Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Scheuer

Scheuer’s line is a bureaucrat’s provocation dressed up as moral neutrality. By insisting on “without the connotation good or bad,” he tries to quarantine himself from outrage while still grabbing the rhetorical voltage of calling bin Laden “a great man.” It’s a classic analytic move from the national-security world: “greatness” as sheer historical force, not virtue. But the sentence can’t actually keep its hands clean. In ordinary English, “great man” carries a prestige charge Scheuer knows will detonate, which is precisely why the phrasing works. It forces listeners to confront an uncomfortable reality: history is often bent by people we’d rather describe only as monsters.

The subtext is partly disciplinary. Scheuer is pushing back against a post-9/11 tendency to treat America’s enemies as irrational or uniquely evil, as if moral disgust were an intelligence method. Calling bin Laden “great” is a way of demanding strategic seriousness: you don’t defeat an adversary by caricaturing him, and you don’t understand a movement by treating it as a criminal anomaly. The sentence also carries an indictment of U.S. complacency. If one man can “influence the course of history” so drastically, then the institutions charged with anticipating such shocks failed at the most basic task: recognizing agency, ideology, and capability before they became world-altering.

Context matters: coming from a public servant and former counterterrorism insider, this isn’t edgy contrarianism for its own sake. It’s a plea for realism that deliberately risks sounding like heresy, because Scheuer’s point is that comforting language can be its own form of self-deception.