Recently Read

Marching Toward Hell
by Michael Scheuer

Marching Toward Hell sat on my desk for almost two weeks after I finished reading it, waiting for a review (this one) which threatened never to see a keyboard. (And now this review is finally being posted, nearly two months after its first draft.)

Visit Michael Scheuer's website,
non-intervention.com

Why the delay? First, the book presents its own problems--issues inherent in the author's quest to explain the nature of the global conflict known as "The War on Terror." And then, in the middle of reading the book, I learned that Osama bin Laden--a central figure in Scheuer's narrative--finally met his demise, thus (presumably) changing the character of the very subject of the book I was reading.

That's a tough nut to crack, intellectually.

So let's start with the basics: in Marching Toward Hell, Scheuer, a longtime CIA veteran who headed the Agency's OBL unit during the late '90s, lays out his interpretation of America's conflict / relationship with Islam--and it's not a happy story for the guys wearing red, white and blue. Along the way, Scheuer castigates almost everyone who set foot in the White House from the George H.W. Bush administration onward. The author builds a lengthy manifest of mistakes made along the way, and warns of dire consequences for the future of the United States that will arise from losing its wars against Muslim nations--in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in hot spots yet to be carpet bombed. (That part, about losing, is not my personal defeatism; Scheuer is adamant throughout that defeat is, at the stage when he wrote the book and possibly still today, inevitable.) Ultimately, Scheuer prescribes a course of action that, he says, is the best hope for securing the United States' future: a laser sharp focus on putting America's national interest first and foremost, and damn the niceties of international relations.

Scheuer's plan has its appeal, but it's a rocky road that leads to that desirable synthesis. As a CIA insider on the terrorism beat, the author presumably has a lot of insight into the mechanics of national strategic policy from the early '90s onward. Unfortunately, Scheuer uses that insider knowledge to set the torch to many members of the national intelligence infrastructure during that period, grinding his axe so vigorously on the likes of Richard Clarke and George Tenet that the reader is left to wonder if this cast of characters can possibly be as bad as he says they are. Scheuer never fails to hurl snide verbal hand grenades at anyone he believes merits abuse, including members of Congress and various federal departments, human rights activists and NGO organizations--even Jay Leno's wife (for her concern for women's rights around the globe). Plus, while Scheuer tries to strike a nonpartisan pose in presenting his arguments, his hagiographic references to Reagan and Thatcher make the reader suspect that any national security personnel with left-leaning tendencies are automatically destined for a place in the crosshairs. Perhaps the most troublesome stuff comes early in the book, when Scheuer spells out actions he took during his CIA tenure and ostentatiously points out where in the written record the reader can find his reports--and their ultimate failure to move his superiors in the direction he recommended. This presentation comes across as less an argument based on solid evidence and more a grand-scale exercise in CYA, allowing Scheuer to inoculate himself against any charge that he himself did not do enough to bring bin Laden to heel before the 9/11 attacks.

Added together, the tone of Scheuer's text leads the reader to a distracting conclusion: the author is, to put it bluntly, a colossal dick. Though such a reaction may be irrational, that sense of the man certainly undermines the reader's ability to judge the author's argument without bias.

The bias factor is not the only problem with Scheuer's argument; the wisdom of his recommendations is also questionable. For instance, Scheuer's overarching argument is that the United States should use overwhelming force against its enemies in The War on Terror, in all circumstances and regardless of how it affects our standing in the international community. At one point he quotes the pithy axiom, "Rubble don't cause trouble," as a good mission statement. Scheuer frequently chastises people like Tenet, Presidents Clinton and Bush (both), and others in positions of authority for cowardice due to their failure to act on what he considered to be actionable intelligence. Scheuer lays the charge that these officials were too concerned with their image, too afraid of the rebukes they would receive for excessive force and collateral damage, to act in the nation's best interest. Yet, one can easily point out that Scheuer, as a relatively unknown CIA officer--as a well-hidden nobody--can be casual in throwing that charge around; after all, he himself would never have had to deal with the caustic consequences of the policies he promoted. Had he been sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office, Scheuer's perspective might have been different--or might have been reoriented by the fallout from his first, careless engagement in energetic, "consequences be damned" actions against our enemies (and the people who happened to be standing beside them at the time).

Further, Scheuer's argument contains an inherent logical inconsistency: throughout Marching Toward Hell, Scheuer acknowledges bin Laden and his al Quaeda lieutenants as intelligent, capable men--adaptable, dangerous, and perfectly capable of fighting a superpower to at least a draw in their various insurgencies. Does Scheuer then imagine that these same men, when confronted with the sort of massive attack he recommends, would somehow not find a way to ramp up their own response in order to achieve some order of reciprocity? Does he not conceive that such a policy might accelerate al Quaeda's already alleged fervor for obtaining nuclear weapons? Will they just cooperatively roll over and die? Has Scheuer never heard of "blowback?" The consequences for substantially ramped up action against Muslim extremists might amount to much more than censure from effete Europeans. The author seems not to grasp that fact--or is willing to ignore that possibility.

Still, despite the faults of the man and his perspective, there are virtues in the analysis Scheuer delivers in Marching Toward Hell. He makes a compelling case for the single greatest failure of the U.S. military and intelligence establishment: being stuck in a Cold War mentality when confronted with an extremist threat that bore no resemblance to the Soviet enemy of yesteryear. And Scheuer's appeal for a tighter, more focused foreign policy--one that places our strongest national interests far out in front of any other concerns--is convincing and likely to win the reader over--especially given the use of bolstering arguments pulled from the words of the Founding Fathers, whose wisdom still shines through to this day. It doesn't take an intelligence expert to recognize that the United States and its foreign policy are overstretched and too tangled up in extraneous concerns. Our responsibility is to ourselves, and to the future of our own nation; the future of other nations is their concern, and we should aid those causes only insofar as they are our causes as well.

So Marching Toward Hell is a complex work on a complex subject, a book that gives the reader a lot to think about. Scheuer raises a lot of questions, and provides many answers--some good, some debatable, but all important to think about. It is worth reading Marching Toward Hell, at the very least, to make an intelligent approach to those crucial questions and answers, even if the reader draws different conclusions than the author would recommend.