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If the Americans attack Iran for the first time in 1,400 years, we may unite Sunnis and Shias against us. So I guess there is room for accomplishment everywhere.

Michael Scheuer

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Michael Scheuer
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 1
Author
Blogger
Intelligence Analyst
Buffalo
New York
First
Attack
Years
Everywhere
Time
Guess
Americans
Sunnis
Room
Shia
Rooms
Unite
May
Accomplishment
Firsts
Iran

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Well, the next attack in the United States will be larger than 9/11. And there's no doubt that if they have a weapon of mass destruction, they'll use it.
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I think it's very instructive to look at a man like Ramsey Ahmad Yousef, who almost brought down the World Trade Center in 1993. He's short some fingers, his body is scarred, he's missing an eye - because he was practicing and not getting it right. But eventually they get it right.
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The whole importance of Iraq is that we have now created two things. One, Iraq is in the Arab heartland in terms of an attraction for people who want to fight the Americans and their allies. It's far greater than anything Afghanistan was aftertheSoviets invaded. It's easy to get to, there's no trouble with languages.
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So what we have is an American foreign policy that is inextricably linked to domestic matters. It is very dangerous for a politician who desires nothing more than to stay in office to address the mindset that any change in policy is appeasement. And Americans will accept that for a certain amount of time.
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You become an anti-Semite. And as powerful as the Israeli lobby is, the Saudi lobby is just as powerful. In fact, the Saudis probably have more money to throw around, and they suborn former U.S. intelligence officials, former ambassadors, former generals to support them from within by lobbying the Congress and other American institutions.
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If you look at groups in the Palestine region, Hamas and the Palestine Islamic jihad, more often than not in their first operations they would accidentally blow themselves up on the way to the target or the bomb wouldn't go off.
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I don't know what our capabilities are. If I were there, I think it would be nutty to do that. The only country on Earth more containable than Iran is Iraq. And we've certainly made a mistake there. We could have continued Saddam.
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Initial incompetence is not a reason to be dismissive of capabilities. Al Qaeda itself was incompetent when it started as a terrorist organization. And clearly it's gone from blowing themselves up to knocking down the World Trade Center.
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You just have to come to grips with the fact that people don't like to be invaded or bombed by anybody. And America has been engaged in that.
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I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable...Yes, I think it's probably a near thing.
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In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we've probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria.
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What I tried to do is to present the evidence that's available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.
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We [Americans] continue to be harangued by politicians about how Americans must fight this war because we're being attacked because we have freedoms and liberties and women in the workplace and a whole list of ephemera that have nothing to do with this war at all.
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You couldn't have done this without killing an Arab prince.
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And we're being attacked because of what we do, not because of who we are. And by refusing to talk about that, I'm afraid the American people, at least, don't have a good idea of just how dangerous the threat is that we face.
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I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who's out to destroy our civilization.
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A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device. Yes, I think it's probably a near thing.
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I think the world is more perilous and America is basically undefended. For me the two touchstones after 9/11 for domestic security were our borders. Not for discriminatory reasons or to stop immigration, but simply to allow law enforcement to find out who is in our country without facing an undocumented pool of aliens that increases by the hour.
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