Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) by Michael Scheuer Page A
Authors: Michael Scheuer
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stick to status quo policies and bleed blood and money because our self-image might suffer if we admit to being wrong and thereby earn the criticism of others.
U.S. foreign policies are not addenda to the Ten Commandments; changing our policies is a sign of common sense, not weakness; and protecting America is infinitely more important than seeking to avoid driving Europeans and Arab royals into a snit. Foreign policy success can be measured only by the extent to which it preserves and expands freedom and liberty domestically. As Walter Lippman wrote, foreign policy is the “shield of the republic”; it is not the agent of planting the republic or clones thereof outside North America. The right path for America, therefore, is nonintervention and a studied aloofness from affairs outside the United States that have no bearing on our national interests. Nonintervention is not isolationism; the former is a policy, the latter is a slur used by America’s governing elite to quiet any voice that asks, for example, why are you dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Serbs who never attacked or even threatened the United States? To ask such a commonsense question is to be labeled by the elite and the media, right and left, as a Luddite isolationist who thinks America can hide behind its oceanic frontiers and have no truck with the outside world. Well, no, there is nothing explicit or implicit in the question “Why are you bombing the Serbs?” that suggests a desire to hermetically seal America. The question asks only what it asks: “Why are you intervening in the affairs of a people and a region who have done nothing to threaten or harm you and of whose politics, culture, and history you know next to nothing?” To respond by saying, “Be gone, you ignorant isolationist!” is not an answer, it is an arrogance that says, “We know so much more than you about the complexity of world affairs and—here it is again—the ballet of international politics and, in this case, the nuances of Balkan politics, that you must accept our analysis and actions as correct. Please go home, be quiet, and watch television.”
This modus operandi ought not to wash with Americans, but it does far too frequently, and our elites are today running a foreign policy in the Muslim world that has left the United States with no options in the ongoing war and that, if left as is, will ultimately destroy America. U.S. foreign policy neither protects Americans at home nor brings much benefit, let alone democracy to anyone abroad. Indeed, it is an absolute mystery as to why our elites believe that any American should give a tinker’s damn, much less a son or daughter, about whether any foreigner ever has a chance to vote in a democratic election. Mimicking President Woodrow Wilson, President George W. Bush has implanted more of this nonsense in the American political lexicon. “We are led, by events and common sense to one conclusion,” President Bush said in January 2005. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” 11
Like Wilson’s half-baked assertion of an American security requirement to install a League of Nations, facilitate universal self-determination, and fight wars to end wars, Mr. Bush’s assertion is false and fatuous, and where applied as policy it can only lead to a grievous and unnecessary squandering of American lives and treasure.
Finally, it remains to say that the proper future use of the U.S. military against our Islamic enemies has been suggested repeatedly throughout this book. The force that we will have to employ will be far in excess of anything most Americans have seen in their lifetimes, as will the resulting casualties and physical damage. Writing in 2007, the peerless Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld explained that fighting Islamist insurgents can be done with a
U.S. foreign policies are not addenda to the Ten Commandments; changing our policies is a sign of common sense, not weakness; and protecting America is infinitely more important than seeking to avoid driving Europeans and Arab royals into a snit. Foreign policy success can be measured only by the extent to which it preserves and expands freedom and liberty domestically. As Walter Lippman wrote, foreign policy is the “shield of the republic”; it is not the agent of planting the republic or clones thereof outside North America. The right path for America, therefore, is nonintervention and a studied aloofness from affairs outside the United States that have no bearing on our national interests. Nonintervention is not isolationism; the former is a policy, the latter is a slur used by America’s governing elite to quiet any voice that asks, for example, why are you dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Serbs who never attacked or even threatened the United States? To ask such a commonsense question is to be labeled by the elite and the media, right and left, as a Luddite isolationist who thinks America can hide behind its oceanic frontiers and have no truck with the outside world. Well, no, there is nothing explicit or implicit in the question “Why are you bombing the Serbs?” that suggests a desire to hermetically seal America. The question asks only what it asks: “Why are you intervening in the affairs of a people and a region who have done nothing to threaten or harm you and of whose politics, culture, and history you know next to nothing?” To respond by saying, “Be gone, you ignorant isolationist!” is not an answer, it is an arrogance that says, “We know so much more than you about the complexity of world affairs and—here it is again—the ballet of international politics and, in this case, the nuances of Balkan politics, that you must accept our analysis and actions as correct. Please go home, be quiet, and watch television.”
This modus operandi ought not to wash with Americans, but it does far too frequently, and our elites are today running a foreign policy in the Muslim world that has left the United States with no options in the ongoing war and that, if left as is, will ultimately destroy America. U.S. foreign policy neither protects Americans at home nor brings much benefit, let alone democracy to anyone abroad. Indeed, it is an absolute mystery as to why our elites believe that any American should give a tinker’s damn, much less a son or daughter, about whether any foreigner ever has a chance to vote in a democratic election. Mimicking President Woodrow Wilson, President George W. Bush has implanted more of this nonsense in the American political lexicon. “We are led, by events and common sense to one conclusion,” President Bush said in January 2005. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” 11
Like Wilson’s half-baked assertion of an American security requirement to install a League of Nations, facilitate universal self-determination, and fight wars to end wars, Mr. Bush’s assertion is false and fatuous, and where applied as policy it can only lead to a grievous and unnecessary squandering of American lives and treasure.
Finally, it remains to say that the proper future use of the U.S. military against our Islamic enemies has been suggested repeatedly throughout this book. The force that we will have to employ will be far in excess of anything most Americans have seen in their lifetimes, as will the resulting casualties and physical damage. Writing in 2007, the peerless Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld explained that fighting Islamist insurgents can be done with a
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