http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-anonymous2jul02,1,7151
902.story

COMMENTARY
Seeing Islam Through a Lens of U.S. Hubris

Our national mind-set may be leading us toward defeat, a CIA expert says.

By Anonymous

On the one hand, Americans are told daily by the media, newsmakers and
government officials that the West is winning the war that began on Sept.
11; that we've taken the fight to the terrorists and rolled back their
networks, and that the majority of Al Qaeda's leadership has been captured
or killed.

But if you listen closely, you can also hear sharp disconnects. The
directors of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI warn periodically
that Al Qaeda is as dangerous now as it was in 2001. And, if you dig even
deeper into the newspaper, you'll find stories claiming these gentlemen are
incorrect — Al Qaeda actually is more dangerous today than it was before
what Osama bin Laden calls the "blessed attacks" of 11 September.

Periodically, the Department of Homeland Security has raised the
threat-warning indicator from yellow to amber — or is it amber to yellow? —
on a tacky traffic-light-looking device. Adjusting the streetlight-of-death
is meant to portray the DHS judgment that the threat to U.S. interests from
someone, somewhere in the world has increased. The warnings are then
complemented by advice urging citizens to quickly buy a "disaster supply
kit," which includes duct tape and plastic sheeting to make their homes
airtight, WMD-proof fortresses.

To say the least, Americans are getting mixed and confusing messages from
their leaders. Are we headed toward a victory parade, Cold War bomb
shelters or simply straight to the graveyard? Do repeated warnings of an Al
Qaeda-produced disaster mark a genuine threat, or have federal bureaucrats
learned to cover their butts so they will not have another "failed-to-warn"
à la 9/11? Are Bin Laden-related dangers downplayed to nurse the on-again,
off-again economic recovery and the presidential prospects of both U.S.
political parties? Are we to reach for champagne or a rosary?

I believe the answer lies in the way we see and interpret people and events
outside North America, which is heavily clouded by arrogance and
self-centeredness amounting to what I called "imperial hubris." This is not
a genetic flaw in Americans that has been present since the Pilgrims
splashed ashore at Plymouth Rock, but rather a way of thinking that
America's elites acquired after the end of World War II. It is a process of
interpreting the world so it makes sense to us, a process yielding a world
in which few events seem alien because we Americanize their components.

"When confronted by a culturally exotic enemy," Lee Harris explained in the
August/September 2002 issue of Policy Review, "our first instinct is to
understand such conduct in terms that are familiar to us." Thus, for
example, Bin Laden is a criminal whose activities are fueled by money — as
opposed to a devout Muslim soldier fueled by faith — because Americans know
how to beat well-heeled gangsters. We assume, moreover, that Bin Laden and
the Islamists hate us for our liberty, freedoms and democracy, not because
they and many millions of Muslims believe U.S. foreign policy is an attack
on Islam or because the U.S. military now has a more-than-10-year record of
smashing people and things in the Islamic world.

Our political leaders contend that America's astoundingly low approval
ratings in polls taken in major Islamic countries do not reflect our
unquestioning support of Israel and, as such, its "targeted killings" and
other lethal high jinks. Nor, they say, are the ratings due to our
relentless support for tyrannical and corrupt Islamic regimes that are
systematically dissipating the Islamic world's energy resources for family
fun and profit, while imprisoning, torturing and executing domestic
dissenters. The low approval ratings, we are confident, have nothing to do
with our refusal to apply nuclear nonproliferation rules with anything
close to an even hand; a situation that makes Israeli and Indian nuclear
weapons acceptable — each is a democracy, after all — while Pakistan's
weapons are intolerable, perhaps because they are held by Muslims. And
surely, if we can just drive and manage an Islamic Reformation that makes
Muslims secular like us, all this unfortunate talk about religious war will
end.

Thus, because of the pervasive imperial hubris that dominates the minds of
our political, academic, social, media and military elites, America is able
and content to believe that the Islamic world fails to understand the
benign intent of U.S. foreign policy. This mind-set holds that America does
not need to reevaluate its policies, let alone change them; it merely needs
to better explain the wholesomeness of its views and the purity of its
purposes to the uncomprehending Islamic world. What could be more American
in the early 21st century, after all, then to re-identify a casus belli as
a communication problem, and then call on Madison Avenue to package and
hawk a remedy called
"Democracy-Secularism-and-Capitalism-are-good-for-Muslims" to an Islamic
world that has, to date, violently refused to purchase?

This is meant neither to ridicule my countrymen's intellectual abilities
nor to be supportive of Bin Laden and his interpretation of Islam, but to
say that most of the world outside North America is not, does not want to
be and probably will never be just like us. And let me be clear, I am not
talking about America's political freedoms, personal liberties or respect
for education and human rights; the same polls showing that Muslims hate
Americans for their actions find broad support for the ideas and beliefs
that make us who we are. Pew Trust polls in 2003, for instance, found that
although Muslims believed it "necessary to believe in God to be moral,"
they also favored what were termed "democratic values."

I'm saying that when Americans — the leaders and the led — process incoming
information to make it intelligible in American terms, many not only fail
to clearly understand what is going on abroad but, more ominous, fail to
accurately gauge the severity of the danger that these foreign events,
organizations, attitudes and personalities pose to U.S. national security
and our society's welfare and lifestyle.

In order to make the decisions and allocate the resources needed to ensure
U.S. security, Americans must understand the world as it is, not as we want
— or worse yet, hope — it will be.

I have long experience analyzing and attacking Bin Laden and Islamists. I
believe they are a growing threat to the United States — there is no
greater threat — and that we are being defeated not because the evidence of
the threat is unavailable but because we refuse to accept it at face value
and without Americanizing the data. This must change, or our way of life
will be unrecognizably altered.

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The author is a senior counterintelligence official at the CIA who served
from 1996 to 1999 as head of a special unit tracking Osama bin Laden. The
CIA allowed publication of his forthcoming book, "Imperial Hubris"
(Brassey's, 2004), in which the author is identified as "Anonymous."