- "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy
campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic
strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success,"
said President George W Bush on September 20, 2001.
-
- Unique among America's foreign conflicts, the
so-called "war on terror" is an intelligence war. That bodes ill for
America, because an intelligence war is the kind America is least
capable of fighting, for reasons inherent in the country's character.
That is one more reason why Islamic radicalism yet may defeat the
West.
-
- It is already clear that America is losing the
intelligence war in Iraq, for the same reasons it lost in Somalia. The
rocket attack on the al-Rashid hotel while Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz was present, the downing of a Chinook helicopter with 16
deaths, and related incidents suggest that the Iraqi resistance has
infiltrated the American command. That should be no surprise, given that
the occupiers depend on local sources for information, and have little
capacity to distinguish a repentant Ba'athist from a saboteur. There
exist ways to compensate for such limitations, to be sure, but an army
that would court-martial Lieutenant-Colonel Allen West for scaring a
prisoner into a confession with a harmless pistol shot does not have the
stomach for them.
-
- More disturbing for the American side are the treason
charges against an army chaplain and translator at the Guantanamo prison
for al-Qaeda captives. The situation brings to mind Kim Philby and the
failure of Anglo-American intelligence in the 1930s, when the Soviet
side wielded a higher moral authority among the intellectual class.
Syrian intelligence, it appears, reached into one of America's most
secure installations. That is quite a turnabout from the 1960s, when
Israel's master spy Eli Cohen infiltrated the highest levels of the
Syrian government.
-
- Assigning blame for intelligence failures has become a
minor industry in the United States. Gerald Posner's recent book Why
America Slept (See the Asia Times Online review of September 17, Caught
napping) prompted a new round of finger-pointing, all of which ignores
the greater issue. A tragic flaw in the American character rather than
preventible negligence accounts for systematic intelligence
failure.
-
- In the intelligence war, Islamists have a distinct
advantage. Among the ranks of Islamist radicals are thousands who have
studied in the United States, speak serviceable English, and can move
with ease in American society. How many field agents of American
intelligence can move at ease in the Islamist milieu? German and British
universities once produced spies who could speak half a dozen Arab
dialects and recite the Koran from memory. Today's only superpower
cannot recruit enough Arabic translators to handle routine
intercepts.
-
- Precisely why the US cannot find Arabic translators
(let alone Arabic-speaking field agents) deserves a moment's attention.
Conservative critics of the American intelligence establishment, such as
Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, ridicule the
Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) lack of language ability, and
blame the previous (Democratic) administration for failing to spend
enough money on the requisite skills.
-
- All that is somewhat unfair. During the 1990s, the CIA
under Admiral James Woolsey and then under George Tenet cast its net
wide for speakers of foreign languages, particularly Middle Eastern and
South Asian dialects, with disappointing results. The pool of qualified
applicants was too small, and within this pool, too few applicants met
the agency's security standards. Particularly in the case of Arabic and
Persian, too many of the candidates were first and second generation
immigrants who failed the screening criteria, that is, they were deemed
too likely to sympathize with their subjects. The Guantanamo allegations
suggest that the CIA's security concerns were not ill placed.
-
- By contrast, Israeli intelligence can draw on a pool
of first and second generation immigrants who speak foreign languages
(among which Arabic is most common) as natives, but feel no loyalty
whatever, but rather hostility, to their native culture. During the Cold
War, European intelligence services could find native speakers of all
varieties - German-speaking Bohemians from the Austrian Empire,
Polish-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Poles, Italian-speaking
Austrians - who despised the cultures in which they were educated and
were happy to subvert them. The average Hungarian headwaiter had a
greater command of languages than today's doctoral students in
comparative literature at American universities.
-
- In terms of linguistic and cultural capacity, the US
today commands what may be the lowest-quality clandestine service of any
great power in history. Why don't more Americans learn foreign
languages? Turn the question around: why do they forget the languages
they already know? The children of immigrants almost invariably lose the
native language of their ancestors. One finds German festivals in
Wisconson with lederhosen-wearing brass bands, Weissbier and bratwurst,
but no one who can form a single German sentence. Italian-Americans
march through the streets in what they imagine to be native costume to
honor the birthday of Columbus, without knowing more than a few
obscenities in a southern dialect.
-
- Folk came to America precisely in order to shed their
culture. More precisely, they fled the tragic destiny of their cultures.
Immigrants to America were the poor or the rebels. Not the Milanese but
the Calabrians, not the Berliners but the Bavarians, not the assimilated
Jews of Germany but the persecuted Jews of Russia made their way
westward. These had little stake in their own cultures and no connection
to the high culture of the countries they abandoned. There are a few
exceptions, eg, the German political exiles of 1848, but these are few.
What did the Irish immigrants care for Shakespeare, or Russian-Jewish
immigrants for Leo Tolstoy? They shed their old culture almost as fast
as their traveling-clothes.
-
- America has little culture in the strict sense of the
term. Culture - the transmittable experience of one's antecedents - is
the stuff from which we weave the illusion of immortality. In the Old
World one could not separate religion and culture. Myths of national
origin, poetry and song, cuisine and geography fused into a shared
experience of those who went before, with those who come after. Culture
means existential continuity.
-
- What America offers, by contrast, is redemption
through a new beginning, as closely as anyone is likely to get to a
realization of the original Christian project. That is the subject of
the Western, which passes as an American original but in fact stems from
the 16th century chivalresque novel. It finds its highest _expression_ in
John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, the greatest American work of
narrative art (ignoring that insufferable allegory Moby Dick and that
poor-man's picaresque novel Huckleberry Finn.).
-
- In Ford's film, a convict and a prostitute travel
west, pass through danger and tests of character, and start a new life.
That is why Americans do not know foreign languages. Rare is the
American who learns a foreign language truly well. Those who do so fall
in love with the strangeness of a foreign culture, like the adolescent
who becomes infatuated with the streetwalker to whom he lost his
virginity. Such people are of no use for intelligence work, for who can
be trusted to subvert a culture he loves?
-
- The quality of American intelligence depends on its
moral authority to recruit spies who are willing to betray their own
cultures because of their faith in America. During the Great Depression
of the 1930s, when the credibility of the West stood at an ebb, Russia
recruited intellectuals from the great universities of the West. Against
the betrayal of its own elites, the West had no defense, and Russia won
the intelligence war of the 1940s and 1950s. Not until the credibility
of Russian communism collapsed after the 1956 Hungarian invasion did the
tide turn, as Russians and Eastern Europeans shifted loyalty to the
American side.
-
- Today's intelligence war with radical Islam comes down
to a contest for the loyalties of the population of individuals who can
move between both worlds. The vast majority of these are university
students from Islamic countries in the US or Western Europe, and the
remainder are students of Oriental languages in the West. For several
reasons, the US is at a vast disadvantage.
-
- Unlike other immigrants, Muslim students in the US
neither are poor nor politically disenfranchised. They are there
precisely because they belong to the elite of their country, for whom
foreign study is a privilege. Few are prepared to abandon their culture,
while many resent the West. Because of the cultural divide, the vast
majority of Muslims who study in the West read sciences or mathematics.
Indian and Chinese foreign students dominate these faculties. No Arab
has become a scientist of note since the early Middle Ages, while the
universities are full of Indian and Chinese Nobelists. Hell hath no fury
like an elite slighted. These circumstances tend to provoke the
resentment of Arab and other Muslim foreign students toward the
West.
-
- Muslim students attending the most prestigious Western
universities, moreover, hear nothing of the merits of Western culture.
Instead, what they learn from post-colonial theory, deconstructionism,
and post-modernism is that all culture is a pretext for the assertion of
power by oppressors. No qualitative difference separates Dante and
Goethe from the meanest screed of the cheapest propagandist. What
matters is the sub-text, the _expression_ of power relations buried
beneath the rhetoric. They learn of the evil US that slaughtered its
native population, oppressed blacks and other minorities, degraded
women, marginalized the poor, and operates on behalf of plutocratic
financial interests.
-
- Not since Kim Philby was an undergraduate at Oxford
has the intellectual elite of the West been so inclined to bite the hand
that feeds it. The degenerate view of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig
Wittgenstein, which reduces all faith and conviction to capricious
existential choice, dominates the mind of the West. From this standpoint
it is impossible to challenge another culture, because all differences
are arbitrary to begin with. How is it possible under these
circumstances to make ideological recruits?
-
- There is not much hope for American intelligence among
Western students of the Middle East. General John Abizaid, the commander
of US Central Command, earned a master's degree in Middle Eastern
Studies in 1981 under Professor Nadav Safran, one of the best academics
in the field. But in 1985, the Middle East Studies Association censured
Safran for accepting CIA funding, destroying his career, according to
Martin Kramer, a right-wing critic of the overwhelmingly left-wing
Middle East Studies establishment. That was a generation ago; in the
interim, the field has shifted even further toward Heideggerian
relativism.
-
- One does encounter exceptions, such as General William
Boykin, an evangelical Christian who evidently does not subscribe to the
relativism of the academics and who heads the hunt for Osama bin Laden,
among others. The evangelicals represent an important force in American
politics, but have little to contribute to the intelligence effort.
Born-again Christians in some respects seem as if they were born
yesterday. Their educational institutions, such as they are, lack the
sophistication to produce the sort of training that General Abizaid
received at Harvard when it was still available.
-
- American intelligence cannot recruit reliable spies
from the available pool of foreign nationals, nor can it train its own.
Army Special Forces makes an effort to teach languages to its personnel,
but anyone who has met these fresh-faced, well-meaning young people has
the impression that they are much better in a gunfight than in a war of
ideas. I expect more intelligence failures, more "why-America-slept"
exposes, more Congressional committees debating who lost what, and more
American casualties. One possible consequence of America's intelligence
failures may be a far greater degree of dependency on Israel and India
for human intelligence.
-
- Final note: in an October 3 column (How
'cherry-picking' militant Islam can win), I criticized Professor Victor
Davis Hanson for dismissing Islamic radicalism as a form of Medieval
ignorance. His November 7 column in the National Review Online website
has quite a different tone. It is entitled, "If we don't change, we will
lose this war" and reflects a far soberer evaluation of America's
strategic position.
-
- Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved.
-
- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK11Ak01.html
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