- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.).
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved.
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- http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK11Ak01.html
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