Book Review - Marching Toward Hell

I thought I would share a book review of mine from a few years ago that has been fairly well-received on Goodreads.  It is by a very knowledgeable author with a lot of experience in the Middle East.  If you want to understand why the US is so reviled in that part of the world and why everything we do over there seems to make matters worse...well, read on:

Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq by Michael Scheuer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A very slow, and at times frustrating read. Slow because sometimes you need to just stop and process the information, and a lot of the information/wisdom the author has to share is in the footnotes, of which there are many. Frustrating when you come to fully realize how completely, totally, and utterly wrong the US policy in the Middle East has been.

This is a book written by a justifiably angry, passionate man, who invested 20+ years at the CIA specializing in the Middle East, among other things creating and running the bin Laden unit and watching Clinton ignore opportunity after opportunity to take bin Laden out, or Bush II execute a half-hearted, ineffective war in Afghanistan and follow it up with a pointless, equally ineffective invasion of Iraq, while bin Laden celebrated his good fortune and the strategic victory that Iraq represented.

Indeed, one of the things I learned from this book is that bin Laden's publicly stated goals not only are very different from what US politicians spout in sound bites for the cameras, but also that they are very consistent over time and make a certain amount of sense relative to the realities of Islam and the Middle East.

Reading this book (and the others by the author) also taught me that there is no politician of either party that can be trusted to give anything like a true accounting of the events leading up to, including, and after 9/11. The 'ruling elite' (a contemptuous term used a lot in the book) of the US in both the executive and congressional branches is in either mass denial, or unfathomable ignorance and stupidity, or both. They are also guilty of a mass paranoia about what other countries think - they are convinced that we have to fight 'polite wars' where civilians are never hurt and a minimal amount of damage is done to the country, largely to keep in the good graces of European governments and special-interest voting blocs at home. The author makes a compelling, if squirm-inducing case for why we need to bring the full force and power of the US military to bear when it is used without tempering it, or apologizing for it.

The book has one interesting theme throughout, which the author returns to again and again, and finishes the book with -- and that is how far from the principles set forth by the founders of the American republic our policies in the Middle East have been...in many cases directly contrary to the wishes and warnings of the very gentlemen whose memories the neoconservative politicians who got us into this mess just love to invoke when they thunder forth about spreading American democracy anywhere and everywhere, appropriate or not.


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