From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The chilling first words, "We are losing," capture the tone of this scathing evaluation of the Bush administration's responses to the September 11 attacks. Benjamin, a Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow, and Simon, an instructor at Georgetown University, authors of the award-winning Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America, do not mince words; America's foreign policy vis-a-vis the Muslim world is bankrupt and has "cleared the way for the next attack-and those that will come after." By invading Iraq, the authors argue, the U.S. demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the scope of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, and has turned Iraq into a "country-sized training ground" for terrorists. The authors also explore terror's philosophical roots, analyzing how salafism, a strain of Islamic fundamentalism, dominates jihadist beliefs, as well as how the Internet helps facilitate global dissemination of its tenets, strategies and tactics. The authors' remedies for this baleful state of affairs include fostering an understanding that independent cell-based terrorist units, not state sponsors, are the backbone of the movement; dispensing with reflexive use of military solutions; improving links with foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies; and recognizing the limitations of democracy in solving developing nations' problems. Not a book that'll appeal to readers whose politics are right of center, it's nevertheless a sobering analysis of compromised American security.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
Another terrorist attack on the U.S. is inevitable, according to analysts Simon and Benjamin. Based on interviews with current and former government officials, they warn that actions by the Bush administration are only energizing radical Islamist groups and paving the way for further terrorist attacks even as we squander resources in the war in Iraq. Despite unsubstantiated and overstated claims of success in apprehending al Qaeda members, the group remains elusive. And many self-started terrorist groups that have patterned themselves after al Qaeda have attacked targets from Madrid to London to Kuwait. With the aid of technology and the Internet, the threat to the U.S. has become more agile and mobile. Exploring the long history of Islamic tensions with the West, the authors note that jihadists applaud U.S. difficulties in occupying Iraq and the benefits to their recruitment efforts, as they compare the troubled U.S. occupation with that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is a fascinating, though deeply troubling, look at the U.S. strategy against terrorism. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
