Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Read Free Page B

shame, embarrassment, and fear of employing American resources to protect Americans. The more I read and reflected on my own two-plus decades of service at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the more likely it seemed that the answer to the question, “Does protecting Americans come first?” is very plainly no. The organizing concept of the federal government is no longer, as the Founders intended, the protection and expansion of freedom, liberty, and the rule of law at home, with a foreign policy, backed when necessary by military force, designed to ensure the maintenance of that domestic environment. “The Founding Fathers,” the brilliant historian Walter A. McDougall has reminded his fellow citizens, “flatly denied that the United States ought to be in the business of changing the world, lest it only change itself—for the worse….[T]hey saw foreign policy as an instrument for the preservation and expansion of American freedom and warned that crusades would belie our ideals, violate our true interests, and sully our freedom.” 2 Today, however, the federal government’s organizing principle flows directly from the country’s pop culture; namely, the federal government, under Republican or Democratic control, does what is easiest, most expedient, least risky, politically correct and opportune, and most sellable. In the present case, these actions are anchored in neither the Founders’ intent nor any significant knowledge of American history or the history of the Muslim world.
    In essence, U.S. independence and safety are now threatened by our elites consistently asking the wrong question about national-security policy. Instead of asking what could happen if we do not respond in a timely manner and eliminate a particular threat to the United States—that is, what will the failure to act cost America in lives and treasure?—U.S. governing elites ask what will happen if they do act to defend America. The answer to the first question is very substantive and specific. For example, if President Bill Clinton fails to kill Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s, and if President George W. Bush fails to kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before March, 2003, both will live to have the chance to execute the deadly actions against the United States they repeatedly promised. Thus, it seems to be only common sense to say that it is better to try to kill bin Laden and al-Zarqawi and fail than not to try at all. The answer to the second question is usually another set of questions from U.S. political leaders and senior bureaucrats that stress the negative political costs that could accrue to U.S. leaders who authorize such actions when the actions subsequently fail to achieve their aim. Using the case of bin Laden, these questions include: “What will the world think of us if we attack and miss? Won’t the Europeans view us as hip-shooters? If innocents get killed, won’t we alienate Europeans, Muslims, or fill-in-the-blank others around the world?” 3 Summing the answers to such questions usually yields paralysis or an action that is ineffective and that allows—and sometimes encourages—those behind the danger at hand to become more confident, bolder, and increasingly lethal.
    I refer here to the bin Laden and al-Zarqawi cases because I am familiar with them on a direct, first-hand basis, but it is easy to see what inaction or ineffective action has yielded in the cases of North Korea and Iran and in the failure to annihilate Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991. In short, the reason the U.S. federal government does not put the protection of America first is that our governing elites do not believe the United States is worth defending if the world audience they are playing to will criticize the actions they take in America’s interests. Our current elite—including the second Bush administration, which talks tough but refuses to kill the numbers of enemies needed to win America’s wars—takes its guidance on how and when to