Peter Nolan

Iran: Paper Tiger?

I've long suspected that Iran would be an unchallenging military adversary for the US; after all, this is the military that spent six years futilely battering against the same Iraqi army that the Americans blasted out of Kuwait in a hundred hours in 1991.  Foreign Policy has more information on the state of the training and equipment of the Iranian armed forces and Revolutionary Guards in this story from May last year and concludes that bad organisation and lack of equipment mean that

It is hard to envision Iran’s ramshackle forces giving a modern Western force the “burning hell” Iran’s leaders have promised. Only Iranian ingenuity has kept the military from falling into complete disarray, according to Pike. “Their understanding of war is about a century behind America’s understanding of war,” he says.

Imperial Hubris

This is the interview with Dr Michael Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA's Station Alex, the "virtual"  unit headquartered in Langley, devoted to combatting Osama Bin Laden, that Richard and I wrote up for Magill in September 2005, in time for the 4th anniversary of 9/11.  Dr Scheuer is described as an obsessive and determined character who would begin work before dawn and rapidly got to grips with the novel threat of Al Qaeda.  He also was the first to propose some serious violence to stop him, advocating his kidnap and/or killing by Afghan associates of the CIA, an operation that seems, by various accounts, including the 9/11 Commission (which refers to Scheuer as "Mike") to have withered somewhere in the chain of command between then CIA director George Tenet and President Clinton, also involving the White House office of counter-terrorism co-ordinator Richard A Clarke. 

Clarke, incidentally, also seems to have been the person who did the most to kill any possibility of US military intervention to stop Rwanda's genocide in 1994, at least in Samatha Power's telling. 

Scheuer's second book, Imperial Hubris, which I reviewed in detail for the Jerusalem Post, was critical of the conduct of the war on terror under President George W Bush, calling for either radical changes in US foreign policy to defuse tensions with Muslims, such as ending support for Israel and the Arab oligarchies, and withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan or a step-up in the violence used to produce terror and devastation in the Islamic world.  In spite of a number of close readings of the book, I never figured out which exactly Dr Scheuer was advocating or in what mix.  Mainly, his thesis that western policy is to blame for the Al Qaeda campaign chimed well with the critique of much of the European left and many realist scholars of international relations. 

Scheuer, who describes himself as a die-hard Republican and "moderate isolationist" found himself embroiled in controversy over his denigration of Israel and its American advocates. 

Still, he remains a popular analyst, often appearing on the BBC and US television.   Whatever reservations I have about his analytical skills and some of his political attitudes, I think that there is no doubting his patriotism, dedication to his work at the CIA and the judgement he showed in his anti-terrorist role before being removed in 1999. 

---

Mike Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, headed the team covering Osama Bin Laden, from 1996-1999.  In this time, he was responsible for building up the first analysis showing the scale and global reach of the growing threat from Al Qaeda and he organised a number of attempts to capture or kill the terrorist leader.  In his recent bestselling book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the Terror”, published anonymously before he left the Agency last year, he criticises the US government for giving a distorted picture of the threat and shying away from the measures needed to counter it. 

Q: Why do Al Qaeda attack us?

The political leaders of both parties have lied about the motivation of bin Laden and other Islamic militants.  They are attacking America because they believe US foreign policies are a threat to the survival of Islam and Muslims.  They are not attacking us because of our freedom, liberties, elections, or because female movie stars go about in public with bare midriffs. 

We get attacked for a couple of reasons. First, Bin Laden thinks we’re far weaker and less able to taken pain than the Saudi royals and the rest of the dictators. The second thing is that he doesn’t think those governments can survive – Israel included – without the support of the Americans. His goal in attacking us is not to occupy California, it’s just to get us out of the way so that he and his allies can go after the other governments.

We must prepare to fight savagely a patient, well-led, and religiously motivated enemy for as long as we decide to maintain our current foreign policies toward the Muslim world.

Q: Does oil play a role?

Political leaders have wilfully failed to do anything to improve America’s energy security since the first OPEC oil embargo.  For thirty years, we have left our economic welfare in the hands of massively corrupt and anti-Western Arab princes.  And now we are paying extortionate prices for fuel, and our children in the military are dying, in part, so we can pay even more extortionate prices in the years ahead.

Q: What was your opinion of the London attacks?

The London attacks struck me, especially the first one, as precisely in al-Qaeda’s modus operandi of separate simultaneous attacks. Strategically, it hit the three big things - mass casualties, economic damage, and symbolic impact. They proved that the eight strongest men on Earth couldn’t stop it.

The way I look at London is that it’s another in the secondary campaign that they’re conducting against America’s allies.  Britain, France, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Spain – they’ve all been attacked since 9/11.

Q: Why in your book do you warn that America’s use of force to date has been “dainty” and counsel that without radical changes in foreign policy, America must, “get used to and good at killing”?

I’ve been treated both as an appeaser and as a warmonger in reviews, but there’s a great aversion to considering force. In my experience the idea of collateral damage of killing someone when you’re after someone else is a showstopper. One time they had a chance to kill bin Laden and there was an Arab prince having lunch with him and they said ‘No, you can’t do that’. You’re never going to get a chance to kill him when there would have been less collateral damage. The US government is palsied by this. I used to think it was all rhetoric and it was just people being either duplicitous or saying the right thing for the media, Bin Laden is alive today because people were afraid of collateral damage.

Q: You’ve taken criticism and have even been accused of anti-Semitism for saying that Israel is employing covert, clandestine intelligence activities, using lobbyists, spies and even Washington’s Holocaust Museum to influence or control US foreign policy.  What is your response to this?

I am unperturbed by such statements and accusations.  Calling people anti-Semitic is just a way to denigrate and shut-up speakers who raise topics the slingers of that epithet do not want to debate.  I am a firm supporter of Israel’s right to do anything and everything it believes is necessary to defend its territory and people.  That is the right of every nation state. 

What we have is the ability of Israel to influence very important policymakers and very important leaders in the United States – the media elites, the governing elites, and certainly in the cabinet.  That’s a public activity, and a less public activity we know have this unfolding case before the courts on activists from AIPAC [the main pro-Israel lobbying group] were getting classified information from American civil servants.

Q: Who should be America’s allies?

I think there are very few countries in the world where the United States is obligated to support a country largely without question, and I think it stems from two World Wars. I would only put the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand in that particular basket of countries towards whom our nation has a debt of honour.

Q: Will America and its allies win the war against Al Qaeda?

Eventually it’s going to dawn on Republicans and Democrats alike that their chance to win this war was when they had a chance to kill him.  It’s gone and the chance to win has passed. 

I think the best terms on which this can finish is that we get out of the way and let whatever’s going to occur in Islamic society occur. There are so many scores to settle, there’s sectarian differences that are going to be fought out, there is retribution against people like [Egypt’s President] Mubarak and the Saudi royals. It’s going to be a messy Islamic civilization for a long time but it’s not necessarily one that can remain united against us, the West, once we’re out of the way, because I think we’re only the target because we’re seen as the prop for the ones they hate the most which is their own government.

"Never again", again?

My interview with the Harvard human rights scholar, Samantha Power, who won the Pulitzer prize for her book on world inaction in the face of genocide from Armenia to Kosovo, A Problem from Hell, appears in this month's Magill magazine.  Some of the Magill archive is now also available online too, although the current issue is accessible to subscribers only.  Power, who was born in Dungarvan before immigrating to the US at the age of nine, attended Yale before becoming a freelance foreign correspondent covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia for the Economist, Boston Globe, US News & World Report and others.  This was done in collaboration with my friend Patrick Belton of OxBlog. 

As much Borat as Barot...

The 13 March issue of the New Yorker has a long feature on nuclear terrorism, which describes some of the amateurish efforts made by Al Qaeda operatives in the past, including Dhiram Barot, a Hindu Briton who had converted to Islam and was sentenced to forty years' imprisonment in London late last year for plotting terrorist attacks:

Charles Ferguson is a former nuclear submarine officer trained in physics; he left the Navy for a career in security studies and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2003, he co-wrote an unclassified report titled “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks.” About two years later, F.B.I. agents working on an international terrorism case asked to meet with him. They brought a document showing that some of his report had been downloaded onto the computer of a British citizen named Dhiren Barot, a Hindu who had converted to Islam. Barot, it turned out, had been communicating with Al Qaeda about a plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Britain, and he had used a highlighting pen on a printout of Ferguson’s study while conducting his research.

The report described how large amounts of certain commercial radioactive materials might pose a danger to a terrorist who tried to handle them. “This seems to have worried him,” Ferguson told me, referring to Barot, “so he decided to look at smoke detectors.” Some detectors contain slivers of americium-241; the isotope’s constant emission of radiation creates a chemical process that screens for smoke. Barot informed his Al Qaeda handlers that he was thinking about buying ten thousand smoke detectors to make his bomb. In fact, to make a device that would be even remotely effective, Ferguson said, he would have had to buy more than a million

I doubt that we can rely on such incompetence keeping us safe in the future, which is why America and ports around the globe - even harbours in Sri Lanka - are now being rigged with radiation detectors - and nuclear weapons specialists being mobilised routinely to protect high-value targets and investigate suspicious people and objects, "a global nuclear-detection architecture"

New technology is already being adapted for defending the homeland against nuclear attack:

“Today, if you’re looking for a neutrino from a pulsar in the next galaxy,” he said, a scientist “can detect one event per year and reject the millions of background events.” The goal of new defense research, he continued, should be to bring “advanced technologies out of the academic community” and learn how to apply them at border posts and truck stops.        It should be possible, Wagner said, by way of example, to detect the dull signature of highly enriched uranium by spraying out other kinds of radiation, perhaps from an aircraft, and then search for an echo, roughly the way sonar works—an approach that’s likely to create health problems for civilian populations. Even if that difficulty could not be overcome, he continued, such technology could be useful in enemy territory if it was necessary to do a quick search for hidden nuclear bombs. Indeed, Fred Iklé told me that the Pentagon is now conducting this sort of research.

Booms of a different sort

Rational choice analysis in political science at its finest. Harvard economist Efraim Benmelech and  Claude Berrebi of RAND argue in an new NBER paper that:

This paper provides the first detailed analysis of the relationship between suicide bombers characteristics and their performance in suicide bombing attacks. We find evidence that Palestinian terror organizations match older and more educated suicide bombers to more important Israeli targets.

We also find that older and more educated suicide bombers kill more people in their suicide attacks when assigned to important targets. Furthermore, we also find that older and educated suicide bombers are less likely to fail or to be caught when they attack. Our evidence suggests that, as predicted by economic theory, suicide bombers plausibly maximize an expected payoff from their attacks. The evidence confirms the prediction that older and more educated suicide bombers are more effective when assigned to more important targets, and that older and educated suicide bombers are more likely to launch successful attacks without being caught.

Our paper also contributes to the debate on the relation between education, poverty and terrorism. We revise the existing estimate of the proportion of suicide bombers who either have an academic degree or are enrolled as students in academic institutions. While our estimate is still significantly higher than the average educational attainment in the Palestinian society it is lower than previous estimates of educational attainment of suicide bombers. We argue that sample selection may bias the estimates of education among suicide bombers since less educated bombers are significantly more likely to fail in their mission.

I'll be interested to read the NBER studies by Berman et al. that he cites.  My belief so far has been that Robert Pape's evidence is weaker than his conclusions in respect of the Palestinian attacks on Israel.  Still, if we generally expect the more intelligent to be more altruistic than the general population, then Pape's thesis is supported by this study. 

Berman has argued in a 2003 paper that the organisational economics of the terrorist group itself explains much of the escalation of violence, with the dynamics of maintaining trust within the group demanding ever greater committments, escalating ultimately to suicide-bombing.   Interesting. 

By all means necessary

I've never been convinced that torture would be any use.  According to accounts I've read, like The Interrogators' War, by army interrogator Chris Mackey, Brainwash by Dominic Streatfield or Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine - baloney.  Added to this is the French experience, as related in Sir Alastair Horne's history of the Algerian War of Independence, A Savage War of Peace that I read last year.  Horne impresses on the reader that torture was used widely and at the discretion of French troops and police, but never proved effective at anything other than destroying the confidence of the French home front in the authorities; there's an online interview with him here.

Now, the American military and police leadership are worried that their troops are being sold on counterproductive brutality by the hit series 24.  According to this New Yorker story, the American military and the FBI seem increasingly uneasy with its storylines making the case for torture as a counter-terrorist tool - the constant ticking bomb scenarios, the effectiveness, proven again and again of pain, in producing, useful, accurate and timely information and the utility of drugs as truth serum. 

As one conservative TV writer says:

“Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”

The show's main writer is a leathery conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal industry:

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.”

Imperial Hubris

Just last week, the CIA disbanded its special "virtual station" based at their headquarters and dedicated to analysis and operations against Osama bin Laden, subsuming it into their other uits.  Last year, I interviewed, Dr Michael Scheuer, its founding head, the author of of the book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror"  for the Jerusalem Post and Magill.  I thought that his analysis, while thorough, overemphasised the support for AQ among Muslims generally.  Also, Dr Scheuer seems to have an overpowering dislike of Israel and its American partisans. 

Dying to win?

As pressaged in last week's post, Patrick Belton and I have just written a review of the University of Chicago political science professor Robert Pape's new book "Dying to win: Why suicide bombers do it?"  I'm proud to be published in this magazine that I've enjoyed reading for so long.  Download it in PDF