"Bin Laden does reprehensible activities, and we should surely take care of that by killing him as soon as we can. But he's not an irrational man. He's a very worthy enemy. He's an enemy to worry about"
About this Quote
Scheuer’s line tries to do two things Americans often insist are incompatible: endorse lethal force while refusing the comforting story that the target is simply “crazy.” Calling Bin Laden “reprehensible” and urging that “we should surely take care of that by killing him” nods to the post-9/11 appetite for decisiveness. The pivot - “But he’s not an irrational man” - is the real payload. It’s an argument against moralized analysis, the kind that treats terrorism as pathology instead of strategy.
The phrase “a very worthy enemy” is deliberately provocative, not admiring. It’s a technician’s vocabulary smuggled into a culture that prefers villains who are either cartoonish or cowardly. “Worthy” signals capability: discipline, operational patience, ideological coherence. Scheuer’s subtext is bureaucratic and corrective. If you assume irrationality, you stop asking the questions that matter: what incentives, grievances, and geopolitical openings are being exploited; how recruitment is sustained; why certain narratives land.
Context matters: Scheuer was a CIA counterterrorism figure associated with the “Alec Station” era, when the U.S. was struggling to classify al-Qaeda as more than a criminal gang with religious rhetoric. His warning - “an enemy to worry about” - is less about fear than about respect for the adversary’s agency. It’s also a critique of American self-flattery: we like to imagine violence arrives from nowhere, not as a response to policies with names, maps, and timelines.
The sentence’s tight moral-then-analytic structure lets him keep legitimacy (“kill him”) while demanding seriousness (“he’s rational”). It works because it denies the audience the narcotic of contempt.
The phrase “a very worthy enemy” is deliberately provocative, not admiring. It’s a technician’s vocabulary smuggled into a culture that prefers villains who are either cartoonish or cowardly. “Worthy” signals capability: discipline, operational patience, ideological coherence. Scheuer’s subtext is bureaucratic and corrective. If you assume irrationality, you stop asking the questions that matter: what incentives, grievances, and geopolitical openings are being exploited; how recruitment is sustained; why certain narratives land.
Context matters: Scheuer was a CIA counterterrorism figure associated with the “Alec Station” era, when the U.S. was struggling to classify al-Qaeda as more than a criminal gang with religious rhetoric. His warning - “an enemy to worry about” - is less about fear than about respect for the adversary’s agency. It’s also a critique of American self-flattery: we like to imagine violence arrives from nowhere, not as a response to policies with names, maps, and timelines.
The sentence’s tight moral-then-analytic structure lets him keep legitimacy (“kill him”) while demanding seriousness (“he’s rational”). It works because it denies the audience the narcotic of contempt.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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