"We are losing.
"Four years and two wars after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse. Against our most dangerous foe, our strategic position is weakening."
So begins Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's sobering new book, The Next Attack. The authors, two of US ex-president Bill Clinton's counterterrorism aides, draw a persuasive and utterly frightening picture of the current state of America's war on terror.
They see more and more Muslims, many of whom had no earlier ties to radical organizations, enlisting in the struggle against the West, and they also point out the proliferation of freelance terrorists, self-starters without any formal ties to al-Qaeda or other organized groups. They see local and regional grievances (in places like Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Southeast Asia) merging into "a pervasive hatred of the US, its allies, and the inter-national order they uphold." And they see in the Muslim world traditional social and religious inhibitions against violence and even against the use of weapons of mass destruction weakening as a growing number of radical clerics assume positions of influence.
Like the CIA officer Michael Scheuer, the author (under the pseudonym "Anonymous") of the 2004 book Imperial Hubris, Benjamin and Simon regard the US invasion of Iraq as a kind of Christmas present to Osama bin Laden: an unnecessary and ill-judged war of choice that has not only become a recruitment tool for jihadis but that has also affirmed the story line that al-Qaeda leaders have been telling the Muslim world that America is waging war against Islam and seeking to occupy oil-rich Muslim countries.
The US invasion of Iraq toppled one of the Mideast's secular dictatorships, the authors write, and produced a country in chaos, a country that could well become what Afghanistan was during the years of Soviet occupation: a magnet for jihadis and would-be jihadis from around the world; a "country-sized training ground" (with an almost limitless supply of arms). The authors add that "the sad irony" of the war is that Iraq now stands as an argument against democratization for many in the Middle East: "the current chaos there confirms the fears of both the rulers and the ruled in the authoritarian states of the region that sudden political change is bound to let slip the dogs of civil war."
In their last book, The Age of Sacred Terror (2002), Benjamin and Simon looked at how bureaucratic infighting and a lack of urgency on the part of government officials contributed to the failure to prevent Sept. 11. This volume, a sequel of sorts, similarly draws upon the authors' experience in counter-terrorism and their inside know-ledge of the national security apparatus, and it offers a grim cautionary lesson: "not only are we not attending to a growing threat, we are stoking the fire."
Though the authors' message is harrowing, they write in carefully reasoned, highly convincing terms. Much of their narrative ratifies judgments made in recent books by other intelligence experts and journalists.
Like Seymour Hersh (Chain of Command) and James Bamford (A Pretext for War), Simon and Benjamin note the Bush administration's penchant, in the walk-up to the war, for cherry-picking intelligence to bolster its own preconceptions and for setting up alternative intelligence-gathering operations that would produce evidence supporting ideas that higher-ups like former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld already believed to be true.
RSS