Marching Toward Hell - A Review

Scheuer, Michael. Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq. New York, London, and Toronto: Free Press, 2008. xvi + 364 pages. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.00.

Michael Scheuer spent some twenty years in the CIA, including three years as head of Alec Station, the virtual station in Langley charged with intelligence on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. He wrote two previous books, both published anonymously because Scheuer was still employed by CIA at the time. I have seen him a time or two on The Newshour on PBS discussing questions about terrorism. He is also a highly opinionated man who doesn’t seem to mind putting controversial views front and center. I say “seems” because Mr. Scheuer’s feeling were apparently hurt by criticism of his views as expressed in his earlier books.

Scheuer’s thesis is fairly simple, although both the evidence for it and his projected policy options to deal with have a number of ramifications. Scheuer restates his thesis a number of times in the course of the book. That thesis is that the Islamist groups who have attacked the United States and American interests are not motivated by some generalized hatred toward our lifestyle and our freedom. Indeed, polls taken in the Muslim world consistently show widespread approval of the American people and our way of life. Rather, these groups are motivated by dislike for a number of specific policies and actions which the United States has pursued over a period of many years.

I think I should say two things here. First, Mr. Scheuer is not saying that anything the United States might have done would justify terrorist actions. He is saying, however, that such actions may be motivated by other people’s perceptions of our polices and actions. Second, there is another book out recently, Choice of Enemies, which makes something of the same point, though at greater length and with more sophistication. The United States did not have to go to war against any of the Middle Eastern countries, nor were we forced to befriend any of them. We chose to support certain countries rather than others, and we have backed some regimes and tendencies within countries, at some cost to their rivals.

What are the policies and actions of the United States which have made us unpopular to the point that people all over the Muslim world believe that the killing of American soldiers and civilian is acceptable? Mr. Scheuer offers a list of six items:

1. The U.S. military and civilian presence in the Arab Peninsula
   
2. Unqualified U.S. support for Israel
   
3. U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India, and Russia
   
4. U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil and suppression of its price
   
5. U.S. military presence in the Islamic world – Arabian Peninsula, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
   
6. U.S. support, protection, and funding of Arab police states.
   

Much of Marching Toward Hell is devoted to explicating this list, pointing out how our actions and policies appear to the residents of Muslim countries, and explaining why the United States has adopted such a self-defeating posture.

The first point is that, from a Muslim point of view, the United States declarations of support for democracy and freedom mean very little. Since the end of World War II, we have consistently supported military regimes, kingdoms, and dictatorships which have oppressed their own peoples. We have armed and re-armed Israel, and declared that we would never abandon Israel, when Israel has engaged in constant violence against Muslim people. But perhaps the worst thing is that we are there. We are present, in force, with bases in a number of Muslim countries, including parts of the Arabian peninsula which are regarded as sacred ground.

Mr. Scheuer tries to explain why we pursue these policies. I’m not sure that his explanations are sufficient, though they may contribute something to the debate. He strongly believes that we are losing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that we will continue to lose wars in the Muslim world unless we get out of Cold War habits of thinking, try to understand the inhabitants of those countries, and disengage from local politics.

Scheuer contends that the Cold War casts a long shadow on U.S. military and political attitudes. One example is our tendency to try to find proxies to fight our wars for us. The failure of our Iraq policy may be attributed to the simple fact that Iraqis were not willing to kill other Iraqis (at least, Iraqis of the same confession) to forward our purposes. Similarly, I doubt that any Pakistani government will be able to sustain itself by cooperating in our mission to kill hundreds or thousands of Pakistani people. People helped us fight the Soviet Union because they believed that the Russians were evil, and there was plenty of evidence for that view. Scheuer doubts that we can persuade Muslims to believe that their fellow Muslims are evil.

This is partly due to a problem we have in much of the world. We don’t learn the local languages, we know nothing of the local cultures, we expect everybody to act just the way they do back home in Ashtabula. Do you think that the Iraqis are unaware of the contempt in which they are held by U.S. soldiers who speak no Arabic, and that they do not return that contempt in spades.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Scheuer recommends that we attend to American interests first and stop arming both sides in a religious war. Who is responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict lasting for 60 years? We are. And neither Israel’s interests nor those of the Saudis are identical to those of the United States.

No matter how you look at it, Michael Scheuer has written a contentious book. The prose isn’t always elegant, but his sincerity shines through. Sincerity is, of course, no guarantee that Mr. Scheuer is right. This book will anger some people, perhaps especially supporters of Israel. But it raises questions that are worth raising and discussing.

Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism - A Review

Weigel, George. Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, and Auckland: Doubleday, 2007. 195 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. $18.95.

George Weigel is a Catholic – very Catholic, one might say. He is also a conservative who has contributed to Commentary, the neoconservative magazine. Here we have a little book (157 pages of text), with a big title, that reveals its Catholic roots in numerous ways. For example, Weigel dedicates the book to George Pell, the cardinal archbishop of Sydney, Australia. There are many references to Pope Benedict XVI and his writings. The signature block at the end of the acknowledgments reads:

G.W.
Commemoration of St. George
25 April 2007
Washington, D.C.

But the main way in which this strikes me as a Catholic (not “catholic”) book is that it is structured as a series of lessons. This is a sort of catechism on the subject of Islam, “jihadism,” and the West’s relations with Muslims and Islamic societies. After a brief introduction, the book consists of fifteen “lessons,” divided into three sections: “Understanding the Enemy,” “Rethinking Realism,” and “Deserving Victory.” These reflect Weigel’s purpose in writing this book. “My purpose here is to identify what we should have learned, since September 11, 2001: about the enemy, about us – and about what must be done to see us through to a future safe for freedom.”

First, since there are so many terms applied to this particular movement, I should say that Weigel likes the term “jihadism” for what others have called “Islamism,” “political Islam,” “Salafism,” or “Islamic fundamentalism.” Islamic fundamentalism does not necessarily imply either political revolution or violent action. Salafism refers to the sub-set of Islamists who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is an unbeliever or an apostate and, thus, deserves to die. Political Islam includes movements seeking to gain power through electoral processes or other peaceful means. Jihadism expresses a movement based on the necessity of undertaking a struggle, if necessary a violent struggle, in order to impose Islamic law on society.

Like Christianity, Islam lays claim to being a universal religion. Allah is everywhere, and the Quran speaks to all men, so a good Muslim may believe that all men ought to submit to the will of God and become Muslims. Most Muslims worry about things close to home, however, and are not overly exercised by the existence of non-Muslim countries far away. The Jihadists, such as Sayyid Qutb, are, Weigel informs us, in the tradition of Taymiyya (1263-1328) and al-Wahhab (1703/4-1792), and are driven by the idea that conflict between Islam and non-Islam is inevitable. In this view, jihad is a defense against the foreign and sinful ideas assaulting the Islamic world from all sides.

In his first section, “Understanding the Enemy,” Weigel reviews much of the history of Islamic interactions with the West and the principles of jihadist belief. This is good and useful material, and it tells us something about the intractability of the cause arrayed against us. I have one problem with this section, Weigel’s contention in his first lesson that: “The great human questions, including the great questions of public life, are ultimately theological.” This statement assumes a kind of belief not everyone shares, and it implies that Weigel believes that only religious belief can defeat religious belief. In other words, Weigel presumes here that our struggle with jihadism is a religious war, and that it must be a religious war on our side, as well as on theirs, if we are to win it.

The second section, “Rethinking Realism,” lays out a program for opposing jihadism by recognizing wickedness and preparing the way for “responsible and responsive government.” Weigel also asserts that deterrence is unlike to be of much use against those who seek martyrdom. There are some useful suggestions here, including espousal of a major coordinated campaign of public diplomacy. But it concerns me that, by eschewing deterrence, Weigel is, by extension, dismissing the concept of containment. The alternative is, of course, aggressive action taken to the enemy’s ground. I’m not so sure that jihadism cannot be contained, during the time needed to help responsible governments to evolve in the Muslim world.

Next, in “Deserving Victory,” Weigel asserts that we need to believe that we deserve to defeat jihadism. “Cultural self-confidence is indispensable to victory in the long-term struggle against jihadism.” He urges the West to avoid making concessions to Islamists in the name of tolerance. He suggest depriving jihadism of much of its funding “by developing alternatives to” oil. He asserts, most interestingly, that only a domestic political coalition of the center can be victorious.

Finally, he states that U.S. leadership is indispensable.

This is an interesting little book. One fears that it might be read as suggesting that the United States needs to rally its allies under the banner of Christendom and begin a crusade against Islam. I think Weigel’s aims are more limited, and the means he would use less military, than those of, say, Paul Wolfowitz. I find it hard, however, to see how one can wage an explicitly religious war without arousing passions that are at best difficult to control.

Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed - A Review

Evans, Martin, and John Phillips. Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. xvi + 352 pages. Acknowledgements. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Martin Evans is an academic, John Phillips is a journalist, and together they have produced a readable and quite thorough book on Algeria. I noticed some minor errors, such as a reference to William Burns as the “Deputy Secretary of State for North African Affairs”, rather than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (p. 288). But there is a wealth of detail here, much of it not available elsewhere in English.

For the reader who has little or no background in Algeria, or in North Africa in general, this may be a particularly useful book. It has some material on the period before the French invasion in 1830, locating Algeria in the history of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. This is very brief, and the authors really pick up the story on 14 June 1830, when French troops landed at Sidi Ferruch, just west of Algiers. The story of relations with the French, the continued Algerian attempts to throw off the colonizers, the suppression of Algerian culture, and the encouragement of European settlement on the fertile lands near the Mediterranean coast will be familiar to anyone who has read Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace. But it is well-told here.

Horne’s book may be better on the period of the War of Independence and its precursors, beginning with the 1945 violence at Sétif, but Evans and Phillips tell the story competently, and they have the advantage of some additional information. They take us through the formation of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), which became the country’s single political party until the late 1980s. This is where the authors pick up their theme: they assert that many of Algeria’s current problems are rooted in the suppression of historical memory. Few, if any, Algerians know the history of their country, or they know it only through interested accounts by the French, the FLN, or Islamist preachers.

Thus, the French tried to suppress the memory of an independent Algeria, to privilege Europeans over Arabs, Christians and Jews over Muslims, and Francophones over speakers of Arabic. The FLN, in its turn, suppressed the history of the in-fighting within the independence movement, asserting that there was one war, led by the FLN, all of whose one million martyrs were victims of the French. Actually, the military formations of the FLN, which were based in Morocco and Tunisia, did relatively little of the fighting against the French, and were, therefore, in a position to wipe out internal opposition when the French gave up the fight. After Houari Boumedienne, of the Oujda group in the army, ousted Ahmed Ben Bella in a coup in 1965, Ben Bella’s role disappeared from accounts of Algeria’s early days.

The authors assert, as does Horne, that the Islamic (and Islamist) element in the fight for independence has been overlooked, partly because the FLN’s image of the revolution allowed for no divisions. When the Islamists arose in the 1980s under the banner of the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut), it was an unwelcome shock to the military leaders behind the government. The military coup of 1992, which stopped elections the FIS was certain to win, was welcomed in some circles (including in France and the United States), but it led to a period of bloodshed in which at least 100,000 and possibly close to one million Algerians died. Again the opacity of Algerian politics is demonstrated by the widespread ignorance of who committed many of the atrocities, and for whom they were ultimately working.

The authors take us up to the period of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was Foreign Minister, I believe, when I was in Algiers in 1979 and 1980. Evans and Phillips argue, with a good deal of supporting evidence, that Bouteflika has been a front for the generals, whose corrupt control of the Algerian economy, particularly imports and exports, would be threatened by any real change in the regime. Finally, the authors argue that the problems of the Algerian economy, society, and polity cannot be resolved without facing up to the past, acknowledging wrong-doing by the military and the security forces, as well as by the Salafists, and giving the Algerian people a real stake in their society.

Evans and Phillips, out of the good European leftist tradition, place too much emphasis, perhaps, on the forces of imperialism; France and the United States have certainly tried to influence the course of events in Algeria, and their interests may not be those of the Algerian people, but most of Algeria’s problems are internal. Evans and Phillips identify quite correctly Algeria’s single biggest problem: youth unemployment. Unemployment in Algeria may be as high as 30%, and 75-80% of those unemployed are young men. That unemployment, in turn, may or may not be due to corruption in the higher levels of government, but it is certain that the government has not managed to invest its oil and gas revenues to create productive employment.

These unemployed young men have become the foot soldiers of various insurgent movements, left, right, and Salafist. The Islamist rebel group GSPC (the French initials for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) has renamed itself the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. Algeria is an obvious recruiting ground for extremist groups. And Evans and Phillips conclude that there is no chance of reforming Algeria as long as the generals have the “war on terror” as an excuse for their suppression of dissent.

This is grim reading, and a lot of the analysis in this book is very accurate. The real question, one to which the authors have no answer, is whether there is any way out of the impasse in which Algeria has entrapped itself. Another round of internal violence may have to play itself out, unless the government is prepared to commit itself to a thorough-going reform of the political system.

Knight’s Reading List XV: March 2008

Introduction:

This, my fifteenth reading list on this blog, is evenly divided between works of fiction and non-fiction; there are five books in each category. The most interesting of the works of fiction is The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The most rewarding of the non-fiction books is The Best American Essays 2004. The Elements of Style, a book with which I’ve been familiar since college days, is the most useful to writers – including writers who wish to post to Knight’s Castle. Also on the list is another of David A. Drake’s Lord of the Isles novels, the fifth of that ilk. The seventeenth book featuring Elizabeth Peters’ irritating Egyptologist and sleuth, Amelia Peabody, is here, too, along with another travel book from Bill Bryson, and several Best American books. I have not provided reviews or comments on all ten books.

Reading List:

Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island.
Carroll, James. House of War.
Drake, David. Goddess of the Ice Realm.
Ellroy, James, editor. The Best American Mystery Stories 2002.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Menand, Louis, editor. The Best American Essays 2004.
Miller, Sue, editor. The Best American Short Stories 2002.
Mladjenovic, Paul. Stock Investing for Dummies, 2nd edition.
Peters, Elizabeth. The Serpent on the Crown.
Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style.

Non-Fiction:

Bryson, Bill. Notes from a Small Island. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Copyright 1995. 324 pages. Glossary.

Bill Bryson worked and lived for twenty years in England. This book was his farewell to the island, chronicling his farewell tour. There are many flashbacks to his earlier encounters with the places and people of his “small island.” Bryson’s tales are humorous, but his affection for England and the English shines through, however irritating he finds some of their incomprehensible habits. For those thinking of a trip to England, this book includes some less well-known corners of that “sceptered isle.”

Carroll, James. House of War. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. xiv + 657 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Carroll was involved with the Pentagon and its doings both personally and politically since his birth at the time the building was dedicated. His father, a former FBI official, was brought in to create the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and rose to the rank of Lieutenant General. Carroll himself was in the anti-war movement, Catholic sub-division, and has much to say about the evils of the building. This ought to have been a fascinating book, but Carroll’s deep personal attachments, and conflicts, get in the way of his writing skills. For one thing, his obvious affection for the Berrigan brothers leads him to exaggerate their importance in American political life. For another, he apparently took those elementary school air raid drills a little too seriously; his terror and abhorrence of nuclear war carries him away into flights of fancy about the cloud of fear looming over America.

Perhaps most damaging to this book is that, due in large part to his conflicted relationship with his father, Carroll takes the whole of American defense policy as a personal affront to him. Reversing the same coin, he imagines that his personal feelings matter because his teen-age angst was about nuclear war, rather than acne. This would have been a better book, and a much shorter one, if Carroll had written a history instead of a memoir.

Menand, Louis, editor. The Best American Essays 2004. New York: Scribners, 2004. xviii + 323 pages.

If you’d like to write better essays, one of your best options is to read some good ones. Even if you don’t want to write, a well-written essay is a real pleasure to read. I’ve enjoyed the essays of Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and others, but The Best American Essays 2004 (or any other year) has the advantage of collecting essays by a number of different authors, published in different markets (though The New Yorker is a popular venue), on widely varied topics. A terrific sampling of good writers writing well.

Mladjenovic, Paul. Stock Investing for Dummies, 2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2006. xx + 336 pages. Index.

Now might be a good time to read up on when you might want to start investing again. We might be near the bottom of this market! And we might be near the beginning of a great bear market. At the very least, this book may help you to decide that you don’t know nearly enough to risk your money on Wall Street.

Strunk, William, and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1979. xvii + 92 pages. Index.

The little book is still going strong! I got my first copy when I was a freshman at Macalester College, and I picked up my current copy at the bookstore at Pikes Peak Community College. For the writer, the aspiring writer, and particularly for the writer whose education has left him unsure of the proper usage of the objective case, The Elements of Style is a great, short guide.


Fiction:

Drake, David. Goddess of the Ice Realm. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2003. A Tor Book. 496 pages. The sequel to Mistress of the Catacombs.

Ellroy, James, editor. The Best American Mystery Stories 2002. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. xv + 405 pages.

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 2007. 184 pages.

This is an odd little book, and very affecting. It is in the form of a one-sided conversation between a Pakistani intellectual, who may or may not be a terrorist, and an American, who may or may not be an intelligence agent. That is, we read everything the Pakistani says, but we must surmise the content of the American’s comments and questions that lead our “reluctant fundamentalist” to give the responses he does. This is a portrait of a man who knows America well and feels that America has rejected him because of his religion and his culture. This is not an explanation of anti-Americanism so much as an explanation of why many Muslims find that America reacts to them as an individual might react to a foreign body – a mutual rejection, damaging to both participants.

Miller, Sue, editor. The Best American Short Stories 2002. New York: Scribner’s, 2002. xviii + 375 pages.

Peters, Elizabeth. The Serpent on the Crown. New York: William Morrow, 2005. 350 pages.

My wife really enjoys Elizabeth Peters, whose Amelia Peabody novels are set in Egypt in the days of British domination. The seventeenth in the series brings us up to 1922, but Amelia is still overbearing, opinionated, nosy, and humorless. Oddly enough, I don’t find her a sympathetic narrator, or a trustworthy one.

Containing Islamic Radicalism

There is a global force, claiming universal validity, which is opposed to the institutions and values of the United States. The preceding statement, if made in 1960, would surely have referred to international Communism and its leading state representative, the Soviet Union. Today, however, it refers to international radical Islamism, also referred to as “jihadism” or “radical extremist Islam.” The United States and its allies have not yet found the best strategy to deal with this force. The strategy of containment worked against international Communism; it may also be effective against radical Islamism.

The United States confronted the forces of international Communism from the late 1940s until the fall of the Soviet Union. The primary strategic posture of the United States during this period was known as “containment.” There were many arguments about how much the containment policy should rely on military force, and how much it should be based on the tools of diplomacy and other peaceful means. Massive Soviet military force made a direct attack on Russia or its near allies impractical, even had the United States wished to take that course. The policy that resulted from these arguments was a compromise reached between the “hawks” and the “doves” in the government.

Containment was a policy based upon American confidence, as well as American fear. The underlying belief in the superiority of American economic, political, and social institutions assured policymakers that the Communist system would eventually fail. The substance of the policy was to resist military aggression, oppose Communist influence in the United States, Europe, and other regions, and to use public diplomacy and propaganda to undermine popular support for Communist regimes.

The radical Islamists are well entrenched in their home territories because Islam is very nearly the universal religion in those areas. By identifying themselves with this tradition, the Islamists gain the support of the people. Their ideas are much more familiar to their cultures than were the ideas of the Communists. On the other hand, they are much weaker militarily than the Soviet Union was, as well as more distant from strategic targets. Their primary weapon in the U.S. and the West is subversion and infiltration.

The policy of containment, adapted to the specific character of the Islamist threat, can be effective in protecting the United States and its allies from attack, without the necessity for the use of large military forces in the Middle East or South Asia. Anti-terrorist measures in our home territories need to be accompanied by a campaign of public diplomacy and propaganda designed to undermine popular support for the Islamists. Since the Islamist creed is an extreme variant of Islamic belief, there is a strong possibility of isolating the Islamists within their societies. As the example of Communism demonstrates, we can contain the threat of radical Islamism until the Islamic people themselves reject it.