Politics & Power Quote by Michael Scheuer

Scheuer is taking a scalpel to an institutional reflex: treating the absence of violence as evidence of success. The line is built like an indictment, not a musing, with “great intellectual failures” doing the heavy lifting. He’s not accusing the intelligence community of missing facts; he’s accusing it of misreading silence. That’s a more destabilizing charge, because it suggests the problem isn’t collection but cognition: a bureaucratic comfort with narratives that flatter the system.

The quote works because it flips a cherished metric. Counterterrorism culture, especially after 9/11, rewards prevention stories, internal briefings that can be summarized as “we stopped it.” Scheuer argues those stories are epistemically weak: if nothing happens, you can’t easily know whether you deterred an adversary, got lucky, or simply weren’t targeted. By narrowing the community’s default explanations to two self-congratulatory options (“he can’t” or “we’ve defeated him”), he exposes a closed loop of reasoning where success is assumed and uncertainty is treated as a public-relations problem.

The subtext is strategic humility with a bite. Adversaries can pause, adapt, shift theaters, pursue longer timelines, or choose different instruments of harm. Reading that as incapacity mistakes restraint for weakness and patience for surrender. Scheuer, a former CIA counterterrorism official turned critic of U.S. policy, is also signaling that intelligence is being bent toward reassurance and budgetary legitimacy: if your mission is permanent, your performance measures must always look good. His warning is that complacency isn’t just an analytic flaw; it’s an operational vulnerability.