Sunday, February 21, 2010

Michael Scheuer: Civilian Casualties Don't Matter



Most people know Michael Scheuer from his appearance on the Bill Maher show, where he bravely advocated a refreshing America-first, Israel-last policy as he was interviewed by the rattled Zionist Bill Maher. He raised the spectre of the Osama Bin Laden boogeyman by describing him as 'more dangerous than a terrorist', but his stance against Israel and his non-interventionist attitude was admirable. Non-interventionism is pretty much what Michael Scheuer is about (he named his website Non-Intervention.com).

 

He's written some good stuff, despite his adamance that America's true enemies are the "Islamists". Here are a couple of examples.

  • On the American Israel lobby: Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet it Does
  • On the neocons and other Zionists skewing U.S. foreign policy in Israel's favour: Turning The Tables on the Israel Firsters
  • When recently he spoke out against Israel and the Lobby on C-Span, he was widely condemned by Zionists like Jeffrey Goldberg at the TheAtlantic.com who described him as a "Jew-hating crank", IsraelNationalNews.com (IsraelNN) and Adam Holland, which wasn't half predictable.

     

    I posted the IsraelNN article here at WUFYS, implicitly endorsing Scheuer and his views, some of which I was already aware were highly questionable. Nothing quite as questionable as this, though - check this out:

    We can't win anyway

    By Michael F. Scheuer

    Adjunct Professor of Security Studies, Georgetown University

    The military option should be taken off the table in all instances -- save an immediate response to foreign attack -- until we elect a president and congress that will abide by the constitutional requirements and machinery for declaring war that were put in place by the Founders.

    In addition, and more practically, the option should be taken off the table vis-à-vis Iran because we have a military that cannot win a war. The common wisdom is that the politicians are to blame for preventing the generals from doing their job; that is, killing the enemy and, as needed, its civilian supporters until each is convinced it is irrefutably defeated. I begin to think, however, that the common wisdom is only partially correct. Our bipartisan political leadership surely is pathetic when it comes to war-making, but the U.S. general officer corps -- save for a few Marine generals -- is today chockfull of bureaucrats, nation-builders, and wanna-be social scientists.

    Take that might warrior General McChrystal, for example. In the midst of a supposedly “major offensive” in Helmand Province, the general has spent most of his time apologizing for the deaths of civilian supporters of the Taleban and al-Qaeda, and withdrawing from the battlefield a weapon system that presumably was there because it contributed to victory and helped protect our soldiers and Marines. Sparing civilian casualties might make sense if those civilians were pro-U.S. or even pro-Karzai, but they are not.

    The Taleban’s steadily upward trend line across Afghanistan -- not just in the southern provinces -- since 2006 can only be explained by growing popular support from Afghans who are pro-Taleban (some) and/or opposed to the U.S.-NATO occupation (most). To think you are going to win the hearts and minds of these Afghans by limiting civilian casualties is a figment of the social-science minds of counter-insurgency theorists. It is not for nothing that the acerbic but thoroughly brilliant Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld wrote that counter-insurgency doctrine is always written by losers.

    Martin van Creveld is the Israeli academic who threatened that 'we could destroy all European capitals' and that "we have the capability to take the rest of the world down with us [with nukes]. And I can assure you that that will happen, if Israel goes under."

    For the life of me, and as the father of a newly draft-age son, I cannot imagine why American parents still trust their soldier-children to politicians -- in both parties -- and generals who are unwilling to do anything so old-fashion, anachronistic, and politically incorrect as relentlessly killing the enemy and his supporters until they are defeated. One hopes that American parents will soon wise up and begin to discourage their kids from joining a military whose generals increasingly see U.S. casualties as the necessary cost, not of winning, but of nation-building, fawning over their addled political masters, and pleasing international opinion and the pacifist purveyors of international law.

    [Yeah, who cares about international law? Pfft.]

    The wars we are fighting today are the products of the lethal-for-America fantasy that war has changed and no longer requires much killing or an outright victory. This, of course, is nonsense and only our elites and those of Europe believe it; our Islamist enemies know better. America once knew that you never go to war without aiming for victory, and led by men like William Sherman, U.S. Grant, Nathan Bedford Forrest, George Patton, and, until recently, most Marine generals, our military leaders knew that, in Forrest’s words, war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Armed with this fact, and with Sherman’s dictum that the only mercy in war is fast and complete victory, the U.S. military once put fear and sober second thoughts into those who meant America harm. Today, the same military causes some circumspection among our enemies, but it mostly causes mirth in their minds over the specter of a hapless pack of coddled general officers who seek to win un-winnable hearts and minds at the cost of many hundreds of billions dollars and numerous wasted young lives.

    Tom Feeley of InformationClearingHouse.info (ICH) posted this on his site, but not to point out Scheuer's callous disregard for human life. It was posted under the title What Should Obama Do Next On Iran? Act For The Republic and Independence, apparently to endorse a list of actions that Obama should take on the Iran issue, which was apparently written by Scheuer. But if you click on the source link at the ICH post, the list is not there. The link will take you straight to Scheuer's rant about all the fuss over killing innocents, which to him is just an impediment to "victory".

    Scheuer is a regular contributor to Antiwar.com. He might claim to be a non-interventionist but he doesn't sound very anti-war, does he?

    Is Scheuer a Shill?

    Scheuer could still be on the CIA's payroll, but shillery is usually the least likely explanation for suspect behaviour. It stands to reason that most people accused of being disinformationalists are just plain wrong.

    The problem with the online movement is that shillery is often the first conclusion people jump to, especially in the anti-Zionist scene. For example, if a journalist, writer or radio host doesn't blame Israel and Zionism for 9/11, we'll conclude that they're government agents or disinformation artists - a part of the conspiracy - when it's much more likely that they simply believe what they're saying (that cave-dwelling Muslims orchestrated 9/11 or that the Bush family did, or whatever else the case may be). Some will go even further and claim, arbitrarily, that they must be 'Jews'. It's pathological with some people. Rationalisation goes out the window and all they seem to have left is conspiracy theory. Kind of ironic, really.

    Scheuer is not your typical case study, though. The 9/11 operation had to fool the bulk of the global intelligence community as well as the civilian population to be viable and effective, but Scheuer is an expert on al Qaeda and Bin Laden, and was head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit from 1996-99, and then Special Advisor to that unit until 2004. He's written entire books about the al Qaeda 'threat' in which he criticises American policy, the first of which he started writing in 1999, well before September 11, 2001. As a senior CIA analyst, how can he not be aware that Bin Laden and al Qaeda was a creation of, and an asset to, that agency? And if he is aware, why hasn't he written about it? He published his books anonymously and was, perhaps conveniently, 'outed' as the author just in time to come out as a non-interventionist pundit for the anti-war scene. But despite Scheuer's contribution to sites like AntiWar.com and his criticism of the Israel lobby and neocon policy, he is still an ardent promoter of the "war on terror" and ergo the Zionist war against Islam. His position is essentially the same as Ron Paul's: that America's real enemy is radical Islam but American interventionism is to blame for that radicalism.

    Another interesting factoid is that Scheuer's work has been promoted by Bin Laden himself - from the grave. In a tape released in 2007, well after his death, "Bin Laden" sporting a nice, black, freshly "dyed" beard says:

    "If you want to understand what's going on and if you would like to get to know some of the reasons for your losing the war against us, then read the book of Michael Scheuer."



    The Age Old "Six Million" Canard


    Click to enlarge


    "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel."

    David Ben-Gurion (Quoted on pp 855-56 in Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion in a slightly different translation).


    Andie has posted a blog which links to a compilation of newspaper items showing that the mythical figure of six million and talk about a Jewish "holocaust" predates World War II by a long shot, and has been oddly recurrent throughout modern history. The six million figure shows up repeatedly in old newspaper articles, almost as if international Jewry were willing their own "holocaust" into existence.



    This source, among others, offers an explanation as to why:

    In the Hebrew-text of Torah-prophesies it states: "You shall return." In that text the letter "V" or "VAU" is missing (which also stands for "6"). The researcher Ben Weintraub was informed by Rabbis that the missing "V" (= the missing 6) was the foreshadowing of the "6 million". Therefore, the prophesy: "You shall return", is interpreted as: "You shall return minus 6 million." [2]This self-imposed prophesy led to the "6 million-prophecy-crash" in 1919. Based on the Balfour-Declaration of 1917 the state of Israel was guaranteed, and the Diaspora-Jews would return to the "Promised Land". The leading Jews at that time expected 1920 a migration of their brethren into "their Land". But, before the return could take place, "6 million" of them had to disappear, according to prophesies.

    Here are a few interesting quotes.

    "These numbers do matter," Hilberg [one of the most prominent Jewish holocaust historians] said. "They also matter for a very simple reason -- call it religious, if you like."[Guttenplan in The Atlantic Monthly, Boston, USA, February, 2000]

    "What are you writing?" the Rebbe asked. "Stories," I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. "About people you knew?" Yes, about things that happened or could have happened. "But they did not?" No, not all of them did. In fact, some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: "That means you are writing lies!" I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defence. Yet, I had to justify myself: "Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are - although they never occurred." [Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, Schocken Books, New York 1982, S. VIII]

    No-one less important than the late Director of the German government sponsored Institute for Contemporary History, Dr. Martin Broszat, stated under oath in front of a German court, that the "6 million holocaust-Jews" were a "symbolical figure", not a factual one [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Aug. 23, 1994, page 7].

    Source

    There's much more to add to the aforementioned list of news items. This is where the Google news archive comes in handy. Use the advanced search option to refine your search and specify a particular time period (say, 1890 - 1930).

    Here are just a few items of interest.

    Herald-Journal - April 2, 1919: Six Million Jews Starving To Death

    The destitution of Jewish war sufferers during the coming months will probably surpass anything ever known in the history of human suffering; their suffering is worse than death - it is the lingering torture of starvation, the piteous tragedy of emaciation, the horrible waiting, in agony of hunger, for the grim reaper to end their misery.

    The Toronto World - Feb 6 1920: Six Million Jews are Facing Death

    Feilding Star, Volume XXVII, Issue 95, 15 November 1905, Page 2: Great Britain's Indignation At Jewish Massacres

    The above article published in 1905 mentions Arthur Balfour and Lord Rothschild of the British Zionist Federation, and the latter's desire for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine 12 years before the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

    The meeting recorded its earnest conviction that the Jews were not immune from a recurrence of the massacres until they obtained a publicly recognised home in Palestine.

    New York Times - July 20, 1921: Massacre Threatens All Jews as Soviet Power Wanes

    Russia's 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre. As the famine is spreading, the counter-revolutionary movement is gaining and the Soviet's control is waning.

    And this corker, which proves that Jews were asking for billions (in 1918 dollars!) in interest-free loans well before today's post-1967 U.S. policy of billions in aid to Israel.

    New York Times - Oct 18, 1918: $1,000,000,000 Fund To Rebuild Jewry - LOANS WITHOUT INTEREST

    The American people, Jews and nonJews alike, will soon be asked to lend or contribute the larger part of a fund of approximately $1,000,000,000 to carry out plans for the reconstruction of the Jewry of the entire world.

    (List to be updated as time permits.)

    The Google news archive is also helpful in digging up old newspaper articles about early Jewish terrorism in Palestine, before the creation of the Zionist regime. Here are a few examples:

    The Age - Nov 2, 1945: Outrages in Palestine: Jewish Terrorism

    The Sydney Morning Herald - Jan 4, 1947: New Palestine Attacks: Jewish Terrorism Resumed

    Time - Nov 13, 1944: Stern Gangsters

    Get stuck into it and do your own digging. It's a goldmine. Also check the news archive on Churchill's statement about Jewish terrorism in the wake of the assassination of Lord Moyne by the Stern Gang in 1944.



    Originally posted at wakeupfromyourslumber.com, Jan 26, 2010