StickyGreen

From Ron Paul's brilliant book 'The Revolution'

One person to consult if we want to understand those who wish us harm is Michael Scheuer, who was chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late 1990s. Scheuer is a conservative and a pro-life voter who has never voted for a Democrat. And he refuses to buy the usual line that the attacks on America have nothing to do with what our government does in the Islamic world. "In fact," he says, those attacks have "everything to do with what we do."

Some people simply will not listen to this kind of argument, or will pretend to misunderstand it, trivializing this profoundly significant issue by alleging that Scheuer is "blaming America" for the attacks. To the contrary, Scheuer could not be any clearer in his writing that the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on Americans should be pursued mercilessly for their acts of barbarism. His point is very simple: it is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them. That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback -- the unintended consequences of military intervention.

Obviously the onus of blame rests with those who perpetrate acts of terror, regardless of their motivation. The question Scheuer and I are asking is not who is morally responsible for terrorism -- only a fool would place the moral responsibility for terrorism on anyone other than the terrorists themselves. The question we are asking is less doltish and more serious: given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to this kind of blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? Is it really worth it to us? The main focus of our criticism, in other words, is that our government's foreign policy has put the American people in greater danger and made us more vulnerable to attack than we would otherwise have been. This is the issue that we and others want to raise before the American people.

The interventionist policies that have given rise to blowback have been bipartisan in their implementation. For instance, it was Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said on 60 Minutes that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the 1990s were "worth it." Who could be so utopian, so detached from reality, as to think a remark like that -- which was broadcast all over the Arab world, you can be sure -- and policies like these would not provoke a response? If Americans lost that many of their family members, friends, and fellow citizens, would they not seek to hunt down the perpetrators and be unsatisfied until they were apprehended? The question answers itself. So why wouldn't we expect people to try to take revenge for these policies? I have never received an answer to this simple and obvious question.

This does not mean Americans are bad people, or that they are to blame for terrorism -- straw-man arguments that supporters of intervention raise in order to cloud the issue and demonize their opponents. It means only that actions cause reactions, and that Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world. In the year 2000, I wrote: "The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties." I stand by every word of that.

To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheuer points out that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. Bin Laden's message, on the other hand, has been so attractive to so many people because it is fundamentally defensive. Bin Laden, says Scheuer, has "spurned the Ayatollah's wholesale condemnation of Western society," focusing instead on "specific, bread-and-butter issues on which there is widespread agreement among Muslims."

What bin Laden's sympathizers object to, as they have said again and again, is our government's propping up of unpopular regimes in the Middle East, the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the American government's support for the activities of governments (like Russia) that are hostile to their Muslim populations, and what they believe to be an American bias toward Israel. The point is not that we need to agree with these arguments, but that we need to be aware of them if we want to understand what is motivating so many people to rally to bin Laden's banner. Few people are moved to leave behind their worldly possessions and their families to carry out violence on behalf of a disembodied ideology; it is practical grievances, perhaps combined with an underlying ideology, that motivate large numbers to action.

At a press conference I held at the National Press Club in May 2007, Scheuer told reporters: "About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy... They all agree they hate U.S. foreign policy. To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems." That's not what a lot of our talking heads tell us on television every day, but few people are in a better position to understand bin Laden's message than Scheuer, one of our country's foremost experts on the man.

Philip Giraldi, another conservative and former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, adds that "anybody who knows anything about what's been going on for the last ten years would realize that cause and effect are operating here -- that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that 'we're over there.'" The simple fact is that "there [are] consequences for our presence in the Middle East, and if we seriously want to address the terrorism problem we have to be serious about that issue."
Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recognized that foreign intervention could have unintended consequences and that the American presence in the Middle East has bred hostility against our country. On May 29, 2003, Reuters reported: "Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion [of Iraq] had been 'almost unnoticed but huge' -- namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance." In short, according to Wolfowitz one of the motivations of the 9/11 attackers was resentment over the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Again, neither Wolfowitz nor I have said or believed that Americans had it coming on 9/11, or that the attacks were justified, or any of this other nonsense. The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet's nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people. That's just common sense. But hardly anyone in our government dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy.

Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioned domestic program can have. We only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.

(continued in next post)