Alan Bock Sr. editorial writer The Orange County Register abock@ocregister.com

The anonymous author of "Imperial Hubris," a 22-year veteran of the CIA who was widely "outed" after the book was published last year - and finally retired and made himself fully public - is not exactly a pacifist, although he is deeply critical of the war in Iraq. Michael Scheuer, in fact, spent much of his time in the CIA on the Osama bin Laden-emerging terrorist threat beat, and was convinced long enough ago to have written a previous anonymous book ("Through Our Enemies' Eyes") designed to wake Americans to the threat posed by radical Islam.

The previous book, which I found useful in trying to get up to speed on al-Qaida after 9/11 and helped some to raise public awareness, is probably the reason the CIA approved the publication of this book, although there has been speculation that its publication was part of a CIA plan to undermine the Bush administration's policy of pre-emptive war.

Several things are notable about this book. First, Scheuer, who spent years on the bin Laden team in the CIA, doesn't buy the facile "they hate us because we're free" explanation for jihadists. To the contrary, bin Laden's statements, for all their grandiose self-importance, are filled with specific grievances, most notably, prior to 9/11, the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida is resilient and still around, and if you want hints as to what it's likely to do next, take the trouble to study its public statements.

Second, while many critics of the Iraq war view the Afghan campaign as successful, Scheuer views it, as he titles his chapter on the campaign, "An Unprepared and Ignorant Lunge to Defeat." The United States, he says, failed to call on people who had learned about Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns in the 1980s, moved too slowly, and lost its best chance to kill or capture bin Laden.

Scheuer notes that "the occasional substitution of bravado for thought is truly an eternal attribute of senior military and intelligence officers."

Again, Scheuer is no pacifist; many of his suggested approaches to defeat bin Laden-style jihadism are swift and brutal. But he thinks the Iraq war was a gift handed to bin Laden in that it vindicated bin Laden's complaints and helped his recruiting. Scheuer argues that democracy is one of the most difficult commodities to export, and pleads that we should "not need to aspire to reform the world in democracy's name and in the guise of a hectoring, white-faced, pistol-packing, Wilsonian schoolmarm."

Among the topics the author thinks must be debated thoroughly before we have a chance to defeat jihadist terrorism and insurgency are:

Does it serve America's core interests to support Israel uncritically?

Are we ready to give up "the sordid legacy of Woodrow Wilson's internationalism - which soaked the twentieth century in as much or more blood as any other 'ism' - and recall and institutionalize John Quincy Adams's advice that the United States must be 'the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all ... [but] the champion and vindicator only of her own.'"

Is there any reason besides oil to back corrupt dictators in the Middle East?

Do we need military bases on the Arabian Peninsula?

Are there alternatives to dependence on Persian Gulf oil, the cost of which is high in American lives?

Scheuer sees little reason for optimism that the policies that enrage Muslims around the globe and give "bin Laden's efforts to instigate a worldwide anti-U.S. defensive jihad virtually unlimited room for growth" will be changed any time soon. "All war is based on deception,' the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote long ago," he writes. "To date, America's war against bin Laden and al-Qaida has deceived only the American public."

However, he has offered a bracing critique that is worth reading, and that might be a hopeful beginning.