Election’s unsigned influence

The way the smart money had it figured, this first presidential campaign of the 21st century would be the first electoral cycle in which the journalistic pace was set by the maturing Internet echo chamber and the fierce new 24-hour competition between the cable news networks.

That may yet turn out to be a good bet, but so far the momentum has all been with that most traditional and staid of “information technologies” -- book publishing. Books by one-time Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke, analyst James Mann, investigative journalist Bob Woodward and former diplomat Joseph Wilson already have roiled the electoral current, mostly in ways that discomfort the incumbent president and his administration.

To this sequence we now can add the forthcoming “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror,” whose anonymous author -- a senior official of the Central Intelligence Agency -- spent three years heading the special unit charged with tracking Osama bin Laden. The novelty of a serving intelligence officer delivering this sort of real-time critique is considerable. The interest is enhanced because Anonymous also is the author of “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes,” which many counter-terrorism experts consider the foundational account of Al Qaeda’s rise.

The author already has made himself available for a variety of print and television interviews and wrote a concise, even witty, synopsis of his views for this newspaper’s Friday commentary page. “Imperial Hubris” is, in fact, a fascinating and thought-provoking book -- though not, perhaps, entirely as Anonymous intends. The author shares a great deal of his unclassified knowledge concerning the realities of what he sees as a now-global Islamist insurgency. In the process, he suggests much that is perplexing about the collection and uses of intelligence at the moment when the future of that shadowy quasi-fourth branch of government is very much at issue.

There is a seductive patina of realpolitik about “Imperial Hubris,” but at the end of the day those portions that are prescriptive amount to what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

On familiar territory

Anonymous is at his best when he revisits the territory covered in “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes.” He is excellent at tracing the way the Saudi-financed indoctrination into Salafism -- politicized Islamic fundamentalism -- has fundamentally reshaped the way an entire generation of South Asian Muslims conceive their faith. Anyone who recently has watched the insurgents’ savage beheadings of captured foreigners ricochet through cyberspace will take the author’s point that, just as the invention of movable type helped foster and spread the Protestant Reformation, the Internet now spreads Islamism and jihad.

Saudi Arabia is the cradle of this mischief, and Anonymous writes, “In early 2004 the two countries with the world’s largest oil reserves -- Iraq and Saudi Arabia -- found themselves beset by domestic Islamist violence.... Iraq is far worse off and will continue to grow increasingly violent, there is every chance that the al-Saud regime has quietly climbed on its deathbed. Osama bin Laden, after all is not an aberrant product of Saudi society -- he is its poster boy.”

As the CIA’s chief Bin Laden tracker from 1996 through 1999, Anonymous clearly acquired a hunter’s regard for his prey -- and something more. “Viewed from any angle Osama bin Laden is a great man,” he writes, “one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post-Cold War peace.” He cites without contradiction the numerous Arab and other Muslim witnesses who have testified to the wealthy Saudi’s personal simplicity, good humor, piety, sincerity, charity, courtesy and traditional eloquence. Anonymous contradicts other analysts, including distinguished historian of Islam Bernard Lewis, who he thinks incorrectly believe Bin Laden is possessed of an irrational hatred of Western democracy and modernity, per se.

“For nearly a decade now, bin Laden has demonstrated patience, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence and focused, limited war aims,” Anonymous writes. “He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as ‘irrational in the extreme.’ The term irrational, it seems to me, is better applied to Americans who have forgotten or never learned, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s lesson that ‘war means fighting and fighting means killing,’ and are horrified by the modest -- compared to what is coming -- casualties bin Laden has so far exacted.”

At the end of the day, Bin Laden is “a happy warrior, a brilliant hunter-killer waging war trying to achieve precise, devastating but limited goals.”

Anonymous is, as his quotation from the famous Forrest, the Confederate cavalry commander -- and Ku Klux Klan founder -- indicates, something of a Civil War fan. Elsewhere, he compares Bin Laden to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee, a quotation from whose memoirs opens the book: “Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never do less.”

Part of what’s missing from Anonymous’ take on Bin Laden is the notion that he might be a pious and sincere man and still be, as other commentators have labeled him, “a criminal.” Certainly, that’s what the evidence of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the murder of Daniel Pearl -- to cite but three examples -- makes him.

The Civil War-era quotations that come to this reader’s mind also concern Lee, but come from U.S. Grant and Henry Adams.

The former believed that Lee gave the full measure of devotion to his cause, “though I believe it was the worst cause to which any man ever gave himself.”

To Adams, it made no difference that Lee “was a good man. Most of the harm in the world is done by good men. He should have been hanged.”

Anonymous adjudges the war in Afghanistan a necessary but lost cause because the U.S. has attempted to impose a secular, multi-ethnic, democratic government where only the rule of traditional Pashtun Islamists can survive. He abhors the war in Iraq as an unnecessary act of aggression, “like our war on Mexico in 1846 -- an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat, but whose defeat did offer economic advantages.”

Anonymous implicitly assumes that the future of the Islamic world belongs with the Salafists, Wahabis and other rigorists. Thus, the crux of his prescriptive argument is that Bin Laden and the other Islamist “insurgents” do not hate America and the West for what we are, but for what we do. So, the answer is to stop doing what they don’t like -- namely, supporting Israel against Palestinian terrorism; supporting Russia, India and China against their Muslim insurgencies; pressuring Arab nations to hold down oil prices and supporting what Anonymous calls “apostate, corrupt and tyrannical Muslim governments.”

When pigs fly.

Collecting intelligence is a dangerous and tricky business. Analyzing it is tougher still and making sound policy from it even yet more difficult. Just as we long ago realized that war is too important to be left to the generals, “Imperial Hubris” reminds us -- at a critical juncture -- that intelligence is too important to be left to the spies.