Marching Toward Hell IV

Michael Scheuer, a 20-plus-year veteran of the CIA, headed the agency’s bin Laden unit, managed its covert-action operation and authored its rendition program. Scheuer spent his career developing strategies to keep America safe. Read here excerpts from Marching Toward Hell:

Here are some Scheuer insights aimed at putting America on a course to minding our own business and withdrawing from the misguided course of hegemony set by the neocon/interventionists.

Only the federal government can lead the Manhattan Project-like effort that is required to release the United States from energy dependence on governments who are our enemies, who cannot control their own territory and ensure reliable energy production and export, or who be tempted to disrupt our economy for religious reasons, such as, respectfully Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia.

In the conduct of foreign policy, the degree of energy-efficiency America attains will be the degree to which it can begin to aggressively disengage from the problems, hatreds, and wars of the Muslim world in which it has a stake only as long as U.S. energy supplies are insecure. Put it bluntly, as progress is made toward U.S. energy self-suffciency, it will become obvious that there is no U.S. national interest in the Arabian Peninsula that is worth the life of a single U.S. Marine.

The activities that Washington undertakes to facilitate the success of its current foreign policies in the Muslim world succeed only in digging a deeper hole for the United States.

It is a common belief in many Muslim countries that U.S. financial, military, political, and diplomatic aid ensures that tyrannies remain in power.

If there is one hard-and-fast-rule in U.S. national security, it should be that U.S. leaders must never adopt policies that tend to bring other peoples’ conflicts, especially religious wars, inside the United States.