive insurgency.
But can you imagine doing so in the middle of the insurgency?
And then that's been our policy since 2011, even to this day, even after ISIS has grown up so strong, it's declared itself a real state.
And it has the monetary power and the bureaucratic power to control the area it's in.
It is, in essence, it's a de facto state.
People are working for it.
People are prospering under it.
People's wages are better than they were under either Maliki or Assad.
It is a force to be reckoned with, but we don't understand that.
We're completely inane.
What difference does it make, Scott?
If you're looking back into February 2011, what difference does it make who rules in Egypt or in Libya or anywhere else?
If the people want to change their government and they don't get all killed and they succeed, good for them.
We need to go back to Washington and Jefferson, who said, anybody who controls a country, we recognize and we deal with.
Their internal problems are their own, but we do not try to overthrow them because we dislike their politics.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so what about the Islamic State?
Because here, and I'm actually very curious about what you think about all the difference between them wanting to go ahead and declare a caliphate now in defiance of Zawahiri and splitting off from Al-Qaeda, and what you think of that strategy and what's going to become of it?
Well, I think what we're seeing is a change in generation.
The National Interest asked me to write a piece about a year, year and a half ago about what's going to happen after Zawahiri, and what we're seeing is a new generation coming into the leadership roles in all of these organizations.
And I have to say, Scott, that we can point to differences between Zawahiri and the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, and all of that is true.
But when you look at the bunch of them together, they're all going in the same direction.
They may not be united, but they're all going in the same direction.
They're trying to get rid of our allies, the Israelis, and they're trying to drive us out of the region.
So there's really not, we shouldn't count on their factionalism to be of any benefit to us at all, really.
But the point you were making is, I forgot what the question was.
I'm sorry.
It was very overly broad, really.
It was just, what do you think of this split for what it's worth?
Oh, what I was saying is, we're seeing a new generation, Scott.
This guy Baghdadi, for example, it has what Osama bin Laden sorely lacked, which is a credential.
He's a PhD in Islamic studies.
More and more of the people we're seeing taking either political leadership or command leadership in the field are better educated than the first generation of al-Qaeda.
We're seeing people who are more familiar with their religion and who have a much more vicious, if you will, or at least a much more militant view of how they need to go about defending it.
And we're also seeing a generation that is extraordinarily savvy in terms of the tools of modernity, whether it's internet, videos, rifles, mortars, whatever it is.
And so what we're seeing is a generation taking the place of the old one that is much more savvy in all the areas that are going to cause us problems.
Yeah.
Well, now, a few different points here.
First of all, as far as all these groups being basically the same, that's what Patrick Coburn says from walking around in Syria and talking to him.
And of course, we're seeing more and more of how all the different jihadi groups in Syria all get along and have ceasefires with each other and give each other American tow missiles.
What they really argue about is timing, Scott.
As you pointed out, al-Zawahiri said, now's not the time.
Baghdadi and his boys said, yes, it is the time.
And I think part of it, we have to keep in mind that al-Zawahiri wanted to declare the start of the caliphate in Afghanistan after we leave.
And so there's a little bit of rivalry there, but the one thing about an insurgency, one of the reasons it almost always wins is because they're factionalized.
They fight each other.
They disagree with each other.
But there's no head to cut off.
And we've certainly proved that with al-Qaeda.
We've spent 15 years trying to cut off the head and have not yet realized it's not there.
Right.
Yeah.
They found bin Laden's caliphate.
He was hiding in the attic even from his wife, which is a pretty funny end for him, if you ask me.
But so now, you know, what I wonder, though, is if America does and I think they're going to end up sending in the Marines because there's no other force that can dislodge these guys from from Mosul to Crete, Fallujah.
And so I think just under the assumptions of the empire, eventually they'll end up with another full scale ground invasion and all that.
But I wonder then if America ends up with any degree of victory over ISIS in that sense, whether that just gives a massive PR win and maybe more than just PR win to al-Qaeda, which proves their case that you can't attack.
You can't win on the near front until you get rid of the far enemy first is just going to redouble everybody's efforts to attack inside the United States.
Scott, this is what we've seen in these three guys heads getting cut off is not just barbarity or or, you know, meanness.
What we saw was the Islamic State putting a worm on a hook.
The one thing they need more than anything is U.S. intervention on the ground in Iraq.
And if it brings along ground troops from Sunni states fighting on the side of the Americans and the Shia, the more the better.
And I would I there's no one who has more respect for in the United States for the Marine Corps than I have.
But if they take those places back, the question becomes, then what?
They will take them back because the Mujahideen will, as they always do, run away to fight again later.
Right.
And we're going to garrison that damn place for for when, like like the Balkans for 20 years.
And knowing that if we ever leave, the war starts again.
It is it is a it is a nonsense.
Obama is a madman, really.
He deserves a nice little nice little white jacket that ties in the back because he doesn't have a clue about what to do.
Yeah.
In other words, what you're saying is he's doing nothing but provoke these guys, doing nothing to limit him.
So tell me, then, if if I could magically make you the national security adviser and you could put that straight jacket on him and force him to listen to you.
What's the plan?
I think the first plan is to say to him and for him to say that American to the American people, you know, we don't like the fact that our two guys got their heads cut off.
But this is a zero threat to U.S. national security.
The people who did it are and their allies are.
But first, we have to have a discussion with someone who's got to tell the truth, Scott.
These are these are not madmen.
If we were fighting madmen, it would be a pleasure because they make mistakes.
They can't organize.
All of those things would play against them.
But these are calculating, in many cases, well-educated individuals and and street savvy in terms of how the world is Obama and Clinton and Bush.
The only world they could see was the world they wanted to be.
And so they always lost because what they want is never coming.
And it's not out there at the moment.
So my idea would be to to, for God's sake, do the do the pipeline, get rid of our dependence on anybody else for oil and dump the Saudis.
And if our allies don't want to do that, fine.
Let them stand by the Saudis and let them take the brunt.
Better to kill Frenchmen than Americans.
Israel, what in the world are we doing there?
Our foreign policy of intervention has not only alienated the Muslim world, but it has absolutely destroyed Israel's security.
I have no, no, no regard for the claim that Israel has a right to survive.
No country has a right to survive, but it deserves to be able to defend itself to the extent it believes is necessary.
And what we have done by taking out Saddam, by turning against Assad, by destroying Gaddafi was to make sure that the Israelis now have the enemy, the Mujahideen, right on their borders everywhere except Jordan.
And Jordan is going to go if we intervene in the north.
So I don't know.
You know, what do you do?
You you stop motivating people to attack us and let them attack the people they would prefer to attack, the Israelis, the Saudis, the Shia.
Let the war fester there.
There's no there's no real other choice.
Our military is broken.
They say the army is 450,000.
One in three of those are shooters.
They couldn't hold Virginia against the people who have rifles in Virginia.
So you know, these people talk a good and on top of that, all were bankrupt.
You have to remember.
So I don't know what these people are talking about or why they're talking about it, but I know not one of them has bothered to tell the American people the truth.
Well, on on a great many of those things, and I wonder whether you think that, you know, they're saying in the media that there's a fight, a discrepancy between Obama and the generals about whether they're going to sound send ground troops or not.
It seems clear enough to me, like I was explaining, just by thinking it out, that under their assumptions of what must be done here, eventually they will be sent in the Army of the Marines, probably sooner than later.
But I wonder if you think Obama is being dishonest or if he really thinks he can do, you know, a kind of Northwestern tribal territory style drone war against, as you said, a state, a new kind of proto state.
He may well think that Scott, because he was educated in the Ivy League and he is he he clearly doesn't understand the power of religion in today's world.
He's like Christopher Hitchens in that regard.
Hitchens was a very brilliant man, but he was stupid in terms of world affairs because he could not get his arms around the idea that religion plays an extraordinarily strong role in every place but England and the United States for the most part and most of Western Europe.
And I think Obama is the same way.
He said something about after the first American was decapitated, he said, well, the 21st, the world in the 21st century will not put up with this.
And he's it's like somehow human nature has changed because he's in the world and he's ruling us.
Human nature is always the same.
People are going to kill each other in the most barbarous methods that they would that they that they find are useful.
Yeah.
You know, even Francis Fukuyama and the end of history where he says, you know, more or less free markets and more or less democracy are the final form of human sovereignty, et cetera, et cetera.
He still said, you know, so that basically excludes fascism and communism from ever being able to work.
And no one's going to ever believe in them again as really being able to work.
But he did not at all discount the power of ethnic and tribal and religious identity and nationalism and absolutely every other kind of other, you know, right wing flavor.
He just said that no matter how right wing you are, you're still going to have to let people, you know, let there be prices on the market, basically, you know.
Well, you know, you go back to Sam Huntington's book and the older that book gets, the more correct it is.
There is a clash of civilizations.
But what he didn't expect was it would be waged by the American and British and European administrations against the Muslim world.
They're not trying to install Sharia here.
They're not trying to keep our women from going to university.
We're trying to destroy their faith.
We're trying to impose secularism on them or worse, heresy in the Shias of Iraq.
And this is not a complicated problem, Scott.
It's it is it is an easy problem to understand if you're willing to kind of abandon the lousy education you had.
Not you, but I mean, generally our leadership.
They may accept the world as it is.
Yeah, no, you're right.
I definitely think you're right.
And, you know, it's funny because I'm a libertarian and a pretty evangelical one at that.
And I sure believe that, you know, individual human rights to me, you know, are the top of my priorities and for all people in the world.
And I would like very much to kind of sell the ideas of libertarianism on the market to the world, like Harry Brown and his great Statue of Liberty speech.
If he had been the president, 9-11 wouldn't have happened because he would have ended all the interventionism.
And then he would have just given speeches, beating people over the head about liberty all the time and how wonderful it is.
And if you want to change the world and make the world a more declaration of independence kind of a place, that's the way you do it.
You do it how Ron Paul would do it.
He'd explain it to you and recommend like, you know, which Hayek should you read first and that kind of thing.
And instead, we got George W.
Bush and the rest of them since just going, yeah, I'll show you freedom.
It's a daisy cutter in your neighborhood.
Yeah, well, Ron Paul, of course, is an echo and an eloquent one of Washington, of John Adams, of Alexander Hamilton.
Absolutely the case that we were going to be the best we could be at home.
And if that is a if that serves as an educational tool for the rest of the world and something they want to follow, fine.
If not, also fine.
You know, look at Europe hasn't been closer to war in 60 years than it is now.
Why?
Because we and the Europeans intervened to overthrow that government in camp.
Right.
If you if you can't see the problem with with intervention, you're you're bordering on a fascist.
And I think Obama's administration has strong fascist influences in it.
Yeah, sure, they all do.
I mean, and also, you know, like I want to argue with you every time, but then I think, no, you're right.
Your job was telling these people what the truth is and looking at the glaze in their eyes when you told them that's your job at the CIA.
These people, as you keep explaining it, they just don't understand.
Hillary Clinton can sit here and be mad at Obama publicly for not backing the rebels in Syria enough.
John McCain was saying to Chuck Hagel on TV yesterday, the day before yesterday, well, what if Assad attacks the rebels?
You're still not going to protect them from him.
And it's like, dude, are you kidding me?
These people, they really don't understand, do they?
They don't.
You really are on all sides of a sectarian civil war here, Mr. McCain.
And you're you're doing the wrong thing here, pal.
You know, I used to think that there was only two to two choices, Scott.
They either didn't understand it or they understood it and they're lying because they don't want to upset the applecart of multiculturalism, the applecart of open borders, the applecart of all civilizations and people are the same.
Because they're going to have to at some point, if America is to survive, if America is not to fight a war in North America against these people, someone's going to have to stand up and say, listen, what we're facing is a religious war against 1.3 or 4 billion people.
Chop out the Shia and you have 1.2 billion Sunnis.
What do you want to do?
You want to keep pursuing the policies that make them attack you?
Or would you like to live here comfortably in North America as we have for a long time?
And if they want to be libertarians or Democrats or whatever they want to be, let them be it.
But we're not going to help them be it.
But I can't see that happening with with with with Mr. Paul or Dr.
Paul out of the picture and his son really not seeming to know where he stands on most every issue.
I don't know where it's going to come from.
And by the way, I'm glad that you went back to that because I want to clarify something when you were saying earlier about Al Qaeda being good Muslims for outside of the power of the state, resorting to fighting an enemy that is attacking from without.
Obviously, you're an American and you're on America's side in this, but you're just, you know, dispassionate analysis, as you say, but you call them good Muslims in that sense.
And I wonder whether and, you know, honestly, I don't know enough about the what all the Koran says or what modern Sunni imams consensus is on these questions exactly.
But I assume that they don't countenance targeting innocent civilians in order to score political points.
Well, no, they probably don't.
But they understand what war is about, Scott.
You know, the idea that civilians, innocent people don't get killed in wars is something kind of a new age thought has nothing to do with reality.
It has nothing to do with war.
It has nothing to do with history.
Well, it's the difference between targeting them or not.
Right.
Kind of.
I mean, that's certainly what the U.S. government says when it kills people is that, well, we were shooting at this guy and those guys shouldn't have been nearby.
But that's different than a science.
Who, who, who firebombed Tokyo?
Oh, yeah.
Truman.
You know, the only the only mercy in war is a speedy conclusion.
The first thing is, don't go to war unless it's a direct life and death interest.
But if you have to go to war, then kill everybody you need to kill and get out of it.
It's a mercy to them and it's a mercy to us.
Well, by all the rest of the crap about just war, they ought to get all those just war philosophers, professors, teachers, pundits, and turn them over to the Khmer Rouge for about two months and a re-education.
Actually, the Republicans do have connections right to the Khmer Rouge.
That could be weird.
I just picked a goop out of my hat.
That's all.
That was a good one.
Yeah.
And one with, you know, friends in the Reagan administration.
Now, listen, though.
Here's the thing, though, about that is and like you say, and you've reiterated a few times, never mind the Shia for the sake of argument here.
They're the minority and the outgroup among and certainly not the enemy that we're addressing here anyway.
But the reaction of Muslims from Morocco to the Philippines was they were horrified about September 11th and they didn't think Osama was a hero and represented them.
And they didn't.
They sure as hell didn't endorse his tactics of targeting and slaughtering civilians in our towers.
And well, I would say about that, Scott, how do you know?
Well, you know, I read the Gallup poll.
Did it one hell of a great survey where they said they love America.
They just hate our foreign policy.
And they certainly don't support terrorism as defined as targeting civilians in order to create this kind of reaction, that kind of thing.
And they studied.
They went.
They didn't do phone calls and they went on the ground from Morocco to the Philippines and all through Indonesia and everywhere else and talk to Muslims all over the world and found that, you know, more like the other part of what you say, that they just hate our foreign policy.
Otherwise, we could be getting along just fine here.
It's not so much a religious mandate as it's the same mandate that the Wolverines took in Red Dawn or any nationalist would take in fighting for his own home county in any war.
You know, what I would say is the intervention puts Islam into play, puts religion into play.
I also have always suspected the polls, perhaps not as much as Indonesia and Malaysia, but the polls taken among Muslims in places like Egypt and Morocco and other places where the society is basically completely infiltrated by security officers and their agents.
People don't want to be saying things that might bring them into jail.
Like, yeah, we thought Osama's attack on New York City was a great thing.
Very few people are going to say that and risk having Mubarak's security service come down on their heads at that point.
But I would say the other thing in comparison to those polls, Scott, is look at the growth in the movement.
Geographically, manpower.
The other thing I would say is the one thing that almost wrecked Al Qaeda in 2006 was our colleague cutting the heads off of people and televising it.
There was an enormous revulsion in the Muslim world, and not just from the clerics that worked for King Abdullah or who worked for Mubarak, but from common people.
Right now, today, that's entirely missing.
The clerics that work for...
It's going on too long now, in other words.
I think the movement has done two things.
First, it has spread.
Three things.
Second, the Muslim world is more and more motivated by our intervention in it.
And third, they've been successful.
When Osama talked about the Arabs following the strong horse, they just beat us in Iraq.
They're beating us in Afghanistan, which I think at the end of the day is probably a more serious problem than Iraq is in terms of the media.
And if we go back into Iraq with any kind of ground troops, they'll beat us again there.
These guys got rifles from the Korean War.
How are they beating a superpower three times in 15 years?
Stupidity on this side, or at least...
Absolutely, sir.
Absolutely.
And see, it's not just stupidity, because it's willful stupidity.
I mean, the idea after September 11th, I don't know if I could prove this, but I certainly believe was go ahead and let Osama go, because we need that Goldstein, because there hardly was an Al-Qaeda at all.
It was a few hundred guys.
That was why, you know, if you want to be real cynical about it, well, I don't know.
No, it's a hindsight thing.
Well, I don't know.
No, it's a hindsight thing.
But the real Al-Qaeda movement, the new generation of Al-Qaeda everything after September 11th came with the invasion and the destruction of the Iraqi government in 2003.
Well, that's exactly correct.
That's exactly correct, Scott.
What it did was probably something that Osama could never have done by himself.
And that's make the jihad self-motivating.
It has not been affected negatively in the least by bin Laden being killed, perhaps emotionally among some people who miss him.
But the movement itself is growing.
Al-Qaeda is part of it, but it's no longer the vanguard.
It is part of the movement.
It's an important part of the movement.
But it is not what it was in 2005 and 6.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry that we got to stop this conversation.
We could keep talking for a long, long time.
But I know you got to go.
And I sure as hell I'm late.
So thank you very much for your time, Mike.
I appreciate it.
Pleasure, Scott.
Look forward to talking to you again.
OK, bye-bye.
All right, everybody.
That is Michael Shoyer.
He wrote the book, Osama bin Laden.
We'll be right back.
Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, XKeyscore, Boundless Informant.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Warren here for offnow.org.
Now, here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
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We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
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They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
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Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
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Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
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