Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time! This book is very poorly written...
Review: This book is driving me to my first-ever Amazon.com review, because it is quite possibly the most poorly written book I have ever read: its signal-to-noise ratio is truly atrocious, it doesn't tell a coherent story, and its overt biases become really overbearing by the end.

First, as many readers below have commented, the book gives a mind-numbing amount of very precise detail about people, groups, fatwas, decrees, communiques, meetings, newspaper articles, etc. It's almost as if the author didn't choose to edit any of his raw sources, and instead just included them verbatim within the main text in order to stretch a 50-page story into a 406-page book. You, the reader, are left to do the mental work the author should have done in the first place: sift through the noise in all of the sources, and put together the real story.

Second, once you spend the effort putting together the story, you realize that there are some serious holes in it! For example, the author spends 7 chapters and 200 pages describing in (painful) detail what an uber-organization the world-wide terrorist networks represent. They have the experience in driving the US out of Somalia, they have the infrastructure within Saudi Arabia to pull off the Khobar and Riyadh bombings, they have the theological grounding in which to act, etc., etc. Then suddenly, on the first page of Chapter 8, we read, "the participants at the meeting resolved to reverse the sorry state of the [terrorist] movement...the jihad had sunk to such a low due to...'splintering, disputes, and inability to consider their risks.'" Why did this "sorry-state" suddenly arise? Where were the examples of "splintering" and "disputes?" The author gives no reason for this sudden turnabout, either from his sources or from an analysis of the political situation. In short, the author is disguising a basically incomplete and somewhat weak story by throwing out a dizzying array of other source material. (Other reviewers, I might note, have also commented on the fact that the author misses the forest for the trees, that they didn't quite see what the big point was, etc.)

Lastly, the author's biases, by the end of the book, just get to be too much to stomach. I'm a Republican, but even I found myself mentally defending Clinton against some of charges brought forward by the author. For example, the author spends a lot of time describing, in excruciating detail, the build-up of the terrorist organizations in Kosovo, and how they would be used as a launching pad for "spectacular" terrorist strikes against Western Europe. Then, when the US begins hunting down and apprehending the terrorists, the author implies that this was a mistake! On page 298, the author writes, "With the Islamists yearning for excuses to strike out, the Clinton administration could not have been more accommodating." I mean, what was the Clinton administration supposed to do? Was it supposed to NOT arrest the terrorists, and to LET them act out on their plans? Come on!

Unfortunately, this is the first book I've read that is relevant to the current situation, so I can't give any other book recommendations at the moment (other reviewers have, which I plan on checking out...). However, for all the reasons I've listed above, I would certainly advise others to search out alternative books before spending the time and mental energy to get through this one. It's just not worth it...

Rating:
Summary: The best account available
Review: Bin Laden's origin and socio-historical context is well analyzed in this book which is, definitively, a must-read for everyone who wishes to understand the true nature and extent of his terrorist net.

Rating:
Summary: a chilling tale
Review: Yosef Bodansky describes the machinations of militant Islam in chilling detail in "Ben Laden: the Man who Declared War on America". This book is clearly the product of exhaustive research. It is not in any sense light reading and will mainly be of interest to people who already have quite a bit of knowledge about the militant Islamic jihadist movement. The book mainly focuses on the 1980's and 90's when the Islamic militant groups stepped up their operations, formed an internationale based in Khartoum, resolved differences between Shiites in Iran and Sunnis elsewhere, and decided in the 90's on a strategy to challenge the United States directly in the places where it is most vulnerable. It is amazing that Bodansky has managed to discover the detailed information he brings to this study, and one has to wonder if all of it is 100% accurate. This would not be the book to begin with for someone who is getting his or her first orientation in this subject.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, but only periphally about bin Laden...
Review: This is a superb book about the scourge of Islamic terrorism which now plaques our country and world. However, despite the title, this book is not really about Osama bin Laden. While I purchased the book expecting a biography of bin Laden, what I found was a detailed and thorough study about the rise, inner workings and future of fundamentalist Islam and terrorism. Usually, the fact that the title of the book doesn't accurately represent the contents would turn me off, but the story contained in this book is engrossing, informative, and disturbing. Especially enlightening was the illustration of the stunning ineptness of former President Clinton's foreign policy which led to our current problems with the terrorists. This book should be required reading for anyone who desires to become well acquainted with the world of Islamic terror networks. However, someone looking for a simple biography of bin Laden may be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Difficult, but rewarding, read
Review: I found this book rewarding and tough going at the same time. On the one hand, it is packed with painstaking factual details about various intelligence agencies, front groups, terrorist groups and political figures that Bin Laden comes in contact with over time. Fortunately, there is an index of significant abbreviations and organizations which is helpful but this book is still a "difficult read." One disappointment: I never got a sense of the big picture. What is the strategy and agenda of Bin Laden and his fundamentalist allies? What motivates them? What is their overall,longterm plan as we head into this new century? I felt the book was always focused on particular "trees" and did not focus on the proverbial "forest" and the man's vision for this movement he supposedly now leads. I would suggest one other book that I think provides this missing piece: Anthony J. Dennis wrote a book called "The Rise of the Islamic Empire and
the Threat to the West" which contains a lot of predictions and unique insights that in retrospect are absolutely prophetic (I re-read the book after 9/11/01). He focuses on the game plan for territorial conquest of the international fundamentalist movement in a way that Bodansky does not. So, both Dennis's and Bodansky's books are a must to get the complete picture.

Rating:
Summary: Bodansky Biased
Review: Here's the deal; I am middle of the road politically, but have leaned conservative in terms of the current crisis. First of all, I thought this would be a biography of bin Laden, but it really isn't. It's full of detailed minutae about terrorist organizations; a dizzying, detailed cloud of specific dates, names, summits, meetings, declarations, communiques, etc. Bodansky doesn't focus on bin Laden and the book is lacking in the big picture department.

Second, I wondered how Bodansky could know all of these "facts." He details the names, dates, locations, even conversations of SECRET terrorist meetings and SECRET agreements and SECRET government sponsorships of terrorists. I looked up his list of sources: it's all newspaper articles, most of them from Arab publications. Most of the time he simply states information as objective fact (he knows how the intelligence organizations of closed societies like Iran and Saudi Arabia collect information, make decisions, etc.) with zero footnotes or reference to sources. Sometimes he mentions the information came from a named source; the vast majority of the time oral sources are POSITIVELY ANONYMOUS.

Third, he leans, bends, prostrates in a blatantly conservative direction. He roundly blasts Clinton at several points, even claiming that "if certain terrorist sources are to be believed" Clinton made an evil deal with the Islamists; supposedly that the US would tolerate the overthrow of the Egyptian government and installation of an Islamist regime in return for no terrorist attacks on US troops in Bosnia.

I was further perplexed by his claim that the President of Iran, widely considered to be a moderate in favor of liberal reforms, is personally involved in planning terrorist acts against the US. Bodansky asserts that Iran was behind the bombings of US embassies in Africa. Really? Why haven't the American people been told? It took us years to figure out a couple of Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie disaster. Once we had the facts we were relentless in our pressure on Libya to hand them over. If our government knows Iran bombed our embassies, why are we not doing the same with them? The cause of the crash of TWA flight 800 has never been determined. But omnicient Bodansky knows it was IN FACT a terrorist bombing, that Tehran was behind it, he even knows the type and placement of the explosive; "A small, twin-charge bomb was placed against the middle of the forward wall of the central fuel tank... The twin charges were a blast charge made of powerful plastic explosives (SEMTEX-H class)... The direction of the explosion was toward the tail of the aircraft (p.179)."

The back of the book says Bodansky is "an internationally renowned military and threat analyst, is the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism..." I noticed that both of the plug quotes on the book are from staunch conservatives: Jean Kirkpatrick (former Reagan appointee who fired off a letter with fellow arch conservatives to President Bush urging expansion of the war to Iran and Iraq) and Fred Barnes.

I did some research on Bodansky on the internet and found a biography (biased also, as it is written by Fred Abood of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, but the only profile of Bodansky my search found) that states: 1) Bodansky was the editor of the Israeli Air Force's official magazine in the 1970's, 2) , Bodansky became the technical director of the newsletter JINSA (The Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs), 3) . In the early years of the first Reagan administration (1980-84), Bodansky was hired as a Defense Department consultant, 4) In 1985, shortly after Naval intelligence employee Jonathan Pollard was caught as an Israeli spy, Bodansky dropped out of sight. According to sources, Bodansky was one of Pollard's controllers and had, they say, always operated as an agent of LEKEM, the Israeli defense ministry's technological espionage branch, 5) . In 1989, Bodansky became director of the House REPUBLICAN (my caps) Research Committee's "Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare."

The man is a former Israeli citizen who now works for REPUBLICAN congresspeople. In fact, the "task force" is unofficial. It's a body dreamed up by Republicans, given an official sounding name, and appointed conservative members. (Rep. Saxton, the "task force " chair, admits as much in his remarks to Congress on August 7, 1998; "As the chairman of a group of Republicans... [known as] the Task Force on Terrorism and U.N. Conventional Warfare.") This blasts Bodansky positively out of the orbit of what we would call "objectivity." My concern is that people will buy this book, thinking it's an objective account of bin Laden and the Islamist movement, as I did (this book is now a best seller here at Amazon; it glares off the shelves as the featured bin Laden book at a major book chain). I did a search on bin Laden books and thought, hey, here's one that sounds good, and bought it. I'm sure much of this stuff is true; a great deal jibes with what I've read since 9/11 (Pakistan has been an incubator for terrorism, Saudi Arabia has tons of Islamist sympathizers and citizen patrons, etc.) but I have no doubts much of the content is pro-Israel rhetoric. And it's packaged in a way that makes it sound like an objective study, which it clearly ain't. Which parts are true and what is propaganda I couldn't say. But I can say for certain it's a dry read chock full of minutae, NOT a biography of bin Laden, and deviously biased.

Americans want to know about bin Laden, and this book clearly appears to be the number one book they are snatching up to learn about him and the Islamists. It is shaping opinions with false, biased, uncited information, and this is positively dangerous.

Rating:
Summary: Highly detailed, systematic and downright scary!
Review: The author obviously has spent much time in seeking information and sources. He has come up with a complete tapestry of embittered and hate-filled men, who use religion as an excuse for slaughtering innocent thousands.
My only criticism is there is too much detail. I have myself at times becoming distracted by the scrupulous logging of a multitude of names, times, places, and events. That is why I gave this otherwise crucial book four stars instead of five.

Rating:
Summary: meagre substance badly presented by an ignorant author
Review: Read "Taliban" by Ahmed Rashid instead.

The good parts of this books are the brief biographical bit about bin Laden; the emphasis on Pakistani (esp. ISI) involvement; and details about Iranian strategies and participation. They were not worth wading through this 400+ pages polemic to get.

Strike 1: The book is mislabeled.
Chapter 1 is about bin Laden. Chapter 2 is somewhat about bin Laden. The other chapters have only an occasional mention of him.

Strike 2: Ayman al-Zawahiri is the COO to bin Laden's CEO in HizbAllah International, and so has far greater involvement with specific terrorist acts. He figures more strongly than bin Laden, but get less coverage in the text.

Strike 3: There are so many groups mentioned here that keeping track is overwhelming. appendices relating them each to the other would be most helpful.
One out: not well organized or packaged.

Strike 1: The narrative is weak, the analysis thin and full of surmise and conjecture. Periodic jabs are taken at Clinton's policies, while Bush I's 'love 'em and leave 'em' approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan -- abandoning them to a Kalashnikov culture from 1989 to 1993 -- is ignored. Israel and 'The Jews' are mentioned as co-indicted with the US -- certainly as a red herring, perhaps to foster sympathy for Israel -- but no information about any operations targeting Israel are mentioned anywhere in the text.

Strike 2: As a couple other reviewers have said, he can't go ten pages without saying 'spectacular operation', 'spectacular terrorist operation,' or 'these were not idle threats.' These are the most obvious bits of an extensive seam of purple prose riddling the book.

Strike 3: Too much ink is devoted to long verbatim quotes from windy overwritten communiques by various terrorist organizations, which irritate then bore. The book should be at least 100 pages shorter. Two out: not well written.

Strike 1: The author does not know the history of Islamic societies (and should read Ira Lapidus' excellent work of that name). On the second page of the introduction, he says "during the eleventh century the Muslim world suffered a series of major defeats: The Crusaders occupied the Levant... while in the Iberian Peninsula a Christian coalition... began the campaign to evict the Muslims from Spain and Portugal" Far from occupying the entire Levant (the Nile - Oxus area), the Crusaders occupied no more than some bits of what are now Israel, Syria and Lebanon, and mostly they just occupied a handful of ports and the hinterland within 20 miles of the coast. By 1300 they were all gone. At the time, the Crusaders were crude barbarians by comparison to the civilized and technologically advanced societies of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. The Crusaders had a far larger (and negative) impact on their erstwhile fellow Christians in Constantinople in 1204 than ever they did in the Levant, indeed facilitating the Muslim conquest of the Balkans.

In Iberia, the Reconquest began with Charlemagne in the 9th Century, with major surges around 1085 (Toledo), 1212 (Las Navas de Tolosa), and 1492 (Grenada). Between 1099 and 1529 the (Muslim) Turks conquered Anatolia (making it Turkish rather than Greek), Greece, Bulgaria, Moldavia and Wallachia (Romania), Serbia, and Hungary, losing only Hungary before 1815 (in 1699). As late as 1700 Muslims ruled all of India. On the whole it was the Christian world that was suffering the defeats before 1700, not the Muslim one. Muslims were also victorious against the Hindu, Buddhist, and African worlds in these years, giving better than they got worldwide. Bodansky waves his hand and says that Muslim rulers "revived religious extremism as the source of their legitimacy... so the Muslim world was swept with ... 'anti-intellectual rage'... Thus the Muslim world has been in paralysis since religious extremism rose in the twelfth century." It would be interesting to hear what he thinks about the Inquisition or Jerry Falwell.

Strike 2: The author has problems distinguishing Western from Modern. Phones are modern; jeans and carbonated soda are Western. The author is not alone in this problem: many thoughtful people in the Orient, Occident, India and Africa have problems with it also. The breakdown of the family in America is just one sign of it (what Americans call a nuclear family would be seen as a sad fragment of a family in much of the world). Bin Laden is himself both utterly Modern as well as totally (though by most standards heterodox) Islamic. A large part of his achievement is that reconciliation internally as well as within the organizations he's been part of. The interesting question here is: Why did Modernity arise in the Occident not in, say, Sung China of the 12th century? [See "Rethinking World History", Marshall Hodgson] For Bodansky to call Islam backwards (p. XVI) is a mark of his ignorance. Is Christianity backwards too? Hinduism?

Strike 3: Bodansky says that "the seemingly unstoppable spread of Westernization... motivates the terrorists... Their individual struggles are the essence of the Islamist movement against Westernization." Bodansky is wrong. Most Muslim people are ruled by military dictatorships and monarchies, without the opportunities and freedoms that many Occidentals take for granted. Why have a pointless impoverished, oppressed and hopeless life when you can have a meaningful death, say recruiters to prospective suicide terrorists/martyrs? Naming the US operation "Enduring Freedom" must seem a bitter irony to most Muslims, who have no prospect for any such thing. The US support for those regimes at high (though not limitless, as the Shah found) levels pours salt into the wound. Three outs: not well conceived or knowledgeably produced.

Rating:
Summary: Tom Clancy Where Are You?
Review: Save your time & money, this book is neither fact nor fiction.
A tatal waste.

Rating:
Summary: Unfortunately, probably worthless...in fact, definitely.
Review: A fascinating read at first glance.... However, to protect some of his sources the author gives no references for any of the fantastic assertions made in this book. I did not know anything about the author when I started reading it and was inclined to believe the whole tale, hook, line, and sinker until the penny dropped when he claimed that the Clinton administration struck a deal with the Islamic International that in exchange for refraining from attacking U.S. troops in Bosnia, the Islamists would have free rein to topple Mubarak in Egypt without fear of US interference! Suddenly, one has the feeling after 8 hours of reading of having been unsuspectingly in the company of a lunatic all the while. This sort of lapse then totally destroys any confidence one might have in the rest of the book.
Probably, most of what he asserts in the book is true. My guess is about 90%. But the inclusion of wild tales of anti-Clinton fantasy (he seems to have some republican connections) detract from his credibility completely. The guy is either an eccentric nut who believes what he is telling us or a malignant zealot mixing fact with dangerous disinformation. I wish I could get a refund. If you wish to learn about the current situation in Afghanistan, but Rashid's 5 star book "Taliban".