Terrorism, War and WMDs
The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda by Yaroslav Trofimov
A WSJ foreign correspondent spins a taut, well-researched narrative of the 1979 seizure by armed Sunni extremists of Mecca's Grand Mosque, the subsequent two-week siege, and its catastrophic end. In part because the takeover came just 16 days after Iranian students took dozens of U.S. diplomats hostage, U.S. understandings of the Mecca siege were severely skewed at the time and the story has since faded from memory. Part of that has been by design, says Trofimov. Much of the Muslim world -- and especially Saudi Arabia -- has for decades suppressed information about the crisis, which claimed hundreds of innocent lives thanks largely to the Saudis' appalling mismanagement of the situation. The author shows that America tried to use jihadis sympathetic to those who'd taken over the Grand Mosque as proxy warriors against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Among those encouraged and enabled by inept U.S. cold warriors was Osama bin Laden.
Trofimov spoke with NPR's Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
*Also available on Audio CD and mp3 CD
The Siege of Mecca ... published September 18, 2007 by Doubleday
The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior -- and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage
by Martha Stout
A clinical psychologist, for 25 years a Harvard prof, looks at how fear affects individuals and societies. Sections on the neuroscience of fear are enlightening, but things can get a bit wooly when Stout ventures into fields (e.g., history, geopolitics) outside her discipline. Overall, though, her work is lucid and likely to provoke sober reflection on the need to transcend irrational fear with reason and democracy. Says Stout,
Chronic fear, with its yearning for authoritarian rule, directly opposes our founding ideals, just as our founding ideals are in direct opposition to chronic fear. We can have one or the other, but not both at the same time, at least not for long. Our level of anxiety is not merely a matter of our personal discomfort. Our continued fear has large social and political implications. And healing from it is more than an individual mental health objective -- it is a national mission. Striving to be calmer, more aware, and more rational is, arguably, a patriotic act.
The Paranoia Switch ... published September 4, 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War
by David Livingstone Smith
Over 200 million of our fellow humans, most of them civilians, died as a result of 20th-century warfare. Could there be a more pressing question than ... Why? With exceptionally deft prose, the co-founder and director of the Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology at U-NE engages in an incisive, wide-ranging exploration of what it is in us that drives us to wage war against one another. Smith concludes,
Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated. If I am right, we will never stop men from enjoying war, and trying to do so is a fool's errand. The most we can hope for, in the end, is for men to detest it more than they enjoy it, and the only way to shift that balance is to expose the self-deception that makes killing bearable. If we can do this, however incompletely, we will have accomplished something heroic indeed.
The Most Dangerous Animal ... published August 7, 2007 by St. Martin's Press
What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism
by Alan B. Krueger
A Princeton economics prof offers persuasive evidence that terrorism is rooted not in poverty, but in political repression. Those who actually perpetrate terrorist attacks are, in most cases, wealthier and better educated than other members of their societies. The author maintains that the proliferation of contrary beliefs leads to over-reaction to the point of handing terrorists some of the victories they seek. Says Krueger,
There's a stereotype that people attack us because they're so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. ... If we tend to think of terrorists as people who are attacking us for no reason, just because they're desperately poor, I think that makes the phenomenon seem much more dangerous than it is. Two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. The world is full of impoverished people. If poverty was the cause of terrorism, we'd be experiencing much more terrorism than we've actually experienced.
Krueger spoke with WAMU's Diane Rehm.
What Makes a Terrorist ... published August 16, 2007 by Princeton University Press
Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man
Who Makes War Possible by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun
The authors have been widely praised for their investigative reporting on paunchy ex-Soviet military officer Viktor Bout -- a Russian arms broker who has, at the age of 40, built a global empire of death, using his private 60-plane air armada to supply vast quantities of virtually any weapons imaginable to anyone willing and able to meet his price. His customers have often included both sides of bloody conflicts in and among poverty-wracked nations in Africa and Asia. In Afghanistan he supplied both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. And he's garnered millions of dollars by providing crucial transportation and materiel to U.S. forces in Iraq. Some have gone so far as to say that U.S. officials have long helped Bout evade arrest. Given his stunning sociopathy and extensive connections throughout the old Soviet Union, it's easy to envision his getting hold of and distributing some of the USSR's "loose nukes" to Al Qaeda or another terrorist entity.
Merchant of Death ... published July 9, 2007 by Wiley
Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them by John Mueller
In the estimation of an OSU poly sci prof, America has a bad habit of overestimating and overstating security threats. In the past, it's led to the WWII internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism. Now, it's undermining some of our basic democratic principles, costing vast sums of money and helping to fuel an insidious national paranoia that will inevitably cause a host of other problems. Says Mueller,
Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist -- reminiscent of those inspired by images of the 20-foot-tall Japanese after Pearl Harbor or the 20-foot-tall Communists at various points in the Cold War (particularly after Sputnik) -- may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.
Overblown ... published November 14, 2006 by Free Press
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and
The Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma
After Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's grisly, public 2004 murder in Amsterdam by a Dutch Islamist, Buruma returned from New York to his native Netherlands to gain perspective on the killing. Among other things, he found some liberal Europeans insanely sympathetic to homegrown Islamists bent on exterminating liberalism. More precisely, he finds second-generation Islamists at the heart of Europe's "clash of civilizations." It was one such Muhammad-come-lately who took umbrage at Submission, a 10-minute movie by Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali that bitterly attacked Islam's violent subjugation and abuse of women. Buruma shows that, to some extent, the murderer embraced violent Islam as a result of his failures to get (1) laid; and (2) funding for his projects. Buruma's been criticized for the ambiguities of this slim but brilliantly illuminating volume, but that seems unfair, given the historical, social and theological complexities involved.
Murder in Amsterdam ... published September 7, 2006 by Penguin Press, HC
What Terrorists Want:
Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat by Louise Richardson
The executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study delivers a marvelously erudite, lucid, and widely lauded primer on terrorists. Richardson shows that while their behavior may be reprehensible in the extreme, they're not crazy -- they can and must, if they're to be checked, be understood. That's the aim of the first portion of her book. The question of how terrorist threats are most effectively managed occupies the balance of the volume. Unsurprisingly, strategies that have proven effective against terrorists are in many cases precisely the opposite of those the Bush administration and their fellow Republicans are pursuing around the world with suicidal zeal. Terrorist-troubled states that hew to the moral high ground and take every opportunity to be the "good guy" in public opinion stand the best chance of thwarting terrorism; those that invade other countries without provocation and perpetrate Abu Ghraibs are the best recruiters terrorists will ever have.
Richardson spoke with WAMU's Diane Rehm and KQED's Michael Krasny.
What Terrorists Want ... published September 5, 2006 by Random House
Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and The Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network by Gordon Corera
BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera says that A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, "thought the entire non-proliferation system was a tool of the West to stop other countries getting the bomb and he wanted to break that system." To a horrifying extent he's done just that, and nuclear weapons have entered the marketplace. Says Corera,
Khan was responsible not only for developing the nuclear capability in his native Pakistan but for building an unrivalled clandestine procurement network that spanned the globe. Many states have longed for the power that nuclear weapons are perceived to provide, but the technical challenges had appeared insurmountable to all but a few. And so they might have remained until Khan began looking for customers and shifting his exceptional business model from import to export.
Shopping for Bombs ... published August 31, 2006 by Oxford University Press, USA
The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón
"We're in the business of clarification," says one of the authors of this volume, which seeks to clarify the 9/11 Commission Report. And in that their book succeeds swimmingly -- not only for those accustomed to chewing and digesting lots of complex information, but also for a wider, less ambitious audience. The book's a public service. That being the case, one really hates to call this 144-page masterpiece a "comic book." But to a great extent, that's exactly what it is. And while one's initial reaction to the idea of turning the 9/11 Report into a comic book might range from doubt to disgust to depression, there are many good reasons for the fact that the reviews of this remarkable work have been, on balance, quite favorable. But this is obviously something one must see for one's self (which Slate makes possible here) before passing judgment.
The authors spoke with NPR's Neil Conan on Talk of the Nation.
The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation ... published August 22, 2006 by Hill and Wang
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11
by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins
Two NYC journalists tip their hats to Rudy Giuliani for the imagery he projected on 9/11, but they also reveal that the substance of his governance was poor both on 9/11 and during the years that preceded it. Likewise the lax safety measures during the cleanup that have led to severe health problems among those who worked at Ground Zero. While Giuliani's spent the last five years burnishing his image as a prescient anti-terrorist planner prior to 9/11, Barrett's and Collins' meticulous research and dogged interviewing show that it just wasn't so. When NYPD official Louis Anemone tried to interest Giuliani in developing a citywide anti-terror plan in 1998, "Rudy glazed over." His pre-9/11 decision to locate the city's command center (with its 6,000 gallons of fuel) on the 27th floor of 7 World Trade Center proved catastrophic, as did a politically colored decision to equip the city's fire and police departments with incompatible communications equipment.
Barrett and Collins spoke with New York public radio's Beth Fertig.
Grand Illusion ... published August 22, 2006 by HarperCollins
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
A meticulously researched and grippingly narrated explanation of how 9/11 happened. Wright, New Yorker staff writer, builds his narrative on a framework provided by the lives of four men: Osama bin Laden; his advisor, Ayman al-Zawahiri; FBI counterterrorism chief John O'Neill and Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi security in 2001. Also fundamental to the story of 9/11 is Sayyid Qutb, whose book, Milestones, provides the theoretical basis for much of today's Islamist terrorism. Two of Qutb's biggest fans are Zawahiri and bin Laden, who Wright compares to Col. Parker and Elvis. Zawahiri is in many ways the driving force behind Al Qaeda terrorism, but he's no good on stage -- he needs the far more charismatic bin Laden as his front man. In a sense, the real "villain" of Looming Tower is the crippling antagonism between the CIA and FBI that preceded the 9/11 attacks. Wright sees bureaucratic bungling continuing even now within America's intelligence community, so that "most experienced members of the intelligence community, demoralized by poor leadership and wrongheaded reforms, have left the service."
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD
The Looming Tower ... first published August 8, 2006 by Knopf
The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right by George Michael
While the notion of "convergences" of white supremacists and Islamist radicals may seem preposterous at first blush, skeptics are advised to reserve judgment until reviewing Michael's mind-bogglingly extensive catalogue of ideological linkages between Muslim and "Aryan" hatethink. The author details a stunningly long list of instances of lethally potent cross-fertilizations ... such as this:
Last year, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stirred worldwide condemnation by dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth," purportedly used as a pretext for the creation of a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world, one of the voices that rose to his defense was David Duke, the former Klan leader (and Louisiana representative) who says he "has dedicated his life to the freedom and heritage of European American peoples."
The Enemy of My Enemy ... published April 24, 2006 by University Press of Kansas
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
by Mary Habeck
A Johns Hopkins military historian explains the jihadist ideologies and goals that led to 9/11 -- and that seem likely to prompt further attacks. Habeck begins by noting that violent jihadis comprise only a tiny percentage of Muslim fundamentalists and only a small minority of Muslims are fundamentalists. After having also explained the origins of the jihadis' animus toward the West (including extensive coverage of arch-theorist Sayyid Qutb), Habeck makes various suggestions for reducing the threat of jihadi violence. Among these are the usual suspects: kill the undeterrables now, support moderate Muslims, push for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, etc. Slightly more original is her suggestion that we stop talking about a "War on Terror" and start calling it a "War on Jihadis." That crucial clarification, she says, would both improve our own thinking about the problem and send constructive and helpful messages to moderate Muslims.
Knowing the Enemy ... published January 4, 2006 by Yale University Press
The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear
And What That Means for the World by Michael Karpin
Five years ago on Israeli TV, Shimon Peres provided unprecedented confirmation of Israel's nuclear weapons program. A key member of the documentary team that produced that show now expands and updates their look at how Israel got the Bomb -- and how events might play out as Iran also attempts to go nuclear. Beyond the fact that the story of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is of critical importance to everyone on earth, the tale that Karpin tells is also compelling both for its complex drama and its sometimes surprising cast of international characters. Those already familiar with Israel's nuclear history will find no new blockbuster revelations here, but for the rest of us it's a deeply fascinating narrative. The author concludes with some well-informed and highly plausible speculation about possible Israeli military strikes at Iranian nuclear facilities should they "reach the point of no return." One leaves with the impression that if current diplomatic efforts fail, such operations may come sooner, rather than later.
The Bomb in the Basement ... first published January 3, 2006 by Simon & Schuster
The Osama bin Laden I Know by Peter Bergen
The author of Holy War, Inc. (2001; according to the Washington Post, "The only book you need to read on Osama bin Laden") may have found a way to improve on that previous effort by enabling dozens of primary sources to speak for themselves. Bergen has collected -- and masterfully edited into a cogent portrait -- oral histories from those who've known Osama bin Laden throughout his life.
Because the subject is considered from so very many angles, the picture that emerges is revealing in some surprising ways, thanks in part to the quirky details that are necessarily part of the mix. Some of the more memorable of these relate to Osama's elder brother Salem, who ran the family mega-business until he died in a plane crash, did not share his younger brother's religious fanaticism, but enjoyed Western diversions such as playing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" on the guitar.
Bergen was featured on NPR's Talk of the Nation last Thursday.
The Osama bin Laden I Know ... first published January 3, 2006 by Free Press
The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
The authors of The Age of Sacred Terror show how utterly the Bush administration has squandered the four years since 9/11, taking virtually none of the defensive steps necessary to deal with future catastrophic attacks. "America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse," and while the administration's homeland defense is grossly inadequate, its diplomatic failures are even worse.
Benjamin and Simon maintain that BushCo's response to 9/11 is overwhelmingly focused on misguided offensive measures that appeal to their Christian Right base -- some of whom see the battle in what amount to apocalyptic terms. Missing from Bush's approach, the authors say, is a comprehensive plan that includes the kinds of defensive infrastructure adjustments and diplomatic measures Benjamin and Simon see as essential to national security. They conclude,
We need the right resources, organization, and, of course, the right plan. We also need the right allies, and if we continue to be pulled by the currents shaping American culture today, we will drive away our friends in the West and moderate Muslims around the world. There is, however, a prior choice we need to make: We must decide whether we want a strategy for this conflict or a theology. How much blood will be shed depends at least in part upon that choice.
The Next Attack ... first published October 13, 2005 by Times Books
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