I have completed reading
Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer so here is my book report. Some of Scheuer’s main points are discussed below.
Americans have a tendency to redefine those from other cultures in terms we can understand. This is understandable but may be leading us astray. When we have an enemy like bin Laden and we redefine him in a way that makes us feel better—“lunatic”, “fanatic”, etc.—we are missing an important opportunity to know our enemy. Scheuer argues that we miss the fact that he is widely accepted and respected in the Muslim world for various reasons including his piety. His statements ring true to many, many Muslims. We do not have to understand and agree with this from the standpoint of our culture but dismissing the reality of how his culture works puts us at peril.
Afghans do not accept foreign occupiers on their soil. History shows that Afghanistan has been the downfall of any invader. The British were defeated 3 times (1838, 1878, and 1919) during their “Great Game” with Russia for regional dominance. This point leads to the next:
We do not have a chance of winning in Afghanistan. The latest edition of
Newsweek has headlines like “As Karzai Looses his Grip…”, and “A Picture of Gloom”. Other media sources paint a similar picture. Whether or not Scheuer is correct—and I am inclined to agree with him because of the British and Soviet experience—it will be interesting to watch how the drama plays out. If we prevail in Afghanistan we may be the first in history to do so.
Everyone in the world does not want to be like us. Scheuer quotes Joshua Mitchell writing in the Washington Post August 10, 2003: “Freedom is neither a spontaneous nor a universal aspiration. Other goods captivate the minds of other people from other lands, order, honor, and tribal loyalties being the most obvious”. And this leads to the next…
Our idealistic drive to impose democracy on those who do not want it wastes our treasure, our lives, and our credibility. The idea that after centuries (actually from 1215 and the Magna Carta) of developing our system we can install instant democracy in places where there is no framework for it is truly ludicrous.
Labeling bin Laden et al. as terrorists misses the fact that their training camps trained insurgents first and terrorists second. Those insurgents went back to their home states and were able to be more effective fighting against those governments and us. The author fears we are not waging an effective response if we do not realize we are fighting a global insurgency. He says that “stepping back from the victim’s perspective, accepting the need for this semantic change, and then making it, could ensure wide recognition that America is at war with a faith-driven force that dwarfs anything that can, with intellectual honesty, be called terrorism.”
Scheuer has harsh criticism of our desires to fight a “dainty” war. We don’t want to hurt too many of the enemy and we certainly don’t want to lose many of our own so we fight half wars that leaves the issue smoldering to re-ignite at a later time. He argues convincingly that we will not get the job done this way and quotes Lincoln’s displeasure with McClellan’s reticence to fight. He also includes a quote from General W.T. Sherman (1875), “Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster”.
