People have their minds made up about Iraq. Facts don’t change perceptions. Readers just fit facts into pre-existing world views. In World War I, soldiers killed each other by the millions in the name of the very same Christian God. At least divided Americans aren’t killing each other yet over their differences over Iraq.Of course I was disappointed, but not surprised, by how PBS’s latest “seminal” TV series, ”America at a Crossroads,” handled the Iraq war in its initial broadcast Sunday. They had Fouad Ajami, John Hopkins’ noted Arabist, on in the earlier, more historical part of the broadcast, but when the story reached the U.S. overthrow of Saddam, Ajami was nowhere to be found. Their preferred expert on Iraq's liberation was Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA man who headed the analytical effort to find Osama bin Laden. Scheuer in a recent interview correctly said, “I'm not at all an expert on Iraq.” Still, Scheuer is an al-Qaeda expert who is highly critical of the Clinton administration’s non-effort to take out bin Laden. So what he says about Iraq has credibility. According to Scheuer:
the whole war effort so far has been a mistake. . . the invasion of Iraq turned Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden from a man and an organization into a philosophy and a movement. And now we're faced with an Islamic militancy around the world that is far greater than it was on [September 11, 2001] . . . bin Laden's goal has been to simply hurt the United States enough to force us to look at home, to take care of things here, and thereby prevent us from supporting [Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria] which he -- and I think the vast majority of Muslims -- regard as oppressive police states.
Once America is removed from that sort of support, Al-Qaeda intends to focus on removing those governments, eliminating Israel, and the third step, further down the road: settling scores with what the Sunni world regards as heretics in the Shi'ite part of the Islamic world. . .
I think we're defeated in Iraq. I think we're simply looking for a way to be graceful about the exit, but it's going to be very clear to our opponents in the Islamic world that they've defeated the second superpower.
They defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; they've defeated us in Iraq; and it looks very likely that they'll defeat us in Afghanistan. And so Iraq, for all intents and purposes, as far as our enemies are concerned, is over. . . Al-Qaedaism is a more serious problem than we have imagined to date. And that it has much more to do with religion than anyone in power is willing to talk about.
