Following is a typically punchy commentary from Mike Scheuer in which he states that the first step back to sanity must be a realization that we are off course. It remains, however, an open question whether top decision makers are ready to concede anything more than that the US needs to beef up its communitcations skills. The President's view seems to be that the problem lies more in the message rather than the policy, as indicated by his remarks at Karen Hughes' swearing in on September 9.
"In the war on terror, the world's civilized nations face a common enemy, an enemy that hates us, because of the values we hold in common...By spreading the hope of freedom across the broader Middle East, Condi and Karen -- or should I say Madam Secretary and the Ambassador -- understand that spreading the message of freedom requires an aggressive effort to share and communicate America's fundamental values."

Full text available at http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/52846.htm



Michael Scheuer: Has the Iraq war made us safer?

No: Osama bin Laden is still out there

05:27 AM CDT on Sunday, September 11, 2005

John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner once said the office of U.S. vice president, which he held under Franklin D. Roosevelt, was "not worth a bucket of warm spit." Mr. Garner's figure of speech aptly assesses the worth of officials from both parties who assert Americans are safer today than before the Iraq war.

Our bipartisan governing elite is arrogant, cowardly and incompetent. It is crewed by pontificating time-servers, trained to bow to the foreign masters of U.S. politics in Mexico, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and who have pledged fealty to the fantasy that they are elected to rule and improve the world, whatever it costs Americans.

In this context, the invasion of Iraq and the growing insurgency there are best seen as tipping points on the continuum of disasters our bipartisan Wilsonian elite has inflicted on Americans as they remake the world in their – not our – image. Our leaders have forgotten Benjamin Franklin's advice that, on issues of America's survival, it is well for each to "doubt a little of his own infallibility."

On Iraq, the invasion ensured a bloody, interminable struggle with militant Islam. With 2,000 U.S. military personnel already dead, we occupy a country out of control politically, ungovernable except as a police state, and a strategic asset for al-Qaeda and its allies as they move in to kill Americans and acquire contiguous safe haven to reach from Iraq into Turkey, Jordan and Syria – and, ultimately, through the latter two into Lebanon and Israel.

Thus, while U.S. leaders crow about the cleverness of making Iraq a "magnet" for Islamists so the fight is there and not in America, al-Qaeda quietly uses Iraq as a corridor to its other important targets. Last month's failed attack on U.S. Navy ships in Jordan is a mere token of trouble that will flow out of Iraq.

Bipartisan approval for invading Iraq also was a conscious decision to neuter America's counterterrorism campaign. Most obviously, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are alive and lead functioning organizations; al-Qaeda and its allies have attacked more than 20 U.S. allies since 2002; and the Afghan insurgency's tempo is rising. Ignoring Lincoln's dictum that one war at a time is plenty, our leaders' Iraq war is draining human, materiel and financial resources from fighting al-Qaeda, ensuring that it survives and refits.

Parenthetically, the Iraq adventure again proves our bipartisan rulers do not understand that a transnational entity – like al-Qaeda – can be more dangerous than a nation-state like Iraq. The enduring control of this debilitating Cold War mind-set can be heard by cocking an ear toward that hermetically sealed asylum on the Potomac where the elected, their bureaucrats and their pundits are beating drums for war on Iran.

More ominously, the Iraq war is speeding the Islamic world's radicalization by completing al-Qaeda's evolution from a man and a group to a philosophy and a movement. In Iraq, our ruling elites validated claims Mr. bin Laden made to Muslims for a decade.

Bin Laden: "The Americans want Muslim oil."

U.S. response: Invade Iraq, owner of the world's second largest reserves.

Bin Laden: "The Americans will destroy any Muslim state threatening Israel."

U.S. response: Invade Iraq.

Bin Laden: "The Americans will destroy Islam and its sanctities."

U.S. response: Invade Iraq, Islamic civilization's center, adding it to the perceived U.S. occupation of the Arab peninsula and Israel's of Jerusalem.

Amid this accelerating disaster, our bipartisan leaders hawk new polls showing Americans better liked by Muslims, and Mr. bin Laden less liked, than a year ago. "We're winning," they claim.

Liars. This is not a personality contest. Polls always show Muslims like Americans as Americans; the fact is that hatred for U.S. foreign policy is nearly universal among Muslims. This hatred fuels and renews al-Qaeda and its allies.

And at home? Four years after 9-11 and two-plus years after the Iraq invasion, U.S. borders are wide open (and Russia's nuclear arsenal is not secure). Our immigration laws are not enforced; we do not know who is in our country. The FBI director cannot buy a workable computer system and thinks FBI officers need no Islamic or Middle Eastern expertise to fight al-Qaeda.

And the early Hurricane Katrina experience suggests the post-9-11 bipartisan spending binge bought votes and re-elections but naught for emergency preparedness. Katrina deployed unprecedented force, but we had many days' warning; similarly, 9-11 brought unprecedented carnage, but we had many years' warning. Failure to be ready for Katrina does not build confidence that our leaders are prepared for al-Qaeda detonating a nuclear device in the United States.

How to undo this lethal, mostly self-inflicted mess? Well, Americans must first sense something is dreadfully wrong. In 1787, George Washington wrote to Marquis de Lafayette about the dire need to alter the new nation's political system. It has been clear for years, Washington said, that the Articles of Confederation did not ensure America's survival as a united nation.

"It is to be regretted, I confess," he wrote, "that democratical [sic] states must always feel before they can see, it is this that makes their government slow, but the people will be right at last." Americans must soon "feel" the dangers posed by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of their bipartisan governing elite and begin pressing them to protect U.S. interests – not just their own sinecures.

Fortunately, this is doable. "The great mass of our citizens," Washington argued, "require only to understand matters rightly, to form right decisions." We must begin to understand matters rightly.

Michael Scheuer is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and head of the agency's Bin Laden unit. He is also the author, under the pseudonym Anonymous, of "Imperial Hubris" (2004).