Former CIA official Michael Scheuer, last heard from (in book form) in 2004's Imperial Hubris, has a new volume out -- Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.
The NYT's Michiko Kakutani doesn't much like the new tome.
If readers thought Michael Scheuer, the former C.I.A. officer who headed the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit, was angry about the folly of the Iraq war in his 2004 book, “Imperial Hubris” (published under the byline “Anonymous”), then wait until they delve into his latest assessment of the war on terror: “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq.” This scathing, wildly uneven and often intemperate work eviscerates not just the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, but also the entire foreign policy establishment, and it is filled with arguments sure to enrage just about everyone, including Republicans and Democrats, neo-conservatives and liberals, oil companies and international humanitarian organizations.
Mr. Scheuer’s appraisal of the situation in which the United States now finds itself is grim. Because of the “profound and willful ignorance” of the “bipartisan governing elite” (those “individuals who have influenced, contributed ideas to, drafted and conducted U.S. foreign policy for the past 35 years”), he argues, “America has traveled a path that has seen the lethal nuisance originally presented by Sunni militants transformed into an existential threat that is poised to strike at the core of our social and civil institutions in a way that could change our collective lifestyle for many decades, perhaps forever.” If there is “a place worse than hell in 2008,” he adds, “Americans are now in it.”
Like “Imperial Hubris,” this volume is a messy agglomeration of informed analyses of al Qaeda’s strategy and motivations; bullying, Shermanesque calls for an all-out war on terror (including batty suggestions like mining America’s borders with Mexico and Canada); bellicose calls for a neo-isolationalist foreign policy driven by a stone-cold realpolitik; and shrewd assessments of the fallout that the Iraq war has had on the Middle East.
The problem with this book is that Mr. Scheuer has not only turned up the volume on his arguments, but also seeded his narrative with alarming rants against Israel (“I care not a whit whether or not Israel survives”) and nonsensical observations that fly in the face of reality: for instance, he accuses President Bush of being “his father’s son” and sparing no effort before the 2003 Iraq war, obtaining “prewar Congressional support, extensive U.N. consultations and intricate coalition-building.” Such passages undermine the many more-reasoned arguments in this volume dealing with the post-9/11 failure to secure the American homeland, the dangers of trying to export “Western-style, secular democracies” to places where “they are not wanted” and the myriad benefits al Qaeda has reaped from the United States invasion of Iraq. ...
The prognosis Mr. Scheuer serves up is bleak. He sees the insurgency in Iraq becoming “an attraction for would-be Islamist fighters far more powerful than was Afghanistan in 1979” (which was where Mr. bin Laden, during the anti-Soviet jihad, first established his leadership abilities), and he sees Iraq becoming a “base from which al Qaeda and other groups will infiltrate and stage attacks in Jordan,” destabilizing the Hashemite monarchy and further emboldening domestic Islamists in nearby Syria.
In addition, he writes that Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants are using the anti-American sentiment stoked by the Iraq war to “instigate an ever-increasing number of Muslims in an ever-increasing number of places to join the jihad against America and its allies.”
Ignorance of history, combined with the “foreign policy baggage” that informed the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Scheuer portentously declares in this deliberately provocative and often shrill volume, have resulted in “self-imposed tragedies of unplanned-for length and Shakespearean proportions.”