1 of 2
The sound track this week was supposed to be the Rev. Charlie Jackson, but I can't find the CD. Wendy must have loaned it to someone. (Yes, I still listen to CDs. When Alan Jacobs finishes his book, I will ask him for a one-day seminar in which he'll usher me into the 21st century.) So instead, we'll turn to Gloryland, the new release from Anonymous 4 (Harmonia Mundi), continuing wonderfully in the vein of American Angels.
I should add that my grip on everyday reality, always a bit shaky, becomes much more so whenever my wife Wendy is gone, and she has been gone most of the time for the last several weeks, first to visit our daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter in Texas, then to be with her sister in California, whose cancer has taken a turn for the worse. For the first time in almost 40 years, Wendy and I were not together at Thanksgiving. If I sound odd, or conspicuously more foolish than usual, that may be the cause.
The current issue of the New York Review of Books (November 30, 2006) includes a substantial essay-review by Max Rodenbeck on the "war against terror." While he considers three books (and two papers from the National Security Council), Rodenbeck relies most heavily on Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (Random House). If you have been reading the NYRB at all over the past five years, you will not be surprised to learn that Rodenbeck approvingly cites Richardson's assessment that the "declaration of a global war on terror has been a terrible mistake" on the part of the Bush Adminstration. Indeed (he continues to quote Richardson),
Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda's language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.
So who is to blame for the current threat? Rodenbeck tells us: "In essence, America's reactions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden's organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower's undivided attention… . America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics."
I urge you to read Rodenbeck's article in full, and to at least skim Richardson's book—which, as its title suggests, emphasizes commonalities among a wide variety of terrorist movements. But then, please read another book that Rodenbeck doesn't consider, Mary Habeck's Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (Yale Univ. Press).
The contrasts between Richardson and Habeck are marked. Richardson issues swaggering judgments. Habeck writes in a sober, unemphatic style; her book is rather like a briefing (if you are a reasonably fast reader, you can easily finish it in a single night), and it has none of the personal drama of Lawrence Wright's fascinating account in The Looming Tower (Knopf). Richardson talks in comparative terms about recurring lessons; Habeck focuses on the ideology of jihadism.
While in some respects the two books lead to different assessments of the current situation, in one important respect they do not. Richardson's critique of the very notion of a vaguely defined "global war on terror" is quite congruent with Habeck's attention to the particularities of the enemy we face. Clearly the Bush Administration erred in not identifying that enemy at the outset. As Habeck writes in her modest conclusion, "The significant difference between the ideas presented here and other proposals for fighting the war on terror is the conclusion drawn from the preceding discussion: that the center of the jihadist movement is its ideology, which must be directly confronted, challenged, and defeated." That should be one of the first priorities of the administration that takes over when the Bush presidency ends.
RSS Feed
