"Imperial Hubris" Author Says U.S. Is Deluded about Al Qaeda

Michael Scheuer, a retired CIA official and the author of several books on the "war on terror," offered a briskly stinging rebuke to essentially everything the United States is doing to counter Al Qaeda, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on September 18:

The government of the United States continues to fight an Islamist terrorist enemy--in al-Qaeda and its allies--that does not exist in the form Washington sees it; is not motivated by the factors Washington ascribes to it; and will not be defeated by the military forces and political toos Washington is deploying against it.

Scheuer's basic line of argument is that the United States has completely failed to grapple with the sole motivation of Al Qaeda, and the basis for its support:

...their perception that U.S. foreign policy is a deliberate attack on Islam and Muslms. From our enemies' perspective, therefore, this is preeminently a religious war, nothwithstanding the blather to the contrary of Western politicians, academics, policy makers and pundits.

Despite my appreciation for Scheuer's unmatched ability to take down government pieties about the war on terror, in less than a dozen words, I would maintain with the blatherers (as I have previously) that it is not quite right to call this a religious war and leave it at that.

First, the concept of religious war doesn't communicate at all correctly to American counterterrorism officials, who spend their time trying to pick apart the minutiae of Islamic jurisprudence (which they do not know), or seeking to use Islamic precepts (whose historical, cultural and linguistic bases they do not understand) against their adversaries in communications campaigns, and the like.

Scheuer's actual formulation of the grievance, which is that Al Qaeda's "perception that U.S. foreign policy is a deliberate attack on Islam and Muslims," places it in the realm of politics. Al Qaeda and their ilk feel that American policies are directed prejudicially against one particular group. The group -- the Islamic community -- is bound by religion, but their complaint lies in the realm of politics.

Al Qaeda's characterization of conflict as religious may be genuine, but the grievance itself is fundamentally political-- it is about relations between groups and nations and their governance. It may be recalled that the Iranian revolution, which was fundamentally a political event, was also carried out in a religious idiom.

Scheuer, in fact, recommends in the end that it is the policy end of the equation, rather than engagement with "other people's religious wars" to which we should attend:

It is worth considering whether it might be smarter, cheaper and less bloody to change the failed foreign policies that brought war with al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies, rather than maintaining those war-motivating policies as divine writ and building an ever-larger military to fight the ever-expanding wars that writ produces ... a much more narrowly defined set of genuine U.S. national interests would require far less frequent resort to war and would be umch more consonant with timelessly wise foreign policy goals of our country's Founding Fathers.