"Imperial Hubris" by Michael Scheuer

• US leaders refuse to accept the obvious: We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency--not criminality or terrorism--and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces.
• The military is now America’s only tool and will remain so while current policies are in place. No public diplomacy, presidential praise for Islam, or politically correct debate masking the reality that many of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims hate us for actions not values, will get America out of this war.
• Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with US policies and actions in the Muslim world.
• The war Bin Laden is waging has everything to do with the tenets of the Islamic religion. He could not have his current--and increasing--level of success if Muslims did not believe their faith, brethren, resources, and lands to be under attack by the United States and, more generally, the West. Indeed, the United States, and its policies and actions, are bin Laden’s only indispensable allies.
• Persian Gulf oil and the lack of serious US alternative-energy development are at the core of the bin Laden issue. For cheap, easily accessible oil, Washington and the West have supported the Muslim tyrannies bin Laden and other Islamists seek to destroy. There can be no other reason for backing Saudi Arabia, a regime that, since its founding, has deliberately fostered an Islamic ideology, whose goals--unlike bin Laden’s--can be met only by annihilating all non-Muslims.
• This war has the potential to last beyond our children’s lifetimes and to be fought mostly on US soil.
• Seven truths about Afghanistan:
• Minorities can rule in Kabul, but not for long
• The Afghans who matter are Muslim tribal xenophobes
• Afghans cannot be bought
• Strong governments in Kabul cause war
• An international cockpit not insular backwater
• Pakistan must have an Islamist, Pashtun-dominated Afghan regime
• There will be an Islamist regime in Kabul
• America and the West have no means to measure success against al Qaeda.
• Al Qaeda’s most important growth since the 11 September attacks has not been physical but has been, rather, its expansion into the Internet.
• Bin Laden and other Islamist leaders view Afghanistan as “the only Islamic country” in the world.
• A core tenant of al Qaeda’s strategy is the radical Islamists must gain control of a nation.
• The years since 1990 have seen a series of ill-conceived, half-started US wars: the 1991 Iraq war, Somalia, Haiti, Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq again.
• Generals are given a three part directive regarding war: fight and win quickly; do not kill many of the enemy, destroy much of his property, or kill many of his civilian; and, above all, lose the barest minimum of US soldiers because the soft American public will not tolerate high casualties.
• The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific US government policies and actions.
• Six US policies seen as anti-Muslim:
• US support for Israel that keeps Palestinians in the Israelis thrall
• US and other Western troops on the Arabian Peninsula
• US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
• US support for Russia, India, and China against their Muslim militants
• US pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low
• US support for apostate, corrupt, and tyrannical Muslim governments
• Get used to and good at killing. To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms.
• Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come Sherman-like razing of infrastructure.
• Because Americans are not used to a professional military fighting their wars, they are too worried by causalities. The sooner our leaders start speaking of the cruel reality of professional soldiering, the sooner Americans will stop knee-jerk yellow ribboning and calling to “bring the troops home” almost before they deploy to the war zone.
• So committed are we to finding others to do hard and bloody things for us that we misread reality and enlist allies who cannot or will not do the job.
• Bin Laden is leading and inspiring a worldwide anti-US insurgency; he is waging war while we fight him with counter-terrorism policies dominated by law-enforcement tactics and procedures.
• War is being waged on us because of what we, as a nation, are doing in the Islamic world.
• For our own welfare and survival, we must “watch others dies with equanimity” and help after “the flames burn themselves out” by focusing our overseas intercourse on trade, sharing knowledge, and donating food and medicine. America must not commit abroad unless genuine national interests are at risk, and she must go to war only for survival and then act to annihilate the enemy.