Imperial Hubris (short version) by Michael Scheuer (aka Anonymous)

This is a significant book by a former CIA analyst. From the title I had expected something of a rant from someone who thought a bit like I do. I was pleasantly surprised. The book is pretty balanced and takes a lot of people to task for our intelligence failures. A flavor of Mr. Scheuer's conservative bona fides: " ...It was said 'Let Reagan be Reagan' when that great and good man was president,[italics mine] and the key here is to let the FBI and its police allies across America do things at which they excel and not insist they do things-especially, operations overseas-for which they are unsuited by mission, structure, training, and attitude."

He begins in the introduction with some clear observations about bin Laden and his attacks on the US:

...These attacks are meant to advance bin Laden's clear, focused, limited, and widely popular foreign policy goals: the end of u.s. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of that state; the removal of u.s. and Western forces from the Arabian Peninsula; ...
...Bin Laden is out to drastically alter u.s. and Western policies toward the Islamic world, not necessarily to destroy America, much less its freedoms and liberties. He is a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.

In chapter one Mr. Scheuer talks about how Muslims perceive America's actions:

Challenging God's Word [and Attacking the Faithful]

• America has declared that waging jihad against Islam's attackers is a criminal act... For a Muslim to refrain from joining a defensive jihad to protect Islam means disobeying God's law and earning damnation.
• America has demanded that Muslim regimes limit, control, and track the donations.. Tithing is one of Islam's five pillars, and so America is asking Muslims to abandon God's law for manmade law.
• America has demanded Muslim educational authorities alter their curricula to teach a brand of Islam more in keeping with modernity and, not coincidentally, U.S. interests. ...
• U.S. policy supports oppression and often aggression [in non-Muslim countries].
• America supports apostate Islamic governments...
• America, on its own or with the UN, often imposes economic and military sanctions on Muslims...
• The U.S. government and oil companies are seeking control of the Arab Peninsula...
• America helped the UN create a new Christian state in East Timor...
• America now occupies and effectively rules the Muslim states of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula, the Prophet Mohammed's birthplace.
• America invariably backs Israel's occupation of Muslim Palestine and invaded Iraq to advance the Jews' goal of creating a "Greater Israel" from the Nile to the Euphrates.

He has a great way of describing events such as the war in Afganistan:

Like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in the 1930s movies, U.S. government agencies got the neighborhood kids together, gave each a role and a script, and expected to produce a professional Broadway musical in the backyard-Andy Hardy Conquers and Rebuilds Kabul, perhaps. Sadly, success from "winging it" occurs only in movies, and Washington's attempt to duplicate Hollywood's methods in Afghanistan yielded a full-blown disaster. As Ralph Peters has wisely posited, "If you intervene ignorant of local conditions, you will likely fail-and you will certainly pay in blood."

He explains how we have underestimated our opponents: "Like [Robert E.] Lee's boys, the mujahideen are often dirty, unkempt, bearded, armed with a variety of weapons, rarely paid, and haphazardly supplied. And like Lee's boys, they are aflame with courage, audaciousness, commitment to their cause, optimism, and religious zeal."

Significantly for me, Mr. Scheuer addresses the economic effects of what's going on, and he gives us some insight into how we are shooting ourselves in our economic foot:

The 11 September attacks, of course, devastated the u.S. economy...

Likewise, al Qaeda is at the core of massive increases in defense spending...:

• ....the steady diet of shocks thrown into business by steady call-ups of reserve-soldier employees...
• ...Without a second 11 September-like attack, al Qaeda has stimulated immense unanticipated spending...
• "Aborting the American economy is not an unattainable dream," al-Qurashi wrote in AI-Ansar. Perhaps he is correct.

Some of our delusions:

• The term "irrational," it seems to me, is better applied to Americans who have forgotten, or never learned, Nathan Bedford Forrest's lesson that "war means fighting and fighting means killing," ...
• ...The West, I believe, completely underestimates the degree of admiration, respect, and even love accorded to the 11 September attackers, especially by young Muslims.
• ...For years, we in the West have watched the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers and concluded that the young men and, now, women are tragic figures, victims of poverty, poor education, joblessness, despair, and brainwashing by cynical political and religious leaders.
• ...To date, we have been unable to see the issue through any but Western eyes, and so have missed recognizing that the young Palestinian bombers are seen by large numbers of Muslims as heroes...

He also talks about religions in a way that prompted me to think about a life cycle: that is, religion is like a person. Christianity reached adolesence in the middle ages with the Crusades and witch burnings. Islam is 500 years younger and is reaching adolesence now. I leave the reader to draw conclusions about the current Christian evangelism.

What's frightening is what I have learned about what Muslim countries believe about us: "...in June 2003, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that majorities in seven of eight Muslim countries feared a U.S. invasion;..." And, that bin Laden is strategically and tactically competent: ". . . . Take care not to be pushed into fragmenting your efforts and squandering your resources in marginal battles with the lackeys and parties but concentrate the blows on the head of the unfaith[ful] until it collapses. Once it collapses, all the other parts will collapse, vanish and be defeated."

Shades of Rummie: "...Americans must understand the world as it is, not as we want-or worse yet, hope-it will be. While I believe this contention is true for all of America's dealings with the world, I am not smart or arrogant enough to formulate an all-inclusive approach to u.s. foreign policy. I do, however, have long experience analyzing and attacking bin Laden and Islamists."

How we conduct these wars:

Each of these American soldiers knew-by training, intuition, or both-that war is a last resort and that once begun it is immoral and unnecessarily costly not to destroy the enemy and end the war as soon as possible. Damage is to be inflicted to the degree needed to ensure the enemy does not pose a military threat...

One of the points that resonated most with me was that we can only manage our affairs. We can only be responsible for ourselves. We can only help those who want to be helped.

On 4 July, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stood in the well of the House of Representatives-then used for some public occasions-and made a speech understood to be his personal views "... does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the wellwisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her own example. She well knows that by once enlisting under banners other 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, ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards 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.

And a few other observations:

The difference between Mr. Lincoln's moral conclusion and the moral arguments usually made during wartime is that he did not identify the enemy alone as evil. - Kent Gramm, 1994.

Frenetic activity, ceaseless chatter, and loud voices usually signal confusion, and nowhere more than in Washington. Let us get on with the war and recall the power of silence. After all, bin Laden has us scared to death, and we have heard little from him since 2001.

I highly reccomend this book to anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the world and our part in that activity. By no means have the excerpts here covered all the insights to be found in Imperial Hubris.

Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer (aka Anonymous)

This is a significant book by a former CIA analyst. From the title I had expected something of a rant from someone who thought a bit like I do. I was pleasantly surprised. The book is pretty balanced and takes a lot of people to task for our intelligence failures. A flavor of Mr. Scheuer's conservative bona fides: " ...It was said 'Let Reagan be Reagan' when that great and good man was president,[italics mine] and the key here is to let the FBI and its police allies across America do things at which they excel and not insist they do things-especially, operations overseas-for which they are unsuited by mission, structure, training, and attitude."

He begins in the introduction with some clear observations about bin Laden and his attacks on the US:

...These attacks are meant to advance bin Laden's clear, focused, limited, and widely popular foreign policy goals: the end of u.s. aid to Israel and the ultimate elimination of that state; the removal of u.s. and Western forces from the Arabian Peninsula; the removal of u.s. and Western military forces from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Muslim lands; the end of u.s. support for the
oppression of Muslims by Russia, China, and India; the end of U.S. protection for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, et cetera; and the conservation of the Muslim world's energy resources and their sale at higher prices.

...Bin Laden is out to drastically alter u.s. and Western policies toward the Islamic world, not necessarily to destroy America, much less its freedoms and liberties. He is a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon.

In chapter one Mr. Scheuer talks about how Muslims perceive America's actions:

Challenging God's Word [and Attacking the Faithful]

• America has declared that waging jihad against Islam's attackers is a criminal act and has seized and incarcerated-often without trial-hundreds of suspected mujahideen around the world. For a Muslim to refrain from joining a defensive jihad to protect Islam means disobeying God's law and earning damnation.
• America has demanded that Muslim regimes limit, control, and track the donations Muslims make to charitable organizations that serve their poor, refugee, or embattled brethren. Tithing is one of Islam's five pillars, and so America is asking Muslims to abandon God's law for manmade law.
• America has demanded Muslim educational authorities alter their curricula to teach a brand of Islam more in keeping with modernity and, not coincidentally, U.S. interests. Thus, America wants Muslims to abandon the word of God as He revealed it in the Koran...
• U.S. policy supports oppression and often aggression by Hindu India in Kashmir, Catholic Filipinos in Mindanao, Orthodox Christian Russians in Chechnya, Uzbek ex-communists in Uzbekistan, Chinese communists in Xinjiang Province, apostate al-Sauds in the Arabian Peninsula, and Israeli Jews in Palestine.
• America supports apostate Islamic governments in Kuwait, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
• America, on its own or with the UN, often imposes economic and military sanctions on Muslims, including the peoples of Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia. These actions force Muslims to follow U.S. orders, sanctioning Pakistan, for example, for building a nuclear weapon while condoning the possession of such weapons by India and Israel.
• The U.S. government and oil companies are seeking control of the Arab Peninsula to make sure its energy resources are sold to the West at below-market prices. The goal of a U.S. war in Iraq, in large part, is to gain "control of the oil wells," asserted Abu-Ubayd al-Qurashi in al Qaeda's journal Al-Ansar in August 2002.
• America helped the UN create a new Christian state in East Timor, taking it from ndonesia, the most populous Muslim state, and ignoring the principle of self-determination.
• America now occupies and effectively rules the Muslim states of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula, the Prophet Mohammed's birthplace.
• America invariably backs Israel's occupation of Muslim Palestine and invaded Iraq to advance the Jews' goal of creating a "Greater Israel" from the Nile to the Euphrates.

He has a great way of describing events such as the war in Afganistan:

Like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in the 1930s movies, U.S. government agencies got the neighborhood kids together, gave each a role and a script, and expected to produce a professional Broadway musical in the backyard-Andy Hardy Conquers and Rebuilds Kabul, perhaps. Sadly, success from "winging it" occurs only in movies, and Washington's attempt to duplicate Hollywood's methods in Afghanistan yielded a full-blown disaster. As Ralph Peters has wisely posited, "If you intervene ignorant of local conditions, you will likely fail-and you will certainly pay in blood."

He explains how we have underestimated our opponents: "Like [Robert E.] Lee's boys, the mujahideen are often dirty, unkempt, bearded, armed with a variety of weapons, rarely paid, and haphazardly supplied. And like Lee's boys, they are aflame with courage, audaciousness, commitment to their cause, optimism, and religious zeal."

Significantly for me, Mr. Scheuer addresses the economic effects of what's going on, and he gives us some insight into how we are shooting ourselves in our economic foot:

The 11 September attacks, of course, devastated the u.S. economy; it is only now, in early 2004, recovering. But beyond the immediate impact lie massive expenditures-at all levels of American government-that will add permanently to the size and cost of government. ...there lie what must be substantial amounts of unpredictable expenditures for overtime wages-in government and business alike whenever Washington raises the threat level, or when high levels of security are provided at public places or functions heretofore not seen as serious security risks.

Likewise, al Qaeda is at the core of massive increases in defense spending, costs that are likely to accelerate as U.S. officials find the military is not organized, manned, trained, or equipped to fight the kind of wars being waged in Afghanistan and Iraq:

• ....the steady diet of shocks thrown into business by steady call-ups of reserve-soldier employees; and-especially in the transport and tourist sectors-by such events as the "emergency" cancellation of flights from Western Europe to the United States in late 2003 and early 2004.
• ...Without a second 11 September-like attack, al Qaeda has stimulated immense unanticipated spending, much of which will become fixed in budgets at all levels of government. "Aborting the American economy is not an unattainable dream," al-Qurashi wrote in AI-Ansar. Perhaps he is correct.

Some of our delusions:

• The term "irrational," it seems to me, is better applied to Americans who have forgotten, or never learned, Nathan Bedford Forrest's lesson that "war means fighting and fighting means killing," and are horrified by the modest-compared to what is coming-casualties bin Laden has so far exacted.


• ...The West, I believe, completely underestimates the degree of admiration, respect, and even love accorded to the 11 September attackers, especially by young Muslims.


• ...For years, we in the West have watched the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers and concluded that the young men and, now, women are tragic figures, victims of poverty, poor education, joblessness, despair, and brainwashing by cynical political and religious leaders.


• ...To date, we have been unable to see the issue through any but Western eyes, and so have missed recognizing that the young Palestinian bombers are seen by large numbers of Muslims as heroes who are willing to sacrifice their lives-in martyrdom, not suicide attacks-for a cause that is greater than themselves and sanctioned by their God.

He also talks about religions in a way that prompted me to think about a life cycle: that is, religion is like a person. Christianity reached adolesence in the middle ages with the Crusades and witch burnings. Islam is 500 years younger and is reaching adolesence now. I leave the reader to draw conclusions about the current Christian evangelism.

What's frightening is what I have learned about what Muslim countries believe about us: "...in June 2003, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that majorities in seven of eight Muslim countries feared a U.S. invasion;..." And, that bin Laden is strategically and tactically competent: ". . . . Take care not to be pushed into fragmenting your efforts and squandering your resources in marginal battles with the lackeys and parties but concentrate the blows on the head of the unfaith[ful] until it collapses. Once it collapses, all the other parts will collapse, vanish and be defeated."

Shades of Rummie: "...Americans must understand the world as it is, not as we want-or worse yet, hope-it will be. While I believe this contention is true for all of America's dealings with the world, I am not smart or arrogant enough to formulate an all-inclusive approach to u.s. foreign policy. I do, however, have long experience analyzing and attacking bin Laden and Islamists."

How we conduct these wars:

Each of these American soldiers knew-by training, intuition, or both-that war is a last resort and that once begun it is immoral and unnecessarily costly not to destroy the enemy and end the war as soon as possible. Damage is to be inflicted to the degree needed to ensure the enemy does not pose a military threat-this by measuring destruction on his order-of-battle-and that he no longer has the will, resources, or infrastructure to resist. Grant and Sherman, for example, would have recognized the uselessness of occupying Afghan cities without destroying the Taleban and al Qaeda, just as they knew victory was not won if Union armies occupied Richmond, Charleston, and Atlanta without destroying the rebel armies of Northern Virginia and Tennessee.

One of the points that resonated most with me was that we can only manage our affairs. We can only be responsible for ourselves. We can only help those who want to be helped.

On 4 July, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams stood in the well of the House of Representatives-then used for some public occasions-and made a speech understood to be his personal views "... does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the wellwisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her own example. She well knows that by once enlisting under banners other 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, ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards 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.

More on our approach to war:

The U.S. approach to Afghanistan must be judged one that is suffused with arrogance. Knowing nothing of what we were getting into, we staged a mighty air attack followed by a dainty ground war that limited U.S. casualties but allowed most of the enemy to go home with their guns.[italics mine] We next installed a regime in Kabul with no credible members from the largest Afghan ethnic group-from which Afghan rulers historically come-and assigned it the task of pushing a Westernized political agenda unacceptable to the Afghans' tribal traditions and offensive to Islam. (This will sound familiar to those watching developments in Iraq.)

And a few other observations:

The difference between Mr. Lincoln's moral conclusion and the moral arguments usually made during wartime is that he did not identify the enemy alone as evil. - Kent Gramm, 1994.

Frenetic activity, ceaseless chatter, and loud voices usually signal confusion, and nowhere more than in Washington. Let us get on with the war and recall the power of silence. After all, bin Laden has us scared to death, and we have heard little from him since 2001.

I highly reccomend this book to anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the world and our part in that activity. By no means have the excerpts here covered all the insights to be found in Imperial Hubris.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean Available on Audio Book Available on MP3

A few weeks ago my wife bought an orchid plant. It promptly produced five spectacular flowers that are still around weeks later. Amazing. This stoked our interest in orchids and so I went out and found a number of how-to-grow-them. I also stumbled onto this non-fiction account of the Florida flower community; it reads like fiction. Ms. Orlean is a superb storyteller.

Much of the book is about the strange orchid community, colorful characters, and the amazing finances of the orchid business. It's also about Indians, poaching, and fortunes made and lost. Along the way there are some wonderful words.

About belief:

They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.

About value:

...or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anying as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want. It saved me all sorts of trouble knowing I wouldn't find a ghost orchid here, since then I didn't even need to look. It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don't have to look means you can't be disappointed.

About life in the swamp:

You never smell plain air in a swamp-you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant's roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and
unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hutry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if somone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.