Re-reading Michael Scheuer

Michael Scheuer, who still has a website, was a CIA hand on the Bin Laden desk - over the late 1990s. As has been pointed out, he was unqualified for that position and his office overall was a failure.

Scheuer then latched onto the pro-Islam, anti-Israel side of the Deep State: Graham Fuller, Valerie Plame, other Giraldi-readers. After Bush was gone there wasn't any use for them.

At base, the Deep State wants the same wars and interventions but under a rainbow flag. David Frum, the MOAR WOAR faction's spokesman, found it in himself to denounce Scheuer early in the Trump Presidency. It seems Scheuer found his true party in the Ron Paul Forum, and then - where else - QAnon. Nowadays he's antivax.

Andrew Harrod is now reviewing Scheuer's early material. Harrod seems ... pleasantly surprised. The key work here is a study of Bin Laden's actual words, not always read by Frum's set. Contrary to popular opinion, and somewhat contrary to Arab popular opinion, Bin Laden didn't claim the mantle of Caliph and didn't even claim to be a trained scholar. (Contrast, Ibrahim Baghdadi.) He claimed to be a Muslim who could read Scripture and history, which he presented with rational arguments, not ever claiming himself as authority. (Again: contrast a self-identified caliph.)

I should interject here that Bin Laden's qaeda did on occasion defer to living authorities on Islam, starting with... the Taliban. I dimly recall the qaeda had hailed Mullah Omar as the amir al-mu'minîn. Mainly, though, Bin Laden hoped to appeal to Shi'ism as well, which Bin Laden could do as a layman. It was a neverending source of frustration to him that his fanclub, like Zarqawi's "Al Qaeda In Iraq", kept bombing Imami shrines and gatherings.

It is, I hazard, the very opposite of irony that Harrod is doing the same favour to Scheuer - judging the output, not the man - as Scheuer had done to Bin Laden.

Harrod reviewing Scheuer is mostly looking at early 2002, and here Scheuer seems solid. Looking back, we might also revisit Scheuer's Imperial Hubris in 2004, when he was calling the Afghanistan occupation an error. As for Iraq, well... that book Fiasco wasn't Scheuer's.

Which is not to say the books lack nits to pick. Frum is correct to flag this one in the second one: the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history. Late in 2001, Bin Laden did enjoy some popularity in the Islamic world; but even by year-end 2002, I got the whiff of Edgelord Troll among his loudest supporters. Like those in Finsbury Park - their poster A TOWERING DAY IN HISTORY was designed to inflame. As Bin Laden receded further into hiding (Abbottabad, we later learnt) it was questionable if this man had even survived Tora Bora. As Sunni-Shi'a relations cratered in Iraq and Syria, other spinoffs claimed more importance, like Zarqawi, and especially Baghdadi. My records show 14 March 2004 as where I'd laid my marker (from Lee Harris) that "Ladenism" was an attitude, not an organisation; and that Bin Laden himself was a symbol at most. Nowadays I doubt most Muslims respected Shaykh Stronghorse even as a symbol by the end of 2002 let alone 2004.

Scheuer's inability to see that just goes to illustrate, further, just how unqualified he was as a CIA agent. Shame, really. He arguably made the right enemies.