E-mail a friendMichael Scheuer
airdate February 21, 2008
Toward the end of his 22 years in the CIA, Michael Scheuer's duties included helming the unit in charge of tracking down Osama bin Laden. Since resigning in '04, he's offered commentary on U.S. policy in the Middle East. A Senior Fellow with The Jamestown Foundation, Scheuer is an analyst for the online publication, Global Terrorism Analysis, and teaches a course on Al-Qaeda at Georgetown University. He's also the author of the New York Times best seller, Imperial Hubris, and Marching Toward Hell.
Michael Scheuer
Tavis: Michael Scheuer is a former counterterrorism agent at the CIA who served as chief of the bin Laden unit from 1996 until 1999. He's now a professor of security studies at Georgetown and the author of the new book "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq." He joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Scheuer, honored to have you on the program, sir.
Michael Scheuer: My pleasure, sir, thank you for having me.
Tavis: This title is rather self-explanatory, but I want to give you a chance to unpack it. Is it that serious? Are we really marching toward hell?
Scheuer: Well I think we are, sir. We're still 10 years into this war, 12 years into this war since bin Laden and al Qaeda declared war on us. We're still led by people in both parties who are deceiving Americans. We're not being attacked because of women in the workplace or liberties or freedoms, we're being attacked because of the impact of our foreign policy in the Muslim world and the perception among the majority of Muslims that our foreign policy is an attack on their faith. We're fundamentally misunderstanding the enemy and therefore fundamentally underestimating the threat we face.
Tavis: How do we have entire departments full of career persons like yourself, whose work it is to help us understand the world we live in, to help the president, then engage in foreign policy that does not put Americans at risk? How do we have, again, entire agencies dedicated to understanding the world we live in, but yet you suggest to me tonight that we are fundamentally underestimating or not engaging in the right way or just quite frankly misunderstanding the world that we live in?
Scheuer: Yeah, I was a bureaucrat, sir, so I'm going to sound a bit like I'm (laughter) just defending the bureaucrats, but this is not a mystery to people who work in the departments you talk about. We have a political class in our country that is extremely unwilling to discuss foreign policy, especially foreign policy regarding the Middle East.
They don't want to talk about a relationship with Israel, they don't want to talk about the fact that we're dependent on a police state in Saudi Arabia for oil, and they're just simply not interested in anything that disrupts the status quo in foreign policy, and that's across the board in both parties.
Tavis: But yet when all hell breaks loose, the politicians then start to point the finger at agencies like the one you work for, blaming them on bad intel.
Scheuer: That's most often the case, sir. Intelligence failure is another name for politicians not having the courage to protect America, and we've seen an awful lot of that over the past 20 years, and I'm afraid we're going to continue to see more of it.
Tavis: What is it that we are most principally not getting about the Middle East?
Scheuer: I think the fact that this is a war based on religion. We have a set of political leaders in our country who really generally can't go to the Safeway without reading polls, and yet the polls that have been taken in the Middle East over the past 15 years now by reputable firms show that invariably, up to 80 percent of Muslims regard our foreign policy as an attack on Islam.
And yet the same polls show that most Muslims, sometimes very large majorities in countries, admire the way Americans live. The ability of parents to feed their children, educate their children, find employment, speak their mind, and yet our politicians, from Mrs. Clinton over to Senator McCain, continually tell Americans that it's not about what we do, it's about who we are. How we get out of that mess, I'm not sure, sir.
Tavis: Tell me what you were doing as the head of the bin Laden unit -- prior to 9/11, I underscore -- what you were doing as head of the bin Laden unit and then secondly why to this day bin Laden has not been caught.
Scheuer: Our responsibility, sir, was starting in late '95 to identify whether or not bin Laden and al Qaeda were a threat to the United States. We did that very quickly and then the task became very simple: to present the president of the United States with opportunities to either capture or kill Osama bin Laden.
And that was done on 10 different occasions for Mr. Clinton. Twice we had an opportunity to capture him using our CIA assets and eight times he could have killed bin Laden using the U.S. military, and on each occasion he refused to do it. Why haven't we got him now, sir? I think the primary reason is we've tried to do Afghanistan on the cheap.
We have less than 30,000 soldiers and Marines there and we've assigned them the task of keeping Mr. Karzai's government in power, reconstructing the economy, building a democracy, building an infrastructure, destroying the Taliban, eradicating al Qaeda, and putting an end to the world's largest heroin industry, and all of this in a country the size of Texas.
So we're really reaping what we've sown. We've tried to do this on the cheap and now we're being defeated because of that.
Tavis: You hit a little bit of this just a moment ago -- you covered a little bit of it a few minutes ago, but I want to go a little deeper here. In the book, you don't pull any punches. You make it clear that the person, from your perspective, the person who could have done the most to capture bin Laden who did not was Bill Clinton.
Scheuer: Yes, sir. No one could have done more; no man could conceivably have done less. But Mr. Clinton is representative of our political class in both parties. They're always very much more concerned with avoiding criticism from the media or from the Europeans especially than in protecting Americans.
Mr. Bush, for example, had a chance to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq, and yet he didn't do it because he was trying to convince the French and the Germans to join us in the invasion. And now we're in the absurd position that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi probably was responsible for the death of more Americans in a short period of time than Saddam Hussein's military was in the course of two wars.
Tavis: But are you suggesting, though, that President Clinton or President Bush should run around the world just taking people out because the CIA says they're bad people?
Scheuer: Certainly not, sir. The president of the United States, though, his first responsibility is not to be loved by the world or by the media, it is to protect Americans. And there was no doubt, when President Clinton had the opportunity to kill bin Laden, the information was irrefutable that bin Laden was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union and use it in the United States. I don't know how much more impetus you need to think you'd better do something about that problem or you're going to lose a lot of American lives.
Tavis: You call this so-called -- you suggest, rather, in the text that this so-called war on terror should not be fought like we fought the Cold War. Explain.
Scheuer: Well, sir, we're really in a position where Americans are led by people who think that there is no real enemy on the other side of the net. That we hit the tennis ball over and go hit it to ourselves. I think one of the great examples of that is Pakistan. We got very used, during the Cold War, to using proxies to do our dirty work for us.
And now we've tried to use Pakistan to take care of a problem that's not really their problem -- the Taliban and al Qaeda -- and then we're surprised and angry when they don't do it. We have a political class that needs to grow up a little bit. If America is going to protect itself, it's going to have to do some dirty business around the world, whether militarily or with the intelligence services, but it's going to have to do it itself.
This is not the Cold War, we can't count on the mujahedin or the contras anymore. We have to protect ourselves.
Tavis: Since you mentioned Pakistan, what do you make of these Pakistan elections?
Scheuer: I think that's a very good example of the almost ridiculous way in which our foreign policy is conducted. President Musharraf was an important ally in the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and now by pushing for democracy we have reinstalled in Pakistan civilians who are really nothing more than kleptomaniacs.
Both Nawaz Sharif and Mrs. Bhutto's husband are among the biggest thieves in Pakistani history. And so in the name of democracy we have both weakened our ally and returned to power one or the other of those men, who will probably again resume stealing from the Pakistani people to the maximum.
Tavis: So you spend and entire book addressing this issue and I get 30 seconds to ask you a simple question. So with regard to our U.S. policy in the Middle East, what now?
Scheuer: Tell the American people the truth, sir. Our foreign policy is what's driving this war. If we want to maintain that foreign policy, that's up to the American people. But the cost of maintaining that policy will be a continuing drain on American treasure and on American lives.
As Mr. McCain says, he wants to stay in Iraq for another hundred years. Well, that's not an option because the enemy is a very talented and dangerous one. And until we can combine a foreign policy that makes fewer enemies and a military approach that is more discerning but at the same time more brutal, we're going to end up losing this war.
Tavis: The new book from Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden unit inside the CIA is called "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq." Mr. Scheuer, nice to have you on the program.
Scheuer: My pleasure, sir, thank you for having me.
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