brethren in
Iraq. You know it's - I could be too old and too
cynical, but I've watched this for a long time,
and you know, the first thing I thought for
example, when Prince Turki [former Saudi
ambassador to the US] left [New York] in such a
hurry, was: he is the one guy in the Saudi
government who has 15 years' experience in running
guns to Sunni insurgents, and I wondered if that
wasn't one of the reasons he hoofed out of town
very quickly.
NIO: So you
certainly see a kind of political hedging in the
NIE, and it's interesting because if you do a News
Google search, you
see a
wide variety of interpretations. You have Real
Clear Politics, for example, saying "NIE report
seems to back Bush Iraq plan", and then you have
All American Patriots with the story "Senator
[Joe] Biden: National Intelligence Estimate is
devastating repudiation of the president's
strategy in Iraq". So it seems like the document
is a Rorschach test [a method of psychological
evaluation], perhaps as a result of hedging.
An indictment of failure MS: When I read the report, in
its unclassified form - what I took from that was
the classified version probably says as clearly as
it can be said, given bureaucratic realities, that
we're sunk in Iraq. Because if you read it, it
lays out a whole litany of terrible things, and
then it says, if these things happen, that could
change. But the things they say need to happen
would be close to miracles. I think that, to me,
if this is the best they could do to make this
palatable to the administration - for the publicly
released form - the classified form must be just
an indictment, if you will, of failure.
NIO: That point that the NIE
made, which I mentioned before, about how al-Qaeda
would attempt to use parts of the country,
particularly al-Anbar province, to plan increased
attacks in and outside Iraq in the event of a US
troop withdrawal - that seems to validate one of
the central rationales for the Iraq war, which is,
"If we don't fight them there, we will be fighting
them here." Do you believe that given a US troop
withdrawal, al-Qaeda would ramp up its planning of
attacks inside and outside of Iraq? Particularly
of interest would be its plans for the United
States. What's your view on that?
MS: Yeah, I don't think the
possession or non-possession of Iraq makes any
difference to the planning of al-Qaeda, because
al-Qaeda's headquarters is in Afghanistan, where
they're about to, over the next seven years, evict
the US and NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization]. So the idea that somehow Iraq
provides them a safe haven from which to plan
attacks in the United States is kind of nonsense.
Planning goes on where bin Laden and Zawahiri are,
and that's in South Asia at the moment.
So
I think that that's not a credible statement, and
the idea of Mr [George W] Bush, with all respect
for the office of the president, that we were
going to fight them there instead of here is just
ludicrous. There are 1.4 billion Muslims, there
are plenty to go around.
I don't know if
that was Mr Bush or Mr [Vice President Dick]
Cheney, but that was always nonsense.
Scheuer's estimate NIO: What would be your own
intelligence estimate of the threat that al-Qaeda
poses today?
MS: I think
it's probably worse then it was on September 11,
2001. Not necessarily because they're stronger,
simply because we've done nothing to defend the
United States.
We didn't have to invade
Iraq, and what we've done is really push the
transformation that bin Laden has been aiming for
of al-Qaeda, from a man and a group to a
philosophy and an organization. But as an American
citizen what I'm just utterly appalled by are
basically three things. The president - not only
not the president or the vice president but no one
in the Democratic Party - has yet stood up and
told the American people the truth about why we're
fighting.
This is not about our liberties,
our freedoms, our gender equality, it's about what
we do in the Islamic world. And until we get some
politician who will stand up and say that, we're
not going to be able to even understand what the
enemy is about.
The second thing is that
the borders are still open. The idea that America
can be defended without closing the borders, at
least giving law enforcement the chance to find
out who is in the country, is just not possible to
do. We're losing in Iraq, we're losing in
Afghanistan - one of the major reasons in both
places is because we didn't close the borders. The
enemy is constantly being reinforced and re-funded
and re-equipped.
And then the third thing,
probably the one that will come back to haunt, is
the failure of the last three administrations to
complete the securing of the Soviet nuclear
arsenal, giving bin Laden now a 16-year window to
purchase, build or steal some sort of a nuclear
device out of the Soviet arsenal. You know, I
think we're very much as a country and a
government still at the drawing board.
NIO: In what regard? In
terms of ...
MS: In terms of
defending America. You know it's almost - perhaps
it's not a very clever analogy, but when you're on
the airplane and they're giving you the safety
indoctrination, they say: "If we lose pressure,
the air mask comes down, put it on yourself before
you help your daughter or your wife or your
grandfather." What we did is exactly the opposite
after September 11. We've spent the whole period
since September 11 trying to put the oxygen on the
Afghan situation, the Iraq situation, the Somalia
situation, and here at home, we're kind of gasping
breath.
To me, as a former intelligence
officer, I was impressed by what I think the
released version of the NIE means about what's in
the classified version.
NIO:
That's very interesting.
Frank - and
dire MS: It strikes me very
much that it's a very frank NIE. Certainly with
the released version, because they're bureaucrats
and politicians they dressed it up to make it less
Cassandra-like. It's really kind of silly to say
it, but I'm proud of the people who wrote that NIE
because it sounds to me like it's a very factual,
direct text.
NIO: And your
point before being that that level of frankness
suggests to you that the classified version is
really quite dire and grim indeed. And if what
we're getting unclassified is, I guess you could
say, this pessimistic, then the classified version
must be twofold in that regard, or threefold.
MS: The classified version
is going to be backed up point-by-point by
evidence, by reporting from the field, by signals
intelligence, by what other countries are telling
us. So yes, if the part that's available on the
DNI's [Director of National Intelligence] website
is as sweet and sunny as they could make it, the
NIE itself must be a very frank document about, as
you said, the dire situation in Iraq.
Michael Scheuer served in the
CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004. He
served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the
Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is
the once-anonymous author of Imperial Hubris:
Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror
and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin
Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
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