Ok, I finished the Benjamin/Simon book("Age of Sacred Terror"), and here are my thoughts. The book has two parts--a history of radical Islamist terror and a study of how the US government has dealt with it over the last decade. I think the former is quite good, and is the most accessible and up-to-date treatmet of the subject I know of. I would now recommend it as the first substantial reading for people who want to learn about the threat we're confronting.
The second part is a useful corrective to the shallow partisan hackery one hears from many Clinton-haters, and a good introduction to what the government has actually been doing on the counterterrorism front in recent years. That said, it's a bit too self-congratulatory: the shop where the authors worked (the counterterrorism office at the NSC) is portrayed as incredibly smart, far-seeing, creative, hard-working, etc., while everybody else in government, the media, and so forth is hide-bound, stupid, lazy, etc. I don't doubt any of the facts the book contains--these guys were indeed there, and wouldn't lie, so you can be sure that if they say X happened, it really did--but I got the distinct sense that this was only one side of the story, and that there were others one wasn't hearing.
For example, they never criticize themselves, even when they manifestly should--not a good sign. Thus they go on at length about the 1998 raid on Sudan, in order to show that it was indeed a legitimate attack at a real bin Ladin facility that had been associated with chemical weapons. All true, I think. But they seem blind to the fact that perceptions matter, and that if they couldn't make that case persuasively at the time the attack was not justified. Also, they don't get into other kinds of options that might have been embraced, or some of the other criticisms of this operation. So this is not a Pollack-like entirely fair-minded survey of all possible alternative policies, more a strong brief from one set of players in the game.
As for the 1993 WTC bombing, btw, they place it squarely in the line of recent "jihadist" terrorist attacks, and argue that Ramzi Yousef should indeed be seen as part of the bin Ladin milieu. They see no state-sponsorship of al Qaeda and its colleagues (except by the Taliban, and before that Sudan to some extent), and argue that Iraq has no role in this story at all. Seems credible to me.
tb@backtothebeach.com |
