The Confessions of a Rum-Runner Book

This book was written by Michael Scheuer, who was the first head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit. The author was a counterterrorist analyst for the CIA.

We hear many things in the news about Osama bin Laden. Much of it seems contradictory, and much of it does not seem accurate. Why is this? The author decided to evaluate OBL from his own words -- speeches, publications, and his own writings first and foremost. In the past, military adversaries studied each other and tried to understand why and how they planned and behaved as they did. A good example of this would be the study that Patton made of Rommel during WWII that allowed Patton to defeat the German Panzer battalion in North Africa.

Schuer's premise is that we have based our understanding of OBL on media and political rhetoric and not on what the man himself said. As a result of this, we have totally misunderstood and misrepresented what OBL wanted to do. Patton was able to defeat Rommel because he studied the man himself. If Patton were to approach Rommel the way the US is approaching OBL, Patton would never have won because he would have been fighting an adversary who actually did not exist.

Scheuer does a masterful job of showing how both the Bush and the Obama administration foreign policy has set the US military up for defeat, not because they are outclassed by a superior adversary, but because they are not fighting the real adversary. I recommend this book highly. I am looking now for comments and updates from the author on OBL since his death in May 2011.