Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror (review)

Imperial Hubris is an important work by the foremost intelligence analyst on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in the US government, who worked with distinction on the related topics of radical Islam and terrorism for several years. It is an antidote to the illusions on which policy makers have founded their foreign policies, particularly those of the so-called war on terrorism. This book gives us the voice of Cassandra, prophesizing disaster and giving us prescriptive advice we do not welcome and which, in all likelihood, we will discount. Anonymous has been identified in several media reports as Michael Scheuer, a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who headed the Counterterrorism Center's bin Laden task force. Scheuer also wrote the book Through Our Enemies' Eyes, which was and remains the most perceptive appreciation of the bin Laden phenomena and how he views his struggle with the United States and its allies.

Scheuer was granted permission to publish this book by former director of central intelligence George Tenet, even though it is unusual for a serving CIA officer to publish a work that tends to undermine the policies of the administration under which he serves. At the time, Tenet was the recipient of hostile fire launched clandestinely from some of the Pentagon's civilian leaders, who have long resented the influence of the institutional intelligence community, which it accuses of not discerning the concealed patterns of evil in the real world, which only they have uncovered. In this instance, Tenet, for all his usual tacking to the political winds, would not wholeheartedly support the slanted analysis issued by the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of policy who claimed an intimate link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Feith was providing a tortured version of the supposed linkage directly to senior policy makers, including the vice president. A different version, stripped of its controversial conclusions, was first briefed to the CIA to satisfy the requirement of coordination. It was only one of the many incidents of guerrilla warfare on the topic of al Qaeda and Iraq that played out in Washington between the Pentagon and the intelligence community. As we know now, most of the foundation for Feith's analytical work was fabricated data provided by the notorious Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi. One of the great ironies is that Chalabi, darling of the neoconservatives in the administration and at the American Enterprise Institute, has been charged with serving an Iranian agenda, collaborating with Iranian intelligence in provoking the United States into invading Iraq by channeling disinformation. Some of the data passed by Chalabi to the Pentagon was apparently prepared by Iranian intelligence. An example: video footage of a mobile SCUD launcher was filmed inside Iran and presented as an example of Saddam's hidden weapons program. Chalabi returned the favor to the Iranians by warning them that the United States had broken their communications codes.

The author presciently describes how bin Laden views the West—how his antagonism is based on opposition to US policies in the Middle East and not on his alleged hatred of our "way of life" or democracy. By the election of 2004, bin Laden, as if on cue, appeared on videotape making statements that support Scheuer's analysis. Bin Laden mocked President Bush by saying that al Qaeda does not "hate democracy," citing Sweden as a democratic country that has earned no enmity from his movement and has not been attacked for its way of life. But even on the subject of interpreting the bin Laden tape the neocons got it wrong. MEMRI, a translation service funded by Israeli interests, analyzed the bin Laden diatribe as threatening those individual states that would vote for President Bush. The archaic usage in the text, however, does not refer to component states in the United States, but rather countries in the US sphere of influence, a reference prompted by bin Laden's...