West will fail, says ex-CIA operative

[babylonsister]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18001.htm

West will fail, says ex-CIA operative

By The Age

0711/07 "The Age" -- - -AS PESSIMISM grows in the US about Iraq, the American commander there has warned that the war will take many years to win and a former top CIA officer has told a Sydney conference that defeat is inevitable in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's bin Laden unit until 2004, said the West was losing the global battle against Muslim insurgents.

Mr Scheuer said the US and its allies had failed to commit enough troops to win and did not understand the grievances motivating Muslim insurgents.

"We in the West are fighting an enemy we have woefully chosen to misunderstand and to whom we are losing hands down and on every front," he said.

Mr Scheuer said the US and its allies continually became involved in Middle East wars because of their reliance on Arab oil supplies and had little other interest in the region.

The US had tried "to do Afghanistan on the cheap" and that defeat there was "just around the corner," he said.

Mr Scheuer's bleak declaration came as the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, said the war in Iraq could last for many years.

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[Igel]

1. Well, yes.

That was obvious a couple of years ago. One could hope, but it's fairly hopeless.

And Scheuer shows that he believes everybody's culture is just like his. He can read Zawahri and read 'honor' as having Scheuer's meaning for the word--i.e., anger of some sort over very precious and specific wrongs that merely need right action or an apology--and discounts all talk of religion as simply anomalous because he can't perceive religion being any sort of motivation at all. An analyst that can't get out of his own preconceptions is far from just being useless.

They pretty much get everything wrong that requires understanding. The only reason they look like they get things right is because of spin--minority reports become wisdom that was always accepted, reports that are ambiguous have the ambiguity removed to render reports retroactively clear. The collapse of the USSR is a case in point; in the '70s and even into the late '80s, it was nearly unanimous that the USSR would survive at least another 20 years. But in the '90s the folk that made the opinion un-unanimous were suddenly cited as having always expressed the CIA's only opinion on the matter. Fools. "Predicting the future isn't what's hard. What's hard is predicting the past."