Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, we're streaming live worldwide on the internet every weekday here from 11 to 1 Texas time at ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
And now welcoming back to the show Michael Shoyer, he's the former chief of the CIS Bin Laden unit and is the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
Welcome back to the show Mike.
Thank you sir.
Good to have you on the air here, we have quite a few headlines in the news focusing attention again on Osama Bin Laden's network and we have a pretty astounding bit of reporting in the New York Times here about a jihadi leader in Iraq supposedly saying that Obama's victory is partially theirs.
So I guess first of all, on the immediate headlines there's two, one that the English government is worried about wide scale threats to their country in the near term and then also supposedly there's this message that promises an attack by Al-Qaeda which will outdo 9-11 by far.
How seriously do you take these latest threats?
Well the second one I think very much I would take very seriously.
They have since 96 promised that each attack would be more violent and destructive than the last.
If you chart all of the attacks they have, each one has become more destructive and I think that's probably the reason we haven't had an attack since 9-11 is simply they weren't ready with an attack that was bigger than the attacks on Washington and New York.
So I take that one very seriously, although what I would say is that as far as I understand it, it was not a communique directly from Al-Qaeda but it was somebody being interviewed out of Yemen.
So I'm not quite sure how authoritative it is.
Well and what about their capability to attack the United States?
I mean, let's get real, destroying the two towers and crashing into the Pentagon, it would be pretty hard to outdo that.
Not if you had a nuclear device or some kind of a chemical weapon or a tanker full of liquid natural gas.
It's not, it wouldn't be hard at all.
And getting it across the border if it's some kind of weapon of course is simplicity itself.
So we've done a lot of crowing about not being attacked since 9-11 but I think, what's the saying, the chicken is the wisest animal because it never cackles until the egg is laid.
And we may cackle too soon on that.
Well and the thing is too, when you bring up crashing an 18-wheeler full of fuel into something, something like that, I mean that just goes to show how completely hopeless this situation is in terms of empowering a national police force, the Homeland Security or the FBI, to really be able to protect us from that.
I mean the best thing that they could do would be keep these people from getting into the country.
But if some jackass wants to, you know, carjack an 18-wheeler and suicide crash it into a mall or something, no police state in the world is going to be able to keep us safe from that.
No, since America redefined national security without a place for border control in it, we're wide open.
Anybody can come into this country and if you suggest that perhaps we should have a controlled border, then of course you're a racist or an anti-Hispanic or whatever you want to call someone who has that, I think would be a very good idea.
Well and of course, this is something we actually covered on the show last week, where if you ask the national government for some border control, then they draw a 100-mile inland zone of the border wherein they can stop and harass anybody, which of course includes two-thirds of the population of this country, lives within 100 miles from the outside edge at any point.
And so if you ask them to do a minimal job of what they're supposed to be doing, of course they go completely overboard and violate all of our rights.
Well, it's a pretty hopeless situation right now, although the violence and drug traffic wars that are going on in Mexico, I would assume, are going to continue and to push an increasing number of people across the border.
So there may come a point where they have to make a decision to do something, although the ability of our political elite to avoid reality is pretty strong.
Yeah, well, okay, now so this gets to the larger question of the election and the war on terrorism.
Help clear something up for me, because I guess there's two kind of competing themes, if I can sort of generally overstate them, regarding the argument about the war on terrorism, what we're up against, and what to do about it.
Basically, on one hand, the war party would argue that every time America leaves somewhere, we inspire these guys with our weakness.
When Reagan turned and left Beirut, when Bill Clinton got the guys out of Somalia, that they learned that, see, all we have to do is blow up the Americans and they'll turn tail and run.
And then there's what I think is a more sophisticated explanation, although not necessarily a more correct one, which is that the attacks of September 11th, for example, were not meant, or even the attacks on the embassies in Africa and on the coal, were not meant to drive us away.
They were meant to draw us in.
They were meant as a lure, that the action is in the reaction, and that what they wanted was a full-scale American invasion, particularly of Afghanistan, in order to bleed our empire dry and force us out.
Now, I believe that you've really made the latter case there, although there's certainly an element of truth in the former, because I forget if it was Ramzi Yousef or some of the guys who plotted to bomb the Holland Tunnel back in the early 90s, that they told the judge, oh, we see what cowards you are, and that if we blow you up, we'll run away.
Now, of course, the conclusion of the war party, if we accept their argument, their side of the argument here, is that we can never leave.
We have to stay forever, or else they'll take credit for us running.
Well, I think there's elements of truth in both of the propositions you outlined, Scott.
What I would say is, I've never really encountered in any reading of history where we go to war never not to win.
I think, myself, applying a catastrophic defeat to these people in one place or another ultimately is going to be necessary, but right now they have done what they've wanted.
They've sucked us into Afghanistan, and we're going to lose in Afghanistan.
First of all, we've just elected a party that doesn't have the gumption to win anything, and second, we don't have enough soldiers to win in Afghanistan.
So that one worked.
Iraq was a gift to them, and I think Iraq will come unglued.
I personally think that Petraeus and the surge was simply to try to get the Republicans past the election so they could maybe win the election, but it didn't work, and now I think Iraq in the next year will come unglued from where it is today.
Well, so, but what was the motivation behind the attack?
Was it, they sort of hoped that we would just turn tail and run, but if we didn't, that we would overreact and they sort of win either way?
Yeah, it was win-win, but they certainly, the attacks of 9-11 were designed to get us into Afghanistan.
The kind of mistake or the misjudgment they made was that for five years we just sat in our camps in Afghanistan and never came out of them, and so they didn't have a lot of opportunities to kill us, but now the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and their allies are so much stronger that we're engaging them on a daily basis and losing people on a daily basis, and so right now the attacks got us there and they're going to drive us out of there, which will be a huge victory for them.
Now I have this quote here from an interview that Ayman al-Zawahiri gave to, I think it was a Pakistani news station, where this was in May, May 5th of 2007, and this was when, I guess there were still people in the world who were under the illusion that the Democrats in Congress were going to get us out of Iraq.
And Zawahiri complained to the interviewer, this bill will deprive us, this was the timeline bill that we knew was dead on arrival, but they didn't, I guess, this bill will deprive us of the opportunity to destroy the American forces which we have caught in a historic trap.
Continuing in the same tone, Zawahiri says, quote, 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.
So that really goes to what you're saying, they really want to bleed us dry and force us out all the way there.
But when he talks about the historic trap, he's referring to the same thing in Iraq that you're saying in Afghanistan, that when we do leave, they get to take all the credit for it.
Yeah.
Again, it's win-win.
And I guess I would say that probably Zawahiri's prayer was answered, because certainly Obama is as close to the Israelis as McCain, and he's appointed an IDF veteran to be in the White House with him.
There's probably zero chance we're getting out of Iraq, so we'll continue to bleed and spend there for the foreseeable future.
Well, and you know, it seems to me, too, and I just made this up, maybe this is no good, if there was a time that we could get out of Iraq, it would be right now, because we could say, oh no, listen, Al-Qaeda in Iraq basically amounts to nothing.
Now the sons of Iraq, the former Sunni insurgency, they're now good guys, and they're no longer tolerating Al-Qaeda's presence to help them fight us, because now they're friends with us, and we've turned Baghdad and everything to the south of there, over to the barter core of the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party, who are by no means friends with Al-Qaeda, and their alliance with the Kurds.
So this has, we could leave right now, and actually credibly argue, it has nothing to do with any Al-Qaeda jihadi violence against us driving us out, it's only because we won.
Hooray, victory, let's go now.
Well, if we were smart we would do it, but we're not smart.
And I think we're beginning to see, just in the past couple days, that part of the reason there wasn't a lot of violence is because, at least from Al-Qaeda's perspective, they wanted the Obama team to win in the election here.
So we're not going to go, Scott.
The Israelis have told us, listen, if you leave, we're dead.
We already see increasing violence in Syria, in Lebanon, in Jordan, and that's all bleed through from Iraq.
And so we've got our orders from the Israelis, we're going to be staying in Iraq for probably forever, if things go as they're going now.
But aren't there people in Israel saying that, no, listen, the American presence in Iraq is what's making everything so much more difficult for us in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon?
Well, they may be saying that, but it's not something you can reverse.
When we leave, Saddam is not going to be there.
Saddam was a very careful man, he dabbled with the Palestinians, but he did not have any truck with the Sunni insurgents, the worldwide, or Al-Qaeda.
When we leave there, we're going to have a pro-Iranian Shia state, and part of the country will be controlled by Sunnis who hate both the Shias and the Israelis.
So I'm not sure what's being said by some people in Israel, but the geopolitical reality is Iraq without America there is a disaster for the Israelis.
Yeah, I guess, well, Israel first, right?
Unfortunately, in our government, that's exactly correct.
So when you talk about, you know, the Democrats don't have the will to win anything or whatever, if you were the National Security Advisor, what would you have Obama do, invade Waziristan and get bin Laden in Zawahiri and then call it quits, or fight the Taliban?
I would either do something or get out.
Is the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, or is the war against the Arab-Afghans that were allowed to hang out there back in the day?
Yeah, our target when we went in there was just Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Zawahiri, and if we could get Mullah Omar and his boys, some of his boys, that was good, too.
But the only real target there was Al-Qaeda.
And we didn't get them, and now, I think what's going to happen, Scott, is ultimately the situation is so bad in Afghanistan and in Pakistan that we're going to have to have a decision made by this administration, certainly in the next four years, do we want to lose Pakistan and Afghanistan, or do we want to give up the Afghan effort and try to stabilize Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons?
I think it's going to come down to that at some point in the pretty near future.
Yeah, it could have been Ron.
I'm going to have to get that tattooed somewhere on my body, I think.
It could have been Ron.
All right, well, so now let's talk about this Obama's victory shared by the jihadi leaders.
We spoke a couple of weeks ago when there was this website that claimed that they would prefer McCain victory, as you explained, at least from their perspective, having someone like McCain, who's so forthright in his warmongery, is good for their recruiting.
It's good for defining Americans as, see, they are the enemy.
They've ratified this policy yet again, and re-electing the Republicans, it would have made things basically easier for them in continuing the same policy from the same, you know, Obama's dubious, basically, from kind of the world's perspective.
Nobody's really sure exactly how it's going to be.
But just now you said that you seem to agree with this article that the victory of Barack Obama is really what they would prefer.
I think if the only thing you can conclude is they were perfectly silent through the whole election, the things that were trumpeted as supportive of McCain were emails that were sent to various jihadi websites by anonymous people.
But the media, of course, played that up for whatever reason.
But they weren't authoritative statements from Al-Qaeda.
I think Al-Qaeda's silence clearly was meant to let Obama and the Democrats be elected.
Because I think they're pretty clear, having listened to the campaign and having listened to Obama talk about Israel, that the foreign policies are not going to be changed, at least radically.
And more important than that, Al-Qaeda's goal, you know, we've talked before, Scott, their goal is to bleed us to bankruptcy.
We're in terrible economic shape at the moment.
Obama is promising more bailouts for the auto industry, a trillion dollars in new spending, some sort of health insurance.
They need help in order to bleed us to bankruptcy.
And I think they probably thought that the Democrats are more likely to help out in that area than McCain would have been.
Yeah.
Well, historically, the Republicans always grow government at a much faster rate than the Democrats.
But I could see how people would think otherwise.
And yeah, you know, this is the whole thing about the October 2004 speech, the one that came out right before the last presidential election, where it's funny, you know, I read something the other day.
I forget which book it was, but apparently the deputy director of the CIA referred to this as, oh, well, I guess Osama's doing his part to help Bush or something like that.
Like they recognized it as helping Bush immediately over at CIA headquarters.
And yet the text of that thing, the text of that speech, he very clearly laid out what's going on here, that everybody is losing except the American government and their politically connected corporations that are feeding at the war party trough, you know, feeding off of our treasury during wartime and him and his jihadi movement and the people of Iraq lose and the people of Afghanistan lose.
But the government of America and his own government gain, although he outlines that that's only short term, that in the long term you're going bankrupt and you're going home.
And then, I guess, we'll have help to complete the radicalization of the Middle East for him in the meantime.
Yeah, he was really very clear, he said, you know, we don't care if you elect Bush or Kerry or the devil himself.
As far as we're concerned, this is about your policies.
You can elect whoever you want.
If you don't change your policies, we fight you.
Exactly.
He said the only ones that benefit are Ruth Kellogg and the rest of them.
You know, it's funny that still, after all this time, the debate is still so limited.
I mean, most people just don't even, I mean, like on the news or whatever, they don't even talk about al-Qaeda all that much at all.
And these kind of brass tacks questions about, you know, what exactly is their motive and what exactly is their goal, and therefore how best do we respond to that, is still just not even discussed at all.
It's like we want to just call them names and pretend, oh yeah, a bunch of Arabs in a cave, this, that, and pretend like they're just, you know, we're Superman and they're the villain and we always win in the end and it's no big deal.
But meanwhile, like, you know, these guys are educated guys.
They know what they're doing and basically they're winning so far, it would seem like to me, as far as how the chess game is played.
Yeah, they're very much, it's got a learning kind of organization.
They pretty much know that we have expended all of the troops we have.
They know the British are going to go home from Iraq this year.
They know that over the weekend, for example, the commander of the British forces said none of our troops are going to Afghanistan in any kind of surge because our military is broken.
I also think the British want to get more of their military troops back home because they're expecting unrest at home between Islamists and their opponents on the streets of Britain.
So we're in a big mess and we live in under blue skies and sunshine and we think we're invulnerable and we're not.
And that's the whole thing about counterinsurgency.
I remember learning this as a kid.
They would say about Vietnam that the VC, all they had to do was not lose and they win.
And that was basically the position that we came into here, America and Britain and these are the most powerful militaries in the whole world.
But if they get into a war to not just complete the mission and get the hell out of there, we're broken all over Afghanistan, no different than Alexander the Great and the Brits and the Russians before us and they still live.
That's exactly right.
We've kind of spent our bullets and now it's just a matter of how we get out without looking like we were chased out.
But Afghanistan is a very dicey place.
It could turn into another evacuation situation like South Vietnam was because we simply have so few troops there and the enemy is so numerous and has infiltrated the government at every level and the Afghan army would rather fight us than fight the insurgents.
So it's really a very inhospitable place, Scott.
The media doesn't talk about it.
Very few people talk about it, really.
It's all a matter of management as if we come up with a new scheme.
The Post this morning here in Washington, the newspaper, had the Obama team coming up with a new regional scheme to address Afghanistan.
Well, that's all pretty much crap because it's the guys with the guns that are going to decide it.
Right now, it's the Arab guns and the Afghan guns that are winning.
Well, so what is to be done?
Do you think that America could make a deal with the Taliban that, look, just give us Bin Laden and Zawahiri and their ten friends and we'll get the hell out of here?
No.
I think that's another dream that has come up recently, mostly from Western journalists, that there's some kind of a split between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
I'll tell you, Scott, if Mullah Omar and his guys in the party were willing to give up their country to the Americans and NATO in order to protect Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda when they were going to lose to that war, they're certainly not going to give them up now when they're on the comeback trail, if you will.
That they've won a lot of credit across the Islamic world for protecting Al-Qaeda, and fighters are flowing in and funding is flowing in from all over the Arab world for them.
So I think that's just one of those things that we would like to see happen, so our journalists write it as if it is happening.
You say finance flowing to them from all over the Arab world.
Now this is a distinction, which I guess it's been a few years since I've heard it this way, but this is one distinction between our war in Afghanistan and the Russians' war in Afghanistan that used to be kind of common, was that while the Russians were up against all the money that America and Saudi Arabia could throw at the Pakistanis to back the Mujahideen warriors in their fight in the 1980s, and yet in our situation, almost all the mullahs and imams around the entire Gulf denounced Osama bin Laden and his jihad, and they haven't participated in financing in the same manner.
Oh, they never stopped financing the Taliban.
And I'm very sure they're financing Al-Qaeda in its fight against the United States and Afghanistan, Scott.
You know, we live in a dream world when it comes to the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Emiratis.
They want us out of Afghanistan.
They support the Taliban surreptitiously.
And even if those governments didn't, there was just as much money that flowed, for example, to the Afghan Mujahideen to fight the Soviets from private sources, from private families in the Arab world, as did from the United States and the Saudi government.
So Afghanistan is a cause celebre for the entire Islamic world, but in terms of donating money, between narcotics and wealthy Arabs, the Taliban has more money than it knows what to do with.
Oh, well, that's good.
Do you know where a man can read some good reporting about that?
It's something you don't need to read reporting about, Scott.
The Taliban has better arms, it has bigger units, they're better trained, they have better communications equipment, they have very sophisticated camp facilities.
Where does that money come from?
It certainly doesn't all come from narcotics.
It comes from donations from wealthy Arabs.
But we want to believe that somehow the Saudis have turned the corner, you know, and now they're rehabilitating these former jihadis to be good husbands and peaceful people.
That's what you read in the paper.
The reality is they want us out of Afghanistan, they want us out of Iraq, and they'll pay people to kill us.
Well, so what about Iran?
Now, you talked about Barack Obama's statements, and I guess you referred to his speech at AIPAC and his connections to the Israel lobby and to Israel firsters in his administration and his group of advisors.
And of course he, again, laid down the George Bush gauntlet the other day, basically pretending that Iran enriching uranium at all, even in the presence of IAEA inspectors, is the development of a nuclear weapon and that they must be stopped.
What do you think that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, based on all you know about them, what do they think about America's position toward Iran?
I think they're in the same position they were in Iraq.
They were hoping that we would attack the Iraqis, but they kind of never believed we would be stupid enough to do it.
I think they're probably the same way regarding the Iranians, that they would like us to do it, but they probably don't believe we're stupid enough to do it.
But as you said, Mr.
Obama has given them a little bit of reassurance.
It's funny that the whole idea that they hate us because we haven't invaded them and given them a democracy yet.
They're all so poor and oppressed and hopeless.
That's why they attack us.
What we need to do is help make them all rich and free by overthrowing their governments.
We're overthrowing, or at least targeting, the governments that they want overthrown, not the Saudis, although I'm sure they'd like to see the Saudi kingdom overthrown.
But we've targeted Iraq so far, and clearly this whole time the neocons have had Syria and Iran in their sights.
These are exactly the regimes that bin Laden al-Zawahiri would like to be rid of, the secular Baathists and the Shiite Ayatollahs.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
We're kind of doing their work for them.
As you said, we got rid of Saddam, we ruined Bashar al-Assad by forcing him to withdraw from Lebanon.
It's a reading of the Islamic world or of the Sunni Islamist movement that is really 180 degrees away from reality.
And every time we have an election in the Middle East, of course, we get the bad guys, from our point of view, elected.
So, it's rather hopeless, Scott.
You know, there's really no...
You read the media, you listen to the radio, or you listen to television, and there doesn't seem to be anyone who's really saying, you know, we're in a hell of a mess here, and we're creating more enemies and more wars than is necessary.
I don't know what's going to change that, maybe another attack in the United States.
Well, you know, it's pretty easy to see at this point why some people assume that Bush and Bin Laden are getting together for drinks and laughing about all this.
Well, I think people do assume that, but my own opinion is that the neoconservatives are just so completely one-dimensional.
It's all about Israel, it's all about the arrogance of believing that our way is the only way people could or should live.
I think the President is, you know, he's probably not a bad person as such, he's just completely at sea when it comes to looking at how the world works.
Right, I mean, that really is the thing about George Bush, too.
I mean, I don't want to give Bill Clinton credit, but at least the man could read.
And when you have a President like George Bush, who is simply just such a dilettante and has never studied anything, he doesn't really have the background.
I mean, Mike, if you were the one giving him the briefing and telling him everything that it was that you wanted him to know, he probably still doesn't really have enough background understanding of how the world works to really fit your puzzle pieces into, to really have the context to understand the importance of what you're saying or which part of it, you know?
No, I think he was probably, I agree with that, Scott.
I think he probably was underqualified in terms of his knowledge of the world and his general knowledge to be President.
And that opened the door to people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and the rest of them.
So it's a good era to be done with when they're gone.
I'm not sure that the Obama era is going to be any better at all, but we'll have to wait and see on that one.
One thing that we're going to have to wait and see about, and I'm not looking forward to what's going to happen here, I think it's pretty clear already at least what they're going to try, and that is intervention in Africa.
If I remember it right, it was the summer of 2006 when bin Laden put out, I forget, I guess an audio tape that said, the Americans are coming to Somalia and to Sudan next.
Get ready for them.
All true believers in Allah, head to Africa.
That's the next battleground.
And six months later, we help the Ethiopian government overthrow the, by comparison, we're going to see moderate Islamic Courts Union because they had the word Islamic in their name and supposedly we're sheltering Al-Qaeda guys.
So now already I think I've read about suicide bombings in Somalia and...
And outside of the Mogadishu area, up in the northern part of the country where they haven't been before.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
And what kind of a brain, really?
We're in enough trouble in the Muslim world, so what do we do but have a Christian country like Ethiopia invade a Muslim country?
There's not a lot of smarts involved in that, is there?
No, not at all.
And you know, from what I understand, and I admit I've never been there, but from what I understand, Somali culture is not particularly bent toward being a bunch of suicide bombers and generation-long grudge-keeping maniacs, you know what I mean?
That's not really the way they are, and yet we seem to be trying to force them into that mold, you know?
Yeah, I think that's right.
There was an interesting article in the Jamestown Terrorism Focus by a guy named Andrew McGregor, who pointed out that the only time Somali Islam has become very radical in the last hundred years is when a Christian country invades them, either Ethiopia or the British Army.
You know, so that you can educate yourself up on this pretty easily in a six-page article.
But we didn't obviously take the time to do that.
Now we've got a hell of a problem in the Horn of Africa.
I read this morning that our Kenyan friends are now fighting different people coming out of Somalia.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it doesn't seem all that complicated, and yet there you go.
I mean, they just fall right into it over and over again.
And of course, next on the list is Sudan.
Don't you know that there's a politically incorrect war going on there?
Well, sure.
Even McCain wanted to send Marines in there, and British Marines.
I don't see where that's any of America's concern.
But I think that, for me at least, the real problem, the real danger in Africa is not even Islamic.
It's the whole business in the Gulf of Guinea and Nigerian oil.
In 2012, we're going to have 20 percent of our foreign crew come out of there.
And there's a revolutionary movement that's going on there that already has cut production by a quarter because of their attacks on pipelines and foreign expatriate workers.
So to me, that's what this new command, this AFRICOM, is about, really.
It's being prepared to go to war to restore production in the Gulf of Guinea.
They just haven't found a place in Africa to base it yet, I guess.
Right, yeah.
So far, they're keeping it in Germany.
Well, and you know, I think you're very right about that.
And this is something I really wish I had more expertise.
Actually, a friend of mine is Nigerian.
Maybe I can ask him some things.
But I know I interviewed, I guess in January, February of 2007, Sebastian Younger wrote an article for Vanity Fair about these guys.
Very frightening article, wasn't it?
I'm sorry?
It was a very frightening article.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, the thing is, too, is that the solution was so obvious throughout the article.
And you know, it was as simple as pay these people for the oil you're taking from under their village.
It's as simple as that.
All the national government and all the politicians get all the money.
The people whose property is being stolen get none of it.
And so guess what?
They're fighting.
They steal a little bit of oil, they sell it, buy some badass firearms and some aluminum bottom boats, and now it's on.
And if you think, you know, fighting for America was tough in Iraq or Afghanistan, the Niger Delta is, I think I read, 27,000 square kilometers of swamp and forest.
So if you want to fight an insurgency there, you know, good luck to you.
Yeah, well, you know, it all, I think, sounds a lot like the British in New Orleans in 1814, man.
They lost, by the way, for those of you who don't know your history out there, they lost.
Now, also, something you mentioned there in terms of Somalia, this is also true for Sudan.
And I'm not exactly sure what kind of sort of pagan style I think religion these rebels in Nigeria believe in.
But in any case, it should be the same thing either way, especially we know this will be true for Somalia and for Sudan.
And this is the difference in the religion.
Like you said, in Somalia, their Islam becomes radical when they are invaded by Christians, by British or by Ethiopians.
And this is something that Robert Pape talks about in his book, Dying to Win, that religion is part of this.
No, it's not for virgins in heaven.
And no, it's not because, you know, the Prophet Mohammed disapproves of our way of life here in America.
It's the difference in religion between the occupier and the occupy e.
And he points to Sudan and says, in Sudan, we have hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Everybody who's sort of black, African, sort of Arab, they're all Sunni Muslims.
And even though you have vicious fighting between nomads and farmers and different militias and factions and slaughters and refugee camps, nobody is resorting to suicide attacks because the threat that even though they might lose their life, they're not living in the fear that whoever kills them is going to convert their children and change their entire way of life.
That's the kind of thing that will motivate someone to actually strap a bomb to themselves or crash a plane into a building.
Same for the Japanese, for that matter, in World War II.
That's certainly Pape's argument.
It's a very strong one.
I wish, you know, the new administration would read that book.
I think it's a very powerful, convincing argument he makes.
Yeah, I mean, I saw footage one time of old men who were Japanese kamikazes who either didn't go on their mission or got shot down and survived or whatever.
And they explain that the myth that they were fighting for their devotion to the emperor and all that was just hogwash.
They actually were laughing about it and saying, no, we were fighting to prevent or at least prolong, as long as possible, the American invasion of our home islands where they were going to come and they were going to change our way of life.
And we were resisting them.
That's why.
And I think Pape points out that when we studied the Japanese after the war ended, suicide bombings made perfect sense from their perspective.
That was all they had left.
Right.
Yeah, same thing happened in Vietnam.
In the Middle East, I think we're seeing just something we should be able to understand very clearly.
In fact, I like this one because it sort of puts people in the other guy's shoes.
When the Romans occupied Israel, this is one that Pape brought up the last time I interviewed him just a few weeks ago.
The Israeli zealots would run up on a gang of Roman soldiers and stab one of them under the armpit and kill him.
But which was guaranteed death.
The other three or four Roman soldiers would pull out their swords and hack the zealot to death.
There was no way they were going to get away with it.
And yet they continued.
That's the same thing.
Same, same business, except those are good terrorists.
Oh, right.
Because they were, I guess, even though they were, I guess they were white Europeans or something, somehow like us or something.
I don't know.
Wait, no, that would be the Romans.
But then even the Romans then considered the white Europeans to the north to be a bunch of monolith savages.
So, boy, I'm thrown for a loop here trying to figure out who are the good guys, where am I?
It's hard sometimes.
Well, we're the good guys, but we don't do much of a job of defending ourselves or avoiding becoming involved in other people's wars.
We have lost, we're kind of unanchored, Scott.
We drift around thinking that somehow we prove ourselves to be good Americans by what we do overseas, rather than making sure our country at home remains solvent and secure and sensible.
It's a sad situation when we have people like Pelosi and Obama and McCain trying to prove our country's worth by things they want to do overseas, rather than things that can be done here at home.
Yeah, or just even things they could stop doing.
That would be a good start if you asked me.
Well, so now, back to the alarmism and threats at the beginning, you really think there's a possibility that al-Qaeda could smuggle a nuclear weapon into this country that they could carry out mass casualty attacks?
I don't think it would be hard to get it into this country, Scott.
I think the only question is, can they acquire it?
They've got the money, they've got the intention, they've got the desire to use it as a first-strike weapon, the borders are open, not all of the Soviet nuclear arsenal is secured.
The question comes down only to whether they can find the right person to approach to buy one.
Do you have any faith at all in the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence to keep these people out of our country?
No, no, not at all.
Not at all?
Not because they're not working to do it, but because we've made it impossible for them to do it.
Our ports are wide open, our borders are wide open.
If somebody coming into our country maintains any kind of security for their communications, we never know it.
They don't have to carry anything with them because, you know, in terms of plans, because they can email it to somebody in the United States and pick it up once they get here.
I just think the government has made it impossible for the police, the FBI, the security agencies to protect America.
All right, well...
No, we'll take the blame after the next attack.
The politicians won't take it.
But the fact of the matter is, it's just a monumental task.
Right, and the focus on what actually needs to be done is nowhere to be found.
It's everywhere else.
Everywhere else, yeah.
We're trying to somehow protect America without protecting it.
You know, the borders are the place to start, and the ports.
Then secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
That might not stop the next attack, but it certainly puts two things... you check two boxes you don't have to worry about anymore.
Right, you know, what was it?
Oh, it was the Times or the Post, just in the last week, an article about Obama and his emphasis, actually, as a senator, he kind of was taken under the wing of Dick Lugar, and how these guys actually are...
Lugar, of course, is very serious about working with the Russians on their nuclear material and so forth, and it said that in this age of international terrorism and whatever, Obama's focus on old Russian nuclear material seems quaint.
That was what they called it.
I forgot if it was the Post or the Times.
I'll send you the link, I have it here.
Oh, actually, I sent it to Gordon Prather, I knew he'd like it, so I'll find it here.
All right.
All right, hey, thanks a lot for your time, I really appreciate it, Mike.
Anytime, Scott, it's always nice to talk to you.
All right, folks, that's Michael Schoyer, he's the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, he's the author of Imperial Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq.
We'll be right back.
