For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
Well, as you know, it's been a controversy all week long that Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani got into it at the Republican debate the other night.
Ron Paul said that the reason that America was attacked on September 11th and 3,000 people killed, or at least actually what he said was a significant contributing factor to that, was American foreign policy in the Middle East.
Rudy Giuliani responded that that was crazy, he'd never heard such an absurd thing before, and he demanded that Ron Paul retract it.
Everybody knows that Al-Qaeda hates us because we're free, and because, as he told Sean Hannity after the debate, because we have rights for women, freedom for women.
And so, joining me on the phone is Michael Schoyer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
Thank you.
Good morning.
I figure if there's anybody in America who can tell me about the mind of Osama bin Laden, and what it is that motivates his behavior, it would be the guy that wrote, through our enemy's eyes, for the CIA.
And that's you.
Well, I appreciate that very much.
I thought Mr. Paul, the other night, captured it exactly correctly.
This war is dangerous to America because it's based not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic world.
Because we're over there, basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate.
Okay.
So, for those who didn't hear it, let's go ahead and play the exchange, and then we can come back and discuss a little bit more.
They attack us because we've been over there.
We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
We've been in the Middle East.
I think Reagan was right.
We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
So right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican.
We're building 14 permanent bases.
What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico?
We would be objecting.
We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.
Are you suggesting we invited the 9-11 attack, sir?
I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.
And they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.
We've already now, since that time, killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.
Wendell, may I make a comment on that?
That's really an extraordinary statement.
It's an extraordinary statement.
As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq.
I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11.
I would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.
Congressman?
I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback.
When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback.
The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages, and that persists.
And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk.
If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.
They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free.
They attack us because we're over there.
What would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us?
And then the narrator interrupts and asks John McCain about the Confederate flag.
So that was the end of that debate.
So now, let's get this straight, Mr. Shoyer.
You were the head of the bin Laden unit in the 1990s, and you've written these two books, Through Our Enemy's Eyes and Imperial Hubris.
You resigned from the CIA in protest, if I remember right, in 2005, or late 2004, right?
Yes, I resigned.
But I was not angry with the agency I resigned because I thought the 9-11 Commission had made America less secure.
What was it about the 9-11 Commission?
Well, their inability to find anyone responsible for anything before 9-11.
Inside our government?
Yes.
And you can see from Mr. Tennant's recent book, the intelligence was there to stop 9-11, and it was there to prevent us from going to Iraq.
So I think the 9-11 Commission has turned out to be very much a disaster for America.
Okay.
Now, I want to talk in depth about Osama bin Laden, who he is, his history, all about him, what he thinks, where he's at, why anybody listens to him, etc.
But I need to know from you first that you're not some Jimmy Carter-loving liberal Democrat who just hates Republicans and hates George Bush and wants the terrorists to win over America or anything like that.
We all know that Bill Clinton was the second or third worst president in American history.
It's plausible that he would hire some sissy boy to be the head of his bin Laden unit.
Well, that's quite an introduction.
I've said in print and I've said on the radio and on television many times, I've never voted for anybody but a Republican in my entire life.
And I don't intend to unless it's Mr. Giuliani and then I just won't vote at all because abortion is a very important issue to me.
But I don't think you could classify me in the category of either Mr. Carter or Mr. Clinton.
You would definitely consider yourself a conservative then on the right.
Oh, very much so.
Yes, I'm not a neoconservative and also not a conservative that thinks the immigration bill that's pending is a good one.
I guess I'm an old-fashioned conservative, a non-interventionist.
Right.
And now the reason I had to say all that and I think it's important is because I'm pretty familiar with what you have to say about Osama bin Laden.
And I don't want anybody thinking that what we're talking about here is somehow giving favor to him or giving credit to him where it's not due or something.
I know from what I've read, from what you've written in the past, from reading your book Imperial Hubris that you are an American nationalist, that you don't have any sympathy for America's enemies.
In fact, you use extremely strong language in talking about how they ought to be dealt with in many cases.
And so here in a moment when you tell us that bin Laden is not Lex Luthor, the evil criminal mastermind hell-bent on destruction for no good reason except destruction, I want people to know that you are not coming from some blame-America-first leftist position.
No, I think that's fair enough.
I'm probably one of the most outspoken people in terms of using our military more aggressively and less discriminantly.
And my argument here is simply you understand the enemy because it allows you to destroy him more efficiently.
Right.
And I'll go ahead and tell you now, although I don't want to argue with you about it, that I completely disagree about that.
But what I want to know is, who is this guy, Osama bin Laden, and why does anybody care what he says?
I mean, I got to take the Republicans' argument, this guy is pure evil, he's a serial killer, fine, but he's got apparently thousands and thousands of people, maybe millions of people who look up to him all across the Middle East.
How could that be?
I think there are several reasons.
The first is because of his personal characteristics.
He is, in a culture that values oral presentations and eloquence, he's an extraordinarily well-spoken individual and inspires people to believe what he says.
Second, he is, if he was in our culture, he'd be very much a role model.
Here's a billionaire who gave up all of that money to live in Afghanistan and Sudan to fight for his faith, to be wounded four times.
It's kind of a Pat Tillman story, in a way.
He gave up all the riches to go and fight for his God and his country, if you will.
Those are two things.
The third thing is that the Islamic world is basically a desert when it comes to any credible leadership.
It's ruled by princes and royal families and dictators and generals, and there's just not much competition for leadership in the Islamic world at the moment.
There's Osama bin Laden, there's Ayman al-Zawahiri, and there's virtually no one else.
You never see an Arab or an Egyptian wearing an I Love Hosni Mubarak t-shirt, for example.
All of those things together make him a very credible person in the Islamic world, and he's focused on the one thing that all Muslims share, whether they are whiskey-drinking Pakistani generals or missionaries.
They share the Islamic faith, and if the polls are correct, they're increasingly viewing U.S. foreign policy as an attack on Islam.
When we talk about the kind of support bin Laden has, I would think we're talking about hundreds of millions of people who sympathize with his goal, a much smaller proportion ready to pick up arms.
But this is a man of historical importance, and we've yet to come to grips with that.
We try to keep identifying him as Jesse James.
Yeah, a criminal mastermind.
I think he's clearly a mastermind.
Criminal is in the eye of the beholder in this case.
I think here's a man who openly declared war against the United States twice, has read us the riot act about what the war is about, what he intends to do, and why he intends to do it.
Probably more importantly for the United States is that we don't pay much attention to what he says, but the polling that our own firms in the West are taking in the Islamic world over the last 15 years clearly show that he's speaking for a majority of Muslims when he talks about the negative impact of what the U.S. does in the Islamic world.
You told me when I first interviewed you two years ago that the Ayatollah Khomeini spent the 1980s condemning American decadence, miniskirts, MTV, etc., and nobody cared.
And that bin Laden instead points to six specific American foreign policies, and people flocked him.
I think that's exactly right.
We have had the object lesson, really, of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
He could not inspire any kind of an attack against the United States, of a sustained attack against us, by claiming we were degenerate and debauched and evil socially and sexually.
Even the attacks on our Marines in Lebanon, that was conducted by Hezbollah under the umbrella of Khomeini's rhetoric, but really it was a nationalist movement to get us off of their turf, and it succeeded, unfortunately.
Now I guess to the question of bin Laden's motivation.
We know that he fought against the Russians with American money and American backing and training and didn't he use CIA funds to build a lot of the cave complexes and all that kind of stuff?
No he didn't, as a matter of fact.
When we first set up the unit to chase bin Laden, one of the things we had to make sure was we were able to say whether or not the CIA ever had contact with bin Laden.
And we clearly knew his activities at the time in Afghanistan, but he was on the side of the angels then.
He was killing Russians, and we didn't search out contact with him.
But I think more tellingly, he refused to talk to us.
He had his own money from his family, from other supporters, from the Saudi government, and their own sources of weapons.
He has been a very independent-minded person ever since we ran across him in the early 90s.
And what was it that...
So he was already anti-American then during the jihad against the Russians in the 80s, is what you're saying?
Yes, some of the first tapes we captured of him talking to his people, he would say once the Russians are gone, there's only one danger left to Islam, and that's the United States.
And at that point he was focusing on the aid the Americans were giving to the Israelis, either in military weapons or in funding.
But he also told his followers that once the Russians are gone, we'll go after the Americans and they'll be much easier because they're softer and they're not nearly as ruthless or barbarous.
And now you mentioned the bombing in Beirut.
I think it was Osama bin Laden's speech from 2004 where he said the shelling of Beirut by the United States was the first time that he got the idea back in 1983 to knock down some towers in America.
Do you think that's right?
That might be a little poetic extrapolation after the fact, but the reality is, one thing we have missed is a lot of American commentators and Western commentators say that bin Laden is kind of a Johnny-come-lately to the Israel issue, Israel-Palestine, and is trying to jump on that bandwagon.
But very early in his career, and very consistently, bin Laden has been outspoken in support of the Palestinians, and of course condemning the Israelis.
So it's an issue that clearly weighs heavily on his mind and is motivating.
That is one of the six foreign policies that he has focused on in attacking the United States.
And, in fact, didn't the 1996 declaration of war come right on the heels of the Qana massacre in Lebanon?
Yes.
That's one of the massacres that always comes up in his mind.
Shatila is another one.
He always mentions that.
I'm not sure if one triggered the other.
My suspicion was that he was ready to declare war earlier in the year, but he waited until he got to Afghanistan because he thought it would be safer.
And now, what are the rest of the six reasons, if you can just go through them as a list for us?
Sure.
We went over its unqualified support for Israel, the presence of American military and civilians on the Arabian Peninsula, American military presence in Muslim countries.
It used to be places like the Philippines and Yemen.
Now it's Afghanistan and Iraq and the other places where we have troops.
It's our ability until recently to keep oil prices below what market forces probably would have demanded them to be.
It's our support for governments that are widely viewed in the Islamic world as suppressing Muslims, the Indians in Kashmir, the Chinese in Western China, the Russians in Chechnya.
And probably the most damaging for the United States is our pretty consistent support over the last 50 years for Arab tyrannies and police states in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Jordan, Kuwait, you name it, we've supported it.
And I'm sorry, those are basically the six things.
And now, when he put out that declaration of war in 1996, the title referred to, well, let's see, I have it here somewhere.
It was something about ridding the land of, oh, here it is, declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of two holy places.
And this goes directly to what Rahm Paul said in the speech the other night about bombing Iraq.
They were bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia.
That was where all the bases were, and that buildup had begun in the late summer of 1990, right?
That's correct.
And so the war against the Russians had just ended.
These guys were still all full of piss and vinegar.
Yeah, and they were looking initially to other places like Chechnya and Mendanao and Kashmir to fight.
But really, for bin Laden, when the prophet died on his deathbed, he's reputed to have said that if he had lived, no non-Muslim would be allowed on the Arabian Peninsula.
And that's what broke the back for bin Laden, both regarding the United States and the Saudi royal family who rule Saudi Arabia.
Our deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia was just a huge religious offense to, I think, most Muslims, not just Osama bin Laden.
You know, I don't have the quote here, but a friend of mine was telling me the other day how he remembered in 1990 that Senator Lloyd Bentsen from Texas, who was an oilman and knew the Middle East well, was against the war and said it was going to stir up all the crazies in Saudi Arabia way back then.
Well, I think that's pretty much the reality of the situation.
It's very difficult for Americans to understand what goes on in the Middle East, and especially in Saudi Arabia.
Osama bin Laden is the poster boy for the Saudi educational system.
He's the type of person that they want to produce.
And the Saudis really didn't care at all about terrorism, as long as it didn't happen in their country.
And until 2003, when there was an attack in their country, they were probably one of the least helpful of our allies in the war against terrorism.
And now to the religion here.
I'm a suburban white boy from Austin, Texas.
I'm not very conversant with Islam myself.
He wrote a book called Through Our Enemy's Eyes, which focuses I'm sure on, and I've actually only read the second one, but certainly I guess it focuses on Wahhabism and Salafism and these particular strains of Sunni Islam, that if we're to believe the war party are just sick, evil religions that say, convert or die, take over the world and never stop, and that these guys are the aggressors, we're on the defensive, and they might want to point at Saudi Arabia and American troops there and say that that's offensive or whatever.
But what they're really after is to cut all our heads off and force all our kids to convert.
Well, if that's the case, then of course we would need to kill all of them everywhere we found them all the time, which I don't think is either desirable or practical.
A lot of hype has been going on in the last year about their goal is a new caliphate where everyone in the world is Muslim and there's no more religion of any other kind.
That of course is theologically true.
Their Lord has said that the end state of Islam on earth is a caliphate where the whole world is Muslim, and there's as much chance of that happening in any kind of foreseeable future as the application of the golden rule and turn the other cheek and love thy neighbor in the Christian world.
There's no chance.
Bin Laden is popular, and his message resonates because it's a defensive message.
It is very much a message of get out and leave us to our own problem.
One of the things Americans have a very hard time focusing on is that we're not even the main enemy in this war.
We are what our enemy has determined a pivotal person to get out of the way.
We're in the way of what they want to do.
They want to destroy the Israelis and then they want to destroy the Saudis and the Egyptian government and the Algerian government.
They've decided that we are the people who, through money, military power, political and diplomatic support, prop up those number one targets, if you will.
Their mission against the United States is not to defeat us, not to occupy Alabama, but simply to push us as far out of the Middle East as they can so they can go after the primary enemy.
We do support all those regimes.
Should they overthrow those governments if we stop supporting them?
You know, I think that's a question that's up in the air.
I tend to think they're probably a bit stronger, especially Israel and Egypt, than the Islamists give them credit for.
But certainly the amount of money and manpower and military protection we pour into that region, there is probably good reason for the Islamists to believe that it'd be a much more even match if we weren't there.
We've created a lot of dependence, really.
Well, one wonders if some of them are our dependents, but we're also the dependents of the oil producers.
Really, as long as we don't have any energy policy of our own, we are dependent on tyranny to supply our oil.
And as long as we have to support the Saudis and we have to support the dictators of the region, we are going to appear as spectacular hypocrites, preaching democracy in Iraq and supporting a police state in Saudi Arabia simultaneously.
And that's the kind of thing bin Ladenism feeds off of and grows on.
And when Mr. Giuliani and the rest of them on both sides of the aisle just simply dismiss this man and what he believes in as gangsterism, they're really doing Americans a disservice, because the threat to us is so much greater than an El Capone and a turban.
You know, I just saw the movie Red Dawn the other night while I was trying to get some reading done.
And it occurred to me that the boys who fight the Soviet occupation in that movie are the American Mujahideen, right?
Mary Dean Stanton is Mr. John Birch, and these are John Birch's sons.
Well, you know, one of the great things...
They're the ones who pick up the rifles, the ones with the right-wing religious convictions.
They're the ones who fight.
Well, I worked on Afghanistan pretty much for a decade, and I can't remember running into any Americans carrying guns there.
Really, all we did was to allow the Afghans to kill Russians with AK-47s instead of Lee Enfield rifles.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
I think you misunderstand me.
I'm sorry.
I was referring back to your earlier point about the reason people are following bin Laden is because he has a defensive message.
He's basically portraying himself as the Patrick Swayze of this situation, rather than being, you know, the aggressor against us.
It's really the other way around.
Well, that's the perception, and I'm very sure that if you look at what happened to the Ayatollah when he tried, it's very clear that most Muslims don't consider gender equality or whiskey or movies or elections a dire threat to their families in a life-and-death issue.
But they very clearly see our support for Israel, our support for the dictators that rule them, as an offense against both themselves and against their faith.
And it's a very defensive-minded message, and that's why it's appealing.
There are offensive people in the Islamic world who do want to realize the creation of the caliphate, but most of those are our allies, like the Saudis.
The Saudis are very much Islamic imperialists.
They spend an enormous amount of money in the United States and Western Europe and Africa creating enemies for Western civilization.
They are the offensive element in the equation here.
And it seems like, and you've said before, that America is bin Laden's indispensable ally.
And I understand that there's a whole lot of incompetence in the American government, but one could almost imagine that America has set about a deliberate policy to help bin Laden deliberately, overthrowing Saddam Hussein, threatening regime change in Shiite Iran, the proxy war in Somalia, which is exactly what bin Laden predicted last summer.
Are we not just making all this guy's dreams come true here?
Well, we are.
I don't think we're doing it intentionally.
I think we're doing it out of fear.
Because there's a touch of genius, more than a touch of genius, unfortunately, in bin Laden.
And he is focused on attacking policies that, more than any of our other foreign policies, are inextricably mixed up with domestic politics, whether it's energy or Israel or support for other great powers in their efforts against Islamism or the war on terrorism, call it what you will.
They're all issues that the American political establishment does not want to talk about.
And that's why when Mr. Paul said something the other night, Giuliani jumped down his throat and the rest of the gang on the stage did the same thing.
Because they're all deathly afraid of ever having American foreign policy in the Middle East examined by their countrymen, who are much more fair-minded and much more reasonable than they are.
Death goes for the Democrats in spades.
There is no one in the Democratic Party who would stand up and say what Mr. Paul said.
Well, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich would.
But no, ultimately, you're right, the political system.
Here it is, 2007.
Halfway through 2007, and still, it's too emotional of an issue to even try to talk about why we were attacked, that Giuliani wins the debate by being 100% wrong against Ron Paul, who's completely right.
It's extraordinary, and Patrick Cannon made that point this morning, or yesterday morning, in his article.
I think that's exactly right.
Mr. Paul spoke not only the truth, but he spoke in the interests of the American people.
And he got from the right and from the left, he got chopped up.
And at the end of the day, you admire Mr. Paul's courage, but what you fear for is the security of America.
Because the people who attack Mr. Paul are much more concerned with staying in power than they are with protecting my family and yours.
And you know, as I watched this, and I saw the Republicans all jumping on board to try to attack them, and then the moderator tried to switch the subject to the Confederate flag, I could feel the ground shift beneath my feet as the other five and a half billion people in the world all rolled their eyes at the same time.
Jesus Christ, the American people still are not allowed to talk about anything but they hate us because we're free?
Still?
I mean, my God.
What did Giuliani basically call for at the end there was to say that Mr. Paul exceeded the bounds of free speech, he should retract and apologize for saying the truth.
You know, unfortunately, what Mr. Paul is saying and what other people have tried to say will become so clear to the American people the next time that Osama bin Laden attacks inside the United States, and we have a disaster bigger than 9-11.
And then the talk of they hate us for primary elections, and they hate us for gender equality.
That will go out the window, and maybe we'll get down to brass tacks after we have multiple tens of thousands of dead Americans.
Yeah, but no, I mean, if September 11th is the example, what will happen is we'll become even more sure that they hate us for gender equality.
Well, the real tragedy, besides the corpses that we'll have and that kind of influence on the course of the debate, of course, will be we will have nothing to respond to as a great power.
There is no target for us to hit, and so what we will do is further restrict our own civil liberties.
Yeah, or bomb Iran.
Well, Iran is the out for these guys right now.
Iran is a zero threat to the United States, but it would certainly give them an opportunity to beat hell out of the Iranians if bin Laden attacked us, even though the Iranians would have had nothing to do with it.
Yeah, obviously not, since they've offered to turn over al-Qaeda guys they're holding an on house arrest in trade to the Mujahideen al-Khalq that used to be Saddam's terrorists that now work for us, and we've refused.
Yep, that's exactly right.
Yeah.
Okay, well, now, something that Ron Paul said in the debate that, you know, I think that literally the people hosting the debate and the TV news commentators who are doing all the so-called debunking of Ron Paul this whole time, they're not even smart enough to understand what he said to even be confused by it.
But if they did understand what he said, I think it's a little bit confusing and bears, you know, further explanation.
And that is that they have, they are glad we are in the Middle East now, that what they've done with September 11th is lure us closer where they can fight us, because they always considered America to be at war against them anyway.
And so now they're happy to have us over there, because it bankrupts us and it makes them seem, as you said, as though they're the ones fighting on the defensive.
That's exactly right.bin Laden, over the course of the late 90s and early into 2000, repeatedly dared the United States to come to Afghanistan or the Middle East and try to defeat them, because he consistently had told his followers the Americans are much easier to beat than the Russians.
9-11 was meant not only to hurt our economy and kill Americans, but to lure us into going to Afghanistan.
And surely, he was very successful in that, and we're losing that war as well as the war in Iraq.
Iraq was, I think, something he always hoped for, but never expected to come true.
But he got a twofer in many ways from 9-11.
Well, it's just so frustrating to see how far we still have to go before a conversation like this is heard by the American people in any kind of large numbers.
We haven't even begun to fight this war yet.
One of the great tragedies is we're about to lose two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The American people are clearly confused and war-weary and very upset over the loss of probably close to 4,000 Americans now between the two wars.
And because we have never listened to the enemy or tried to understand his motivation, Americans are going to continually be surprised that this war is going to continue to ratchet upwards.
And the only reason that's going to happen is because American politicians on both sides of the aisle have routinely lied to Americans about the enemy, portraying them as a small clandestine gang of criminals, rather than not only a worldwide movement, but a growing worldwide movement.
All right, well, a couple things there.
First of all, I want to ask you whether you think that Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a threat and whether it's, as George Bush says, an excuse to stay.
In fact, in the Senate bill that was voted down that called for withdrawal the other day, it said, oh, except, of course, for anti-terrorism forces to stay and fight in Al-Anbar province and that sort of thing.
So is there a danger of Al-Qaeda taking over the Sunni Triangle if America pulls out of Iraq?
No, none at all.
What's going to go on in Iraq is a war between Sunnis and Shias, and no matter what's going on in Al-Anbar today, when we leave, the Sunnis will welcome some elements of Al-Qaeda back to Al-Anbar because they will be helping them fight the Shias.
The danger for the United States in Iraq is something we don't understand because we don't listen.
Bin Laden grew up in Afghanistan.
He very seldom sends people anywhere where they don't have contiguous safe havens.
He's always looking for another Pakistan.
In Iraq, he now has that contiguous safe haven to project his forces into the countries we claim to be allied with, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel.
And so the big danger for us is not inside of Iraq from Al-Qaeda, but as Al-Qaeda spreads outward from Iraq, the instability amongst the people we regard as allies will grow with some rapidity.
Are the Saudi and Israeli studies right that virtually every single foreign jihadist who has traveled to Iraq to join Al-Qaeda and fight Americans are new terrorists radicalized by the invasion of Iraq itself?
I think what I would say is they were probably Islamists.
They were radicalized already, but they were motivated to actually pick up a gun to kind of cross the line between intellectual and emotional jihadism and actually fighting by the invasion of Iraq.
So when you talk about the danger of these people being spread to other countries, I guess as they go back home and for the ones who stay somehow in Iraq, these are new terrorists basically?
Oh, yes.
Sure, they've got combat experience.
Some of them have gone there just to train and gain combat experience and then go home to Sub-Saharan Africa, to Western Europe, to the Philippines.
Yes, not only have we not stopped the training in Afghanistan, but we have created a place in Iraq where more and more training is going on.
Okay, now I want to share a couple of quotes with you here just because they're such good ones.
From May 5th, Ayman al-Zawahiri in an interview said in complaining about the Democrats' bill with the time tables and benchmarks and such, this bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap.
We ask Allah that they only get out of it after losing 200,000 to 300,000 killed in order that we give the spillers of blood in Washington and Europe an unforgettable lesson.
And I believe there was also a letter from 1995 by a guy named Atiyah or something supposedly to Zarqawi saying indeed it is in our interest to prolong this war.
Yeah, it's win-win for them.
If we stay, we're not going to deploy enough troops to win and we're going to continue to bleed and the country will continue to fall apart and we'll continue to spend billions of dollars for nothing.
So they win in that regard.
The Congress and our politicians haven't quite picked up on this yet, but the galvanizing moment for the Islamist movement in the 20th century was the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan.
When we lose in Iraq and then we follow that with a loss in Afghanistan, that will galvanize the movement around the world much more than Afghanistan did.
But more than America staying in Iraq and continuing to kill people?
Yeah, I don't think there's a big difference either way.
When we leave Iraq, we're going to be still the main threat to Muslims.
We're still going to be supporting tyranny in their world.
We're still going to be having their oil.
We're still going to have unqualified support, probably more support for Israel.
So those things are unchanged.
But what will change is the perception of American military credibility.
When we lose two wars, a superpower getting beat by guys that are armed with World War II weapons for the most part, it will mean quite a bit.
It will embolden, it will encourage people to strike at us because they don't have any fear of us anymore.
Okay, now if we could withdraw the troops from the occupations and set about a real policy to fight only America's enemies, not side issues, not enemies of allies of ours, but only fight Osama bin Laden and his network.
How many people, first of all, do you think that we're really talking about?
And how much destruction really has to be waged?
Because if the action for terrorism is in the reaction, then we want to have as narrow and targeted a reaction as possible and then, well, cease or at least begin to cease the policies that you just listed that are going to continue to create more of these guys for us.
Well, I'm all in favor of anything that cuts down on the number of wars we fight for other people.
I think that's a very good idea.
But the reality is, if we're going to go after bin Laden and al-Qaeda at this point in the game, you're talking about several hundred thousand troops into Afghanistan to try to find them and then destroy them.
We don't have enough troops there now, even barely, to protect Mr. Karzai's government.
So it's a big commitment that would have to be made.
And the one thing I do worry about, and this is an area where you and I disagree, is that our actions in the Islamic world are so universally hated that there's only room at the very margin for any increase in hatred toward the United States.
We might as well do what needs to be done to protect American interests in this case and then think about beginning to find an energy policy that makes sense, a less one-way policy with the Israelis.
But when people argue that we're creating more terrorists, that's true.
But also, even if we weren't in Iraq, we would still be creating more terrorists.
So it's a very difficult situation, but I think the reality of it is the military component of what we do from here on out is going to continue to be very large, I hope much more discriminating.
Well, we're already over time a little bit, but that's all right, we've still got 15 minutes before the next guest, if I can keep you on for just a couple more minutes.
I could have broken that question really into two parts.
One of them being, how many enemies do we have left to fight and how to fight them, assuming we continue all those other policies?
And then the separate question, how many enemies do we really have to fight and how to do that if we were to cease all these policies?
Say for example, if Ron Paul was the president and stopped backing all these dictatorships and stopped using the barrel of a gun to dictate the price of oil and tried to be even-handed in the dispute between the Israelis and the Palestinians, for example, now how many do we have to fight and how brutally do we have to carry out that war?
Well, if we maintain the status quo for the next administration, the next two administrations, basically what America will become is Israel.
The only thing we'll have to defend ourselves with is the intelligence services and the military, and we'll have to fight everywhere.
We will keep identifying enemies in absurd places like Somalia, like the Philippines, places where we really have no national interest at stake at all.
If we combine an ability to annihilate what's left of al Qaeda and at the same time begin to make sense of an energy policy and a lot that allows us to back away from supporting police states over time, that's a move in the right direction.
It creates less enemies, but it also distracts them.
About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy.
That's one thing that the Muslims in Chechnya can agree with, with the Muslims in South Africa and the Muslim in Egypt and the Muslim in the Philippines.
They all agree they hate U.S. foreign policy.
To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems, attacking the Philippine government, attacking the Saudi government, or the Egyptian government, and that's kind of what we want.
We want them to be killing each other instead of us.
That will only happen, though, if we begin to take a more broad approach to how to fight this war and don't keep moving only in the direction of military and intelligence operations.
Well, and even killing each other instead of us, really, if we left this up to the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, whatever, they have much more incentive and probably much more ability to actually maintain their own monopoly on violence inside those states and really weed these guys out, don't they?
I don't know if that's the case or not, but what comes down to me is who cares.
Better for them to kill each other than to kill us.
And I'm not one that really thinks that a Saudi Arabia ruled by Osama bin Laden would be much worse than a Saudi Arabia ruled by the Al-Saluds, because they both have control of oil, and so they both have a death lock on the American economy.
That we're in a position where America has to do something to help itself, we can no longer depend on proxies, whether it's the Saudis to provide oil, Muharraf and the Pakistanis to go after bin Laden or NATO to send troops to help us in Afghanistan.
We really need to begin to do some things for ourselves.
Well, you heard it, folks.
This guy's no bleeding heart.
Michael Shoyer, he's the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Alex Station, he's the author of Through Our Enemy's Eyes and Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism.
Thanks very much for your time today, Mike.
Anytime.
I'll see you later.
