Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) by Michael Scheuer

leaders must never adopt policies that tend to bring other peoples’ conflicts, especially religious wars, inside the United States. Washington’s current policies in the Muslim world are open invitations to others to bring their religious wars—Arab-vs.-Israeli and Sunni-vs.-Shia—to America.
    I want to stress that the foregoing is not a purist’s argument against any U.S. support at any time for an authoritarian or tyrannical government. Because human beings are hard-wired for war and lesser conflicts, the United States will inevitably and repeatedly find itself in wartime situations where our interests will mandate such an association. We should have no moral qualms about working with any regime that can further U.S. security; these kinds of relationships, however, should be kept to the necessary minimum and the ties should be transitory, with disengagement becoming a priority once the wartime situation has ended. Most of our current relationships with Muslim tyrannies do not meet that criterion. The billions of dollars we annually pay to the Egyptian regime to pretend it does not hate Israel, for example, earn America nothing but a diplomatic mercenary in a peace process that will never come to fruition, and the hatred of common Egyptians who daily feel the wrathful whip of Mubarak’s U.S.-funded security services. I will leave it for the American people to decide whether they believe the Founders would have, for even a moment, endorsed the federal government taking money from its citizens’ pockets to pay a massive annual bribe to a Muslim dictatorship to pretend to be friends with the near-theocracy in Israel that American taxpayers also are lavishly funding.
    So the first step toward American security after Iraq and the drive toward energy self-sufficiency is a thoroughgoing revision of U.S. policy in the Islamic world in the direction the Founders intended: noninterventionist, commerce-oriented, nonideological, focused on genuine life-and-death national interests, and undergirded by an inflexible bias toward neutrality in other peoples’ wars. Now, before the hyperventilating begins, let us hand out oxygen supplies to the any-change-in-U.S.-foreign-policyis-appeasement-or-surrender-to-the-terrorists crowd. And bring lots of oxygen because this crowd includes most of the U.S. governing elite. So pervasive is this no-change sentiment that at times you would swear that U.S. foreign policy was not drafted by fallible humans but rather arrived in the Rotunda, hand-etched by the Deity on stone tablets. It did not. The first thing most military and intelligence officers learn is to never, ever reinforce defeat; if a plan on execution lands you in a no-win situation, get out of the mess as cleanly as possible and go back to the drawing board. Our elite, however, invariably and perversely shows resolve only when it defends and reinforces policies that have America being defeated on every front. For example, the Muslim world’s anti-American hatred was raging in July 2006 because Washington and its G-8 partners were standing by and letting Israel gut Lebanon’s economy and infrastructure. Okay, what do we do? Right, publicly announce that the U.S. military is urgently sending large shipments of precision weaponry to assist Israel in making the gutting more destructive. Where is the sense in that? Enough. America is the greatest economic and military power the world has ever seen. What on earth do we have to be afraid of if we change foreign policies that are palpable failures and detrimental to U.S. security? Foreigners will think we are weak? Our allies will doubt our constancy? Domestic lobbies will retaliate in the next election? Churchill would never surrender? So what. We are the superpower, the policies are ours for the changing, and if other peoples and countries do not like the changes—tough. We are in business as a country to please and protect ourselves, and it is truly stupid, not altruistic, to stubbornly