Michael Scheuer's book is a kind of argument against a thesis, and here we have in Bush's State of the Union address a succinct statement of the thesis. "We're still grasping or groping around to try to find out why we're being attacked, and it has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe in. It has to do with what we do in the world, or at least in the Islamic world." "I don't think we're out of the woods yet in Afghanistan. Afghanistan, as always, has many more chapters to go, and I think we're going to see some surprising ones." "They simply don't understand that the threats to the United States are transnational and not nation-state in dimension. And one of the reasons they went to Iraq is they don't understand that. The Clinton administration didn't understand it; this administration doesn't understand it." "There's just a basic misperception of the way the world works -- partly a holdover from the Cold War, partly because it's genuinely hard to defend America against transnational threats, but partly because they're at the moment addicted to this kind of hands-on Wilsonianism." |