Stephen's got Michael Scheuer:
Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst until 2004. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism .
Wikipedia, of couse, has more. So does Media Matters. He's been doing publicity for his latest book, a biography of Osama Bin Laden. A quick look at the reviews at B&N and Amazon reveals nothing at all surprising (though fun fact: in a Google search using the ISBN, the fourth result -- after Google books, Amazon, and Amazon.nz -- was for SexualAstrology.com. B&N didn't show up until page 5). Several thoughtful customer reviews in there, though this one in particular immediately struck a chord:
3.0 out of 5 stars A So-So Bio, February 24, 2011
By Eric Borgman (USA)
This review is from: Osama Bin Laden (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
The reader will learn some new information on Bin Laden, provided that they really want to, but frankly, I find the topic to be rather boring...
Yeah, there's (a bit) more, but y'know. I was entertained by this NYTimes review, though:
“Aye, aye! they were mine — my irons, cried Ahab, exultantly. . . . Aye, I see — wanted to part it; free the fast fish — an old trick — I know him.” For a good generation now, the former chief of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has insisted that he knew the tricks of Osama bin Laden, that he was on to him from the start, that he and the unit he headed from 1996 to 1999 had given the government multiple chances to kill or capture the Saudi master terrorist. The bureaucracy had not gone along; indecisive leaders who didn’t know the man they were trying to snag, who didn’t read his writings, had thwarted and betrayed the hunt. And still, after the calamities, after all the disasters inflicted upon us by this elusive and cunning adversary, we haven’t yet understood what we are up against. A view has crystallized that the trail of terror now goes beyond bin Laden, that the man on the run no longer pulls the strings of the jihad. Scheuer has come forth to challenge this complacency...
...In “Osama bin Laden,” Scheuer aims to re-establish his mastery of the bin Laden phenomenon. The bureaucratic enemies of yesteryear are still the knaves and fools they were, but another class of adversaries is now in the docket — the writers who stepped into the breach without sufficient knowledge or authority. There is Steve Coll, the author of “Ghost Wars,” credulous in his “whole-hog acceptance” of the narrative about Osama given him by Saudi intelligence. There is Lawrence Wright, who in his book “The Looming Tower” is “even more credulous when it comes to taking these spinning Saudis at face value.” Then there is a “legion of pro-Israel writers,” who brought with them into the discussion of bin Laden and the other Islamists “blind faith in the moral superiority of Israel in general and Likudites in particular.” This is not the prettiest, or the most subtle of writing. We had been done in by the “bin Laden experts” (the quotation marks are Scheuer’s); they hadn’t read the man, they hadn’t gone back to his actual words, yet they have come forth with “quasi-psychological explanations for Osama’s behavior.”
Scheuer says he has not come “to praise Osama bin Laden but to help bury him.” But he has been on his trail for so long: those are his irons, his harpoons, in Osama; he is the one who knows that “Osama’s father, Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden, was born into Yemen’s Kenda tribe,” and that he “lived in the village of al-Rubat Baeshn in the inland valley of Wadi Doan in the country’s Hadramut region,” and a certain measure of admiration is inevitable in this kind of chase. In the Scheuer narrative, Osama bin Laden is the Saladin of the Islamists, he has command of lyrical Arabic, and of contemporary world affairs. He has “management skills” that enable him to run a “multiethnic, multinational and multilingual organization that is unique in the Muslim world. He displays the cool reasoning of a cost-benefit-calculating businessman, and the sophistication of a media mogul.” He has outwitted his pursuers, tormented the world’s only superpower. Before the burial, there is the essential paean...
Really, go read. No idea how relevant it is to the actual book/author, but it's a great essay.
And a good chunk of that is backed up by other reviews. Here's the Financial Times:
...Scheuer is the former head of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s unit dedicated to tracking bin Laden. This book, and his previous (anonymously written), 2004 broadside against the obtuse policies of the “war on terror”, Imperial Hubris, are steeped in detailed knowledge of the Saudi jihadist. It is a needed corrective to most of the airy generalisations about bin Laden and his followers...
Bin Laden himself emerges as courageous and charismatic, lyrical and media-savvy. He is “as comfortable with the poor and the indigent as he is with the rich and powerful”, ruthless and a formidable organiser, a man who in his contempt for “earthly flags” lives already partly in the afterlife. The legends of his survival against vastly superior Soviet forces at Jaji in 1987, and the awesome might of America at Tora Bora in 2001, will have led many Muslims to divine that Allah is on his side.
Much of this short but dense book is spent scoring points off other students of bin Laden. The underlying thesis is that, because we have gratuitously misunderstood and caricatured him, we have wilfully disarmed ourselves in the fight against global jihadism. He has a plan: to restore the glory of the worldwide ummah of Muslim believers, and bring down the west’s infidel clients...
Some detailed info in that one, which starts with this:
One of the many uplifting things about the tide of revolution that has started to course through Arab lands is that nowhere in their Manichean prospectus did Osama bin Laden and his ilk see it coming. These Islamist messiahs, who have taken it upon themselves to redeem their fallen world by blood and fire, were, quite simply, nowhere.
They have had other setbacks but, depending how the new Arab awakening proceeds, this one could be decisive...
Which is something else I've seen echoed elsewhere, although (from an article dated Feb 5)
Michael Scheuer thinks Osama bin Laden must be delighted with the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt.
"This is nothing but good news for him," Scheuer said. "It's always been one of his primary goals to get rid of those who he sees as oppressors and apostates and dominate the region. I'm sure this is very welcome news for him."..
and
...Michael Scheuer...thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.
Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.
“The talent of an organization is not just leadership, but taking advantage of opportunities,” Mr. Scheuer said. In Al Qaeda and its allies, he said, “We’re looking over all at a more geographically widespread, probably numerically bigger and certainly more influential movement than in 2001.”
I suspect we'll be hearing about that in the interview. Might be another 'our soldiers should kill more people' chat, too -- he says
in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States "has fielded a slow-moving, over-equipped, and casualty-averse army that failed to win under careerist generals drawing advice from New Age social scientists bent on pursuing hearts and minds and avoiding blood and iron."
(New Age?)
Also
Most Westerners miss the resonance bin Laden strikes aligning himself with legendary Muslim figures such as Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders and captured Jerusalem eight centuries ago. Many young Muslims, Scheuer writes, identify bin Laden as a modern day Saladin.
Scheuer spells out bin Laden's objectives: "since 1996 bin Laden has made clear that {al-Qaida's} three war aims were to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world, to destroy Muslim tyrannies and Israel, and to settle scores with the Shias."
...The Soviet Army's defeat in Afghanistan was "a military victory for Islam, the first in several hundred years, and it undermined the pervasive defeatism that had haunted the Muslim world." Then the attacks of a decade ago lured Americans into Afghanistan, where bin Laden's aim is "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy..."
The more of these I read, the more I find myself wondering how dated his info -- and his positions -- are. I don't expect to hear anything tonight that I haven't heard before. Though I suppose that if there's anywhere Scheuer won't bore me, it'll be in an interview with Colbert. |