by
Michael Scheuer
Non-Intervention.com

Recently
by Michael Scheuer: Awash
in Hypocrisy and Hubris, Obama and His Party Push Toward Despotism

Last Friday’s
Wall Street Journal brought the inevitable. In an opinion
piece, Shiraz Maher, a professor at King’s College, London – wrote
that “the story of what is going on in Mali”

actually
begins in Libya, where the unintended consequences of the
Arab spring are now roiling North Africa and West Africa. When
NATO forces decided to support the Libyan rebellion against Moammar
Gadhafi in 2011, they could scarcely have predicted the impact
of their intervention on the region’s labyrinth of competing
economic and confessional interests. [my italics]

Now, I have
never heard of Professor Maher but, clearly, he is an intellectually
dishonest jackass. Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no
way to truthfully argue that “unintended consequences”
are at work in Libya, Mali, or elsewhere in Africa. The events that
are occurring in North Africa and the Sahel presumably are not wanted
by either the academy or the political leaders of the United States,
Canada, the UK, and the rest of Europe, but they were perfectly
predictable as a consequence of Western intervention in Libya. When
the relentless, war-causing interventionists in those places decided
to remove Gadhafi in favor of a “democratic revolution”
that did not exist in Libya, or in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan,
Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world, they ushered in everything
that has happened since, and if they knew anything about history,
the region, and the Islamist movement they would have known it.

How could these
genius Western interventionists know that they were deliberately
opening Pandora’s Islamist Box? A few facts that should have been
obvious to anyone with a bit of commonsense as the Islamist Spring
unfolded make a claim of “unintended consequences” preposterous
in the extreme.

• The leaders
  of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were secular dictators. One thing
  each of these secular leaders did was suppress Islam and persecute,
  imprison, or kill Muslims who held too closely to their faith,
  spoke too publicly and vociferously in its support, or opposed
  by word or deed the un-Islamic actions of their government. It
  is worth mentioning that each of these leaders was paid handsomely
  by U.S. and Western governments for the persecution of Islam.
  Needless to say, when the tyrants departed, the people of each
  country became much freer to profess, live, and apply their faith.
  Islam, at last, had become the way.
• The leaders
  of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were master jailers. Their prisons
  were full of convicts. There were many common felons and crooks,
  but there was just as many – if not more – mujahedin fighters,
  theorists, logisticians, clerics, etc. When the Islamist Spring
  took down the master jailers, the prisons were opened and the
  freed Islamist fighters and their supporters returned to local
  militant groups and traveled far and wide to join al-Qaeda and
  other such organizations. These men had maintained and probably
  strengthened their faith while jailed, and they likewise burned
  to avenge the treatment they had received while incarcerated.
  Not surprisingly, this result of the Islamist Spring brought mujahedin
  groups around the world large numbers of experienced, skilled,
  and angry reinforcements.
• The leaders
  of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were experts at keeping almost all
  weaponry under their governments’ control, just as President Obama
  seeks to do in the United States. At the time of the Islamist
  Spring, the militaries of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were exceptionally
  well-armed with up-to-date weaponry, and their many arsenals –
  like those of Sadam Hussein in 2003 – were stuffed to overflowing
  with reserve weapons and ammunition. When the tyrants fell, each
  country’s internal-security apparatus naturally disintegrated
  and the arsenals were thoroughly looted by Islamists who ferried
  away massive amounts of modern arms and munitions for safe keeping
  in rural areas or in remote regions of nearby countries. Thus
  the Islamist Spring yielded an international mujahedin force better
  armed than at anytime since its inception in the 1980s.

Each of these
important points was easily knowable before the Islamist Spring
began in February, 2011. And the results of the Islamist Spring
that the world is now seeing in North and West Africa were just
as easily predictable. Honest and responsible Western leaders, professors,
and journalists would have warned their citizens that the Islamist
Spring would cause Islamist militant organizations – al-Qaeda, its
allies, and groups no one had yet heard about – to soon grow larger,
more lethal, bolder, more geographically dispersed, and more bitterly
opposed to U.S. and Western interventionism than ever before. Instead,
those Western leaders knowingly and deliberately lied, applauding
the fictitious advent of secular democracy in the Arab world – of
which there was never a chance – and, as President Obama likes to
say, the substantial receding of the Islamist threat.

Why do I argue
that the results of the Islamist Spring were knowable at least from
the moment it began, and that the events that have occurred since
were just as predictable? Well, because I knew and predicted them
in such places as lewrockwell.com, antiwar.com, non-intervention.com;
the Washington Post, the American Conservative, the National Interest,
the BBC World Service, FOX News, and other media outlets. I even
suggested the current unrest in Syria in my 2008 book and in a written
article. A few others predicted the same things in many of the same
places; I certainly had no corner on the market of the blatantly
obvious that always eludes Ivy Leaguers.

I draw attention
to myself on this occasion because I know that I am far from the
brightest bulb in the shed. In their periodic efforts to get me
fired from Georgetown University, in fact, my detractors among pro-Israel
U.S. citizens tell the Georgetown deans that not only am I an anti-Semite
but the school where I earned my Ph. D. – the University of Manitoba
in Canada – is a “diploma mill” and that I am therefore
unqualified to teach at the graduate level. Though, of course, I
disagree with this conclusion and their slander of fine university,
let us suppose that they are correct and that I am a bear of little
or even almost no brain. How then could I have been so right about
the Islamist Spring and the disasters it would cause, while Mrs.
Clinton (Yale); Senator McCain (U.S. Naval Academy); Prime Minister
Cameron (Oxford); Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford), and President Obama
(Harvard and Columbia) could be so nearly 100-percent wrong?

Simple. It
is because I know that the Founding Fathers warned of the mortal
danger interventionism posed to America’s survival; that U.S. and
Western interventionism is the main motivation for the religious
war our Islamist enemies are waging against the West; and that the
men and women just mentioned are among the leading practitioners
of war-causing intervention. In short, it was clear as night following
day that the Islamist Spring would feed Muslim hatred for U.S. and
Western interventionism and supply the Islamist movement fighting
that intervention with men, guns, optimism, and momentum.

My exquisitely
educated betters and their media acolytes, on the other hand, are
too intellectual – that is, too dogmatic and arrogant – to have
any contact points with reality; they believe in the ludicrous notion
of American Exceptionalism and its concomitant duty to force our
little brown brothers to be secular – if not pagan – democrats;
and they are willing to get any number of America’s soldiers and
Marines killed to further their utterly unattainable dream of an
all-democratic world.

Maybe we should
consider sending send our governing elite to the University of Manitoba
for a few freezing months of reeducation?

January
21, 2013

Michael
Scheuer [send him mail] is
the author of Marching
Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq and Imperial
Hubris and Through
Our Enemies’ Eyes. He recently resigned after 22 years at
the CIA. He served as chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit.

Copyright
2013 © Michael Scheuer

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