After Iraq

Ours will surely be remembered as an age of angry books. Whether it is a function of cable television punditry, a sharply divided electorate, or the simple economics of publishing, finger-pointing jeremiads are popping up all over. And what was once the entertainment niche of Ann Coulter and Al Franken has grown into a genre that includes economics (Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”) and national defense (Chalmers Johnson’s “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”). Hell’s real fury these days is reserved for the angry wonk, and the angriest wonk on the planet may well be Michael Scheuer, judging from “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq” (FreePress, 384 pages, $27), his latest treatise on the struggle between Western democracy and Islamic terrorism.Nothing among the recent rants quite prepared this reader for passages such as the following, which amounts to a thumb in the eye of the entire body politic:In the continental United States the majority of U.S. politicians, academics, new-age Christian do-gooders and anti-nationalist organizations — be they human rights, refugee rights, or women’s rights groups — have prevented the lawful and effective control of U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada. A pox on all of them.Mr. Scheuer’s editor could have inserted an exclamatory harrumph after this and a good many of his author’s paragraphs without the least disturbance to the tone of the book. To call it a screed is to seriously underestimate the level of vitriol on offer.What sets Mr. Scheuer’s work apart from the recent works of outrage, however, is its condemnation of the entire political class, which is referred to throughout the book as “the governing elites”: most think tanks, mainstream journalists, diplomats, party activists, internationalist “do-gooders,” and virtually all politicians. And while the Bush administration is taken to task at greatest length for alleged mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Scheuer is at heart a fire-eating warrior whose contempt for Bill Clinton is fairly breathtaking. At one point he claims that “no other individual could have conceivably achieved less” than Mr. Clinton with regard to Islamic terrorism.These claims are made by an author not without credentials: Mr. Scheuer served as chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit and as head of the agency’s terrorist rendition program. This is his third book since resigning from the federal government in 2004, and his central thesis — that American foreign policy, stuck in a Cold War mindset, is ill-suited to the challenge of Islamist jihad — is certainly plausible. He even provides a few neat illustrations, particularly in the diplomatic sphere where under former Secretary of State Colin Powell there was often more attention paid to building a coalition of allies than to targeting terrorist enemies.But his argument is consistently undone, and not only by his intemperate haranguing. Mr. Scheuer is a faithful proponent of the sadly familiar idée fixe that jihad revolves around the Palestinian-Arab conflict and American support for Israel. He is a lot smarter than some other critics of American-Israeli relations, and is careful to factor in years of American support for Middle East dictators, the stationing of American military forces on the Arabian Peninsula, as well as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is no gainsaying his animus toward Israel, despite his considerable pains at denial: “Clearly, no nation has the ‘right’ to exist,” he writes. “Darwinian logic applies to nation-states as well as to other components of the animal kingdom.” This would be unsettling enough, but he goes on to accuse the “bipartisan governing elite” of preventing free debate on American-Israeli relations by suggesting that critics are anti-Semites. This kind of circular thinking is designed, one assumes, to disarm Mr. Scheuer’s own critics, who may strongly disagree with his views regardless from whence they spring.Still, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, even Mr. Scheuer occasionally hits on a point that is well worth considering. One of these concerns the subject of deterrence, which has been omitted in much of the public debate on terrorism, although President Bush did allude to it early on in speeches warning those who harbor or assist terrorists. Typically, Mr. Scheuer’s thoughts on deterrence are uncompromising:America today, for example, would be a far more credible military power and a far safer place if instead of endless puerile bickering over what sort of monument should be built at the site of the World Trade Center, we had firebombed Kabul and Qandahar, demolished whatever ruins were left and sowed salt over the length and width of both sites.The extremity of Mr. Scheuer’s policy prescription is unhelpful to his argument, but the logic of establishing severe penalties for enemy governments and even civilian populations should not be neglected. Such penalties were important factors in both of our World War victories and they helped keep the peace for the most part during the long Cold War as well.Another insight concerns the best method of defeating the terrorist networks. Mr. Scheuer advocates everywhere using overwhelming lethal force and then withdrawing quickly. Given the magnitude of the challenge, its organizational structure, and the protracted nature of the struggle itself, this may indeed be good advice, and certainly rates careful consideration.Mr. Willcox, a former editor in chief of Reader’s Digest, lives in Ridgefield, Conn.

After Iraq

After Iraq

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