There are a couple of very big red flags in your article. I hope you can follow them up with Michael Scheuer:
"In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world."
No - We are hated because we are infidels and are not muslims. To a significant portion of the Islamic world, infidels are worthy of rape, slavery and slaughter. Even in the most "progressive" muslim countries in the world, non-muslims citizens are third class citizens. According to the Koran, it is right and good (and a way to heaven) to attack non-muslims and non-muslim lands. And once non-muslim land is conquered, it is forever muslim land (that is why Israeli really drives them nuts).
"If you're bin Laden living in a cave, all those things are part of the war and those things are going your way."
Somehow I do not think the invasion and conquering of two muslim countries by America, the death of nearly all his top leadership and himself living in cave worried that even one wrong cell phone call may invite Special Forces to pay him a visit was in his original plans. OBL wanted wars in which muslims would be killing and conquering the infidels. What he has now (mostly) is muslims killing muslims in muslim lands.
"It has said it couldn't get involved with large numbers in the Balkans war because it had no safe haven in the region."
This I do not understand. Thousands upon thousands of muslim fighters flocked to Bosnia and Kosovo from all across the middle east to fight the Serbs. They have a safe haven in Bosnia and Kosovo and are looking to expand them.
"We paid a great price for demonizing the Taliban. We saw them as evil because they didn't let women work, but that's largely irrelevant in Afghanistan."
The Taliban banned girls from school, executed women for adultery (from rape) as half time shows at soccer games, massacred untold tens of thousands (I have seen the mass graves), bombed cities to rubble, killed at will, destroyed anything non-islamic enough (including other mosques), wipe-out entire villages if one person converted from Islam, banned music, kite flying, certain haircuts, movies, etc. They were monsters. Yes, they kept order - so did the Nazis in the Jewish ghettos.
Regards,
2banana
A bigger load of shit I have yet to read.
to paraphase ushad manji, "don't let them talk you into believing that it is the policies of the u.s. and britain that makes them behave this way."
iow, it is their policies, not ours, that are the problem.
That, plus the fact that we stand in the way of their ambitions.
That's true to a point, but it's not that simple.
We support a lot of tyrants in the name of stability, and that motivates people into nationalistic goals that are co-opted by Islam, the same way that many of the independence movements of the 20th century were co-opted by Communism. The hard core Islamic fundamentalists wouldn't have a fraction of the power they do now, if they weren't fed from one hand on hatred of their tyrant, and on the other from oil dollars.
Islamic whackjobs have always been a problem, but the reason that the 'global jihad' has legs has a lot more to do with local politics than theological intolerance.
Michael Scheuer was let out of the CIA by Portor Goss's predeccessor so that he could go blow smoke across the CIA failures of the 1990s,
and so he could go falsely blame our foreign policy instead of admitting just how little they, the CIA actually knew and understood about:
(1)Al Queda,
(2)its basis in radical Islamic fundamentalist philosophy - not reactions to U.S. policy -
and
(3) just how deep the radical philosophy was penetrating Islamic societies and creating public push in those societies for changes in the policies of Islamic nations, to fulfill the goals of the radical philosophy - movement toward a world Islamic caliphate.
The CIA failed in the 1990s and continues to fail because it is more ignorant about the philosophical movement - and the depth and breadth of that movement - that underpins the terrorists than most western high school kids were about communism in the 1960s.
We lost nothing when people like Schuerer were let out of the CIA so they could author misinformation that blames the policians for the CIAs failures.
Michael Scheurer is NOT an expert in this at all...he was wrong starting with the answer to the first question.
They met at an IHOP?
I envision two men wearing dark suits speaking in low conspiratorial tones in the orange plastic confines of the booth.."uh, excuse me Mike..but I think you've got a bit of egg on your face..."
The whole palestinian thing is a total cannard. Its a fundraising tool. The jihadists and the arab media point to the poor abused palestinians all the freakin time while failing to point out that of the 4 countries who have been to war with the 'palestinians' in the last 40 years only one of them was Israel.
I really love the whole 'we are only antagonizing them by fighting them' approach. I guess the best thing we could do would just be build a big freaking wall around our coasts, hiring 200,000 union members to hand-sort the contents of every container, resign from the UN/NATO/WTO/CFR/UNICEF/ and, oh yeah, kill all of the Jews!!!! Yeah, that would really make them love us and forgot that they are a pathetically delinquent society 700 years behind the West with ugly women, uglier men, no freedom, no pursuit of happiness and no skills beyond beheadings foreigners or beating their wives.
I'm sure that the US trying to keep Iran from going nuclear is also going to really piss off the jihadist so we better stop doing that as well. And I'm sure that when we helped the muslims in Afghanistan in the 80s & in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Kuwait in the 90s that was also causing the 'arab street' to hate us for 'what we do'. Gosh, we really have a lot to make up for.
Maybe this genius has an idea why it is that the muslim world seems not to just hate the U.S. but every other country in the world??? They are at war with the Russians in Chechnya, India, Israel, Sudan, Sri Lanka, etc. etc. Are the Sudanese people somehow doing something wrong to antagonize these jihadists and get themselves beheaded? Very confusing to follow the logic.
Those two countries are jihad magnets and recruiting tools that pull in more terrorists every day. His top leadership, when taken out one by one, is replacable, since we never get large numbers of them at any time. From the looks of the stage he sent his last video from, if it's a cave he's living in it's a roomy, high end model. Finally, given how long he's been attacking America, he's probably surprised to be alive at all in mid 2006.
OBL wanted wars in which muslims would be killing and conquering the infidels. What he has now (mostly) is muslims killing muslims in muslim lands.
What he wanted specifically was for all true Muslims to rise up and fight apostate Muslims and infidels. Since he considers all of the dying Muslims to be either apostates or martyrs, and that his global jihadist movement is growing every year, while we're bogged down in Iraq, things aren't going quite as bad for his whackjob sceme as you'd think.