Friday, September 11, 2009

Michael Scheuer hates everyone and everything

Except America, I guess. But especially "contemporary American paganism, death-loving, and libertinism." If that makes any sense.

(I think one could be excused for asking how a guy that avowedly loathes modern America and its culture can be taken seriously when he advocates a narrow, isolationist, "America-first" foreign policy.)

Anyway, Scheuer and several others were asked to respond to this set of questions:
Should Obama gamble that more troops and new tactics will turn the tide, as Bush did in Iraq, and how many more troops would it take? Or does Obama risk his presidency by getting bogged down in another Asian land war in support of an increasingly undemocratic government? And what's the alternative to an "Afghan surge" -- perhaps, as conservative columnist George Will wrote last week, withdrawing and relying on special forces, intelligence and drones just to monitor the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?
And below is a bit of Scheuer's response. (I'd like to copy the whole thing in full, just so you can get a feel for how scattershot and angry this tirade is, but I'll fight the urge.) Watch out -- the crazy comes so fast it's kind of hard to focus.

This week’s question is an apt one to follow the discussion on summer reading. Summer was once the time when adults indulged in beach reading that allowed them -- in a child-like fashion -- to escape the hard realities and simple right-and-wrong choices of adult life. The books chosen allowed the sea-side reader to create his own reality for a few days and to intellectually experiment and wrestle with creating the world he or she would want to exist.

Sadly for America, virtually all of our ruling elite -- politicians, generals, teleprompter-reading news “experts” like Stewart, Hannity, and Olberman; print commentators and pundits, and most especially the great bulk of the thoroughly pagan, ahistorical, and anti-American academy -- now live the beach-reading experience the year round with no time off for reality, or for right and wrong. Although examples of this are legion -- witness the child-like world conjured by the communist/ultra-green/felon-loving/9/11-truther that our president wanted to advise the White House -- there is no better example of the nature of our perpetually child-like elite than those who offer us the vision of a world where there is legitimate reason for hope on the issue of Afghanistan.

Quite simply, there is no hope. The Afghan war is lost beyond recall, and all the young men and women who have died there since 9/11, and all those who will die from today forward, have died in vain. Their lives have been wasted by those in both parties who have governed us since 2001. These are men and women who find the idea of fighting to win repulsive and inhumane, but do not mind a lick wasting our kids lives for such non- essentials as human rights, women’s rights, secularism, and democracy for non-Americans, most of whom want no part of them and will fight them to the death. The simple reality is:

--Bush had a window for savagery for the first 12 or 15 months after 9/11; he could have done anything in using the U.S. military to achieve the only mission that could -- or can -- be accomplished in Afghanistan-- the annihilation of al-Qaeda and the Taleban. He and his tough-talking but always effete Neocons advisers and pundits did not have the courage to effectively destroy America’s enemies in Afghanistan. Obama’s team, on the other hand, has a clear affinity for America’s Islamist enemies and has dismantled most of the U.S. intelligence and covert-action programs that helped hold the Islamists at bay without having anything to put in their place.

--Rumsfeld and his clique fielded a tiny force in Afghanistan; foolishly believed George Tenet‘s lie that Afghans would sell their families and faith for money; assigned the task of closing the Pak-Afghan border to the Taleban’s tribal brothers in the Pak Frontier Corps; and so allowed most of al-Qaeda and the Taleban escape to regroup, refit, and fight another day. That day has arrived.

Et cetera. Good luck with all that.

11 comments:

  1. Scheuer here follows Ralph Peters and Victor Davis Hanson... but really they all follow Nietzsche and Spengler don't they? We're become soft and materialistic. We don't believe in our own Gods, etc.

    Their worldview ends up being proto-fascist (in the actual literal meaning of the term, rather than as an insult) dressed up in the language of cultural renewal and national security.

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  2. Bernard -- Bang on. Couldn't agree more.

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  3. Proto-fascist, or just paranoid? I like VDH, actually.


    Wait, no, I kind of hate everyone and everything, too, but only in that slight feeble 'Gen X' way some of us have. My thesis is that the Douglas Copeland book, Generation X, sets the ground for the sly, snarky, sarcastic tone of much of the internets...I am actually kind of serious. Go back and read the book and then take a look at websites like Stuff White People Like, or web comics like xkcd.

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  4. Madhu -- Low-grade misanthropy is the birthright of every member of "Gen X" and "Gen Y." Scheuer and Powers are a whole different story. Gomorrah rising and all that.

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  5. Low-grade misanthropy is the birthright of every member of "Gen X" and "Gen Y."

    haha, I am going to steal that....

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  6. I agree with Bernard, but most of all I just wonder:

    What the f*** is that dude's problem?

    (He probably goes home from work and reads Us Weekly and watches American Idol. People this full of venom are always some kind of hypocritically self-hatingly f-ed up like that.)

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  7. I've seen this guy on Fox News. He's certainly an angry fellow. Isn't he the former CIA analyst who signed his books on Al-Qaeda as "Anonymous"?

    But in his statement quoted above, I found this part striking and I agree with him on this point: "wasting our kids lives for such non- essentials as human rights, women’s rights, secularism, and democracy for non-Americans, most of whom want no part of them and will fight them to the death"...

    The recent conjugal rape law recently passed just for one community (the Shias), the burqas still forced upon women, the travesty Karzai has made of the elections; all these developments tend, in my view, to support Scheuer's point in the particular case of Afghanistan...

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  8. "I agree with Bernard, but most of all I just wonder: What the f*** is that dude's problem?"

    I wonder WTF is yours and the rest of the US population's that this guy has any standing permitting him to say anything at all in public, let alone shit like this. And in the role of valued CT expert no less, FFS.

    I wonder if Russians regularly get to hear from the guy who let Chernobyl melt down opine on how others have irresponsible policies visa vi nuclear reactors and how they are endangering people.

    "Isn't he the former CIA analyst who signed his books on Al-Qaeda as "Anonymous"?"

    Yes, but more significantly, he was an essential producer in another bestseller "The 9/11 Commission Report". Without him -- literally if his incompetence and arrogance were absent from the US intel apparatus -- that report would not have been possible. A story about the WTC attacks would have been a work of fiction, not fact.

    Everyone's aware that the 9/11 attacks succeeded because the CIA failed to inform the FBI that known al Qaeda planners had left a terrorism conference and entered the US with those plans.

    The fkn obvious followup question "why'd they do that" apparently never warranted an answer. If were asked the answer would be Michael Scheuer.

    And this individual is not only living in hiding abroad in fear of his life from the general US population, he's the go-to guy for opinions on CT, invited back no matter how insane his shit gets.

    Hence, I wonder WTF is wrong with Americans more than I do this tool.

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  9. But isnt he part of the new rabid crazy republican/pro-israeli right? Ive been reading Jerusalem Post lately, after the Israeli foreign minister declared my country (Norway) for anti-semitic, in a open speech. And the comments section there is really something if you want to see the politics of hate. Where are the decent folks?

    "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity...."

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  10. ex-IDF Soldier to Fnord
    As a hippie, left-wing Marxist, ex-kibbutznik who supports the establishment of a genuine independent Palestinian State, I have to ask you a question.
    ( Without defending any 'anti-Arab hate' comments in Israel or the West )

    Why do you not also denounce the long-term educational campaign of anti-Jewish hatred in the school curriculum of the PLA and their refusal to even consider recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, just as they rightfully demand to have their own country recognised as the homeland of the Palestinians?

    I guess I have more than 1 question...
    Why do the decent Palestinians not publicly demand changes to the school curriculum? Are they also anti-Israeli? Or are they afraid of being attacked and ostracised by their own community, just as happened to the Arab music teacher whose Palestinian children gave a concert to some Holocaust survivors in Israel?

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  11. Gully-

    Gentile's new snippet over at SWJ is begging for your rebuttal.

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