James Jesus Angleton, former head of CIA counterintelligence, once said that the intelligence business is a “wilderness of mirrors.” Surely he was speaking about intelligence and policy at the merge, a junction now obscured by secrecy, bigotry, war, and abject incompetence. 

Policy is ill served by intelligence bias and partisanship. The country, in turn is ill served by policy that gets lost in the tactical weeds at the expense of coherent strategy. The American approach to terror and Islamism is a hodgepodge of contradictions, naive and piecemeal at best.

American Intelligence knows the name and nationality of every Islamist terror group and also knows the names and nationalities of every state supporter of Islamism. Still, two decades hence after 9/11, America still does not have a coherent policy or a plan to take out the Islamist threat.

The real enemy is the collective Arab and/or Muslim tolerance of terror and support to Islamist haters, gunmen, and bombers. The real enemy is Ummah indifference, active and soft support to the shooters. Ironically, authoritarian countries like Russia, China, and Egypt have successfully crushed their Islamic jihads. Every authoritarian state in the Ummah could do the same -- if they chose to.

Collectively, Arab and Muslim states could end religious terror tomorrow, just as Egypt did. The fact that the Ummah does not, tells us everything we need to know about Islam’s toxic fetish with ultimate religious and political supremacy.

Israel is a keystone state for Western civilization as we know it. If Israel goes, so does America. If Andrew Murray is correct, the EU is already on the ropes.

After 9/11, team Bush attacked Iraq; a war that made as much sense as killing a roach to cure a rat problem. America didn’t have the courage to neutralize the real sponsors of 9/11 in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

And now we have October 6 as Israel’s 9/11.

America’s October fail in the Middle East is not just another warning, data, or evidence failure. The perennial failure to act at all against all of Mohamed’s bad actors is the real fail.

American policy pathology guaranteed Israel would have their version 9/11 on 6 October 2023.

If we cut through all the blather, smoke, and mirrors; Israel is clearly expendable. When ‘little Satan” is gone, “big Satan” will be next -- again.

We never learn.

G. Murphy Donovan is a former USAF Intelligence officer who served as the Chief of Research and Russian Studies under General James Clapper, when Clapper was the ACS/I at HQ USAF. 

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