–Answer: No. Obama’s inexperience in foreign affairs and his seeming personal arrogance got him — and America — into this mess, and so little a man is he that he now refuses to accept responsibility for foolishly drawing the red line, instead blaming it on “the world.” Let him swing.

–2.) Question: Will America’s credibility as a great military power be denigrated if it does not attack Syria?

–Answer: No. We have already lost most of that credibility because Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, and their generals waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq they did not intend to win. The wanton waste of American military lives and money by these men, and their willingness to admit defeat to men armed with weapons from the Korean war, have largely destroyed America’s military credibility among allies and foes alike. Compared to failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, a failure to attack Syria is small potatoes.

–3.) Question: Is it unacceptable for one side in a civil war — as in Syria — to use every weapon it needs to try to ensure its survival against an enemy who started the civil war and whose military power is supplied by the Islamist fighters who are at war with America and the West? In other words, must the legitimate government of Syria — which we and all the world recognized before the Syrian opposition started the civil war — commit suicide rather than defend itself and prevent the slaughter of Syria’s million-strong Alawite community?

–Answer: No. The right to self-defense is the first law of nature and the Asaad government has as much right to exercise it as does — as Washington always and correctly insists to be the case — the Israeli government.

–4.) Question: Is it acceptable for the great majority of Americans — who polls show are opposed to a Syrian war — to be ignored by both houses of Congress because they cannot offer the same slate of enticements that are available to their elected representatives from pro-Israel U.S. citizens and organizations, as well as from the Saudi and other Gulf regimes and their subordinates in the lobbies of the U.S. oil and arms-making industries?

–Answer: No. Unless, of course, our country exists only to supply money and cannon fodder for attaining the foreign policy goals of Israel, the Saudis, and other Gulf tyrants while they stand safely on the sidelines.

–5.) Question:  Do American parents whose soldier-children were killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq deserve to have their and their children’s sacrifice made a mockery of by having U.S. military forces ally themselves with and try to deliver victory to the same mujahedin who killed and maimed their offspring?  Do the families of those killed and maimed on 9/11 merit the same treatment?

–Answer: No.

–6.) Question: Is it acceptable for Congress to fail to demand that the Executive Branch publicly explain to the American people the domestic threat that is posed by the substantial terrorist capability that Iran and Lebanese Hizballah have built inside the United States, a capability resulting from open borders and bipartisan political correctness, and one that could be activated if U.S. forces attack Syria?

–Answer: No. If honest, such a briefing from the Executive Branch would make every American aware that border-control is a key national-defense requirement, as well as demonstrate to them how negligent both parties have been for decades in regard to their responsibility to protect the country by controlling its borders.

–7.) Question: Does it make sense for Obama to undertake military action against Syria — which poses no threat to the United States — when he refused to use the U.S. military to try to save the lives of the Americans in Benghazi whom he and his lieutenants were watching on live video being attacked and finally killed?

–Answer: No.

–8.) Question: Would a decent man, respectful of the electorate’s wishes, distribute videos of the gas attacks in Syria in attempt to shame Americans into supporting his unnecessary war?

–Answer: No. But Obama consistently has shown that he, his party, and their media accomplices will exploit the deaths of others — take the shootings in Colorado and Connecticut — to try to achieve their ideological goals, such as negating the 2^nd Amendment.

–9.) Question: Should the Congress and media continue to allow Obama to use his politically well-calculated ardor for an unnecessary war to distract Americans from his administration’s scandals, such as IRS attacks on Conservative groups and his administration’s expansion of NSA programs that have all but shredded the 4^th Amendment?

–Answer: No.

–10.) Question: Given polling data that shows an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose an offensive war against the Syria regime, will the interventionists in both political parties begin to see that Americans are sick to death of both the unnecessary wars they start — such as Libya and Iraq — and the necessary wars they undertake but do not intend to win, such as Afghanistan?  Will they begin to see what their constituents clearly see, that all unnecessary wars inevitably undermine the nation’s liberties, its economic prosperity, and its social and political cohesion?

–Answer: No. As Secretary of State Kerry said this weekend, the bipartisan interventionists who want an offensive war against Syria are “humane and decent” people who — by implication — are much smarter and more moral persons than the people who elect and pay them, and whose children will die in their wars.

More than a decade ago, Osama bin Laden appeared in a brief video to speak about several issues. One of them was to advise the Islamic world that they should expect the U.S. military to be defeated by Islam, the Taleban, and its allies in Afghanistan. The other was to suggest that Muslims should be prepared to watch the U.S. government strangle the civil liberties of Americans in the name of prosecuting its war against the Islamist mujahedin.

A dozen years on, the late-al-Qaeda chief’s first prediction has come true. The U.S. military is leaving Afghanistan after an utter defeat inflicted on it by America’s two most lethal enemies, the Islamist Mujahedin and Barack Obama’s administration.

And in the last week, we have learned that the bin Laden’s second prediction has come to pass in the Obama administration’s expansion of a Bush-era program to collect electronic information on U.S. citizens who are entirely unrelated to the war against the Islamists. The Obama-expanded program authorizes the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect, exploit, and store in databases all the electronic communications of all Americans. The administration’s defense of the NSA program is that this comprehensive collection effort against U.S. citizens stopped one terrorist attack; namely, that of Najibullah Zazi against the New York subway system. The media already have begun to chip away at this claim, noting that publicly available data shows the British and/or the Pakistanis intelligence services appear to have first brought Zazi to the attention of U.S. authorities.

Apparently realizing that the Zazi example might be a weak reed to lean on, Obama‘s Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper, is telling the media about the “grievous harm” the leak of the ongoing NSA program has done to U.S. security. Clapper clearly is hoping to stoke the patriotism of Americans and win their support for the witch hunt to identify the leakers that NSA started by asking the FBI to conduct a criminal investigation. Using this tack, Clapper, NSA, Obama, the judges, and the senators and congressman of both parties who approved the collection operation are hoping to distract Americans from their intentional shredding of the 4^th Amendment, as well as the last bits of trust Americans had in the federal government.

My own view is that Americans ought not to fall for this diversionary effort. Despite Clapper’s tearful whining about the terrible blow the leak has and will deliver to U.S. national security, he is being intentionally deceitful. He is playing to the stereotype most Americans hold of the mujahedin as men who are uneducated, medieval lunatics out to indiscriminately kill all Americans and destroy all of modernity. This, of course, is another sadly effective lie that has long been preached to Americans by both parties. That the Islamists view Western society and lifestyles as libertine and pagan is undeniable, but their skills in the use of such tools of modernity as weapons, communications gear, computers, the Internet, etc. are first rate – ask the U.S. generals defeated by them and Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one place where there will be no surprise that the Obama administration is collecting all of the electronic communications of 309 million Americans is in the headquarters of al-Qaeda and its allies. They assumed that reality long ago, and have tired to adapt their communications security to respond to the challenge.

If Americans are surprised by Obama’s deliberate attack on the Constitution, they have only themselves to blame. From his first months in office, Barack Obama has consistently demonstrated his contempt for Americans and their Constitution, as well as an intention to have his administration – and especially Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department – treat them in a lying and lawless manner. For example:

• Holder’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, about the Fast-and-Furious Program, which was meant to be the opening act of Obama’s attack on the 2^nd Amendment and which killed a U.S. Border Patrol officer.
• The Obama administration’s aggressive campaign of lies – led by Nancy Pelosi – meant to disguise the disastrous economic impact of Obama care.
• The use of Obama’s health care plan to violate the First Amendment rights of the tens of millions of Americans of all religious persuasions who oppose abortion.
• Obama’s shameless exploitation of dead movie-goers in Colorado and dead children in Connecticut to seek to destroy the 2^nd Amendment (while protecting his wealthy, violence-inculcating Hollywood friends), perhaps sensing that his administration’s lawlessness would eventually drive any American with a lick of commonsense to have an AK-47 in the closet.
• Susan Rice’s lies about what happened at Benghazi. (Anyone who is or has been in the Intelligence Community knows Rice knew the truth about Benghazi but knowingly lied for Obama and Mrs. Clinton by using the talking points doctored-up with the okay of now-CIA Director John Brennan.)
• Holder’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, about his direct role in the Department of Justice’s operations against FOX’s James Rosen and the Associated Press.
• The IRS’s deliberate and probably White House-directed effort to prevent Tea Party groups and other American conservatives from effectively participating in the 2012 presidential election, perhaps ensuring Obama’s small victory margin. (Imagine for a moment, what Holder and the Department of Justice would be doing to destroy the IRS and lynch its leaders if it had hamstrung Black, feminist, pro-abortion, environmental, Hispanic, and pro-homosexual groups during the 2012 election.)
• Clapper’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, in telling the House’s intelligence committee that no “intentional” collection of U.S. citizens’ electronic communications was occurring.

This partial summary of the Obama administration’s lawlessness is deeply troubling, but pales in comparison to the Obama-authorized expansion of the NSA collection operation exposed last week. That operation strikes at the very heart of what the Founders believed was essential for the survival of our Republic; namely, Americans’ trust in and affection for their federal government. From here on out, not one American can be sure:

• That his/her communications with a doctor are not being read by the Health and Human Services Department, the IRS, and any other Obama goon who is playing in the enforcement of the administration’s heath care disaster.
• That his/her communications with a lawyer about a case involving the federal government are not being read by the Department of Justice, White House political operatives, federal judges, or other federal government officials. Indeed, how do we know that the Department of Justice did not read the e-mail of those who prepared the first challenge to Obama care that reached the Supreme Court? And how do we know they are not reading the e-mail of those who prepared the First Amendment-related challenge to Obama care now working its way toward the Supreme Court?
• That his/her communications with a priest, minister, rabbi, or imam are not being read by an administration led by a man and a party, and supported by the mainstream media, that lust to remove all traces of all religions from the public square.
• That his/her inquiry about or order for a weapon via electronic means is not being placed on a federal government register of gun owners.
• That his/her opinions expressed in the various means of electronic communication are not being inserted into a dossier that could be used to smear or blackmail him/her if it becomes politically useful to do so.

The foregoing are just the reaction of this non-lawyer to what seems to me to be the most fierce, varied, damaging, and prolonged attack on the U.S. Constitution that I have seen in my lifetime. Those smarter in the law and more politically savvy, I am sure, will try to find a brilliantly deceitful way to disguise the Obama administration’s well-documented authoritarian bent and actions, but I am not sure Americans are going to buy it this time.

What Americans will do about the attack on their Constitution it is another story. Impeachment and conviction of those elected officials – Democrat and Republican – and the judges who authorized, expanded, or condoned the all-inclusive NSA collection program seem absolutely necessary, as does the firing of those senior bureaucrats and military officers in the Intelligence Community, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice who designed the operation. Is this is enough to restore Americans’ trust in and affection for their federal government? Well, I guess we will have to wait and see. One thing does seem clear, however, and that is a failure to remove those responsible for deliberately violating the 4^th Amendment would draw some very ominous battle lines in American society.

Michael Scheuer Archives

As three administration-wrecking scandals – Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP phone records – continue to unfold, it will become increasingly clear that President Obama is: (a) stupid; (b) unable to control his felonious subordinates; or (c) a liar and a trimmer. And as this clarity evolves, Obama will engineer a U.S.-NATO military intervention in Syria. This week Obama told the press his administration has fairly solid evidence that chemical weapons were used by Damascus against al-Qaeda and its allies. Obama also said he still wants more and better evidence that Asaad used the weapons. This long has been his standard line.

But then, before closing his remarks, Obama lapsed into his patented weeping-for-humanity mode, saying in an almost off-hand manner enough thousands of Syrians had been killed in the civil war to justify intervention by that American-killing and nation-bankrupting fiction of our bipartisan governing elite’s imagination, the “U.S.-led International Community.” In other words, our beleaguered president already is looking to distract Americans from his administration’s rampant felonies, and what better way to quiet the hounds of just retribution than by consigning U.S. soldiers and Marines to death in a useless intervention in Syria, a place where no genuine U.S. national interest is at stake. One straw in the wind: Friday’s news brought word of Obama’s talking-points-changing, intelligence-leaking lickspittle of a CIA Director, John Brennan, sneaking into Israel to “discuss Syria.”

Odds are that we are going to see the same old story: Obama will intervene militarily in Syria, get Americans worried about the safety of their soldier-children, stoke their patriotism and fierce support for the troops, and – voila – the Obama-butt-kissing media will refocus the victims of the Obama-ites’ domestic felonies on an unnecessary war in the Levant.

The saddest part of the foregoing scenario is that it probably will work. Obama artfully masks his casual willingness to get Americans killed – seen in his zeal for abortion; keeping troops in Afghanistan to die (6 more on 16 May 2013) long after conceding defeat there; and refusing to try to save soon-to-be-dead Americans in Benghazi – with a maudlin “deep concern” for people suffering abroad, in this case in Syria. Obama’s faux concern for those suffering overseas is just another indelible sign of his and his party’s absolute disdain for the needs of everyday Americans. Under Obama’s two secretaries of state – Clinton and Kerry – the United States have dispersed more than $500 million to strengthen the “Syrian Resistance”; which is to say, to strengthen al-Qaeda and its allies. Both secretaries and their master have deceitfully described the aid as “humanitarian,” but as always this funding is military in every way because it frees up the Islamists’ other funds to be spent for weapons.

With Democrats ever ready to leave Americans to fend for themselves, Obama’s diversionary campaign – obscure impeachable offenses by launching an unnecessary war – will be abetted by Senators McCain, Graham, Lieberman, and dozens of other U.S. Senators and Congressman intent on war with Syria. Obama will use these useful idiots to convince the American people of three bipartisan lies: that (a) genuine U.S. interests are at risk in Syria; (b) Americans “owe” the Syrian people U.S. dollars and blood to stop their sufferingin a war they started; and that (c) Americans “must” expend their dollars and kids to staunch the anarchy spreading in the Levant in order to protect our “loyal and indispensable ally Israel.” Most of the media – left and right – will concur in and support this self-defeating nonsense and, once again, we will all go off intervening in a Muslim country where we have nothing at risk, thereby prolonging our already losing war with Islam and motivating more U.S. Muslims to stage attacks like April’s in Boston.

Will Americans ever see the plain fact that they are being played for fools? If every Syrian dies tomorrow – along with every Palestinian, Israeli, Saudi, etc. – it matters not a lick to the way we live and conduct ourselves in North America. Is it too bad and very sad that they die? You bet, but it is neither our fault they are fighting nor our responsibility to stop their wars; say a prayer for them, but know their deaths are of their own making and no skin of an American’s nose.

And if some self-righteous Americans want to help these folks, let them open their individual wallets and donate; or let them light candles, pile up bouquets, weep, hold hands, and sing for peace; or, better yet, let them renounce their U.S. citizenship and go abroad to fight alongside those in the countries they love better than their own. In fact, it seems only right that some leaders of the anti-U.S., pro-Israel movement – perhaps people like Limbaugh, Lieberman, Levin, McCain, Hannity, and Graham – set the example for others of their ilk. These fearsome tough guys could buy airline tickets to the Levant; turn in their U.S. passport and acquire – at long last – the passport from their country of first allegiance (if they do not have it already); and then go off to the war they have tried so hard to start from their out-of-harm’s-way safety in North America. I would like to be helpful here and would willingly contribute to a fund to buy Rush, Joe, Mark, John, Sean, Lindsey and all others of their interventionist, anti-U.S., and Israel-First orientation an AK-47 and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Each of these folks could claim their arms as soon as they renounce their citizenship and turn in their U.S. passport. America would be far better off without them.

Sound harsh? Well, think for a moment of the cruel and cynical madness of a situation that finds Americans in New Jersey and New York still flat on their backs from Hurricane Sandy while both U.S. political parties are dumping a half-billion dollars into the hands of al-Qaeda-ism in Syria. And think of the billions going to Turkey, Egypt, and Israel, while America’s infrastructure continues to rot; millions of our kids are undernourished; our borders remain undefended; and thousands of wounded and crippled U.S. military veterans must depend on public charity to assist their recovery. And think of all the money and military lives we have and will waste making Muslim enemies overseas by intervening at bayonet point to promote education, women’s rights, irreligion, and the spread of secular democracy.

It seems likely that today’s preeminent Democratic and Republican foreign-policy motto –“Give and pander to foreigners and to hell with the real interests and welfare of America and Americans” – is not one the Founders had in mind when they created America. Indeed, if the Founders could hear it now, they would have yet another reason to thank Providence for their decision to include the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Last week on FOX, I spoke about the reasons why America is losing the war with the mujahedin and it seems to have rattled and angered Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. I know this not because I regularly tune into them, but because acquaintances of mine, who have a much higher tolerance than I do for that trio’s vacuity and deceit on this issue, have sent me video clips and transcripts. So to follow up more fully on what I said on FOX, here are few things to remember about the war in which the United States is engaged with an increasing portion of the Islamic world. I will try to keep this as simple as possible to assist Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity.

a.) America’s war with the mujahedin is preeminently a religious war. The Islamist mujahedin we are fighting – especially the late-Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and its allies – are “good Muslims,” in that they are following religious injunctions that demand Muslims resist foreign intervention, invasion, occupation, and domination. When you hear spokesman for many Muslim organizations in the United States and governments like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia say that the mujahedin are not “good Muslims” and have “hijacked” the Islamic faith – oddly, the same phrases you hear from Obama, his CIA Director Brennan, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators Graham, Lieberman, and McCain – they are lying and trying to lure Americans into complacency, for they, even more than the mujahedin, dream of forcing the entire world to be Islamic.

b.) Therefore, the mujahedin are the “bad guys” from the perspective of the United States and – as always – from mine; that is, they attacked us first, they caused the war. The mujahdein, their infrastructure, and their supporters merit destruction as complete as we can possibly inflict for starting a war with us.

c.) But here is where Rush, Mark, and Sean deliberately cock-up chances for Americans to understand the enemy they face and must defeat; none of the three celebrities seem to know the difference between the words “cause” and “motivate.” Instead of understanding the very simple concept that the Islamists who attack us are reacting to what the U.S. government does and following the duties imposed on them by their faith, Democrats, Republicans, Israeli officials and their U.S.-citizen champions, Neo-Conservatives, and Rush, Mark, Sean, and others of their ilk depict the mujahedin as acting on a religion that demands they attack the United States because of the way we vote, drink, and send girls to school. Although insane, this explanation conveniently makes all Muslims crazy, and gets the United States off the hook; to wit, America did not do anything to offend anyone.

4.) As Sister Mary Lawrence taught at All Saints grammar school, and which anyone knows who has scuffled on a school playground, every action elicits a reaction. This is not rocket science; if it was, it could not come from me. The reality is, therefore, that the religious doctrine adhered to by the mujahdein needs a trigger to activate it; that is, to motivate the decision to attack us. The U.S. government’s foreign policy in the Islamic World – one that is mirrored by nearly all NATO countries – is that trigger. For example: Invade Libya – get an Islamist-dominated country and get your ambassador and three other Americans killed by the mujahedin. Support Israel and Arab tyrannies for a half-century – get the Islamist attacks of Kenya, Tanzania, the USS COLE, and 9/11. And soon, invade Syria – get an al-Qaeda-like regime in Damascus and the fall of the Jordanian regime. (NB: Are you following, Rush, Mark and Sean?)

5.) This reality does not excuse or condone mujahedin attacks – those boys need to be destroyed if we can find any part of the U.S. military that has a clue about how to fight and win a war. That said, Washington’s foreign policy is the main motivator of the mujahedin, and the main factor that makes them decide to attack us. Does that make the United States responsible or – in the words of Rush, Mark, and Sean – “to blame” for the mujahedin attacks? No, certainly not; those who attack us have a free will and on them falls the blame for the deaths and destruction that results from their attacks. They merit annihilation.

6.) So the equation is clear:

a.) Islam is a faith that requires its adherents to defend their religion and brethren against invasion, occupation, and domination, not unlike the Catholic faith that waged the crusades to retake the Holy Land, and multiple Popes who promised heaven to those crusaders who died killing Muslims;

b.) Western interventionism usually takes one of the above forms and so triggers a religious responsibility to defend faith and brethren, one which, since the 1980s, has been consistently taken up by the mujahedin. (NB: One notes that Islamist attacks on the United States were almost non-existent until Washington began its long and gradually intensifying history of intervention in the Muslim world in 1973. The fact that Islamism has been a vibrant force in the Muslim world since at least the 1920s, and only began to regularly attack U.S. interests after 1973, suggests that the Islamists needed U.S. actions as the motivating trigger to make them decide to attack America.);

c.) Because of the motivational force of their interventionist foreign policy, the United States and its Western allies have been repeatedly attacked by Islamists and have allowed their militaries to be shamefully defeated, and all the while they have continued to cultivate more Islamist enemies by continuing the interventionism that is the central and critical factor that motivates the decision of the mujahedin to wage war.

d.) In simple Sister Mary Lawrence-ish terms, when the United States and its allies are perceived by Muslims to be kicking Islam – rearming the Israelis to kill more Palestinians, kowtowing to the Saudi tyrants, invading Iraq, stealing land and oil from Muslim Sudan and giving it to a new “Christian state,” etc. – the mujahedin kick back as “good Muslims” who are following the duties imposed by faith.

7.) Now, Rush, Mark, and Sean are reputed to be smart and patriotic men. If the foregoing is correct – and it is – why are they not smart or patriotic enough to help Americans understand why their soldier-children are being killed overseas; why they and their little kids are being killed at marathons at home; and why their civil liberties are being whittled away by a cowardly bipartisan governing elite – corrupted by Arab princes, pro-Israeli U.S. citizens, and political correctness – which is conducting a self-defeating effort to defeat the Islamists while knowingly hiding the fact that they themselves are motivating our Islamist enemies. In short, why are Rush, Mark, and Sean so eager to get more Americans killed, and to keep cultivating Islamist enemies who ultimately will bleed America to death in terms of money, lives, and the growth of tyrannical central government acting in the name of homeland security?

8.) The answer of course is that Rush, Mark, and Sean have no intention of educating Americans about the Islamist threat they face if they must acknowledge the fact that Washington’s foreign policy motivates the mujahedin to attack us.

a.) Never from their deceitful mouths will you ever hear that Washington’s unquestioning support for Israel motivates the mujahedin to kill Americans, and that activities of pro-Israel groups in the United States have corrupted not only our politics but also are media. (NB: On this last point, think about Rush, Mark, and Sean.)

b.) You will never hear from their mouths the truth that almost all people – be they Muslims, Christians, Jews, or Buddhists – dislike being invaded, bombed, or occupied, and more often then not react to such events with justifiable violence, not unlike our Founders did when the British Army invaded and occupied Boston and sought to disarm Americans.

c.) You will never hear from their mouths that their cheer-leading for Washington’s bipartisan campaign to impose-by-bayonet secular democracy on Muslims is helping to realize Professor Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” What Dr. Huntington never expected is today’s reality, one that sees the clash he predicted being instigated by secular (pagan?) clerics from Harvard, Yale, and the rest of the Ivy League and not from Islamic universities in Mecca and Cairo.

d.) You will never hear from their mouths any condemnation of the many tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that have been wasted – much of it flowing to flim-flamming psychiatrists and the venal hucksters of social science – in trying to figure out what “radicalizes” people like the Boston bombers. The answer is obvious and available for free: U.S. interventionist foreign policy = the motivation that radicalizes Muslims.

And most of all, you will never hear directly from the mouths of Rush, Mark, and Sean what they are implicitly telling Americans; that is, that they hate virtually everything the Founding Fathers thought and prescribed for U.S. foreign policy – in short hand, do not stick your nose in other peoples’ affairs in which you have no interest – and that they do not mind how many Americans get killed as long as Washington keeps pursuing the interventionist foreign policy they believe benefits their friends overseas and their benefactors at home. Indeed, if you reflect on their words, it would not be a surprise to find the fingerprints of Rush, Mark, and Sean – like those of so many U.S. politicians from both parties – on the detonators of those pressure-cooker bombs in Boston.

The U.S. bipartisan governing elite’s fingerprints are on the detonators of those Boston bombs

While the Tsarnev brothers apparently conducted the Marathon bombings in Boston, the detonators of those bombs also have the fingerprints of most Democratic and Republican politicians all over them, and those men and women are in a measure responsible for each and every one of the Boston casualties. Why? Because once again it is blatantly obvious from the evidence the authorities have presented to date that the attackers were motivated by what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world and not because of our freedoms, liberties, and gender equality. So before President Obama and Secretary Kerry, Senators McCain and Graham, and most of the mainstream media swing into intense lying mode – which amounts to “those murderous Muslims are crazy and hate liberty” – here are several contact points with reality worth keeping in mind

1.) To the best of my knowledge, since Osama bin Laden declared war on America in 1996 no Islamist attacker or would-be attacker in the West has ever told the authorities after his arrest that he was motivated to attack by the West’s values, lifestyles, and freedoms. In addition, none of the recovered documents or taped statements by domestic Islamist attackers who died in action have yielded evidence of that kind of motivation. This sort of evidence consistently has shown that the attackers’ overarching motivation to be hatred for U.S. and Western foreign policy toward and intervention in the Islamic world.

2.) Likewise, no major Sunni Islamist leader has preached jihad against the United States and the West because of its values, lifestyle, etc. That they loathe many parts of what has become the West’s semi-pagan society is clear; secular democracy and feminism are not coming to their precincts anytime soon, even if Obama, McCain, and Hillary Clinton continue to seek to impose them with bayonets. Nearly to a man, Islamist leaders have unrelentingly sought to focus Muslims on U.S. and Western interventionist policies and actions in the Muslim world. And those leaders have no lack of things to focus Muslim attention on. Since 2011 alone, for example, President Obama and the similarly interventionist NATO leaders have invaded two Muslim countries – Mali and Libya; established a new U.S. military base in Muslim Niger; and are on the verge of intervening in Syria. In addition, they arbitrarily stripped Muslim Sudan of 30-plus percent of its territory and 75-to-80 percent of its oil reserves and gave it to a new and Christian “South Sudan.” To paraphrase what Edmund Burke said about the resistance of American colonials to direct British intervention and taxation, Muslims who would not resist this sort of illegitimate intervention would be fit to be slaves.

3.) On the U.S. and Western side of the equation we find a mindlessness that is startling; productive of dead and wounded Americans; and which increases the power of our Islamist enemies. Given points 1 and 2 above, it is nothing less than amazing that senior U.S. political leaders in both parties and much of the media – as well as their counterparts in Europe – continue to preach that Americans are being attacked because of their lifestyle and freedoms. One would think that someone in the media would ask them to produce the evidence for this contention, which of course they could not do. But no one has asked because these politicians, pundits, and journalists would have to admit that U.S. foreign policy – preeminently our support for the Saudi tyranny and Israel; our invasions of Muslim countries; and our efforts to impose Western political and social views on Muslims and neuter Islam – is the main motivation of our Islamist enemies and that, therefore, U.S. policy has helped to kill and maim military and civilian Americans abroad, as well as in Boston, New York, Arkansas, Fort Hood, Texas, Washington, and the rural fields of Pennsylvania.

4.) U.S. and Western interventionism also is, in may ways, a two-for for Islamist leaders, their groups, and their ability to attract increasing numbers of young man to their banners. For example, we invade Libya and destroy a viciously anti-Islamist regime. Thereby, we assist in the freeing of thousands of Islamist fighters from Libyan prisons, skilled and experienced men who immediately return to the mujahedin; we facilitate the looting of dozens of arsenals – as we did in Egypt and Tunisia – and so we better arm the mujahedin across Africa; and we deliberately destroy a valuable intelligence ally in our war against the Islamists. And all this in the name of a secular democratic movement that surely exists in the deranged-by-feminism brains of Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice but to no considerable extent anywhere in the Arab world.

5.) Just as damaging to the genuine national security interests of the United States and Western Europe is the combination of relentless interventionism and feckless, effeminate war-making. Whether the war was emphatically a necessity – as in Afghanistan – or a criminally whimsical choice – as in Iraq and Mali – the U.S. and its NATO allies always lose. And they lose not because their Islamist enemies are stronger or better armed – they clearly are not – but because the U.S. and the West will not kill the requisite number of the enemy and their supporters, and destroy enough of the foe’s resources and infrastructures, to make our the Islamists know for certain that the bloody game they started – their religious war against the West – is not worth the candle. As a result, we have suffered truly staggering loses in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we will in Mali as the Islamist insurgency there evolves and expands. However much President Obama and the war-boys McCain and Graham dress up the effectiveness and describe the success of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of the Muslim world – and especially the young male segment of that population – perceives that the much vaunted U.S. military had its ass kicked and is running home chased by Allah’s warriors, just as the Soviets were evicted from Afghanistan in the 1980s. What better recruiting tool could there be than a perceived reality among young Muslims – underpinned by the reality of U.S. withdrawal-without-victory in Iraq and Afghanistan – that the theoretically omni-powerful U.S. military is an organization that is made reliably contemptible because it is deliberately hamstrung by politicians who are more than willing to wail lamentations and cry crocodile tears over U.S. casualties, but are not willing to protect Americans because they cannot face the reality that the one and only thing that counts in war is victory.

6.) So as Boston is cleaned-up and the casualties are buried and tended, all Americans have yet another chance to think about how long they will tolerate a war that Washington refuses to win, while it systematically and knowingly providing much of the motivation for those Islamists intent on killing of Americans. Through its bipartisan truckling to the Saudi and other Gulf tyrannies; its intervention in places like Libya and Syria, where we have no genuine national interest and are helping to put Islamists in power; its willingness to accept U.S. military defeat everywhere; and its unquestioning bipartisan support for Israel and thereby the corruption of U.S. politics by AIPAC and the campaign funds provided by pro-Israel U.S. citizens, Republicans and Democrats are helping to kill Americans, their families, and their children.

7.) There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the young George S. Patton – then fighting to defend the U.S. border with Mexico – raised a July 4^th toast to America’s independence with the words: “May God bless America, and may He damn all of her enemies.” At that point in his career, Patton surely had Pancho Villa and his raiders in mind as enemies, not the bipartisan political leaders of the United States. Given where we stand today in our losing war against Islamist insurgents and terrorists, Patton, if alive, might well enlarge the compass of his definition of America’s enemies to include recent U.S. presidents, senators, and congressman – and he would be right to do so.

Recently by Michael Scheuer: Awash in Hypocrisy and Hubris, Obama and His Party Push Toward Despotism

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal brought the inevitable. In an opinion piece, Shiraz Maher, a professor at King's College, London — wrote that "the story of what is going on in Mali"

actually begins in Libya, where the unintended consequences of the Arab spring are now roiling North Africa and West Africa. When NATO forces decided to support the Libyan rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, they could scarcely have predicted the impact of their intervention on the region's labyrinth of competing economic and confessional interests. [my italics]

Now, I have never heard of Professor Maher but, clearly, he is an intellectually dishonest jackass. Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no way to truthfully argue that "unintended consequences" are at work in Libya, Mali, or elsewhere in Africa. The events that are occurring in North Africa and the Sahel presumably are not wanted by either the academy or the political leaders of the United States, Canada, the UK, and the rest of Europe, but they were perfectly predictable as a consequence of Western intervention in Libya. When the relentless, war-causing interventionists in those places decided to remove Gadhafi in favor of a "democratic revolution" that did not exist in Libya, or in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world, they ushered in everything that has happened since, and if they knew anything about history, the region, and the Islamist movement they would have known it.

How could these genius Western interventionists know that they were deliberately opening Pandora's Islamist Box? A few facts that should have been obvious to anyone with a bit of commonsense as the Islamist Spring unfolded make a claim of "unintended consequences" preposterous in the extreme.

• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were secular dictators. One thing each of these secular leaders did was suppress Islam and persecute, imprison, or kill Muslims who held too closely to their faith, spoke too publicly and vociferously in its support, or opposed by word or deed the un-Islamic actions of their government. It is worth mentioning that each of these leaders was paid handsomely by U.S. and Western governments for the persecution of Islam. Needless to say, when the tyrants departed, the people of each country became much freer to profess, live, and apply their faith. Islam, at last, had become the way.
• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were master jailers. Their prisons were full of convicts. There were many common felons and crooks, but there was just as many — if not more — mujahedin fighters, theorists, logisticians, clerics, etc. When the Islamist Spring took down the master jailers, the prisons were opened and the freed Islamist fighters and their supporters returned to local militant groups and traveled far and wide to join al-Qaeda and other such organizations. These men had maintained and probably strengthened their faith while jailed, and they likewise burned to avenge the treatment they had received while incarcerated. Not surprisingly, this result of the Islamist Spring brought mujahedin groups around the world large numbers of experienced, skilled, and angry reinforcements.
• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were experts at keeping almost all weaponry under their governments' control, just as President Obama seeks to do in the United States. At the time of the Islamist Spring, the militaries of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were exceptionally well-armed with up-to-date weaponry, and their many arsenals — like those of Sadam Hussein in 2003 — were stuffed to overflowing with reserve weapons and ammunition. When the tyrants fell, each country's internal-security apparatus naturally disintegrated and the arsenals were thoroughly looted by Islamists who ferried away massive amounts of modern arms and munitions for safe keeping in rural areas or in remote regions of nearby countries. Thus the Islamist Spring yielded an international mujahedin force better armed than at anytime since its inception in the 1980s.

Each of these important points was easily knowable before the Islamist Spring began in February, 2011. And the results of the Islamist Spring that the world is now seeing in North and West Africa were just as easily predictable. Honest and responsible Western leaders, professors, and journalists would have warned their citizens that the Islamist Spring would cause Islamist militant organizations — al-Qaeda, its allies, and groups no one had yet heard about — to soon grow larger, more lethal, bolder, more geographically dispersed, and more bitterly opposed to U.S. and Western interventionism than ever before. Instead, those Western leaders knowingly and deliberately lied, applauding the fictitious advent of secular democracy in the Arab world — of which there was never a chance — and, as President Obama likes to say, the substantial receding of the Islamist threat.

Why do I argue that the results of the Islamist Spring were knowable at least from the moment it began, and that the events that have occurred since were just as predictable? Well, because I knew and predicted them in such places as lewrockwell.com, antiwar.com, non-intervention.com; the Washington Post, the American Conservative, the National Interest, the BBC World Service, FOX News, and other media outlets. I even suggested the current unrest in Syria in my 2008 book and in a written article. A few others predicted the same things in many of the same places; I certainly had no corner on the market of the blatantly obvious that always eludes Ivy Leaguers.

I draw attention to myself on this occasion because I know that I am far from the brightest bulb in the shed. In their periodic efforts to get me fired from Georgetown University, in fact, my detractors among pro-Israel U.S. citizens tell the Georgetown deans that not only am I an anti-Semite but the school where I earned my Ph. D. — the University of Manitoba in Canada — is a "diploma mill" and that I am therefore unqualified to teach at the graduate level. Though, of course, I disagree with this conclusion and their slander of fine university, let us suppose that they are correct and that I am a bear of little or even almost no brain. How then could I have been so right about the Islamist Spring and the disasters it would cause, while Mrs. Clinton (Yale); Senator McCain (U.S. Naval Academy); Prime Minister Cameron (Oxford); Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford), and President Obama (Harvard and Columbia) could be so nearly 100-percent wrong?

Simple. It is because I know that the Founding Fathers warned of the mortal danger interventionism posed to America's survival; that U.S. and Western interventionism is the main motivation for the religious war our Islamist enemies are waging against the West; and that the men and women just mentioned are among the leading practitioners of war-causing intervention. In short, it was clear as night following day that the Islamist Spring would feed Muslim hatred for U.S. and Western interventionism and supply the Islamist movement fighting that intervention with men, guns, optimism, and momentum.

My exquisitely educated betters and their media acolytes, on the other hand, are too intellectual — that is, too dogmatic and arrogant — to have any contact points with reality; they believe in the ludicrous notion of American Exceptionalism and its concomitant duty to force our little brown brothers to be secular — if not pagan — democrats; and they are willing to get any number of America's soldiers and Marines killed to further their utterly unattainable dream of an all-democratic world.

Maybe we should consider sending send our governing elite to the University of Manitoba for a few freezing months of reeducation?

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Recently by Michael Scheuer: No Matter Who Wins, The Next President Will — Without Question — Be an Interventionist War President

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said something akin to “one death is a tragedy, 25,000 deaths are a statistic.” Surely, President Obama has proven that Uncle Joe was right almost every day since the shootings in Connecticut.

Remember the president’s “touching“, tear-filled statement after the shootings? Weeping crocodile tears over the deaths of those 20 youngsters, Obama played his scene with actor-like skill and sincerity. Indeed, he almost made you forget that he leads a party that has protected a “right” of American women – and their profiteering executioners at the American Medical Association – that has yielded the murder of more than 50 million other American youngsters since 1973. The deaths of those Connecticut youngsters were nothing short of a human calamity; that said, the death of those 50 million other youngsters is a human holocaust that makes Hitler look like an amateur murderer and puts Obama, Clinton, Carter, and their party in the running with Stalin and Mao for the top spot on history’s list of all-time mass murderers.

And Obama’s eagerness to use the deaths of the Connecticut youngsters to further his ideological quest to destroy the 2nd Amendment is not his sole use of dead Americans to further his ideological goals and lust for power. Every Marine and soldier who has died in Afghanistan since Obama’s administration announced U.S. forces would leave that country in 2014 has died for absolutely nothing. Their lives were wasted to further Barack Obama’s political career. In announcing that decision, Obama and his party declared America’s defeat, and, while history-ignorant Americans applauded the action, America’s enemies – the Taleban, al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, etc. – took the full measure of the man. They knew that Obama had white-flagged them, in essence saying “You win, we‘ll get out soon after I am re-elected.” Having re-won the presidency, Obama will complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and will waste every life the U.S. military losses from now until the withdrawal is completed. And what do you think will happen to Afghans who allied themselves with the United States and NATO? Well, they will be dead, killed by the Islamist militant groups that Obama’s administration – under orders from the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) – refers to as unIslamic, Violent Extremist Organizations. Before long, Americans will find that these groups, abetted by the Democrats and CAIR, will be waging war inside the United States.

Obama’s dabbling with the personal and political usefulness of gratuitous murder is never more apparent than in his and the Democratic Party’s intimate ties to the merchants of death who dominate the U.S. entertainment industry. Throughout the late presidential campaign, we saw Obama pass up no chance to appear with actors and directors who produce films and TV programs that condition America’s youngsters to accept large-scale murder and mutilation as commonplace, as well as to regard women essentially as whores. He also appeared with singers who use lyrics that celebrate and even advocate murder and describe women as sub-humans worthy only of servicing the desires of men, as well as with IT geniuses who specialize in producing video games that allow youngsters to kill huge numbers of people for multiple hours a day. Just this month, as Obama, Vice President Biden, and New York Governor Cuomo campaigned for abrogation of the 2nd Amendment, their pals and funders in Hollywood were raking in 40-plus million dollars a week from their most recent lets-kill-for-the-fun-of-it movies: Texas Chainsaw – 3-D and Django Unchained.

Obama and his party prate endlessly about education, but seem to carefully define it in the narrow sense of a classroom education, the milieu in which they and their teacher-union friends deliberately have taught several generations of grammar and high-school students to misunderstand and so grow to hate America; to dismiss religion as a form of superstition or even mental illness; to look to the federal government for life-long help and so avoid hard work; and to fanatically believe in the indefinable but society-destroying concepts of diversity and multiculturalism.

But as pathetic and perverse as is the substance of grammar and high-school education in today’s America, the more pervasive, powerful, insidious, and violence-enabling form of education our children receive flows from the main, death-oriented beliefs of Obama and Democratic Party:

• The “right” of female U.S. citizens to have human beings murdered at their discretion by the American Medical Association’s federal government-protected executioners-for-hire.
• The “right” of the federal government’s executive branch to enforce only the laws its likes; to aggressively seek to eliminate religious faith from the public square; to destroy U.S. national security by refusing to control our borders; and to send our soldiers and Marines overseas to fight in wars it does not intend to win and to keep them dying there until it is politically expedient to bring them home.
• The “right” of the entertainment industry to massively profit from products that return our children to a value system worthy of kill-at-will savages, while at the same time convincing them that misogyny, sexual perversion, and every variety of human depravity is simply another form of “normal” that they must not only tolerate but also celebrate as evidence of their allegiance to diversity.
• The “right” of the American educational establishment to abandon educating children in favor of serving as the Democratic Party’s in-school recruiting agents who propagandize kids to become dependent on the federal government; to demonize America’s founders as dead, white, male, slave drivers, and denigrate what they accomplished; to mindlessly support an interventionist foreign policy that is yielding an endless war with Islam – or, if you like to be politically correct, Violent Extremist Organizations – that will bleed America to death in lives, finances, and domestic stability.

In all, the America created over the past 60 years when power was held by Obama, his Democratic predecessors as president, and their party – and supported by the allies in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the teacher unions – is one that is more divided on serious substantive issues than at anytime since the eve of the Civil War. It also is a country whose Constitution is under direct attack by the Obama administration. First, Obamacare’s birth-control/abortion provisions have violated the 1st Amendment rights of America’s Catholic community, as well as parts of the Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish communities. And, yesterday, Biden told his allies in the whining, effete, and anti-gun media that Obama may abridge 2nd Amendment rights by executive order.

The possibility of arbitrary attacks on the Constitution and/or the Bill of Rights by the national government’s Executive Branch is precisely why the Founding Fathers made sure Americans had the right to be as well-armed as they deem necessary. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be amended by the Constitution’s formal amendment process, but it cannot be amended by congressional legislation alone or by executive decree. Amending via the Constitution’s guidelines is legal and commands the obedience of the populace, but amendment by legislation or by presidential diktat is simply rank despotism, the destruction of which the Founders would have favored and which they meant to facilitate by the 2nd Amendment.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Recently by Michael Scheuer: Pity Poor America: Obama, Romney, and ForeignPolicy

Having listened to a campaign in which Governor Romney explained how he would fix the U.S. economy and carry a big stick around the world, and President Obama continually blame George W. Bush for all our economic problems and try to depict Romney as the evil-millionaire Mr. Potter from Frank Capra's, It's a Wonderful Life, voters can take their pick on Tuesday. But when doing so they must realize that no matter who wins, the next president's biggest problem will be fighting wars overseas with a war weary populace and an undermanned and ill-equipped military. And no matter who is elected, the new president will only have himself and his interventionist party to blame.

With our war against Islamist militants now two months into its seventeenth year and with those forces still scoring victories over America — note their win in Benghazi — both parties continue to pursue a foreign policy that is increasingly suicidal. Both support Israel without qualm or respect for genuine U.S. interests — Obama just wants the Iran war after 6 November — and both approve of surrendering in Afghanistan, in the wake of our surrender in Iraq. You can bet the lesson of how easy it was to defeat the American superpower in both places will not be lost on the Islamists. We also continue to protect and champion the Saudi tyranny and the other Gulf despots as "good U.S. allies," thereby making sure oil flows but building an ever greater hatred among ordinary Muslims for the states that oppress them and their U.S. protectors. (NB: Let's hope that if Romney wins he keep his word and pushes for energy self-sufficiency, ending Obama's reality-defying energy policy which has kept the Gulf tyrannies in high clover; American families extorted at the pump; and America locked in an endless war with Islam.)

Worst and most war-causing of all, both Obama and Romney are pro-Israel, interventionist democracy crusaders. Both men, for example, are awash with pro-Israel bribes — commonly known as "campaign contributions" — and are surrounded by war-mongering Neoconservatives, although those on the Democratic side are more quietly malign. Both men also buy into the lethal nonsense of American "exceptionalism" and the equally demented idea that the world is thirsting for Washington's leadership and instruction on how to be good Westerners. They are cultural warriors to the core and men who are intent on using their rhetoric and your taxes to remake the world — especially the Muslim world — in their image. And if that does not do the trick, they will use U.S. military power to try to accomplish their policy of international cleansing and social/political/religious remodeling.

This said, it seems that facts, analysis, and substantive debate go largely unheeded in contemporary America. Whether you agree or disagree with the foregoing, though, there is a way to test my argument in a manner that seems more palatable to Americans; that is graphically. Given my at-best minimal computer skills, I cannot provide the graphics for you, but all it really takes to get a picture of reality is to imagine two simple political maps of the world, one for September, 2001, and the other for November 2012. What would be seen on these maps?

— The Map of September 2001:

— 1.) Al-Qaeda and its allies had only Taleban-governed Afghanistan as a major base in which to train, store weaponry, plot, launch attacks, and meet other Islamists from around the world. Yes, al-Qaeda and its allies had so-called cells in dozens of other countries around the world — and they still do — but only in Afghanistan could they operate openly and — thanks to the Clinton administration's profound disregard for U.S. lives and interests — with little concern about being attacked while they prepared for 9/11 and what was to come. (NB: Interestingly, many Americans seem to have forgotten that in October, 2000, Clinton refused to defend America and Americans after the near sinking of the USS COLE, just as Obama has refused to do anything during or after the mujahedin's recent easy victory in Benghazi. Both men clearly were more concerned with their party's presidential prospects than with defending American lives and security.)

– The Map of November 2011:

— 1.) After more than decade of successfully resisting the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, the Taleban and its allies will in the next 18 months return to power in Afghanistan. Whether that new regime in Kabul is called the Taleban or not is irrelevant. It will be a Pakistani-and-Saudi-backed Islamist regime and it will welcome al-Qaeda and its allies to remain in its territories to train, plan, rearm, etc. The new Islamist Afghan regime also will have unprecedented access to and influence over the eastern third of Pakistan. Ironically, the Islamist Afghan state will be much larger, better organized, and better armed in 2014 than it was in 2001.

— 2.) In addition to soon controlling an expanded Afghan state, the international spread of the Islamists' presence and power since 9/11 has been impressive. While Americans and their media have been bore-sighted on the willfully lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the politically motivated silence of the Islamist-empowering Obama administration has allowed the creation of a half-dozen Afghan-like Islamist bastions to go mostly unnoticed. Soon after 9/11, Osama bin Laden began dispersing his forces from South Asia — and he helpfully told us what he was up to in a public statement — with the result being that today Islamist military bastions are firmly established in Yemen, throughout the North Caucasus, in East Africa, across North Africa, and reaching from the latter down into Mali and toward southern Africa. There are also the Islamist-redoubts that are growing and solidifying via al-Qaeda's startling and forceful turn to Iraq, as well as in Libya and Syria where Mrs. Clinton's and Senator McCain's "freedom fighters" are in the process of installing Islamist regimes with the military aid of our Gulf "allies" and al-Qaeda.

– 3.) While the sheer geographical dimensions of the mujahedin's growth is very impressive, the places where they have ensconced themselves are even more impressive and strategically dangerous to U.S. interests. As al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks were designed to lure the U.S. military into Afghanistan — it being easier to kill soldiers and Marines there than in America — the post-2001 expansion of al-Qaeda and its allies is meant, among other things, to force the United States to fight in places where it has genuine, life-and-death national interests — not the nonsense of fighting for democracy and women's rights. This becomes especially clear after a review of the activities of Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM), Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arab Peninsula (AQAP); Somalia's Al-Shabab — which the West foolishly thinks is fully beaten after a series of tactical defeats — and Nigeria's Boko Haram. The strategic bottom line for America is simple and clear: these four groups, with minimal inter-group cooperation, are near-to-threatening free U.S. and Western access to the Niger Delta's oil resources and West Africa's rich deposits of uranium and strategic minerals. The mujahedin also sit astride vital sea lanes off both coasts of Africa, at the Suez Canal, and in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Free and reliable access to all of these are indispensable to the economic welfare of the United States and as they become increasingly threatened we will have to fight for them. This is, incidentally, why the brief discussion of U.S. naval power during the presidential debate should have been prolonged. The protection of maritime commerce and offshore resource production is a ship-intensive activity; numbers do matter — perhaps more than military punch each ship packs — and the number of U.S. Navy ships now available is simply inadequate to the potential requirements for them. The method of operation of Al-Qaeda and its allies is today what it has long been: spread out U.S. military assets so as to sap their reserves and flexibility. This is a strategy that might well work as effectively at sea as it has on land.

– 4.) Perhaps the most important development in the U.S.-Islamist war in the last few years also has gone largely unmarked. The fall of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qadhafi has greatly eased the operational environment for Islamist groups and movements not only in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but also in other Muslim states whose regimes have a tenuous hold on power. Think especially of Jordan in the latter regard. Where three years ago Islamists in all these places were constantly hunted by Arab security services and killed, incarcerated, or turned over to U.S. authorities, today they operate freely with little concern for local security forces so long as they do not attack within the country; nowhere is this more true than in Egypt. From the Pakistan-India border to Morocco's Atlantic coast, the Islamists are encountering a freedom of movement and a degree of personal safety that they have never before enjoyed. The Islamist are also much better armed than ever before, thanks largely to the looting of military arsenals in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Libya during the opening of the Pandorau2018s box known as the Arab Spring.

So before voting, take a minute and imagine each of these maps and compare them. Then vote for whoever you want, but vote with the certainty that all Americans are joining you in voting for a president whose interventionism will bring all of us more war.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

This Tuesday’s Romney-Obama foreign-policy debate will again show Americans that both political parties mean to maintain the lie that has kept the United States losing the war al-Qaeda and its allies declared on us in 1996. There will seem to be debate during the debate, but at day’s end there will be no difference between Romney and Obama: America is “exceptional,” and exceptionally entitled to intervene in other peoples’ affairs; what we do in the world is well-intentioned and benign; and Islamist militants are attacking us because they hate freedom, liberty, and Budweiser. In other words, both men will implicitly tell Americans that their government will not recognize the seriousness of our war with the Islamists, let alone that we are losing that war – hands down.

On Obama’s part, he is likely to continue being the simple ideologue he has been since taking office. He will continue to operate in his own world, one in which there is no room for genuine religious belief and motivation unless it comes from the mouth a half-baked, fiercely anti-American Chicago cleric. Obama and his Chicago political pals are suppose to be savvy and slick politicians and yet they are so ideologically blinded by their view of what the world should be that they have not – in four years – bothered to read polls that show that more than 75 percent of the world’s Muslims view U.S. foreign policy as either a threat to Islam or a plan aimed at destroying the faith. To add to this staggering problem for the United States, polling also shows that this interpretation is shared by men and women, young and old, and those who self-identify as moderates and militants.

Confronted by this reality, Obama and his oh-so-smart Ivy League crowd continue to insist that, from the attacks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, to the 1996 destruction of our embassies in East Africa, to the near sinking of the USS COLE in 2000, to the massive U.S. defeat on 9/11, to the bipartisan decision to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars, to the recent, easily predictable mujahedin victory in Benghazi, America has faced only a limited number of militants, criminals, nihilists, and madmen – non-legitimate Muslims – who can be killed one man at a time to achieve victory. Is it really possible that the tiny crew of misfits Obama and his team have identified as America’s enemies have been able to cause so many shameful U.S. defeats and, in the face of a superpower attacking them, to have – since 9/11– established fully viable bases outside South Asia in East Africa, Yemen, West Africa, Palestine, and Iraq.

In the coming debate, Obama will no doubt brag that he killed Osama bin Laden. Well good, about time, well done! But what has he done to stop the spread of militant Islam and its armed forces across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa? This is a presence that now sits directly on sea lanes vital to the United States in the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and is nearing oil reserves and deposits of uranium and other strategic minerals in West Africa that are indispensable to the U.S. and Western economies. Obama has done nothing but lie to Americans about the genuine religious motivation, numbers, and growing armed strength – thanks to his policy facilitated arsenal-looting in Libya, Egypt, and Syria – of al-Qaeda and its allies. At the end of Obama’s term, America is far weaker militarily and far more vulnerable to Islamist power than it was when he took office.

(NB: To show the depth of the Obama-ites’ reality-defying ideological rigidity, I would note that I recently attended a U.S. government conference on the growing threat posed by the Islamists’ war on America. I have worked on this topic for a long time but at first could not get what folks were talking about. My fellow conferees kept talking about “EVOs” and never using the terms Islam or Islamist. Much to my embarrassment, I finally had to ask the meaning of “EVOs.” I was told that the Obama administration had banned the use of the terms like Islam, Islamic, and Islamist in discussing the war the Islamists are waging on and in America, Because of the ban, the military, the intelligence community, and other government organizations now must use the meaningless term “EVOs” – “Extremist Violent Organizations” when discussing how to insure America survives the current war. I suppose that had Obama been in power during the 1941-1991 period the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Red Army, and the KGB would have been termed EGOs, or “Extremist Genocide-producing Organizations.” In addition, I was told there is a thoroughgoing “purge“ being conducted of all counter-Islamist training materials heretofore used to train military, intelligence, and federal, state, and local law enforcement officials if the materials do not portray Islam as benign and/or if they identify those waging war as “Islamists.” If this is true, it fits precisely the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans to lull the West into defenselessness as it prepares to Islamicize the world. If claims about this purge are true – and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of my interlocutors – Obama and his team could not be doing more to ensure the Islamists’ ultimate victory over the West if they were Muslim Brotherhood members in good standing.)

And, in foreign policy, Romney will be no better. Amazingly, Romney has surrounded himself with the same brain-dead, Israel-first Neoconservative cabal that brought on the war we lost in Iraq and which made bin Laden‘s defensive jihad self-perpetuating, the latter proven by the continuing post-bin-Laden geographical spread of war-making Islamist organizations, Islamist-controlled states, and Islamist-caused violence. Listen to the media and hear Bolton, Krauthamer, Hannity, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Keane, Lieberman, and the crazed war boys Graham and McCain mouth exactly the same America-defeating nonsense spouted by Obama, Rice, Brennan, Mrs. Clinton and their acolytes at MSNBC and the mainstream media: Muslims hate America and the West because of their freedom and liberties, gender equality, freedom of speech, and elections.

Whenever you find prominent political, media figures, and professors using this description of the Islamists’ motivation, you will find America’s truest enemies, men and women who want to continue an interventionist foreign policy and so are deliberately providing Americans with an enormous underestimation of the growing threat the Islamists’ pose. These are the men and women who are happy to get any number of America soldiers. Marines, intelligence and security officers, and ambassadors killed so they can keep trying to force Muslims by bayonet to abandon their faith, vote, abort, blaspheme, Zionize, feminize, and generally become pagans just like us.

So cock a non-partisan ear toward the Obama-Romney debate and hear the same worldview and foreign policy prescription presented by both men, although – thankfully – Romney will not be spouting Obama’s Islamist-abetting nonsense about Islam being benign even when it perceives itself under attack. When you clear your way through all the spurious hot air about “American exceptionalism” and “a world eager for U.S. leadership,” you will hear the ardent desire of two men, two parties, and almost all of the media to maintain and even increase the cultural and military interventionism in the Muslim world that has killed so many Americans at home and abroad in the past sixteen years; which has brought the United States numerous, shameful military defeats; and which has created nothing but the prospect of an ever larger and more costly war with much of Islam in the years ahead – a war which no American should be confident his/her country will win as long as the current bipartisan worldview prevails.

And there are perhaps two things to think about after the debate. First, notwithstanding what you hear from Obama and Romney, their followers, and the media on this issue, the fact will remain that (a) most Muslims do not hate Americans for their way of life, but do believe that the Islamic faith and Islamic civilization are under attack by Washington’s – and its Western allies’ – foreign policy and, for that reason, (b) most loathe the U.S. government and judge the late Osama bin Laden to have been a “good Muslim,” who, despite methods of war-making unacceptable to many Muslims, steadfastly defended his faith against the genuine threat posed by unrelenting Western intervention in an era when “Muslim regimes” not only would not resist but actually enabled that intervention.

Second, Americans are faced with a war with the Islamists they cannot avoid and must win. The United States is losing at the moment, and the talk of large cuts in the defense budget is merely campaign drivel. The way the defense budget is spent may change – more Marines and soldiers and fewer submarines, for example – but the last four U.S. presidents have created an environment in which we face war at every turn. Whoever is elected, defense spending will grow, probably starting with a U.S.-led intervention in Syria and a war on Iran.

How to cope? Accept reality:

• Interventionist foreign policy is an aggressive action that – like every aggressive action – earns an aggressive reaction; this is a lesson Americans learn in the grade-school yard but which is erased at university and by politicians and the media.
• We are at war with an increasing portion of the Muslim world, and that world’s fighters are motivated by what we do in the Muslim world and not by what we think or how we behave at home. This is a religious war from our enemies’ perspective, and that is the fact on which Americans must base their analysis and their government’s actions.
• The Obama administration has intentionally strengthened America’s Islamist enemies and undermined U.S. security by maintaining a foreign policy status quo and by deceitfully playing down the nature, severity, size, and geographical extent of the threat we face from them.
• The choice we face is hard but not complex. If maintaining the current slate of foreign policies in the Muslim world is essential to U.S. security, then we must maintain it and begin to kill far more of the Islamist enemy and its civilian supporters than we ever have before. The mujahedin will not get tired and go away, and given the nature of their religious motivation they will stay in the field and their numbers will grow unless we destroy enough of them and their kith, kin, physical assets, and infrastructure to convince them the game is not worth the candle.
• If this is an unappetizing prospect, we can combine more effective, sustained, and lethal military action with a decision to begin to reign in the unnecessary aspects of our bipartisan interventionism which now make sure the Islamists are successfully recruiting in the next Muslim generation. We can move toward energy self-sufficiency, and thus begin to curtail our ties to the Sunni tyrannies on the Arab Peninsula. We can end Washington’s feckless and war-causing campaign to spread secular democracy and women’s rights in the Muslim world; secularism at this point in history is a clear no-go in the Muslim world, and commonsense dictates that no U.S. Marine should die so Mrs. Muhammad can vote, vamp, and abort. We can wish Israel and Palestine well, stop taking calls from either, let them fight out the war they love until one prevails, and begin to clean up the corruption in the American political system wrought by the U.S.-citizen supporters of each and such organizations as AIPAC and CAIR.
• Perhaps most of all, we can begin to accept the fact that we Americans have an enormous amount of work to do to here at home to curtail the federal government’s power – especially that of the president in the area of war-making; to stop building debt; to inculcate civic responsibility in our children instead of an absurdly bloated sense of “rights”; to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure; and to accept that the road to America’s survival, prosperity, and peace is lit by the Founders’ belief that our republicanism is a model for others to imitate if they so choose, not a tool with which U.S. politicians are to militarily remake the world in their – not really America’s – arrogant and condescending image.

This article was originally published at Non-Intervention.com.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Soon after the Denver shootings, President Obama said it was time to put stricter gun-control measures in place. With the failure of Attorney General Holder’s “Fast and Furious” ploy to void the 2nd Amendment, it seems Obama thought he might capitalize on the Denver shootings to further damage the Constitution. The negative public reaction to his words, however, sent Obama backtracking, and senior Democrats like Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi quickly made public remarks to bury the issue – for now.

Before moving on, it is worth noting that Obama said gun laws must be changed but only in a way that protected Americans’ cherished tradition of hunting. Well, hunting game is not the central concern of the 2nd Amendment. What is central is that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of Americans to be armed in case they decide there is a need, in Jefferson’s words, “to alter or to abolish [the government]” and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

In creating the 2nd Amendment, the Founders – through James Madison‘s pen – took their cue from the British Bill of Rights (1689) which recognized that an unarmed populace could not protect its rights, liberty, and economic welfare against a king backed by a standing army, and so it allowed for an armed populace. The Founders also recalled that when London cracked down on New England’s resistance to the Crown, one of British General Thomas Gates’ first moves was to try to seize the munitions and ordnance the colonists had stockpiled around Boston. One reason for the British Army’s ill-fated expedition to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, for example, was to capture the colonists’ stores of cannon, muskets, and munitions.

Even before Jefferson’s declaration, therefore, what in today’s parlance is called “gun control” was seen by Americans for what it was and is, a policy instituted by an oppressive government that fears its population and therefore aims at ensuring that citizens cannot arm to resist its will. The 2nd Amendment is meant, in part, to make sure that if the federal government created by the Constitution turns oppressive, Americans will have arms with which to defend their liberties and welfare.

And this right is much more important today than it was when the 2nd Amendment was drafted because the federal government has over time deliberately and probably unconstitutionally eradicated the 2nd Amendment’s other anti-oppression provision, the one that made sure the several state governments had well-regulated – that is, well-trained – militias at their command. The state militias were of course meant to assist the U.S. government’s standing army in case of foreign attack or domestic insurrection, but they also were meant to defend the states and their populations if the federal government used its standing army to willfully violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or acted in a manner harmful to the peoples’ security, economic welfare, and/or their society’s social cohesion.

Except for Alexander Hamilton and a few other of the Founders, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were very wary of – indeed, many hated – the idea of maintaining a strong standing army in time of peace, seeing it as an all-too-easy-to-use tool of would-be tyrants. The 2nd Amendment took cognizance of this historically genuine danger and established two hedges against it, an armed citizenry and effective state militias. The much stronger hedge – state militias – is long gone, and only the weaker hedge of an armed citizenry remains. And there seems nothing outrageous about the idea that, as the 2nd Amendment allowed citizens to be ready to resist federal-government oppression by matching it musket-for-musket in the 1790s, today’s citizens ought to be free to face the same potential threat of tyranny assault rifle-for-assault rifle.

Now, in response to the foregoing, I am sure President Obama and other recent presidents, their administrations, and their media shills would argue there is no chance of the federal government ever acting in a manner so oppressive to the liberty and welfare of Americans that the latter would decide to take up arms against it. And they may well be right. I hope they are.

But just for the sake of argument, let us imagine a future circumstance – far off and wildly unlikely though it may be – in which the federal government did violate the Constitution, threaten the destruction of the U.S. economy, tore the fabric of American society, and made the American political system a cesspool of financial corruption. And to add to the unreality of our scenario, let us further imagine that these actions are much more substantively threatening than those which motivated the Founding Fathers to rebel against Britain and those that led to the creation of the Confederate States of America and a civil war.

Just imagine, for example,

1.) That a single unelected federal bureaucrat issues a mandate that clearly violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for more than 70 million American Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.

2.) That multiple U.S. presidents take the United States to war without the formal declaration of war irrefutably demanded by the U.S. Constitution, and then intentionally fail to win the wars they start and so kill thousands of America‘s solider-children for nothing.

3.) That the federal government each year reaches into its citizens’ pockets and takes between $40 and $50 billion dollars and then gives it to foreigners, even in times when 25-percent of America’s youngsters are malnourished, more than 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, and the country’s critical infrastructure is crumbling.

4.) That senior elected officials in both parties, as well as senior federal bureaucrats constantly leak highly classified intelligence information to advance their partisan interests and thereby knowingly undermine U.S. national security.

5.) That presidents and attorney generals from both parties pick and choose what laws they will enforce, in direct and flagrant violation of the oath to execute all laws that the Constitution mandates they swear on taking office.

6.) That a long list of presidential administrations under both parties refuse to enforce laws designed to control U.S. borders, thereby knowingly compromising U.S. security and causing several U.S. states to have their economies damaged and social fabric weakened. In addition, imagine that those federal administrations also take legal action to prevent state governors from defending their populations.

7.) That the Congress and the Senate regularly and knowingly act to bankrupt and destroy such essential national institutions as the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Post Office by siphoning off their funds for other pet or less-important projects.

8.) That cabinet members and would-be cabinet members who do not file income tax returns, leak classified intelligence information, mislead Congress, and knowingly hire illegal aliens are never prosecuted.

9.) That the federal government so overspends the public treasury that the national debt can never be repaid, and that in funding the debt it also compromises U.S. independence and citizens’ economic well-being via massive borrowing from malign foreign powers and by exacting half-a-year’s wages from each American taxpayer.

10.) That the unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in a way that makes the nation’s political system a cesspool of financial corruption, endorses the murder of more than 50 million-plus unborn U.S. citizens, and empowers the federal government to wage unrelenting war on religion, especially on Christianity.

11.) That the federal government’s executive and legislative branches permit multiple lobbies to act as agents of foreign powers to corrupt our political system; to influence our foreign policy in a manner destructive of U.S. security and leading to war; and then protects them by not making them register as agents of foreign powers and by passing “hate-speech laws” – the latter a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.

12.) That the federal education department ensures the school curriculum taught to U.S. children negatively distorts U.S. history, denigrates the Founding Fathers, and keeps students ignorant of the meaning and purposes of the country’s founding documents – such as the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

While it is hard, nay, nearly impossible to imagine that even one – let alone all – of these severely oppressive and destructive actions could be deliberately perpetrated by the federal government, we each learn over the course of a lifetime never to say never. And if the sorry day ever dawns when one or more of the above depredations occur, I would suggest Americans might well think about taking recourse to the arms guaranteed them by the 2nd Amendment, arms with which to defend their liberty, economic welfare, national independence, and their Constitution’s viability.

And who knows what the future will bring, some of the foregoing hard-to-imagine actions may not be all so far fetched. If one or more came to pass, I suppose the 2nd Amendment would be the last, best resort for Americans after, as Jefferson recommended, a patient and prolonged effort to peacefully undo the oppressive measures imposed on them. “Prudence, indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

At day’s end, then, the 2nd Amendment exists to permit American citizens to perform the “duty” Jefferson describes by resisting and defeating with arms a federal government that knowingly produces a “train of abuses and usurpations” that is designed “to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The 2nd Amendment should not be altered or diluted a whit, but should stand, as the Founders intended, as a stark reminder to all elected federal officials and their bureaucrats that, in extremis, the 2nd Amendment ensures that Americans have the right and the means with which to hunt down and remove those who use the federal government to oppress them.

This article was originally published at Non-Intervention.com.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Ron Paul’s treatment by mainstream media, other Republican hopefuls, and the punditry makes me think the W.B. Yeats lines “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” also describe the year 2012 in the United States. Indeed, Paul’s experience in the nomination campaign suggests U.S. politics lacks reasoned substance, common sense, and an understanding of what America’s Founding Fathers intended.

Open up any newspaper to see the mess America has sunk itself into around the world: for example, facing off with China over a lone, non-American dissident whose safety has no relation to U.S. security. Yet today, Paul’s call for staying out of other people’s wars unless genuine U.S. national interests are at stake is deemed radical, immoral, even anti-American. Amazing.

If elected president, Paul’s most valuable contribution to a prosperous and secure American future might well lie in his application of a noninterventionist foreign policy, following the wishes of George Washington and the other founders.

Before explaining why Paul’s foreign policy would benefit the United States, it is worth rebutting those ill-educated jackasses in politics, the media, and the academy who denigrate the founders as “dead white males.” To them, the modern world is so different from Washington’s time that nothing the founders said or wrote pertains to contemporary foreign-policymaking. Such self-serving and ahistoric attitudes allow their advocates to pursue policies negating the Constitution, piling up debt, and fueling relentless intervention abroad.

Several years ago, Georgetown University’s distinguished professor emeritus Daniel Robinson cogently explained that the founding generation did not prescribe specific policies for unforeseeable future problems, but, rather, conducted a prolonged and profound seminar on “the nature of human nature.” They examined history and their own experiences and devised a set of principles true not only in their own era and in ancient Sparta, but also for the unknowable American future: Human nature never changes; man is not perfectible; individuals and governments must live within their means; man is hard-wired for conflict; and small government, frequent elections, and secure private property best protect liberty. Most crucial today is the principle that foreign interventions when no genuine U.S. interest is at risk will yield lost wars, deep debt, and decreased domestic liberty. These common-sense principles were the key to national security in the early republic and would regain that status in a Paul presidency.

A President Paul would infuse these principles into U.S. foreign policy and produce a noninterventionist doctrine: far fewer unnecessary and costly wars, far fewer dead soldiers, and far greater U.S. national security. This is a workable, adult approach to the world – especially the Muslim world – unlike the adolescent approach America’s bipartisan governing elite has hewed to for decades.

What the founders and Paul advocate, and what the U.S. political elite have forgotten, might be termed the “Schoolyard Rule.” Most of us, in the halcyon days of youth, learned at recess that every action elicits a reaction: Push someone in the schoolyard, and you will be pushed back. We also learned that a single, cavalier push meaning little to you might quickly turn into a bigger fracas, complete with cuts, bruises, or worse, until Sister Mary Lawrence and her metal-edged yardstick arrived to stop the fight and restore order.

We also learned the Schoolyard Rule’s corollary: If you are pushed during recess, you better push back – even if the instigator is bigger – and hope that the good sister arrives to save your bacon. If you do not push back, the pain you receive becomes a daily occurrence. Militant Islamists assiduously apply this corollary to defend a Muslim world they perceive as too-long passive in the face of murderous superpower pushing. The Islamists are pushing back and depending on Allah – in the role of Sister Mary Lawrence – to give eventual victory to the Muslim David.

This action-reaction lesson is a key part of a youngster’s practical education, and in the course of his or her pre-college schooling the Schoolyard Rule is reinforced by courses in subjects like history, physics, religion, and chemistry. At high school graduation, most American teenagers have a handle on the idea that if you push, you will be pushed back, and are confident that this is an iron law. When was the last time you met a schoolyard Gandhi?

But then comes college. The unfortunates who trundle off to Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and elsewhere in the Ivy League are cleansed of the Schoolyard Rule’s common sense, emerging four years later with few contact points with reality. They have learned to shape policies for the world they want, not the one on offer. They believe it their duty to use whatever tool available, be it laws, bayonets, or cruise missiles, to turn the world’s people into semi-socialist, spendthrift, ahistoric, anti-religious democrats – in short, mirror images of themselves.

These Ivy League graduates who have forgotten the Schoolyard Rule now dominate U.S. foreign policy. Eager to push hard any person or state they disagree with or dislike, they blithely assume the pushed will know such punishment is indispensable in becoming as smart, cool, and sophisticated as people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

Nearly alone among Republicans and Democrats, Paul knows that ignoring the Schoolyard Rule, its corollary, and the founders’ warning against nonessential intervention in foreigners’ affairs would be ruinous for America. As president, Paul would push only if a genuine U.S. national security interest were at stake. Wars would be fought only over life-and-death matters – like access to energy and freedom of the seas – and not over ephemera like Israel’s interests and women’s rights and human rights overseas.

Paul would listen to the enemy. Not to empathize or sympathize, but to understand his motivation and form policy to defeat him, ensuring the motivation of today’s enemies is not passed to the next generation. The failure of both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama to understand that it is U.S. government actions in the Islamic world that fire Islamist motivation, not hatred of freedom or how Americans live at home, proves that only Paul’s approach can restore U.S. security. The Islamists have educated Americans just as clearly and openly as Ho Chi Minh and General Giap did; the United States’ failure of perception has already ensured that much of the next generation of young Muslims will become Islamists.

A Ron Paul presidency would reverse a half-century of Republican and Democratic leaders maintaining national security policies that lethally push Muslims, premised on the delusion they will not push back. President Paul would replace the interventionism of these men and women – who are merely miseducated, not evil – with the founders’ guidance, the Schoolyard Rule, and a belief that the federal government is an engine of national destruction and bankruptcy. For President Paul, the protection of the United States’ genuine interests by avoiding unnecessary wars and frivolous interventions is first, last, and always the main foreign-policy priority of the U.S. government.

This article was originally published on Foreign Policy’s website and is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

I watched a television commercial paid for by the "Emergency Committee for Israel" in which Mr. Gary Bauer spends a minute or so defaming Dr. Paul as: a spinner of 9/11 conspiracies, an America-hater, an opponent of the U.S. military, a friend of Iran, and — that most lethal of all sins — a foe of "our ally Israel." Now, that is a lot of lies to pack into a minute, but as a crazed-Christian one cannot expect the war-mongering Mr. Bauer to know that one of God's commandments is "Thou shall not lie."

The Republican Party's fear of the potentially enormous popular appeal of Dr. Paul's truth-telling in regard to foreign policy is palpable and understandable. Listen to Mr. Bauer's commercial and you will know what the Republican establishment wants:

1. war with Iran, although Iran is no threat to the United States unless we or Israel attack Iran first
2. all the U.S. blood and treasure needed to ensure Israel is free to do what it wants to Palestine, although both Israel and Palestine are irrelevant to the economic and national-security interests of the United States except in the negative sense that both entities bleed the U.S. Treasury and keep us mired in their endless religious war
3. a popular belief that the U.S. military approves of Washington's relentless, war-causing, and bankrupting interventionism, even though almost all campaign contributions from U.S. military personnel go to Dr. Paul
4. complete popular faith in the fallacy that 9/11 has been fully explained, although the 9/11 Commission's archive has yet to be released and so Americans do not know how easily Osama bin Laden could have been killed in 1998-1999
5. Americans to hold the racist, counter-intuitive, and, indeed, brain-dead-Santorum-ite belief that Muslims are attacking us because of our freedom, gender equality, and liberty, a position the depends not on empirical evidence — there is none — but on the need of U.S. politicians to convince voters that their interventionism does not cause wars, which is as silly a belief as one that holds actions do not prompt reactions

Two recent experiences underlined for me what Iowans will vote for next week in the field of foreign policy if they do not vote for Dr. Ron Paul. On Christmas day, I heard Chris Wallace's program on FOX. He had a guest — Mr. Charles Lane — who made the false and scurrilous claim that Dr. Paul's foreign policy was the same as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's America-hating policy, a doctrine that appealed to Barack Obama for more than twenty years and which the president and his party are now implementing. Following this imbecilic assertion of Mr. Lane to its logical conclusion, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines also must be ardent devotees of Rev Wright's anti-Americanism as they donate many times more money to Dr. Paul than to all the other Republican candidates combined.

Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon's new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington's Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington's clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain's interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues' ignorance of Washington's ideas and U.S. history generally.

Based on these two experiences, let us look at what Iowans not voting for Ron Paul will help to inflict on an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.

1.) A foreign policy that will complete U.S. bankruptcy. While there is a lot of talk about cutting domestic spending to bring the federal debt under control, it is obvious that neither party is willing to make substantial cuts in that area. Indeed, both are counting on drastic cuts in defense spending to help reduce the federal debt. While they may agree on and even make defense-spending cuts, any such reductions will be short-lived and then restored to much more than current levels. Obama and any Republican save Dr. Paul will continue to intervene in the Muslim world and so will motivate more Muslims to fight us. A third-grader could tell you that you cannot cut defense spending when Washington's unrelenting interventionism is cultivating new enemies who are intent on attacking U.S. citizens and interests. If you are being attacked, our third grader would patiently explain, you have to spend whatever it takes to defend yourself. And there is no doubt that we and our vital interests are going to keep being attacked by Islamists as long as we continue to intervene in their world.

2.) Obama's return or the election of any Republican but Dr. Paul means the continuation of the State Department's not-so-secret computer/Facebook/Twitter proselytizing campaign to incite people to overthrow their governments in places like Iran, Russia, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. [NB: Three offices of Mrs. Clinton's elitist democracy/feminism crusade in Cairo were raided and shut by Egyptian authorities on 28 December 2011 for intervening in Egypt's domestic affairs.] This mindless promotion of anarchy alienates the governments targeted and will motivate them to harm the United States in some manner. Of no concern to Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators McCain and Graham, of course, are the thousands of young and naive people who will die at the hands of the regimes they are instigated to overthrow by the democracy-pushing federal bureaucrats and their elitist political masters, all of whom are safe and secure here in North America. Dr. Paul's non-interventionist policy will allow foreigners to work out their political destiny in their own way and at their own pace; prevent unnecessary additions to America's growing list of enemies; and save countless young lives.

3.) All the Republican contenders and the Obama administration are whole-hearted believers that the Arab Spring will bring the installation of secular democracy across that region. This has been and still is a nonsense that only adolescent idealists — or deliberate liars — could believe, and one that has been proven fatuous by the fact that Islamists have won every election held since the start of the Arab Spring. Neither the Obamaites nor the Republicans will admit they are wrong on this issue and they will pump billions of dollars in foreign aid into the Arab-Spring countries in a feckless, Muslim-alienating effort to build secular democracies and install the crazed feminism of Mrs. Clinton. Such aid not only will be wasted, but it surely will cause more Muslims take up arms against America. Indeed, the continuation of this bipartisan cultural/feminist war on Islam is likely to start the clash of civilizations Professor Huntington predicted.

4.) Electing anyone but Ron Paul will further increase the already strong chances of widespread Islamist-conducted violence inside the United States. Any other Republican candidate or a reelected Obama will keep lying to Americans by claiming that we are being attacked because of our liberties, gender-equality laws, and elections rather than because of Washington's constant intervention in the Islamic world. This now two-decade-old lie — which is abetted by most of the media — has hidden from Americans the fact that all of the would-be Islamist attackers who have been captured in this country were motivated by the invasion of Iraq, U.S. support for Israel, or some other U.S. government action in the Muslim world. As Dr. Paul has explained, our Islamist enemies are motivated by Washington's bipartisan foreign policy, and as long as that foreign policy does not change the number of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males willing to attack their fellow citizens will keep increasing. For those who doubt this reality, a quick look at the recently adopted Defense Appropriations Act will clear their eyes. That Act's authorization for the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens in the United States is clear evidence that the leaders of both parties know that their foreign policy is going to bring war to America's streets and towns and that the U.S. military will be called on to fight Islamists militants here at home.

5.) Obama and any Republican candidate, except for Dr. Paul, will slavishly obey the U.S.-citizen-dominated, pro-Israel lobby that bribes and suborns them by getting into a war with Iran. Indeed, Washington, Tel Aviv, and London are already conducting a lethal, covert-action war inside Iran which is killing Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying nuclear-related facilities, as well as trying to goad Tehran into reacting with violence and thereby give the West a casus belli. Such a war would be a financial and military disaster for the United States, and would be watched with glee by Russian and Chinese leaders who — while their countries would lose some trade with Iran during a war — would applaud another U.S. self-inflicted would that further erodes the already failing economy that is the base of American power. Moreover, if U.S. political leaders would not permit the U.S. military to defeat Afghan and Iraqi mujahedin armed with Korean War-vintage weapons, they surely will not allow the military to defeat a much better armed nation-state like Iran. Thus we would have yet another politically imposed defeat for the U.S. military. More painful for Americans will be the Iran-sponsored attacks that will occur in the United States if Washington and/or Israel launch a first strike on Iran. The only serious threat Iran poses to the United States is the result of more than 35 years of near-criminal bipartisan negligence by the U.S. executive and legislative branches in the fields of border control and domestic security. Both Iran's military and intelligence services and their Lebanese Hizballah surrogate have created clandestine entry points along our southern border, as well as a large clandestine infrastructure in the continental United States, one which works with similar networks in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Iran is too smart and fearful of U.S. military power to use this apparatus to strike first in North America, but the network clearly is meant to allow Tehran to respond violently here if Iran is attacked by America and/or Israel.

6.) While all of the Republican candidates and Obama talk about their plans to make America energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible, there is no reason to believe any of them. In the past 40 years, the two parties have made virtually no progress toward this goal, unless you count moving up Daylight Savings Time by three weeks as a major gain. Both parties have taken the easy and profitable route: dependence on oil-rich Arab tyrants, a policy that mandates that the U.S. military spends billions each year to defend the Arab Peninsula's fundamentally anti-U.S. police states. Only Dr. Paul could be counted on to allow the unfettered development of all domestic energy resources to promote energy self-sufficiency and allow the gradual abandonment of our mujahedin- motivating exploitation of Muslim oil. But even Dr. Paul cannot prevent the United States from fighting an oil war that the Republicans and Democrats have fixed on the national agenda, one that America will wage in the Niger Delta region — from which we will soon get 20-25 percent of our crude — because of the Islamist insurgency that is gathering steam in Nigeria and threatening the oil-rich Delta region's stability.

Notwithstanding the damnable lies about Dr. Paul's foreign policy constantly proclaimed by his fellow Republican candidates, leading pro-Israel/pro-intervention U.S.-citizens and their journalist friends, and most of the media, only the gentleman from Texas speaks for the Founder's non-interventionist vision of America's role in world affairs and for plain common sense. In the Founders' non-interventionist design for U.S. foreign policy that is championed by Dr. Paul, Iowans will find a proven road to the maintenance of America's sovereignty, independence, peace, and prosperity. In the realm of common sense, Dr. Paul beats his fellow candidates, the Obamaites, and the media hands down. Dr. Paul challenges the interventionists in both parties on their plans for spreading secular democracy — and causing wars thereby — on historical grounds that are irrefutable because they are just good commonsense. We, the British, the Australians, and the Canadians have been building our republics/democracies since Magna Charta in 1215 — that is for nearly 800 years — and we are not yet quite perfect. If Iowans and all Americans truly think about what Dr. Paul is saying — and not what the interventionists say he is saying — they would respond favorably to the Texan's logical conclusion that what we have not fully accomplished in eight centuries cannot possibly be attained in Egypt, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Muslim world in 6 weeks, 6 months, or six years, not least because none of those places separate church from state. Dr. Paul's precise use of history and commonsense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause that is impossibly lost from the start and one that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.

In the words of Dr. Paul's Republican opponents, the Obamaites, and most of the media, on the other hand, Iowans ought to easily be able to hear the elitist, racist, and war-causing Wilsonian doctrine of intervening abroad to impose democracy and secular social beliefs on foreigners at the point of bayonets. Indeed, the national-security policy advocated by Dr. Paul's opponents and critics boils down to the clear and absurd argument that: America needs more and more wars — and the dead/maimed military personnel attendant thereto — that are motivated by Washington's intervention abroad if Americans are to be safe and secure at home.

For Iowans and Americans as a whole, then, the best choice for their children, grandchildren, and country clearly lies in the Founder's foreign-policy wisdom and Dr. Paul's sturdy advocacy and promised application thereof.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Michael Scheuer Archives

Mr. Paul, of course, never blamed the United States for the war the Islamists started and are now waging on the United States. What he did say is merely what is true beyond any credible challenge: Our growing number of Islamist enemies are motivated to attack us because of what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world and not because of how Americans live and think here at home. Mr. Paul bravely and clearly delivers this essential message to U.S. voters, and as long as he tells this truth he will receive the venom and slander of the above mentioned people and organizations.

And worse is yet to come. On 1 and 2 September 2011, Commentary Magazine – long Israel-First’s flagship publication – identified Mr. Paul’s truth-telling in regard to the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world as a “bizarre and twisted interpretation of events” and described him and his supporters as taking Osama bin Laden’s statements as their bible. Commentary went on to damn Mr. Paul and his supporters as follows:

“[Congressman] Paul seems intent on blaming America for the burning [Islamist] hatred directed against us, to the point that he has to disfigure history to justify it. It’s a peculiar citizen who would do such a thing. I suppose I understand why most Republicans (with the fine exception of Rick Santorum) have not taken on the noxious ideology of Representative Paul. But the dirty little secret is Ron Paul holds views that are disgraceful. It seems to me that conservatives, in the name of reaching out to those who inhabit the loony fringes of the libertarian movement, shouldn’t pretend otherwise.”

If this sounds familiar it is because it is precisely the kind of attack that was used against the America First organization when it sought to prevent America from entering the European War that began in September, 1939. Interventionists in both parties; much of the media; senior members of the Roosevelt Administration; leaders of Britain’s pro-intervention covert action program in the United States; and spokesmen for Jewish-American organizations all slandered America First members as disloyal citizens who were ignorant of the world. Together these entities misidentified distinguished Americans who were using 1st Amendment rights to defend what they saw as U.S. interests as traitors, madmen, Nazi sympathizers, and anti-Semites. In their words this week, the articles in Commentary and elsewhere have identified Dr. Paul and the millions who agree with him as “peculiar” citizens (traitors?); madmen (“loony fringes”); and bin Laden sympathizers.

If Mr. Paul continues telling the truth and his support keeps growing, Israel-First’s next step will be to begin smearing him as an anti-Semite, just as Charles Lindbergh and other America First leaders were falsely identified in the late 1930s by the sorts of people noted above. And such attacks on Mr. Paul probably will be more vicious than those on Lindbergh, et al. Some of those who opposed America First, for example, conducted a sharp but fair-minded debate over a clearly substantive and legitimate question: “Does Nazi Germany pose a threat to genuine U.S. national interests?”

Today, however, Mr. Paul’s attackers know they have no legitimate, defensible issue on their side of the debate, only their malevolent desire to see America fight all of Islam on Israel‘s behalf. Indeed, they know the United States and its interests are in large measure threatened and attacked by Islamists because of the U.S. government’s relentless and unquestioning intervention on Israel’s behalf. Thus, the combination of the fact that Mr. Paul’s words are gaining traction with some Americans, and that the Israel-First position is built on sand – that is, it is clear no U.S. interest is served by the current U.S.-Israel relationship – means that Mr. Paul’s attackers use any and every kind of slander to defame him and to ensure the United States will fight to protect Israel against the rising and uncontrollable tide of anti-Israel sentiment that is being produced by the so-called Arab Spring.

In this vein, Commentary’s description of Mr. Paul’s “noxious ideology” is a first step that probably will lead to a systematic Israel-First effort to identify Mr. Paul and those who support him as anti-Semites simply because they do not want to see America’s soldier-children die fighting in an irrelevant Israel-Muslim religious war in which no genuine U.S. interests are at risk.

Reprinted with permission from Non-Intervention.com.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA.

Michael Scheuer Archives

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This speech was delivered at the Ron Paul Revolution March in Washington, DC, on July 12, 2008.

"If there be one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1791, "it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest." We are here today because our bipartisan governing elite and its media apologists have turned Mr. Jefferson on his head to America’s detriment. Today’s leaders in both parties unrelentingly intervene in the affairs of other nations and regions, and, by all appearances, care not a damn about preserving America’s independence. These individuals aspire to be celebrated citizens of the world, believing that being an American citizen is a hum-drum affair best left to the rest of us who pay for their imperial aspirations and interventionist wars with our taxes and soldier-children.

When we celebrated Independence Day eight days ago, no party leader had the moral courage to tell Americans the truth, which is that in the last 50 years both parties have eviscerated our independence in regard to the single most important foreign policy issue — that is, the decision on whether or not to go to war.

• Both parties, for example, have failed to move the United States to energy security since the first Arab-led oil embargo in 1973. Instead of freeing our economy from the Arab-held dagger that is pointed at its heart, American presidents — Democratic and Republican — have shamefully groveled, begging for more oil, from their energy-producing masters in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Muslim police states. The same presidents have so enormously overspent the public treasury that they have put America further in the thrall of the Arab tyrants who buy an ever-increasing portion of our debt.

• Because of this cowardly leadership, Americans find they have lost control of the decision of whether to go to war. If anti-Saudi unrest in the kingdom’s Eastern Province ever severely curtails oil production, U.S. soldiers and Marines will automatically deploy to secure the Saudi police state and restore production.

• And the reality of automatic war for oil goes beyond the Arab world. By 2012, the United States will receive 20-percent of its crude from Africa’s Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea. If production in that region — which already is plagued by insurgent attacks — is ever significantly reduced, U.S. soldiers and Marines will be automatically deployed there to restore production. And if you think the insurgencies being fought today in Iraq and Afghanistan are nightmares, just wait until our men and women are fighting in the Niger Delta’s 27,000 square kilometers of swamp and forest.

We also have lost control of the peace-or-war decision because of our bipartisan elite’s decision to involve America almost inextricably in the unending and unendable war been Arabs and Israelis. Ignoring and even ridiculing the Founding Fathers’ explicit guidance to avoid involving the United States in other peoples’ wars, both parties have not only done so in the Middle East, but have blithely involved us in other peoples’ religious wars.

• Can there be any better definition of an insane foreign policy than the one that today finds the United States not only being involved voluntarily in someone else’s war, but backing both of the major antagonists in that war — Israel and Saudi Arabia?

• By being the main financier and unquestioning protector of Israel, and the only protector of the fundamentally anti-American Saudi state, Washington has created a situation in which America will be drawn into the next Arab-Israeli war, no matter what the wishes or interests of the American people.

Having thus all but negated the ability of the United States to abstain from wars over oil and wars between Arabs and Israelis, our political elite has completed this axis of doom for Americans by their limitless zeal for democracy crusading overseas, a perversion of what America stands for that can only lead to war and more war.

• Our elite’s democracy-crusade in Iraq has destabilized the entire region, creating new threats to oil supplies and driving up their price. It has cost American taxpayers nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and killed 4,200 of their soldier-children and wounded 30,000 more. A few more such missions accomplished in the democracy-building realm will bankrupt our nation.

• And the still-present threat of another democracy-imposing war against Iran — which is a more democratic state than any of Washington’s Islamofascist Arab state allies — would be a negative achievement of epic proportions. War on Iran would be disguised as a campaign to liberate Iranians, but in reality would be nothing more than war to protect Israel. Such a war, moreover, would unite the entire Muslim world — 1.4 billion Sunnis and Shia, if you are counting — in a jihad against the United States.

Our bipartisan governing elite, then, has brought Americans face-to-face with war at every turn: Wars over oil; wars over the religious conflicts of foreigners in which no genuine U.S. national interest at stake; and wars to impose secular democracy on people who will resist it to the death. This situation is surely the antithesis of what the Founders intended when they designed a constitutional system meant to limit the chance of an arbitrary government that inevitably leads to tyranny. The Founders knew — and Americans must relearn — that there is no better definition of tyranny than one that finds an entire nation led into war by the negligence, personal beliefs, or even whims of a single individual — be he or she a king, a dictator, or a popularly elected president.

Americans must begin to reestablish their control over the decision to go to war by removing from office an interventionist elite that is ready to destroy the American republic and replace it with an expanding American empire. The question, of course, is how to begin to draw back from the blank-check war commitments our leaders have given to foreigners? Let me suggest several ways.

• We must accelerate conversion to alternative energies, expand nuclear power, and further exploit U.S. fossil fuel reserves. Nothing should be allowed to deter the ingenuity and initiative of Americans from gaining energy self-sufficiency. Demands for absolute protection for Arctic hares or shrimp-inhabited reefs, at the cost of dead Marines and soldiers, should be ignored. Beyond oil, America has no national interests in the Arab Peninsula region — save the freedom of navigation, which the U.S. Navy can ensure — and as our energy dependence ends, this will be clear. Self-sufficiency will allow America to stop protecting the Gulfs’ tyrannies which now cloud our economic destiny, export religious hatred for us, and make our advocacy of freedom appear to be pure and even spectacular hypocrisy. It also will end the current, cruel reality that sees some portion of the price U.S. parents pay at the pump flow from oil-rich Arabs to the Islamic insurgents who are their killing the soldier-children in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• We must stay out of other peoples’ wars, particularly their religious wars. America now stands as an abject loser in the Israel-Hizballah conflict; the Israel-Palestine war; and the economic strangling of HAMAS; indeed, America is in part losing to the Islamists because of its absolute backing of Israel and its blind-eye for the Saudis’ blatant and aggressive jihad-spreading. America must withdraw from this savagery. No important aspect of American life or security would be negatively impacted if Palestine or Israel or both disappeared tomorrow, and we are tied to the Saudi tyranny only because of the cowardice of U.S. politicians. Americans also must reject their political class’s patently absurd contention that U.S. and Israeli national security interests are identical. America is now shedding blood and treasure because our country’s Israel-first citizens and their journals — men like Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, James Woolsey, and such journals as the Weekly Standard, the National Review, Commentary, and the Wall Street Journal — provoked a hubristic war based on the idiot idea that a state could be created in Muslim Iraq that was not anti-Israeli. These men severely and permanently compromised Israel’s security from the moment the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began. Moreover, it is not a fixable situation because a potentially pro-Israel regime in Iraq exists only in the ahistorical and fervid imaginings of U.S. citizen Israel-firsters, who are, when all is said and done, Israel’s worst and most lethal enemies. The cost of unqualified U.S. support for Israel has heretofore been measured in the expenditure of dollars and political capital, and as such has been acquiesced in or ignored by Americans inured to their government’s prodigal waste of national assets. We now have transitioned into a situation where the cost of such support for Israel is being measured in the blood and lives of the children of American parents. That cost will quickly become obvious, abhorrent, and utterly unacceptable to those parents.

• We must force the Congress to end its supine abdication to the Executive of its sole power to declare war by electing representatives pledged to restoring constitutionality — and therefore sanity — to our war-making process. Infamously, no Congress has declared war since December 8th, 1941, and yet we have repeatedly seen the American people dragged into wars because one man and his advisers have decided it is the right thing to do. Resolutions allowing the president to use military force offensively are cowardly acts that surrender constitutional prerogatives in a manner that allows senators and congressman to have it both ways: they can applaud the troops if the war goes well, or they can snipe at and undermine the president if a war goes belly up. Our post-war history is littered with failed wars that were initiated by the president and which divided Americans amongst themselves. Perhaps the restoration of the Founders’ intent on the issue of war-making will allow us both to win wars abroad and not wage them against each other at home.

• Finally, and most important, we must stop trying to spread democracy abroad by military, financial, humanitarian, or political intervention. No young American should die for the insane goal of "giving the people of Iraq a possibility of embracing democracy," a phrase used ad infinitum by President Bush and other Western leaders. No small "r" republican government like ours has the right to spend the lives of its young in military crusades for such a patently unobtainable abstractions as giving liberty, justice, and democracy to foreigners. U.S. foreign policy must revert to what it was before the historical anomaly called the Cold War gave license to U.S. politicians to become democracy-mongering interventionists. Foreign policy defends who we are; it does not and cannot define who we are. Foreign policy need do only one thing: protect America so as to allow the domestic expansion of liberty, freedom, and equality of conditions. If no additional foreigner ever votes in an election, Americans would be no worse off. Washington’s efforts to build democracies abroad has a track record of making America less safe, not more safe, and, may I ask, is there a better definition of pure waste, than spending the lives of our Marines or soldiers so Mrs. Muhammad can vote in an Iraqi or Afghan election. The post-Cold War, democracy-crusading of U.S. administrations has impoverished us in treasure, blood, domestic political unity, and what has been called the "rightful influence of our republican example." We must return to the Founders’ goal for America, to be, "the well-wisher of freedom and independence for all" but "the champion and vindicator only of her own."

In closing, let me urge that none of us lose heart or fall prey to despair. Though the dangers that confront our republic are many and dire, the future of America, as always, is in the hands of Americans. All of those in attendance here today and the millions more listening or watching across this broad land know that the greatest danger America faces comes not from China, or from Russia, or from global warming, or from Islamic extremism, but rather it comes from the members of our own bipartisan governing elite.

• There is not a nickel’s worth of difference between President Bush and former president Clinton; between Senator McCain and Senator Obama; between Speaker Pelosi and Mayor Giuliani, or between any of the foregoing and their pro-empire, Israel-first cheerleaders at the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the America-Israel Political Action Committee. They are all rank and reckless interventionists, bent on involving America in other peoples’ wars and content to see our republic destroyed by their ego-building and democracy-crusading military adventures overseas.

The greatest danger to the republic lies in the imperial ambitions of these men and women; they are a mortal threat to the American people and all that they have built here in North America over the last 232 years. And no one, may I say, has done more to alert his countrymen to this danger than that soft-spoken gentleman from Texas, Dr. Ron Paul. In a campaign made luminous and memorable by this man’s personal integrity, intellectual honesty and consistency, unwavering allegiance to the Founders’ principles, and most of all, his limitless moral courage, Dr. Paul’s efforts have created space in the public square for me and many others to stand and support him in favoring the best foreign policy for America, the foreign policy of non-intervention. While there is much hard and lengthy work still to do, Dr. Paul has made a lasting start for all of us in the effort to reclaim our republic from the war-mongering hands of our interventionist elite. Dr. Paul, as another patriot-insurgent named Thomas Paine once wrote, has found that "tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered" but Dr. Paul has proven again and again that he is neither a summer soldier nor a sunshine patriot, but rather a man who knows "the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph" and who today, for his efforts against all odds, "deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."

May God always bless Dr. Paul and may God also give us all the moral courage to carry on to success the campaign to destroy interventionism that he has so nobly begun. Let me close by expressing my deep appreciation for the chance to speak here today, and let me leave you with the words Thomas Paine used to describe what it takes to make a successful revolution. "I call not upon a few, but upon all," Paine wrote in December, 1776,

not on this state or that state, but on every state; up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world that, in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, the city and country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence but "show your faith by your works," that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you. The far and the near … the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now, is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man who can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and can grow brave from reflection. It is the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

Paine closed this passage with words that could just as well have been spoken by Dr. Paul and which should be spoken by all of us:

I thank God that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it.

And the way out for America is, of course, the Founders’ strict non-interventionist foreign policy that Dr. Paul so bravely champions.

Michael Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at the CIA.

Michael Scheuer Archives

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Congressman
Ron Paul's new book, The
Revolution, is an unusual presidential campaign book in
that the candidate — Dr. Paul — is almost entirely absent. This
is not to say that his presence is not felt; indeed, Dr. Paul is
with the reader every step of the way and writes in a clear and
very direct style. But the reader will find that Dr. Paul is not
offering the audacity of hope or chanting change; he does not argue
that it takes a village or having slept with a former president;
and he surely does not hold up his military service as a reason
why he should be elected. Instead, Dr. Paul politely, laconically,
but frankly lays it on the line for his countrymen: America is in
significant and potentially catastrophic trouble economically, financially,
and militarily; the country's political class is homogenous, gutless,
and ill-educated; its two major parties do not offer a nickel's
worth of difference on important issues, especially foreign policy
[pp. 2, 26, 163]; and our leaders are consciously negating parts
of the Constitution, compromising America's national sovereignty,
and circumscribing the liberties of Americans. But then, astoundingly
and correctly, Dr. Paul does not say "Only I can fix this mess"
— as have Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain — he says: "Only
you, the American people, can fix this mess." Dr. Paul confronts
Americans with a reality that ought to both chill and inspire them.

Ours is not
a fated existence, for nowhere is our destiny etched in stone.
In the final analysis, the last line of defense in support of
freedom and the Constitution consists of the people themselves.
If the people want to be free, if they want to lift themselves
out from underneath a state apparatus that threatens their liberties,
squanders their resources on needless wars, destroys the value
of their dollar, and spews forth endless propaganda about how
indispensable it is and how lost we would be without it, there
is no force that can stop them. If freedom is what we want, it
is ours for the taking. [p. 167]

At
the risk of angering some of this website's readers, to my conservative-but-not-libertarian
mind no American presidential candidate or serving president since
Abraham Lincoln has put so clearly to Americans the problems they
face and the sole means of their solution. "I wish you to remember
now and forever," Mr. Lincoln told an audience in Indianapolis
on 11 February 1861,

that it is
your business not mine; that if the union of these States and
the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little
to any one man of fifty-two years of age, but a great deal to
the thirty millions of people who inhabit these United States
and to their posterity, in all coming time. It is your business
to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves,
and not for me.

Albeit through
far different philosophical lenses, Dr. Paul sees much the same
thing as did Mr. Lincoln: an approaching national calamity that
only the American people themselves can act to avert. And Mr. Lincoln's
reference to "posterity" is an appropriate point from
which to look at Dr. Paul's concern for America's future because
he, as did Mr. Lincoln, believes that the guide for ensuring the
welfare of our posterity lies in the Constitution left to Americans
by the Founders of their republic.

Dr. Paul reminds
Americans that they are the inheritors — the posterity, if you will
— of the work and guidance of the single wisest, most courageous,
and most foresighted group of leaders who ever lived at one time
and labored successfully to form a new republic. Refusing to be
fashionable — a most admirable characteristic — Dr. Paul forthrightly
declares that the Founders' work and guidance remain just as relevant
to Americans today as it was two-plus centuries ago. [p. 10] In
making this argument, he echoes Oxford Professor Daniel N. Robinson's
contention that the Founders drew from "the political life
of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature
of human nature," a treatise that held as a certainties the
beliefs that man was a flawed, non-perfectible creature whose attitudes
and character did not change over the ages. The Founders knew that
people do not change, that good and evil are constants in history,
and — most important — that power not freedom is the universal
value.

As Dr. Paul
notes, all U.S. politicians in this era pay lip service to the Founders
and their work, but few seem to know anything about what the Founders
thought, fought for, or passed on to us. In so saying, Dr. Paul
is being kind. I doubt a single one of the other presidential candidates
could extemporaneously compare and contrast the differences over
the draft constitution that put fellow Virginians James Madison
and George Mason at odds in 1787. Indeed, it would not surprise
me if they failed to distinguish between a paper by Ben Franklin
and the latest political pronouncement from Ben and Jerry, the Vermont
socialists. Dr. Paul has a well-honed contempt for charlatan politicians
who talk a good game about their fidelity to the Founders, but by
their actions show they regard them as a group of irrelevant and
thankfully dead white males. "These critics should have the
honesty to condemn the Founding Fathers … [but] they wouldn't dare,"
Dr. Paul writes, "But it would be refreshing to hear it stated
in so many words: our current political class is blessed with historic
genius, and Jefferson, Washington, and Madison were contemptible
fools." [p. 14]

Let me say
that I am not competent to assess the entire range of issues discussed
by Dr. Paul in The Revolution, but that at least makes me
the equal of all his presidential competitors. On the issue of U.S.
foreign policy and its impact, however, I have had a bit of experience
and can say with confidence that no sections of Dr. Paul's book
are more immediately important to Americans than those dealing with
foreign affairs. America today faces a quickly approaching, total,
worldwide, and economically ruinous war — in which the conscription
of our young will be unavoidable — against growing numbers of Islamist
fighters and their broadening support base. And if there was ever
a war that the United States did not need to wage in a total manner,
it is this one.

At base, the
war is about matters overwhelmingly internal to the Muslim world.
America has been attacked and will continue to be attacked not because
the Islamists hate our freedoms and liberties or even because we
are their main enemy. We are being attacked because of the unrelentingly
interventionist foreign policies our bipartisan political class
has pursued in the Muslim world for more than 35 years. This interventionism
— as Dr. Paul so well argues — has involved us in other peoples'
wars in which America has no genuine national interests at stake,
most notably in the Arab-Israeli religious war. We were attacked
in Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, Yemen, again, New
York, Washington, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan because of our
decades-long record of interventionist policies, which have included
unqualified and unconscionable support for Israel and equally unconscionable
and unqualified support and protection for Muslim tyrannies like
Saudi Arabia. So mindless has been what Dr. Paul terms "hyperintervention"
[p. 16] that the United States finds itself in the absurd position
of being the major backer and protector of both sides in the Arab-Israeli
religious war, Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Dr. Paul rightly says,
the Islamists' "grievances are basically that we're u2018over there,"
[p. 18] and we are "over there" because of the lust of
U.S. leaders to intervene. "The point is a simple one,"
Dr. Paul concludes, "when our government meddles around the
world, it can stir up hornet's nests and thereby jeopardize the
safety of the American people. That's just common sense. But hardly
anyone dares to level with the American people about our fiasco
of a foreign policy." [p. 19]

Hardly anyone,
that is, except Dr. Paul. In The Revolution, Dr. Paul has
some kind things to say about my work, that of Dr. Robert Pape,
and for the studies of others who have tried to focus Americans
on the growing dangers to the United States posed by their political
class's overseas interventionism. Always the self-deprecating gentleman,
Dr. Paul does not mention that it is really those of us he compliments
who ought to be thanking him for making it possible to begin a debate
on the issue of interventionism. Without Dr. Paul's courage, persistence,
and the popularity of his non-interventionist views among Americans
in their mid-20s to mid-30s — which must be profoundly disturbing
to the two major parties — there would be no such debate and bipartisan
interventionism would continue to be the unquestioned order of the
day.

Dr. Paul's
detailed and outspoken defiance of our political elite's interventionist
gospel, however, has begun to expand what Alexis de Tocqueville
called the remarkably closed circle of acceptable speech in America.
Dr. Paul's success is evident in that non-interventionists can now
speak publicly and be smeared as appeasers, America-haters, and
anti-Semites no more than 80-percent of the time. This, believe
me, is a marked improvement as compared to several years ago. And
in an April, 2008, talk I gave about my book Marching Towards
Hell to San Francisco's World Affairs Council and Chicago's
Global Affairs Council, I tried in the following brief digression
to make a small payment on the large debt all non-interventionists
owe Dr. Paul. "And, if I may be frank," I said to the
hospitable San Franciscans and Chicagoans,

Americans
today face no bigger threat to their national security than Senators
McCain, Obama, and Clinton who in May 2007, along with those presidential
candidates now withdrawn, condemned and tried to silence Texas
Congressman Ron Paul for speaking the truth. When Dr. Paul said
that the Islamists attacked us on 9/11 because we had been intervening
in their world for more than fifty years, he spoke the non-partisan
truth on behalf of all of us.

And, yet,
Dr. Paul was dismissed as absurd by most of his fellow candidates,
and faced demands that he recant and apologize. On that occasion,
free speech was acceptable only if it meshed with our political
class's all-party line, which is summed up in the phrase: "The
terrorists hate us for who we are, not for what we do." Today,
this is the quite dishonest operating assumption of Senators McCain,
Clinton, and Obama.

The most
important impact of this sorry episode, however, is that Dr. Paul's
fellow candidates and the unctuous media deliberately halted the
first post-9/11 foreign policy discussion among senior U.S. politicians
that would have worried Osama bin Laden and his allies. When Dr.
Paul told Americans the truth and was shunted aside by other candidates
and the media, bin Laden and his ilk breathed a heavy sigh of
relief. For the time being, bin Laden's only indispensable ally
— the status quo in U.S. foreign policy — was safe.

To
conclude, I can only urge Americans to get Dr. Paul's The Revolution;
read and think about it; and then share and talk about it with your
family and friends. But be prepared to feel a new burden of responsibility
in your life because Dr. Paul makes it clear that America's future
is in its citizens' hands. Again at the risk of angering this site's
readers, Dr. Paul's book will tell you exactly what Mr. Lincoln
told Americans 170 years ago: "If destruction be our lot, we
must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen,
we must live through all time, or die by suicide." Dr. Paul
recognizes this reality and closes his book with the simple sentence:
"Let the Revolution begin." [p. 167]

And so let
it, but let us first underscore the importance of Dr. Paul's exhortation
by remembering that it must begin from our recognition of duty.
"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same Object," a certain Mr. T. Jefferson of
Virginia wrote in the summer of 1776, "evinces a design to
reduce them [Americans] under absolute Despotism, it is their
right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to
provide new Guards for their future security." Perhaps Dr.
Paul should have written: "Do your duty Americans, let the
revolution begin."

May
7, 2008

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Marching
Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial
Hubris and Through
Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at
the CIA.

DIGG THIS

Despite Dr.
Ron Paul's courageous campaign against Washington's relentless overseas
interventionism, the presidential primaries have been largely free
of substantive foreign-policy debate, aside, that is, from quirky
assertions that sleeping with a president, serving as a prisoner
of war, and setting records for using the word change constitute
adequate commander-in-chief training. Having spent a year warning
Americans that the 9/11 attackers and our tens of millions of Islamist
enemies draw their main motivation from the impact of U.S. foreign
policy in the Muslim world, Dr. Paul has done as much as one man
could do to save Americans from the huge coming blood-and-treasure
costs of U.S. intervention. For his effort, Dr. Paul has been ridiculed,
damned, and vilified by the media and the country's political class,
but has earned the enduring respect and thanks of Americans who
do not understand why their children's lives and the outrageous
taxes they pay are continually wasted in other peoples' wars — especially
other peoples' religious wars — where no genuine U.S. national interests
are at risk.

As
readers of this site know, I am not a libertarian. I have, however,
written several pieces here and at Anti-War.com strongly supporting
Dr. Paul's non-interventionism. He is, after all, speaking for the
security and financial solvency of all Americans and their country.
And I have recently published a book called Marching
Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, which suggests
those who think our Muslim-world problems will end when Mr. Bush
returns to Texas are badly mistaken, and that the next presidential
term will see nothing but more war and escalating human and economic
damage resulting from the interventionism both parties have advocated
as divine scripture for 40 years.

The reception
my book is getting from the press has given me a small taste of
Dr. Paul's experience. Some reviews have taken a serious look at
the book's arguments — agreeing with some, questioning others —
but the New York Times' Sunday review discussed nothing in
the book, simply denouncing it as crude, simplistic, implicitly
unpatriotic, Machiavellian (is that bad when defending America?),
and outside what De Tocqueville described as the closed-circle of
permissible debate. After reading it I thought: Now I know a bit
about how Dr. Paul felt when Rudy Giuliani struck his patented Mussolini
pose and denounced Dr. Paul's precisely true statement that U.S.
policy in the Muslim world motivated the 9/11 attackers and is motivating
the growing millions of our Islamist foes. Interventionism, it seems,
is holy gospel for our political class; to question the gospel is
treason and excludes the questioner from public debate.

Well, perhaps
interventionism is so deeply engrained in the U.S. governing elite
and its media acolytes that the issue cannot be taken on whole.
It is, after all, a broad and multifaceted topic; raising opposition
to it as a whole allows men like Il Duce Giuliani to avoid specifics
and assail non-interventionists as appeasers and blame-America-firsters.
Perhaps, the best non-interventionists can do in this presidential
cycle is to ask a limited number of specific questions which, if
answered honestly, would show Americans how poorly their interventionist
leaders are protecting them and how the defense of America is not
a high priority for Obama, McCain, and Clinton, despite their rhetoric.

There are many
questions to be asked of Senators Obama, McCain, and Clinton; Dr.
Paul has asked them continually, but the media for the most part
refuses to ask any. As long as the media — left, center, and right
— neglect their duty to ask pointedly specific foreign-policy questions,
Dr. Paul's is a lone voice of sanity. Obama, McCain, and Clinton
are all status-quo interventionists. They all helped light the fuse
for a future Balkans War by supporting Kosovo's independence, and
Obama's recent pro-Israel turn means he, like the other two, will
stay in Iraq. The candidates' call for health care, job creation,
tax cuts, and other domestic initiatives is empty talk; intervention's
past, present, and future costs precludes each. The candidates know
this, but will remain silent until the inauguration unless the media
step up to the plate — as Dr. Paul has — to ask the questions that
need answering.

Readers of
this site are sure to have other, better questions than mine, but
here are eight specific ones that reflect concerns I outlined at
length in Marching Toward Hell. I think each merits a full
and frank answer from our would-be presidents. Each is followed
by a proposed answer, a form of which we ought to hear if the candidate
understands the threats America faces from its enemies, and perhaps,
more important, from its own failed and counterproductive policies

1.) Q:
Why are we fighting much of the Muslim world and what is our enemy's
motivation?

A:
We must accept that the U.S. government is seen as the mortal
foe of Islam and Muslims because of its foreign policies. We need
not don sackcloth and ashes or immediately abandon policies motivating
bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and other Islamists. But no nation-state
should keep bankrupt policies for fear of having changes seen
as appeasement.

We must deal
with the world as it is, not as we would like it: we are hated
for what we do not who we are. Armed with this vital understanding,
we can define the talented, pious, and growing foe we confront;
start to alter counterproductive policies; and begin drafting
military plans that can protect America better than a policy of
"bringing terrorists to justice one at a time."

2.) Q:
Given the tax burden Americans shoulder for defense, why is the
U.S. military not winning?

A:
We must change the rules-of-engagement for U.S. soldiers that
make them targets not killers, and which are based on U.S. leaders'
fear of media and foreign criticism. In the few cases in which
America must fight, the military needs to make U.S. might felt
to whatever extent needed for victory. This includes death and
destruction broad enough to make the local populations giving
indispensable support to our enemies demand peace. It wastes U.S.
lives and is fatal to our security to go to war if we do not mean
to win. Without this change, moreover nation-building programs
are useless. History, as well as our Afghan and Iraqi nightmares
show durable nation-building is impossible if the enemy is not
first definitively defeated.

3.) Q:
Can Americans really be safer if our ports and borders are virtually
unguarded, and police must cope with 11-plus million undocumented
aliens?

A:
We must stop the political posturing and media debate and close
our borders to gauge the internal threat. Until this is done,
little of what we do against al-Qaeda makes America safer. Indeed,
the Islamists are America's most serious post-1865 internal threat
because of negligent immigration/border control polices based
on the unproven value of diversity and multiculturalism, rather
than America's essence, a respect and even reverence for the rule
of law. Controlling immigration and borders has nothing to do
with human rights or civil liberties; it deals with national survival
and giving police a fighting chance to defeat the enemy without
extra-constitutional procedures.

4.) Q:
Why is U.S. energy security in the hands of anti-American Arab
tyrants thirty-five years after the Saudi-led oil embargo?

A:
We must accelerate conversion to alternative energies, expand
nuclear power, and further exploit U.S. fossil fuels. When we
celebrate Independence Day, few note that our foreign-energy dependence
means America has lost independence over the most crucial foreign-policy
decision — whether to go to war. If disaster occurs in Saudi Arabia's
Eastern Province or the Niger Delta, Washington will have no choice;
it will go to war to restore production.

Nothing should
deter America from gaining energy self-sufficiency. Demands for
absolute protection for Arctic hares or shrimp-inhabited reefs,
at the cost of dead Marines and soldiers, should be ignored. Beyond
oil, America has no national interests in the Arab Peninsula region
— save freedom of navigation — and as our energy dependence ends,
this will be clear. Self-sufficiency will allow America to stop
protecting the Gulfs' tyrannies which now cloud our economic destiny,
export religious hatred for us, and make our advocacy of freedom
pure hypocrisy.

It also will
end the cruel fact that some of the escalating price U.S. parents
pay for gas is flowing to the Islamists killing their soldier-children.

5.) Q: Why does America back the major antagonists in the
Arab-Israeli war — Saudi Arabia and Israel — and what are U.S.
interests in that war beyond emotional ties to Israel and dependence
on Gulf oil?

A:
We must keep out of other peoples' wars, particularly their religious
wars. America is a major loser in the 2006 Israel-Hizballah
war; the Israel-Palestine war; and the economic strangling of
HAMAS; indeed, America is in part losing to the Islamists because
of its backing of Israel and its blind-eye for Saudi jihad-spreading.
America must withdraw from this savagery. We should define the
settlement that suits us; call in both sides, and say: “50 years
of your brutal and selfish behavior is enough. Here’s what we
want implemented. If you don’t, you are on your own and can kill
each other forever.” We also can tell Americans that Israel's
under-dog status ended when it went nuclear and built a WMD arsenal.

6.) Q: Why is Washington supporting the Russian and Chinese
campaigns to annihilate parts of their Muslim populations?

A:
We must stop building Muslim hatred by supporting Russia in the
North Caucasus and Beijing in western China. Moscow will do what
it must to win in the North Caucasus; our rhetorical support for
it deeply stains us in the Muslim world. Beijing is conducting
genocide against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang by inundating them
with Han Chinese, exactly as it is doing in Tibet. There is no
reason for America to support silent genocide.

7.) Q:
Why has the U.S. government failed since 1991 to secure the Former
Soviet Union's (FSU) nuclear arsenal, leaving a chance for an
Islamist nuclear attack in America?

A:
We must fast complete the program to help Russia secure the FSU's
22,000 weapons, an effort reduced by the last two administrations.
Full security for those weapons is infinitely more vital than
Russian democracy. Seventeen years after the USSR's dissolution,
Senator Luger — co-sponsor of the U.S.-Russia control plan — says
success is far off. Thus, al-Qaeda has had a 17-year window to
procure a weapon it has sworn to use in the United States.

8.) Q:
Why do U.S. politicians claim to follow the Founders' foreign-policy
advice, when the Founders warned that overseas intervention to
build democracies would destroy our republic?

A:
We must stop trying to spread democracy abroad by military, financial,
humanitarian, or political intervention. No American should die
for the goal of "giving the people of Iraq a possibility
of embracing democracy." No small "r" republican
government has the right to spend lives in military crusades for
such a patently unobtainable abstraction as gaining liberty, justice,
and democracy for foreigners.

Foreign policy
must revert to what it was before the anomaly called the Cold
War licensed to U.S. politicians to be democracy-mongering interventionists.
Foreign policy defends, it does not define us. It need do but
one thing: protect America to allow the domestic expansion of
liberty, freedom, and opportunity. If no additional foreigner
ever votes in an election, America would be no worse off. There
is no better definition of pure waste, than spending the lives
of our Marines or soldiers so Mrs. Muhammad can vote in an Iraqi
or Afghan election.

Post-Cold
War, democracy-crusading U.S. administrations have impoverished
us in treasure, blood, political unity, and what has been called
the "rightful influence of our republican example."
We must return to the Founders' goal for America to be, "the
well-wisher of freedom and independence for all" but "the
champion and vindicator only of her own."

I believe that
these and other specific foreign-policy questions must be repeatedly
asked of the candidates until they give direct answers. My proposed
answers clearly are not definitive, but any candidate that answers
the queries above in an evasive or dismissive manner would show
Americans his or her intention to continue the full-bore intervention
that is now bleeding America of lives, money, and political cohesion.

March
24, 2008

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Marching
Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

DIGG THIS

Christmas morning
broke clear and cold here in Virginia and before my children woke
I got to thinking about the opportunities that would lost by anyone
who decided not to vote for Dr. Ron Paul in the primaries. Perhaps
it was because I got chilled and cranky as I walked down to the
road to get the paper, but the more I thought, the more I doubted
if Americans really understood what they would be voting for
if they chose another candidate.

Of course one
need not agree with all of Dr. Paul's views to recognize the chance
he presents for Americans to begin to alter the disastrous status
quo policies — foreign and domestic — being advocated by the other
presidential candidates. I strongly disagree with Dr. Paul, for
example, on the issue of preemptive military action; in our war
against Islamist insurgents, preemption will serve America by keeping
our foes bleeding and off-balance, as we begin, as Dr. Paul has
said, to disengage from other peoples' wars. But because I do not
support Dr. Paul on this point, would it make sense for me to vote
for Senator McCain, who wants to send our soldiers and Marines to
die in the howling wastes of Darfur; or for Mr. Giuliani and his
coterie of neoconservative advisers who are fairly aglow with a
lip-smacking lust for an even broader Hobbesian war against Muslims
than that waged by George W. Bush; or for whatever foreign policies
Mr. Huckabee and his evangelical colleagues cook-up after their
daily chats with God; or for Senator Clinton who is advised by a
self-confessed felon and who believes U.S. and Israeli interests
are identical and that Israel's wars are America's wars? No, such
a vote would be senseless and only help the status quo to triumph.
While I disagree with Dr. Paul on preemption, his position and prudence
on this and other foreign policy issues are a sounder starting point
for an American debate than the other candidates' cheerful willingness
to leap from the frying pan into the flames and dragging our country
into the fire of wars that do not need fighting or that rightfully
should be fought without U.S. involvement.

One can also
dislike the views of Dr. Paul and other Libertarians regarding Abraham
Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and other great figures in American
history. I frankly admit that I cringe and get angry when I hear
Dr. Paul criticize Mr. Lincoln, who I consider the greatest American,
next to George Washington. But Dr. Paul and his colleagues have
reasoned, fact-based arguments for their views, and though I think
their arguments are often wrong, and at times scurrilous and historically
obtuse, they at least have a firm grip on the fact that there was
an America before the 1960s, and that broad knowledge of where the
United States came from is an essential prerequisite for shaping
policies to ensure its survival. This sort of historical literacy
surely is not to be found in Mr. Giuliani, whose knowledge of the
world seems to date from 9/11; in Senator Clinton and most other
Democrats, who are ashamed of where America came from and are doing
their best to coerce by federal mandate the country's remaking in
their own elitist and multicultural image; or in the rest of both
parties' candidates, who are so ignorant of U.S. history, and that
of other peoples and nations, that they believe what Americans have
struggled, fought, and died to create in North America over the
past 400 years can be put on a CD-ROM and transferred to other cultures.

At base, then,
a person need not agree with Dr. Paul on each and every issue, but
only on the most important issue: America's future economic viability
and its sovereign independence as a nation. On this issue, Dr. Paul
puts U.S. economic, constitutional, and national security interests
first, and he does so in a frank, clear, and unflinching manner.
And so what would a non-Ron Paul ballot tell us about the voter
casting it?

• If a person
  chose not to vote for Dr. Paul, he or she would have to be content
  with the staggering debt Washington is incurring for this and
  future generations. While it has become a commonplace to say
  that our grandchildren will pay for this generation's profligacy,
  it is nonetheless troublingly true. And the debt we have incurred
  is not one that finds us owing ourselves, but rather it is one
  in which Americans have knowingly indebted themselves to their
  enemies — the Chinese and the Saudis. There is, so far as I
  can tell, no candidate other than Dr. Paul who says that America
  should return to its pay-as-you-go traditions, and argues that
  it is clearly lacking in foresight, prudence, and commonsense
  to provide rivals and enemies with the ability to detonate a
  financial weapon of mass destruction that could, by simply calling
  in our debt, slay America's economy and standard-of-living.
  Indeed, so oblivious to this danger are Dr. Paul's fellow candidates
  — or so abjectly willing are they to court future economic ruin
  if it means electoral victory now — that they want to borrow
  many billions more from our foes to fund universal health care,
  additional foreign military adventures, college-educations-for-all,
  and more foreign and military aid for their overseas buddies
  in Egypt, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Saudi Arabia.

• A person
  not voting for Dr. Paul would be further validating the reality
  that America is fast becoming a country of men — and women —
  and not of laws. Making issues more complex than they are is,
  of course, the time-honored way in which most U.S. politicians
  ensure that the status quo in which they are elected and reelected
  remains unchanged. The best examples today of this complexification
  process are border control and immigration. Our bipartisan governing
  elite and its non-Paulian spawn running for president have so
  encumbered a straight-forward law-and-order issue like immigration
  with the entangling considerations of human rights, refugee
  rights, citizenship rights and other non-pertinent issues that
  nothing is being done to halt the flood of undocumented aliens
  that is entering the country and eroding national security.
  Save for Dr. Paul the message from the other candidates on this
  issue is "Damn the law and U.S. security, I need the Hispanic
  vote."

• And perhaps
  most inexplicably, ballots cast for one of Dr. Paul's rivals
  — especially Senator McCain and Mayor Giuliani — would show
  that many American parents are content to raise their children
  and then have them pointlessly killed abroad while serving as
  cannon fodder for the democracy-mongering interventions of their
  governing elite and wars that our elite start but never intend
  to win. From the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to protecting
  far-off borders by endlessly expanding NATO, to the civil strife
  of Darfur, to picking fights with the Russians, to democratizing
  Pakistan into anarchy, Dr. Paul's fellow candidates fairly salivate
  at the prospect of getting America involved in ever more bloody
  democracy-installing campaigns overseas. These adventures will
  of course require far greater numbers of soldiers — but not
  from the families of the elite of course — and will inevitably
  force them to reinstitute universal conscription, notwithstanding
  their pledges to the contrary.

So what does
it mean to vote for a candidate other than Dr. Paul? To so vote
means that one is knowingly voting for a man or a woman who does
not intend to do what he she has pledged to do. Whether it is on
the issue of budgetary restraint, abortion, trade, overseas intervention,
borders, taxes, jobs, or foreign aid, there is no reason to believe
that any candidate other than Dr. Paul would alter the policy status
quo more than superficially. Each of the other candidates is the
clone of those who have governed America for the past twenty years:
These are men and women who ignore the law, spend and borrow mindlessly,
and consistently spend the lives of our children by involving America
in other peoples' wars through their unrelenting interventionism.
They will do what they must to win office, and can be relied on
to abandon any and all campaign promises if they find such a jettisoning
can help them keep office.

And it is on
the point of reliability that Dr. Paul's candidacy rightly has roused
so much interest among everyday Americans, and particularly among
younger people. In all of the voluminous and often scare-mongering
criticism of Dr. Paul and his ideas that has flowed from his fellow
candidates and much of the media, no one has yet suggested that
Dr. Paul would not try to do precisely what he says he will try
to do. They have ridiculed what he intends to do if elected, decried
its supposed impracticability, and called it simple-minded isolationism,
but they have not once questioned his resolve to try to get it done.

My
own guess, for what it is worth, is that the reason Dr. Paul is
attracting the interest and support of Americans lies in the sense
they have that the Texan intends to do precisely what he says he
will do. Also spurring interest in Dr. Paul is the fact that he
is the only presidential candidate intent on shattering the structure
of the incestuous, privileged, self-serving, bribe-taking, and above-the-law
country club in which our bipartisan governing elite dwells and
hob-knobs with much of the media. For these reasons, Dr. Paul is
attracting the attention of men and women who know in their minds
and hearts that the other candidates' promises of change are worthless,
and if any is elected Americans would inevitably find themselves
in 2012 with the same disastrous economic, foreign policy, and law-and-order
status quo that is untenable in 2008.

The chance
to see America benefit from a leader who strives to do what he has
promised, while simultaneously thumping America's self-serving political
elite and camp-following media are two of the best of the many excellent
reasons to vote for Dr. Paul.

December
29, 2007

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

DIGG THIS

Amidst the
cacophony of everyday events around world, people outside the United
States ought to cock an ear toward America States and listen closely
for the quiet but resonant voice of a Texas gentleman named Dr.
Ron Paul. Dr. Paul is a retired obstetrician, a 10 term Republican
congressman from the 14th district of Texas and a Republican candidate
in the 2008 race for the US presidency. And if you listen closely
to Dr. Paul, you will hear the only authentic American voice in
a field of nearly twenty presidential candidates from both parties.

It is, these
days, both trite and inaccurate to say that u201CAmerica is a nation
of laws and not men.u201D Since 1945, for example, U.S. presidents routinely
have involved the United States in wars that Congress does not declare,
notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution's clear mandate that only
Congress can declare war. For more than thirty years, successive
U.S. Congresses and presidents have refused to enforce border control
and immigration laws already on the books, thereby abetting the
deterioration of America's social cohesion, social and educational
services, and national security. And for just as long, presidents,
congressman, and senators of both parties have ignored the interests
of everyday Americans to earn donations and retirement sinecures
— both, really, barely disguised bribes — from the U.S.-based military
industry, the multinational oil companies, and foreign lobbies flush
with money, such as those representing Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The foreign lobbies are particularly despicable because American
parents pay for U.S. politicians' kowtowing for money to these foreign
entities with the lives of their soldier-children and their savings.
Sadly, therefore, it is a bad joke to say that America is today
a country of laws not men.

But that is
why Dr. Paul's voice is important and, increasingly, is being listened
to by Americans. It also the reason that the slander machines of
the Democrat and Republican parties, U.S. military-related industries
and their financiers, and the foreign lobbies are working overtime
to discredit and ridicule Dr. Paul. These self-appointed elites
know that Dr. Paul's voice is not only the authentic voice of Americans
and their historical experience, but also potentially the voice
of their doom, because impotence, shame, and drastically less war-profiteering
will be theirs if the rule-of-law endorsed by Mr. Paul is reestablished
in the United States.

Mr. Paul places
his faith in the Constitution of the United States and the legacy
left to Americans by their founding generation. The republican government
created by America's revolutionary generation was meant to be the
agent of an expanding domain for freedom, liberty, prosperity, and
equal opportunity at home. It was never intended to
be the militarized installer of those attributes abroad. u201CWherever
the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled,
there will her [the United States'] heart, her benedictions, and
her prayers be,u201D said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, in 1821,
in words that Americans are today being reminded of by Dr. Paul.

But she does
not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher
to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and
vindicator only of her own. … She well knows that by once enlisting
under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of
foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power
of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual
avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp
the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy
would insensibly change from liberty to force. … She might become
the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler
of her own spirit.

Dr. Paul speaks
in the tradition of Secretary Adams, and in plainer words he speaks
against — indeed, he damns — the bipartisan American governing class
which, since 1945, has u201Cinsensibly chang[ed] from liberty to forceu201D
the spirit of the American nation and people. In his campaign, Dr.
Paul draws attention to the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan that have resulted from U.S. interventionism, and from
the U.S. elite's arrogant and foolish determination to be the u201Cvindicatoru201D
of avaricious and ambitious foreigners who conceal their lust for
arbitrary power behind the words of the American founders. He accuses
and rebukes the bipartisan U.S. elite for having involved America
in endless wars — especially religious wars — in which no genuine
U.S. interest is at stake, and for having brazenly reached into
the pockets of Americans and stolen their money to support and/or
protect states — Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, etc. — that have drawn
America ever more deeply into wars that are none of our business
or concern.

If you listen
to Mr. Paul you will hear a man devoted to his country's welfare
and his countrymen; knowledgeable about and respectful of its history;
realistic about the increasingly barbaric world in which it exists;
and, most of all, fully aware of the fragility of America's republican
experiment and its absolute dependence on the constant nurturing
provided by the rule of law. If elected, Mr. Paul would reshape
America in a direction that would be in America's best interests.

• Going to
  war would once again require a formal, constitutional declaration
  by the U.S. Congress; the world would see America involved in
  far fewer wars, and none started by the whim of a single man and
  the foreign-influenced ideological clique around him. And when
  war was declared, America's foes would absorb an application of
  U.S. military force that would both utterly destroy them and their
  supporters, and serve as a warning to other miscreants bent on
  doing America harm.
• Immigration
  and U.S. borders would re-subjected to the rule of law, and America
  would get the flow of immigrants it needs in an orderly manner
  and based protecting national security and, only then, on the
  needs of the country's society and economy.
• Foreign
  aid would be eliminated and defense spending better targeted to
  real threats so as to end the tax-tyranny of a perennially spendthrift
  federal government; reduce the amount of debt held by foreigners,
  especially that held by regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia;
  and encourage the reemergence of the traditional but long dormant
  pay-as-you-go thriftiness of individual Americans and their families.
• Most important,
  the world would see a massively reduced U.S. voice, presence,
  involvement in events that have no conceivable impact on U.S.
  national interest. Other nations would have to begin looking out
  for themselves; they will have to amicably settle their religious,
  ethnic, tribal, and territorial spats or fight each other to the
  death — no U.S. cavalry will be riding to the rescue.

As you listen
to Dr. Paul, you will hear his opponents describe him as an evil
isolationist, but neither Dr. Paul nor America has ever been isolationist.
Indeed, the term u201Cisolationistu201D is merely a deceptive slur that
America's bipartisan elite hurls at those citizens who prefer not
to waste their wealth or children's lives in other peoples' wars.
Since its inception, the United States has been a trading nation
and a country fully involved in economic, scientific, educational,
and commercial affairs around the world. At its best, America has
been sturdily non-interventionist, recognizing both that it has
more than enough to do to expand liberty's domain and the equality
of opportunity at home, and that non-essential foreign adventures
can only slow or even undo liberty and opportunity for Americans
at home.

In
an America led by the non-interventionist Dr. Paul, the world would
see a more confident and less aggressive nation; a nation more humble,
prosperous, and equitable; and a nation willing to let all other
nations and peoples work out their own destinies, peaceably or violently,
as they wish. America would get back to its own business and interests,
and the rest of the post-Cold War world's nations would be left
alone to try, at long last, to grow into responsible adults.

November
28, 2007

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

Recently
neoconservatives and the editorial pages of major dailies have brooded
about the failure of Iraq's constitutional convention to produce
a document worthy of the Founders. While the neocons try to limit
damage to the Bush Administration, other pundits on the right and
the left draw on "history" to remind Americans the U.S.
constitution was not made in a day, and that the 1776–1789
period passed before the Founders produced a constitution which
still is the indispensable guide for those aspiring to self-government.
Because it took America's greatest men 13 years to create the constitution,
the pundits say, we should not worry that the "Iraqi Founders"
are having trouble.

This
argument is glib and, as a friend says, sounds convincing if you
say it fast. It is, however, an argument that can be grounded only
in a malicious intent to mislead Americans or a fundamental ignorance
of our history. It may be both, but certainly is the latter. For
that reason, we should build gallows sturdy enough to accommodate
our history teachers.

The
road to the U.S. constitution began, to choose a plausible date,
with Magna Charta in 1215. From then, Anglo-American political and
constitutional thought meandered through five-plus centuries of
evolution – guided by Christian scripture and punctuated by theoretical
debate, civil and religious wars, regicide, electoral politics,
and world wars – until 1789 and what Catherine Drinker Bowen aptly
described as "Miracle in Philadelphia." Questions: How
many Americans know, let alone can discuss, that fact? How many
Americans can identify a similar post-1215 process in the Islamic
world from which the Iraqi Founders can seek guidance? Whose fault
is it that such elemental realities elude America's bipartisan governing
elite?

Next,
when the Founders signed Jefferson's Declaration, beginning the
journey to the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, they
were not only informed by Christian scripture and instructed by
centuries of evolving Anglo-American political theory and moral
philosophy, but also drew on 150-years experience of self-government
in North America, beginning in Jamestown and Plymouth. The Founders
were not off-the-cuff, 90-day wonders when it came to self-government.
They were steeped in centuries of republican theory and history,
and many participated in the day-to-day politics of self-government.
Questions: How many Americans know these clear, bare-bone facts?
From what comparable body of self-governing theory and what record
of practical electoral experience are the Iraqi Founders drawing?
Are they informed and guided, as were our Founders, by Christian
scripture? How can any rational American expect the Iraqis to produce
a "Miracle in Baghdad"?

Finally,
when the Founders signed and the states ratified the Constitution,
how did they know power would be peacefully passed from one government
to another? Well, they didn't. But based on the post-Magna Charta
development of Anglo-American self-government, the Constitutionu2018s
provisions, and the unity-producing reverence Americans had for
George Washington's actions and guidance, the Founders hoped for
an orderly transfer. The accession of John Adams to succeed Washington
did not fully prove the Founder's formula because the Federalists
kept power. But their scheme was validated by the 1800 transfer
from Adams to Jefferson, from one party to another after a vicious
election campaign. Questions: Why do Americans believe elections
in places lacking 800 years of Anglo-American political experience,
like Iraq and Afghanistan, make any difference? Whose fault is it
that U.S. leaders fail to see that elections are meaningless in
societies where there is have no history of peacefully transferring
power and men do not shelve their AK-47s and wait for the next election?

History
teachers are the villains. They have left Americans without a sound
understanding of their history. Crippling at home, their failure
causes our humiliation and defeat abroad. America's experience is
long, arduous, bloody, Christianity-based, and largely unique. Others
may aspire to replicate it, and to them we owe rhetorical support,
prayers, and best wishes. Our experience, however, cannot be installed
in alien cultures in a few years time; and certainly not at bayonet
point. That our otherwise brilliant U.S. leaders do not know this
deep in their bones speaks to the failure of America's history teachers,
a failure that should shame them more painfully than any pain derived
from the noose they richly merit.

September
8, 2005

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

It is for the rest of us, rather, to ask for what did the 20
Ohio Marines die? We have heard from the president that the Marines
were killed because the enemy in Iraq is trying to break America's
will. Others have said the Marines died because of terrorism committed
by religious fanatics. Still others claim they died to bring freedom
and democracy to a country long scared by a mad despot's tyranny.
As a corollary to the latter, the president claims installing democracy
in Iraq and across the Islamic world is necessary because the freedoms
of Americans increasingly depend on ensuring others have the same
freedoms.

Each of these reasons bulked large in the rhetoric of the politicians
speaking at or about the funeral and memorial services for the 20
Marines. Some spoke somberly, others pounded their chests and asserted
the nobility of lives spent bringing freedom to others. And all
of them lied.

The 20 Marines died because America's bipartisan governing
elite is intoxicated with the belief that they should, can, and
must govern the world. When Americans push the voting machine's
button for their candidate, the victor who emerges immediately forgets
the voters' concerns and rushes to Washington to participate in
the bipartisan crusade to rebuild the world in what the politicians
see as America's image. Drunk on the headiness and self-flattering
nature of this belief, the governing elite mindlessly pursues building
overseas democracies as if it is their self-evident, Jeffersonian
duty. Make no mistake, it was these politicians and their obsessive,
ignorant-of-America crusade that helped kill the Ohio Marines and
1,780 of their brethren.

Until the last half-century, America's Marines, soldiers, sailors,
and airmen were not used to pursue a war aim called "building
democracies." Historically, U.S. leaders have understood the
American way of war: Get there quick with the biggest stick, annihilate
the enemy, his supporters, and infrastructure, and come home. In
recent decades, and particularly under the Bush and Clinton administrations,
however, our military has been used as armed social workers. From
Somalia to Bosnia, from Haiti to East Timor, from Afghanistan to
Iraq, our democracy-crazed politicians have used our servicemen
and women as glorified policeman who are sent abroad to use minimal
force — thus becoming targets and allowing enemies to survive —
and to run schools, administer towns, build roads, provide potable
water and improved health care, and to do a thousand other things
irrelevant to their one valid mission: Remorselessly annihilating
America's enemies.

The 20 Ohio Marines and all the other military dead in Iraq
died not only from enemy action, but also from the gleaming shivs
that were knowingly and gleefully driven into their vitals by the
hands of democracy crusaders named Bush, Clinton, McCain, Cheney,
Gore, Pelosi, Biden, Albright, Kerry, Wolfowitz, Harmon, Tenet,
Feith, Rumsfeld, Rice, hundreds of other politicians, and their
acolytes in the press, electronic media, and think tanks. We might
be in Iraq because we need to ensure oil supplies, protect the neocons’
masters in Israel, or fight Islamic insurgents, but we have no need
to be there to spread democracy. America's democracy does not now
and never has depended on the democracy of any other country. The
freedoms and liberties of Americans do not now and never have depended
on forcing others to have the same freedoms and liberties. Indeed,
if the democracy crusaders knew American history, they would know
that 800 years of America's at-times-violent democratic evolution
— if we date its start from Runnymede — cannot be replicated in
short order, in foreign lands, and in alien cultures by men named
Sistani and Karzai. Such a belief can only come from ignorance or
a profound contempt for the centuries of sacrifice by Americans
to reach the still less-than-perfect state of our democracy.

So
the 20 Ohio Marines were buried with the quiet dignity and patriotism
that characterizes the Marine Corps. Americans should commend their
souls to God and turn with white-hot fury on their killers, those
in Iraq and those miserable, self-righteous, and blithely murderous
wretches from both parties who inhabit the executive and legislative
branches of the federal government, who worship their idol Woodrow
Wilson, America's most enduringly malignant contribution to world
affairs, and who sent the brave Ohioans and nearly two thousand
other Americans to their deaths – for nothing.

August
18, 2005

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

On
this July 4th Americans must consider if it is again time to "dissolve
the bands which have connected them with another" – this for the third
time in their history. We did so in 1776 to shed ourselves of Britain's thrall,
and our wrong-headed but valiant Southern brethren did so in 1861 after deciding
the Union's political bands threatened their "country's" economy, political
aspirations, culture, and domestic institutions – including especially the
abominable practice of black slavery.

Today,
Americans confront a despotic threat to themselves and their nation like those
of 1776 and 1861, but one that neither Jefferson nor the Southern secessionists
would have imagined possible in the America the Founders designed. Americans now
live under a Federal government that is pervasive and dictatorial – like
Britain in 1776 – and which acts as the destroyer or suppressor of culture,
economic endeavor, and political aspirations. In addition, today's Federal government
is the main inciter of American-vs.-American hatred, much as the South perceived
the Federal government in 1861. The threat posed by the Federal government's deliberate
pitting of citizen against citizen, however, is not most dire threat to America.
That tragic honor belongs to another aspect of the government's performance: Its
supine and resolute refusal to protect American citizens and territory. In regard
to national defense, Americans today find themselves in what Thomas Paine described
as the "intolerable state" of being "exposed to the same miseries
by a government, which we might expect in a country without government…."

Assertions

The
three branches of the Federal government, and the two political parties that run
and staff them, are knowingly and willfully failing to protect what Jefferson
termed the "unalienable Rights" of Americans, chief among which, he
wrote, are "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Declaration
described in simple terms what governments are meant to do, and what citizens
are obliged to do if governments fail to perform to specification. "That
to secure these [unalienable] rights," Jefferson explained,

Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is
the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and Happiness.

Jefferson
went on wisely to warn that long-established governments must not be changed for
"light and transient reasons." He added, however, that the documented
record of a government's "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
… a design to reduce them under an absolute Despotism" creates for its citizens
a right and a duty "to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards
for their future security."

The
"Despotism" Americans face today is not that of George III's Britain,
nor is it the expanding Northern commercial and social juggernaut the Secessionists
despised and feared. No, Americans are confronted and oppressed by an "absolute
Despotism" of incompetence, cowardice, and self-interest, a despotism controlled
by an aristocracy of male and female life-time office servers who have forgotten
that they are hired help, not demigods. These men and women care only for the
perpetuation of their power and sinecures and only act to preserve their power.
They care not a jot about protecting Americans and their land.

Americans
today are ruled by a despotism of failure that is unresponsive – indeed contemptuous
– of their needs, demands, culture, and history. As citizens, therefore,
they must consider recourse to the duty the Founders assigned them: To rid themselves
of a tyrannical Federal aristocracy willing to permit the destruction of their
country in a selfish effort to preserve the power and prerogatives they exercise
over their brethren. The citizen's role in this unavoidable duty is central and
immensely daunting. Still, citizen action is the only path toward safety and away
from despotism. Calling for resistance to British tyranny, Patrick Henry in 1775
argued that America's freedom depended on the willingness of its citizens to defend
their liberties against "so formidable an adversary." Delay, he said,
would be fatal. "Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall
we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and
hugging the delusive phantom of hope until our enemies have bound us hand and
foot?," he asked. No, Henry concluded, whatever the risks of defying a despotic
and powerful foe, the danger to liberty demanded the risks be run. Henry's prescription
was valid in 1775; it is valid today. Americans must either act or allow a despotic
aristocracy of incompetence to commit suicide for them, their children, and their
nation.

Assertions
Explained

Assertions
made are not assertions proved. Jefferson recognized this and so enumerated in
his declaration the British transgressions that compromised the "unalienable
rights" of Americans. He and the Founders submitted their list for review
by "a candid world." In this bill of particulars, Jefferson used the
pronoun "He" to refer to George III and his ministers, whom the Founders
identified as the agent and symbol of America's oppression. Hereafter in this
essay, the pronouns "He" and "His" will refer to the elected
officials and their senior political appointees – of both parties –
who run and administer the Federal government. Let the "candid world"
of the American citizenry consider the following:

• He has taxed citizens at usurious rates and yet has failed to avoid budget deficits
  astonishing in size and crippling to future generations. He has spent massive
  amounts of these taxes on building the strongest military on earth, and yet refuses
  to use that military to remorselessly destroy America's enemies, instead allowing
  America to be attacked with impunity. Preferring not to offend the opinion of
  foreign nations, He refused to exploit numerous opportunities to kill Osama bin
  Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before they became strategic threats, and then
  hid those failures through the work of three intelligence investigations staffed
  by safe and trusted former members of the Federal aristocracy. More recently,
  He wantonly wasted the lives of U.S. Marines by aborting, on victory's threshold,
  the first attempt to take Fallujah in Iraq. And today, as Americans wait for their
  foes to detonate a nuclear weapon in their country, He shamelessly begs and bribes
  a South Asian military dictator to use a Third-World army to find and kill the
  terrorist most likely to inflict nuclear devastation on America.

• He
  has routinely ignored constitutional sanctions by allowing the president to oppress
  the American people by initiating wars without an official, public, and recorded
  vote by the legislative branch declaring war. Nothing in our Constitution is clearer
  than the requirement for Congress to declare war. In Federalist 41, Alexander
  Hamilton stressed that the Constitution made sure the president's ability to make
  war would not equal that of the British king. To this end, the powers to declare
  war and raise and regulate military forces were given to the legislative branch.
  Our first and greatest president respected this limit on his power. "The
  constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress," George Washington
  wrote, "[and] therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken
  until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a
  measure." Notwithstanding the Constitution's clear intent, He has, for half
  a century, acted in the arbitrary manner of the British king and rendered the
  Founders' absolute requirement an irrelevant anachronism.

• He has passed laws with unbecoming fanfare and bravado and then refused to enforce
  them. Thus today, in time of war, the nation is under a continuous and growing
  domestic threat because of His deliberate failure to control borders and check
  illegal immigration, as well as His cowardly refusal to identify the millions
  of aliens in our midst because He fears political retribution. He has thereby
  created and nurtured a situation that vastly increases the chance of more terrorist
  attacks in the United States. Worse, this situation all but ensures American-against-American
  violence – targeting immigrant Americans – after the next attack.

• He has failed to make laws that would curb the undue and destructive influence
  of foreign powers in America. He instead holds hands with tyrannical Arab princes
  who sponsor religious war against America and extort billions by manipulating
  oil supplies. He lines up to genuflect before and pander to the agent of a minor,
  arrogant, and larcenous foreign power in the guise of the America-Israel Public
  Affairs Committee. He recoils in terror before the war-through-inundation-of-immigrants
  threats issued by yet another venal mountebank who is ensconced as Mexico's president.

• He
  has dictated that a cruel bureaucratic war be waged against all religions in our
  own country, consistently passing laws and issuing decisions from the bench that
  denigrate and humiliate the faiths of American believers. In so doing, He has
  set American against American as each religious group strives to protect its identity.
  He has, for the first time, and by deliberate policy, created an environment conducive
  to the spread of religious acrimony – and perhaps violence – among believing
  Americans in America. He has done the same through His dictations on issues ranging
  from education to road construction to law enforcement. He has made Federal domestic
  polices the single greatest instigator of disunity and divisiveness in America,
  almost as if pitting American against American is His goal. He has, moreover,
  negated the ability of Americans to talk, debate, and, if necessary, argue out
  their differences by imposing Federal censorship laws cynically and deliberately
  mislabeled as prohibitions on hate speech.

• He has recklessly squandered hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to foreign
  powers whose policies and ambitions are antithetical to U.S. interests. He has,
  moreover, spent like amounts in monetary and/or military aid to support religious
  theocracies in places like Saudi Arabia and Israel, thus supporting religious
  persecution abroad and unilaterally abrogating the Constitution's prohibition
  against official U.S. support for religion. It is patently absurd to fund and
  promote established, discriminatory, state-dominating religions overseas, while
  waging war against the faiths of the American people at home.

• He has negated the ability of the nation's military to protect Americans and their
  territory by continuing to purchase weapons systems irrelevant to defeating the
  enemies now threatening America. He has done so because the makers of these unusable
  weapons systems contribute massively to the funds that allow His continued manipulation
  of the electoral system and thereby maintain both His power and His ability to
  ignore citizens' safety. He then involves the nation's military in wars it is
  not equipped to fight and binds it with rules of engagement that make our military
  personnel more targets than soldiers.

• He has for more than thirty years knowingly failed to create an energy policy
  that lessens America's dependence on foreign energy resources. He has willingly
  put the country under the thumb of Arab tyrants and Latin American dictators,
  leaving it liable to unexpected and savage increases in energy prices. He has
  deliberately left Americans in a situation where they will pay extortionate energy
  prices which will, in turn, fund the terrorists who are killing their children
  serving in the military.

The
Road Back: Citizen Action, State-based Defiance, and the Ballot

Clearly,
the Federal government, as now constituted and run, has the capacity but not the
will, courage, or commonsense to protect what Jefferson called the "Safety
and Happiness" of American citizens. Americans must act, therefore, to protect
themselves and their country. At this date, violence against the Federal government
is not needed, and must not be in the current set of options for Americans to
consider.

Where
to Start? The only place to start is with the physical security of the United
States. Addressing this issue first has two clear benefits. First, without physical
security, all of America's so-called post-9/11 victories over Islamic militancy
are mere eyewash. Second, if there is a single issue on which those we elected
to run the Federal government have, for decades, failed monumentally and deliberately,
it is the physical security of our nation. Criminal actions against these knowingly
negligent men and women are in order, but for now let us leave them to babble
lies about "improved Homeland Security" and act at the state and local
levels to protect Americans by taking the responsibility for domestic security
that the Federal government has abdicated.

How
to Proceed? It has taken two-plus centuries to statutorily empower our elected
Federal aristocracy of incompetence, arrogance, cowardice, and greed. These men
and women are now the masters of the Federal system and have, through arms-makers
and other industries, domestic and foreign lobbying groups, and incestuous relationships
with foreign powers, built dependable financial resources that make them independent
of and superior to the citizenry. These funds allow them to pay cynical lip-service
to the American electorate. Armed with the power of legal precedent, the aristocracy
will delay and ultimately defeat efforts by citizens to restore to themselves
a government dedicated to securing their "Safety and Happiness." In
the short term, there is no way to alter the cupidity, cowardice, and self-serving
arrogance of the Federal aristocracy. At first it can only be isolated, but then,
over time, it can and must be destroyed from the bottom up by massive, popular
resistance to its policies. "It was by the sober sense of our citizens,"
Jefferson wrote in words as true today as two centuries ago, "that we were
safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the
same agency alone we can be kept from falling back."

For
now, then, an active defiance of the Federal government through cooperation at
the state and local levels is the only means by which America's domestic security
can begin to be protected. At times such defiance will mean using the same state-government
powers that governors invoke when man-made or natural disasters occur; at other
times, defiance will require blatantly refusing to obey Federal edicts. The state
governors must for now be the leading agents of defiance. If America is to be
protected, the governors must work across party lines and focus solely on the
security of their citizens and nation.

• The Governors should exert their control over the military reserve units that
  fall under state jurisdiction and refuse to transfer that control to the Federal
  government. The governors should then mobilize and deploy these units to staff
  and administer state-mandated, border-control regimes to stop the flow of illegal
  immigration. Of course all governors do not have a border-control problem, but
  all governors do suffer from the adverse consequences derived from those who do.
  If extra military manpower is needed by the governors on the front-lines of this
  federally mandated and protected immigration debacle – such as those in California,
  Arizona, Washington, Texas, New York, Michigan, and New Mexico – it should
  be provided by the governors of interior states who do not have contiguous borders
  with negligent, apathetic, or ill-intentioned foreign powers. If the federal aristocracy
  threatens legal or physical action against the states, the governors must defy
  them. The Federal time-servers will quickly find that the electorate, in time
  of war, will rally to governors who act to protect them when the Federal government
  will not. The Federal aristocrats will also find themselves impotent: Can any
  American imagine a U.S. soldier shooting his brethren for defying the Federal
  government and trying to protect all citizens?

• The Governors can also use their control over military reserves to begin to rein-in
  the president's unilateral and unconstitutional war-making ability. The U.S. military's
  reserve forces – including those state governors command – are key components
  of America's war-making ability; without them large, long-duration wars overseas
  are not possible. Because the Federal legislature has allowed the president to
  abrogate the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war, such action
  by the governors will deny the Federal government vital military manpower, thereby
  negating the ability of presidents to take America to war simply because he or
  she is so inclined. By using the military units under their command to protect
  citizens, the governors will provoke a needed confrontation with the federal government
  that may at last return constitutional sanity to the issue of making war. Such
  actions are not meant to make America vulnerable or render it unable to wage war
  abroad. Rather, they are meant to help destroy an unconstitutional power that
  has been assumed by presidents, and to make domestic security certain and reliable,
  without which winning victory over our enemies overseas is, in any event, an illusion.

In the longer term, Americans
must destroy the current Federal aristocracy by establishing litmus tests for
all candidates elected to the Federal legislature. For now, such litmus tests
must have nothing to do with today's contentious social issues. Those issues are
important, but their resolution is both impossible and irrelevant unless America
survives. The litmus tests should rather deal with a limited number of issues
that pertain directly to national security and constitutional rigor. No candidate
should be sent to the Federal legislature before he or she unambiguously pledges
to support:

• Effective control of our national borders by the U.S. military: the temporary
  suspension of all immigration until America puts its domestic house in order vis–vis
  immigration policy and enforcement; the deportation of proven illegal immigrants
  with tightly limited right of appeal; and the creation of an immigration system
  that welcomes foreign nationals if they enter America via the established legal
  system. Candidates must also support the construction of physical impediments
  to crossing U.S. borders, thereby forcing all individuals entering America to
  pass through official checkpoints. Without such barriers, the tens of billions
  of dollars spent on computerized identification and detection systems will be
  easily defeated by foes who will simply avoid official border crossings.

• Equipping the U.S. military with appropriate weaponry to defeat America's current
  enemies; reformulating rules of engagement to facilitate the killing of as many
  of America's enemies as quickly as possible; and curtailing by statute the use
  of U.S. forces in other than war-fighting situations. Also, the immediate and
  permanent abrogation of Executive Order 12333, which forbids assassination of
  foreign leaders. America's young must fight no more wars, and the U.S. government
  must invoke no more civilian-killing economic sanctions, when both can be avoided
  by killing simple butchers like Saddam and Castro or nascent brilliant, charismatic,
  and brutal leaders like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Our own leaders
  are hired help and replaceable. If their lives are put on the line as the cost
  of eliminating threats to Americans as a whole, it is a chance they are paid to
  take. Their protective blanket of E.O. 12333 should be shredded in the interest
  of the greater good.

• Substantial reductions in and eventual elimination of foreign aid to governments
  – especially dictatorships, tyrannies, and theocracies – and the creation
  of a foreign aid program catholic in its approach and limited to food, medical,
  technological, and educational aid, preferably administered entirely by secular
  private or public U.S. institutions.

• An energy policy that demonstrably begins to reduce America's dependence on foreign
  energy sources. This policy should include alternative energy sources, increased
  domestic production and exploration, and hybrid automobiles. Funds now spent on
  aid to foreign tyrants, theocrats, and gangsters must be used as a catalyst for
  creativity and innovation in the energy sector.

• The immediate reclamation of the Congress's now-usurped control of the war-making
  power. This to abide by the constitution, to end a half-century of the American
  people being oppressed by presidents who take them to war on personal whim, and
  to heed Madison’s warning that “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it
  will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

• The reestablishment of Free Speech rights by systematically abrogating the Federal
  hate-speech laws that are meant to preclude criticism of Federal policy and action,
  allow the Federal aristocracy to experiment with and impose domestic policies
  antithetical to America's culture, history, and constitution, and which pit Americans
  against Americans.

Finally,
once the current Federal aristocracy is destroyed and a legislature is installed
that has the protection of Americans as its foremost goal, we must work toward
a constitutional amendment that will sanction the initiative, referendum, and
recall for all Federal officials – elected and politically appointed –
in all three branches of government. These measures must be applied to all Federal
judges. Both political parties long ago made ideology, not talent and objectivity,
the standard for judicial appointment. It seems best, therefore, to afford citizens
the right to decide the brand of ideology they want in their judges. The Internet
Age allows these measures to be executed in reasonable amounts of time and, once
undertaken, they will begin to reestablish a link between citizens and their government
that is vibrant, effective, and vigilant.

Conclusion:
Heed Jefferson and the Founders

The
current Federal despotism is ample proof that the Founders were correct about
the imperfectability of human nature and the corrupting nature of centralized
power in a republic. Sadly, it also is clear that their system of checks-and-balances
has been destroyed by the men and women who staff and run the Federal government.
These individuals will not reform themselves, and so the people who elected them
must seek to take charge. The nationalization of the initiative, referendum, and
recall is essential not only to remove those who deliberately pit Americans against
Americans, but to block polices that further that goal and, concurrently, to initiate
policies to stop the current divisiveness of American politics from descending
into a new civil war.

The
Federal government is now run by individuals who too closely resemble those Walt
Whitman described as responsible for the Civil War. Listen to Whitman's description
of the members of a pre-Civil War political party convention and prepare to cringe
as you recognize the same character types now populating our national parties
and Federal government.

The
members who composed it [the convention] were, seven eighths of them, the meanest
kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office seekers, pimps, malignants,
conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept editors,
spaniels well trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, mail-riflers,
slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the president, creatures of would-be
presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyists, sponges, ruined sports …
crawling, serpentine men – the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of
the earth.

Using
ballots to destroy today's venal, self-serving, and incompetent ruling elite may
be the last chance to reclaim, without violence, a democratic republic in which,
as Jefferson wrote, "the people [are] the safe, as they are the ultimate,
guardians of their own liberty." While close to being too late to do so,
there is no need to despair. The Founders' wisdom is at our disposal; indeed,
it silently but forcefully demands our attention and action.

So
on this Independence Day let all be of good heart as we accept our duty as American
citizens and begin to destroy an elite – not a system of government –
that is knowingly failing to protect the nation's "Safety and Happiness."
In the early, dark days of America's war against Britain, Thomas Paine outlined
the dangers his countrymen faced from British military power and urged them to
act with unity and confidence. "I thank GOD that I fear not," Paine
wrote. "I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and see
the way out."

…
I call not upon a few, but upon all; not on THIS State or THAT State, but on EVERY
State; up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force
than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future
world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive,
that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet
and repulse it. Say not, that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands;
throw not the burthen of the day upon Providence, but "show your faith in
your works," that GOD may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what
rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach all of you. The far
and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, shall suffer
or rejoice alike.

There
is, again, no cause now for Americans to use violence as they confront the Federal
despotism. That said, the threat Americans face is as desperate as that faced
by Paine and our forbearers. Our domestic security is deliberately and disastrously
compromised by presidents and legislators who refuse to defend America. Our constitution
is defied by presidents who covet the role of overseas military buccaneer. And
worst of all, these presidential buccaneers are aided and abetted by a Federal
legislature more concerned with safeguarding their sinecures than in exercising
their constitutional duty. These failures must be rectified, and measures must
be emplaced to prevent their repetition.

Let
each of us, then, draw inner strength from belief in the God of our choice, but
let all of us steel ourselves with the resolve and power found in Jefferson's
timeless declaration and the Founders' actions and legacy – the eternal right
and duty to change a government that does not secure our "Safety and Happiness."
"I love the man," Paine wrote, "that can smile in trouble, that
can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business
of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves
his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." Fortunately for todayu2018s
Americans, the Founders and their compatriots pursued their principles and were
victorious. Now it is our turn, and we must keep in mind that our failure to act
will yield the same result Paine forecast if his own generation had failed to
act: "The blood of his children shall curse his cowardice, who shrinks back
at a time when a little might have saved the whole and made THEM happy."

July
4, 2005

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is the author of
Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years
at the CIA.

Like
a French farceu2018s final act, Robb and Silberman show the Republic
is run by men and women who will inflict any amount of pain on America
to avoid harming one of their own. This federal-level group amounts
to an unaccountable, murderously cynical aristocracy of power. Cowardly
senior bureaucrats and policymakers have failed to act on good intelligence
or misused bad intelligence; congressional oversight committees
ask puerile questions – it's politically safer not to know
– and deceitful senior bureaucrats dutifully give non-answers;
and presidents abscond with the constructional prerogative to declare
war from the pliant, derelict federal legislature.

The
aristocracy's shamefulness came home to roost on 9/11 and in Iraq.
Those responsible reached for the most reliable of all white-washers
– the blue-ribbon, special commission. These panels have been
stocked only with those who will reliably chant: "We are not
here to point fingers." Believing Americans are inattentive
yokels, the Commissions take testimony, ignore or bury truth, and
issue reports exculpating those who appointed them. What caused
3,000 dead on 9/11; 1,500-plus dead in Iraq; failure to eliminate
bin Laden; and the calamity-in-the-making of open borders and unenforced
immigration laws? Why the Intelligence Community's "structure"
of course! Americans are to believe that antiquated structure –
an inanimate object – caused multiple U.S. defeats. Case closed;
aristocracy safe; and Americans – like Union troops at Cold
Harbor – pinning on name tags to identify their corpses after
al-Qaeda's next strike

The
recent commissions have ensured Federal officials – elected
and appointed – and their senior bureaucrats are inviolably
protected by one rule: No one is responsible for anything at anytime,
ever. This phrase should placed on the Great Seal and used to prepare
America's obituary. Though too late to make a difference, lets review
several "serious" problems Robb-Silberman identify, but
for which no one is responsible.

• Dissent/debate are
  not present in the Intelligence Community. This is not caused
  by "structure." Leaders alone promote debate or suppress
  it. The 1996 report detailing al-Qaeda's state-like effort to
  acquire WMD was suppressed for many months by senior CIA officers.
  They then wanted no debate on al-Qaeda's WMD program.

• CIA
  officers doubted primary Iraq WMD source "Curveball,"
  and military analysts were skeptical of Iraq having UAV's to
  disperse chemical or biological weapons. "Structure"
  did stop keep these analyses from the White House, senior managers
  did.

• The FBI does not share
  information with the Intelligence Community. Again, fault lies
  not with "structure," but with the astonishing, pathetic,
  and perhaps negligent failure of Judge Freeh and Mr. Mueller
  to purchase a reliable computer system.

• The Intelligence Community
  lacks the expertise on Islamic extremism it had on the USSR
  Is this a "structure" problem or the failure of three
  DCI's – Woolsey, Deutch, and Tenet – who seem not
  to know the term "Islam" and mandated no training
  on the issue? Also, why have we expanded the Intelligence Community
  if, as Robb-Silberman says, there are no experts for thousands
  of new jobs?

• No
  "Red Teams" challenged pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
  "Structure" creates nothing; mangers create Red Teams.
  It is an aberration in Community practice not to have had Iraq
  intelligence "red-teamed" before the war. The absence
  of Red Teams means Intelligence Community leaders knew the analytic
  answer they wanted, or were told by Administration officials
  the answer to deliver.

Hows
them apples? The Robb-Silberman report is the third coat of whitewash
meant to make Americans think effective intelligence reform is underway.
The commissions have produced institutional chaos and debilitating
bureaucratic growth, not movement toward reform that builds on Intelligence
Community strengths and better defends America. In a successful
effort to protect their patrons in the aristocracy of power, the
commissioners let the culpable escape. Worse, they saddled America
with the absurd Intelligence Community "structure" demanded
by the uninformed 9/11 families, installed by a Congress and President
who followed polls not conscience, and led by many of the same bureaucrats
who got us to 9/11 and Iraq.

After
the commissions' failures help al-Qaeda detonate a nuclear device
in the United States, Americans must ensure the next Commission
has individuals animated by the spirit of those anti-aristocratic
paragons, the Marx Brothers. For Americans, trusting their childrens'
and nation's future to Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo will be
infinitely preferable and safer to relying on more commissioners
like Goss, Graham, Hamilton, Kean, Robb, and Silberman.

April
21, 2005

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.

What
the book says

First,
let me restate my intent in writing the book. My work was meant
to inform Americans about the threat Islamist militancy posed to
our country. The book is strongly nationalistic. I do not aspire
to be a citizen of the world; being an American citizen is enough
honor for one lifetime. The message I wanted to deliver can be summarized
in three points.

1. Our
   Islamist enemies – led and personified by Osama bin Laden
   – attack America for what we do in the Muslim world, not
   for what we believe or the way we live. They attack us because
   they believe America, through its policies and actions, is tying
   to destroy Muslims and the Islamic faith. Our political leaders
   from both parties do not understand this, or, if they do, are
   willfully lying to the electorate. There is no other explanation
   for their abject wrong-headedness.

2. The
   war in which America is engaged is a war for survival, not a
   police action, a regime-changing or nation-building exercise,
   or, least of all, a law enforcement problem. We cannot talk
   our way out of this war, and we cannot – and must not try
   – to appease our way out of it. Indeed, we are faced not
   by a choice between war and peace, but a choice between war
   and endless war.

3. Today
   America is defending itself only through intelligence and military
   operations. These can hold the ring for a while, but to crush
   our Islamist enemy – as we must – the lethal power
   of these services must be complemented by a review of and debate
   about our policies toward the Muslim world. Not aimed at appeasement,
   this review, and the debate it engenders, would ensure that
   our long-in-place policies still serve U.S. national interests.
   If they do, fine, we will have make do with military and intelligence
   means. If they do not, we can alter them in a way that protects
   America's interests while we simultaneously destroy our foes
   at every opportunity.

The
book's reception

I
think any author would be pleased by the reception my book received.
I was not only pleased, but shocked. The book has sold more than
150,000 copies, long excerpts have appeared in the New York Times
and Washington Post, and it was on those papers' bestseller
lists for several weeks. I have had numerous opportunities to talk
about the book and my ideas on television, radio, and in print interviews,
and have been asked to present talks in several public venues. With
the exception of several sui generis Fox TV correspondents, I have
been well treated on all occasions. The best part of this media
experience has been participating in radio call-in shows. The eagerness
of Americans to seek new information, question my ideas and judgments,
and try to pin me down for specifics have reaffirmed my belief that
Americans are not the simpletons their political leaders too often
treat them as.

Notwithstanding
these many positives – for which I am genuinely grateful –
I have been disappointed by the failure of many reviewers to understand
the book's intent. This failure speaks either to the murkiness of
my prose and the weakness of my arguments, or to the agendas of
my reviewers. Likely it is a mix of both.

Reviews
from the left

My
book has been embraced on the left by those eager to attack President
Bush and his neoconservative advisers, especially on the issue of
Iraq. I oppose the Iraq war because it made crushing our bin Laden-led
Islamist enemies vastly more difficult, and because self-initiated,
offensive wars are incompatible with the principles on which the
Founding Fathers grounded U.S. foreign policy. This said, the book
devotes only a few of three-hundred pages to Iraq, and rarely mentions
President Bush. Simply, Imperial Hubris is not about either
Iraq or President Bush.

After
disgorging their anti-Bush venom, reviewers on the left have consistently
referred to the "schizophrenic" nature of the book. The
argument they make on this point is that while I claim that our
Muslim foes hate and fight us because of what we do in the Islamic
world, I also assert that more and more-lethal military and intelligence
activities must be undertaken in America's defense. Well, I am guilty
as charged. At a basic level, America is suffering from the postwar
mangling of our educational system that allows the inculcation of
such errant nonsense as the idea that all wars are evil, as well
as from the willingness of our elites to preach the lie that wars
can be fought and won with few combatant casualties on either side
and even fewer civilian casualties.

As a consequence, since 2001 most of the Taleban, al Qaeda, and
the Iraqi armed forces escaped America's daintily applied wrath,
went home with their guns, and have lived to merrily fight another
day. My point was not schizophrenic, but just this: It does not
matter whether Muslims are angered by the simple fact that we intend
to kill all those who intend to kill us. What matters, and this
point was seldom caught by reviewers on the left, is that we cannot
kill 1.3 billion Muslims, that while we must in the short term kill
far greater numbers of our enemies, this lethality must be coupled
to a policy review aimed at trying to cut into the now steadily
growing numbers of Muslims willing to take up arms against America.
We cannot stop this growth in its tracks, but we can decide to use
all the tools at our command – economic, diplomatic, propaganda,
as well as military and intelligence – to slow it over time.
It does not seem to me schizophrenic to try to broaden the range
of tools available to America by adding non-lethal ones to a more
aggressive use of the lethal.

Reviews
from the right

For
the most part, reviews of Imperial Hubris from the right
have been more straightforward and less nuanced. I am simply and
variously described as a "liberal appeaser", an "Islamist
fellow traveler", and – my personal favorite – a
"rightwing weasel" who always "blames the Jews."
The consensus on the right seems to be that my intention was to
"blame America" for the problems we are having at the
hands of Islamist militants. The use of these epithets necessarily
sets the tone and shapes the content of the reviews. Oddly, the
reviews from the right have not noted the sharp nationalistic tone
of my book, suggesting, perhaps, that the neoconservatives now in
the saddle in Washington are truly more interested in the glories
of empire than in the security of America.

There
is, in the American context at any rate, nothing "conservative"
about a policy of empire-building. Traditionally, as Colonel Ralph
Peters brilliantly argues, America has been the killer of empires
not their creator. American conservatism has meant regarding war
as a last, not a first resort, and going to war only to destroy
foes who present a genuine threat to America's survival. Never has
it meant or sanctioned offensive wars of our choosing, and the explicit
rejection of John Quincy Adams's timeless principle that "America
does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."

Many
of the reviews of my book from the right seem to me – as a
Republican diehard, a nationalist, and a moderate isolationist –
to be grounded in nothing more than repackaged Wilsonianism, a set
of ideological fantasies that have helped to soak the world in blood
since Versailles. The traditional principles of U.S. foreign policy
– non-intervention, freedom of the seas, avoiding detrimental
alliances, being the exemplar not the installer of democracy in
the world, not picking fights abroad, etc. – appear as foreign
to some of my reviewers on the right as they so manifestly are to
the neoconservatives. Many in both categories would not know the
difference between an American founder and an Atlantic flounder,
although our current foreign policy suggests that the advice guiding
it comes from minds similar in quality to the latter not the former.

Summing
up

So far, I have failed in terms of what I intended my book to do.
I have failed to stir any sort of substantive debate, and the nationalist,
America first – not America alone – content of my argument
has gone virtually unnoticed. I am responsible for that failure,
and will work to clarify my prose and sharpen my argumentation on
the chance I am tempted to write a third book on America's war with
Islamist militancy. There is also the chance, of course, that the
problem is not my writing, but that I have not changed with the
times. I suppose that there must be a chance that our elites are
right when they preach casualty-free wars and the efficacy of democracy
crusading; that everyday, working Americans really believe that
their liberty is safe only if we impose our brand of freedom elsewhere
at bayonet point; and that, to do so, American parents are gladly
willing to spend the lives of their sons and daughters to ensure
foreigners are just like us. Call me stubborn, but if there is anyone
in non-elite America who believes this I would like to meet them
because, as George Strait sings, I have some ocean-front property
in Arizona to sell.

February
7, 2005

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Imperial
Hubris and Through Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned
after 22 years at the CIA.