Reviews and Favorites

Book Review:  Michael Scheur, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq. New York: Free Press, 2008.  

Michael Scheuer's studies of the national security challenges confronting America by Islamo-fascist movements and states are extremely disturbing, because of his clear articulation of both the array of actors and resources actively pursuing the destruction of Western ideals of democracy, liberty, and economy, and because of the inept and listless response by the democratic and potentially libertarian forces that oppose them.

Marching Toward Hell is Scheuer's third book since he left a twenty plus year career at the CIA as the strategist responsible for the unit that tracked bin Laden and Al Qaeda. His previous books, Imperial Hubris and Through Our Enemies Eyes, are erudite and thorough studies of the failures of the Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 administrations to understand and prepare for the nature of the conflict between the West and radical Islam. In Marching Toward Hell, Scheuer is primarily focused on the consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq for the broader conflict between the United States, especially, and the Islamic world.

The observations and conclusions Scheuer outlines in Marching Toward Hell are not comforting, even for those who are basically sympathetic to the American effort to depose Saddam Hussein, or, stated another way, basically unsympathetic to the peace movements that seek appeasement with the Islamo-fascist states and movements. In a word, the meaning of victory in Iraq is an extremely nebulous idea and, even if we had a clear idea of what victory meant, the war's primary accomplishment is the exacerbation of Muslim antipathy and hatred toward the United States. In Scheuer's informed view, America and the Islamic world are heading toward a conflict that will be infinitely more destructive than anything in previous human experience.

Scheuer is extremely clear on his most significant point: the failures of the American national security have not been operational failures of intelligence, contrary to the conventional wisdom about the matter propagated by the media and the political class in Washington, primarily through the 9/11 Commission Report and The Iraq Study Group Report. Instead, the failures are a consequence of American policy, not the work of operatives and strategists in the intelligence community.

Scheuer's argument helps to totally reframe the debate about the use of American power, particularly in the middle east because it shifts the nature of the debate away from the relative competence of intelligence agencies and toward the more substantive issues found in policy debates. If we are going to adequately understand and respond to the most significant foreign policy challenges facing the United States, we must focus on the policy questions, not so much on operational issues. Scheuer's book forces a rethinking of the purposes of American foreign policy at its most fundamental level:  exactly what is the United States attempting to achieve through the projection of its power in a changed world?

Scheuer argues that there are two policy positions that have led us into our "March Toward Hell." The first is an uncritical support for the state of Israel and a fantasy that America can somehow broker a peace arrangement between Israel and its enemies. Scheuer is not exactly anti-Israeli. He thinks that Israel should do what it needs to do to defend itself, but the United States should not be absolute Israel's guardian. He argues that we should not underestimate the extent to which America's support for Israel generates hatred for the United States among Muslims. The second, is the continual military intervention in the middle east, especially the placement of American troops in Saudi Arabia. Scheuer argues that the presence of Americans in Saudi Arabia is particularly repugnant to bin Laden and his associates because the presence of American infidels somehow defiles the home of the Prophet and because our military presence helps to prop up a regime that bin Laden wants to destroy.

Taken together, these two, perhaps related, policy positions are leading the country toward an inevitable conflagration with the Islamic world. Scheuer argues that the fundamental principle that should drive our foreign policy is an "America First" point of view in which the most important standard for the use of military force is America's national security interest. Scheuer concludes that the uncritical defense of Israel and the maintenance of American forces in the middle east are not in the national security interest of the United States.

Critics of the Bush administration, including many libertarians and peace advocates from many political tendencies, will applaud Scheuer's conclusions about the philosophic foundations for the use of American military force. However, it remains an open question as to exactly what constitutes America's national security interest and who is to define what that means in any given situation.

From one perspective, America's national security interest may be best secured when it is focused on promoting individual liberty. Of course, this is a relative matter since there is precious little support for individual liberty anywhere in the world, largely because of the efforts of statist and collectivist regimes to maximize order, discipline, and conformity. Following Scheuer, it makes little philosophic or strategic sense to support one type of military dictatorship over another.

Conversely, it may not be wise to view all other nations and political movements as more or less politically and morally equivalent, and reserve the use of force exclusively for self-defense. It might be helpful to base our foreign policy on a principle that equates the promotion of individual liberty with American national security, in which we would not turn our backs, but would assist, nations or movements that, although flawed, have some modicum of freedom for individuals to think for themselves, exchange economic value for value as they see fit, and live their lives as they see fit. As a libertarian, I find the equation of Israel and Hamas, for example, to be morally and politically repugnant.

A point of view that elevates the promotion individual liberty on an international basis would certainly have very dramatic consequences for the projection of American power in many places in the world, perhaps especially in the middle east. Its other virtue is that it would not lead to the betrayal of the few friends of liberty, including Israel and Taiwan. Instead, it would help focus our resources and energy, as well as our risks, on what really matters: the preservation and promotion of individual freedom wherever these exist.

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Book Review:  Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism.

Forthcoming

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