Peter Nolan

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. 

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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.

Bumps in the road

My apologies if posting is a little light over the next week or so.  I'm going through something of a busy period at work, I have to do some travelling and I'm also writing a profile cum interview of the man who is, by many accounts, the world's most influential columnist.  So, sorry to dissappoint all of you in my audience, that means you John, if posting isn't what it should be. 

The New New Republic

The New Republic has had an injection of capital and is beefing up its already considerable web presence.  Of all the American political opinion magazines, The National Interest, American Interest, Commentary, Nation, National Review and Weekly Standard, TNR is still the best-written and most open-minded. 

Along with articles on the web, the magazine has made a major push into blogging, The Plank, Open University and now even one for its editor, The Spine, written by the indomitable Martin Peretz.  According to the New York Times story by Katharine Seelye,

Mr. Peretz, 67, has himself become a blogger. He said he was “not enjoying it exactly,” but that he had found it addictive.

“When I used to see something irritating, I would typically call a friend,” he said. “Now I just go to the blog.” He said he is often surprised at how quickly readers will post a response. “It’s as if they’re waiting for something,” he said. “Then they say, ‘Ah, here he is. I’m going to pounce.’ ”

Poll Position

If Frank Luntz was a bit more modest, maybe he'd be completely perfect.  Luntz, "the world's top pollster" according to this week's Spectator cover story, has been active in promoting himself and his new book, Words that Win, supposedly the lessons for success from his experience in crafting messages for the Republicans, in the British media.  He's also been appearing quite regularly on British TV, most famously being the first to highlight the potential appeal of David Cameron in a televised focus group for Newsnight and then repeating the exercise a year after Cameron's election as leader. 

Nick Cohen was sceptical in an article in the Observer in December on the boy wonder - I'm not so sure whether this species of market research, used to such effect by (Lord) Philip Gould in the 1997 campaign is accurately portrayed in Luntz's work on British and Irish TV. 

Cameron came from nowhere because Newsnight commissioned a focus group run by American pollster Frank Luntz that appeared to prove that the young politician could become extraordinarily popular and the Conservatives believed him. The desperation of the Tories in 2005 produced an election without precedent. The findings of a focus group drove a hitherto obscure politician to the leadership of a major political party. Not a focus group hired by party managers anxious to uphold the best interests of their cause, but by a broadcaster as interested in entertainment as reputable market research.
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But New York journalist Dante Chinni noted in 2000 that normal judgments of broadcasters never applied in Luntz’s case. He was part of ‘a new class of media personality, the celebrity pollster… [who] gets the heavy-hitter treatment, frequently getting called in by the networks to offer colour commentary on politics even when he has no poll to cite’. Producers feted Luntz because he gave television what it wanted: strong opinions expressed with absolute certainty in a populist style. Here, awestruck hacks have lapped up Luntz’s pronouncements on who should lead Labour and the Lib Dems ever since his Cameron gig.

But British pollsters tell me that Luntz’s work for Newsnight shouldn’t have been allowed to influence a parish council election, never mind the future of a great party. If you can’t follow their case against him, their overall explanation is easy to grasp: a well-run focus group could never fill 15 minutes of airtime. It would be too boring. To begin with, standard focus groups have six to eight members, but a handful of people isn’t an impressive sight on television, so Newsnight had Luntz meet 28 voters.

Focus groups are also meant to be focused. Market researchers want volunteers from a similar background so the guinea pigs will lose their inhibitions about speaking freely in front of strangers. But Newsnight mixed up people who had always voted Tory with people who had once voted Tory and people who had never voted Tory. The danger of a large and diverse group is that the loudest voices will dominate and a herd mentality will take over. Watch the footage that made Cameron leader and you will see that’s what happens as the dynamics of crowd psychology convert everyone in the room to his charms.

The standard way to stop easily impressed interviewees going along with the crowd is to have secret ballots. Luntz and Newsnight didn’t use them because a show of hands looks better on TV. After they hear Cameron saying he wants to appeal to people’s hopes rather than their fears, the reaction of the voters on dinky hand-held dials that measure their instant responses was overwhelmingly positive. But they would have been as pleased if you, I or our next-door neighbours had said the same, which is why serious researchers are wary of instant reactions. I could go on, but the big point is that Newsnight produced infotainment, not research.

My concern remains that Cameron's tacking to the left means that he is taking positions he himself doesn't believe in the slightest - which shows he's a character even more amoral than Bill Clinton - or he really believes this stuff, in which case we now have two Labour parties, the real one and the Tories.  Neither gives me much grounds for hope. 

Building on sand

The FT has been trying to get to grips with credit products in general and this week referenced a report from Creditflux, the bible in this part of the industry.  Don't try and look up the original article - subscriptions cost about eight hundred pounds a year. 

The nascent market in derivatives on the ABX Index, a basket of 25 large issues of bonds backed by US home equity loans (roughly equivalent to the non-conforming mortgage market in the UK) must be the Waziristan of the financial markets - an obscure and distant place where important events go on largely unreported.   However, the market is growing rapidly, one of a third generation of credit derivative products, the first being the single name default swaps and the second the products trading correlation  risk between credits, including baskets of the iTraxx and other credit indices.   

Hedge funds and other active players have been taking big bets against the US housing market using contracts on the ABX since this time last year, traders tell me, which now seem to be paying off. 
The US government statistics have shown the wilting of the US new home sales over the past six months.  The markets have taken note of the knock-on effects on US housebuilders and for the profits of HSBC.  However, the February CreditFlux headline "Liquidity Vanishes at ABX HE crumbles", puts some figures on the underlying market, with the ABX-1 for BBB mortgage backed securities now trading down some 10% from its initial level, equivalent to something over a 2.5% jump in yields for these bonds, depending on your assumption about their average life.  No doubt, this is a strong indication of further trouble to come for the consumer and the US economy as a whole.