Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America

Rating:
Summary: Hindsight is 20/20
Review: This is one of the books that has sat on my "going to read" bookshelf until the tragic events of 9/11/01. Now that I have read it I am experiencing a wide array of emotions, not the least of which are anger and dismay. Not that my reading it before would have done anything but it would have at least lessened the shock and surprise at "who could do such a thing" and "how could something like this have happenned?". This book answers those questions. It is for readers who believe in the maxim "Know thy Enemy" for the author does a magnificent job of describing bin Laden and how he developed into the extremist terrorist who threatens the free world's way of life; how he developed his resources, and the complex network of followers who are willing to die for their beliefs. It's almost as interesting to read some of the reviews of this book written prior to the recent acts of terror. Those reviews discount bin Laden and the assertions Bodansky makes about him, claiming the author is trying to make money by sensationalizing the Islamist leader, his resources and his blueprint for destruction. Don't believe them. Yossef Bodansky has impeccable research to back up his statements and the indescribable horror of this last week solidifies his credibility.

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: Bush Failed at getting Osama
Review: More than 3 years after Osama Bin Laden and his gang attacked us we still are having to deal with his threats. We need a president who will not lose sight of our true enemies. After losing so many of our young men and women and spending so much money we are no safer than we were on 9/11!

What was the point?

Please vote for John Kerry.


Rating:
Summary: America Will Hunt Down and Kill Radical Islamic Terrorists
Review: Some day, at the brave and professional hands of USA and Coalition soldiers and agents, Bin Laden and his followers are dead meat. Bin Laden and his followers are cowards, the butchers of Beslin, the vermin who are beheading innocents in the middle east, and bombing babies on buses in Israel. May the terrorists drink pig's blood for all eternity!

I remember walking by this book on display in 2000 and noting that Jeane Kirkpatrick praised it, and I thought, "If she's blurbing the back cover, it must be great." But like most Americans, I never really looked into it further and never wrote my congressman about it. Only a few listened to Bodansky's warnings.

The greatness of this book is not just that it was written before 911 and is free of the post-911 posturing and second-guessing. It's even more important today.

Even this book details Iraq's intelligence agents' involvement with underlings of Bin Laden, the Sudan connection between Bin Laden and Iraq. Iran's greasy paws reach to horn of Africa also.

Although the Iraq-Bin Laden axis and mutual hatred of the Saudi royal family is paramount, it is not the main point of discussion. There are many twists and turns in the landscape of Radical Islam - from the Algeria to the horn of Africa to Pakistan. Bodansky really knows his stuff. I've heard him on the radio as well, and he's got it down to a science.l

Rating:
Summary: LACKING VERIFICATION METHODS
Review: If the story told here could be verified, then it would validate the methods behind our war on terror...yes, even the invasion of Iraq. While Mr. Bodansky, apparently a well-knowned counter-terrorism "expert", writes with thematic clarity, he fails in a major regard to verification. Although the book has a list of sources in the back, they are not cross-referenced to any of the material in the book. This leaves the reader with several choices. 1. Accept his premise entirely, 2. Accept parts of his premise (which parts are fact, which parts are fiction?), or 3. reject his premise entirely. What a conundrum. I can reject item 3 because I would have had to have been living on the moon for the last 20 years to escape the wealth of information negating that premise. I cannot accept premise 1 either due to the lack of a well thought out set of footnotes and references that could be checked for veracity. That leaves item 2 as the only choice available...hmmm...what to believe and what not to believe. Like I said, a conundrum.
In the age of everyone writes a book and the "drive-by" work of literature, I hope that these authors will soon learn that some of us would like a detailed reference list so we can verify what is truth and what is only truth in their own reality.

Rating:
Summary: Very Important Book
Review: Before 9/11, I did not who Osama Bin Laden was, this book tells you in no uncertain terms who he is and what we as a nation are up against. This book was written about 2.5 years before 9/11 and our war on terrorism but it will give you answers to the questions people are asking now. The link between Osama and Iraq, where the WMD's are, etc. In the light of 9/11 this is one eye opening and scary book.

Rating:
Summary: Over the Top in Iraq, Brilliant in All Other Respects
Review:

The author is a brilliant Arabist who has refined the art of acquiring and exploiting open sources of information on bin Laden and terrorism to a near science. His "MOSQINT" lectures draw packed houses of professional intelligence officers from over 40 countries.

The book is a hard read, but if one desires to understand the murky inter-relationships among the *governments* of Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, among others, the businesses and charities working actively to channel government and private funds to terrorists, and the global loosely-knit network of "fellow travelers" and jihadists, then this book is "Ref A."

In my personal view, the author is a bit over the top in trying to link Iraq to bin Laden. This reminds of the Claire Sterling-Ollie North school of "anything goes" as long as you believe it. Having said that (and so has Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, who personally dismissed a lie consistently told by the Bush Administration about a meeting in Prague between a terrorist known by the FBI to have been in Florida at the time, and an Iraqi intelligence officer), I give the book very high marks in all other respects.

The Conclusion, appropriately Chapter 13, is titled "What Next." The book is worthy of purchase and recurring reference for this chapter alone. Especially troubling is the documentation of how many terrorists are moving around the world on legitimate passports from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Turkey, Kuwait, Algeria, Albania, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and other countries. The book adds confirmation to the many other references I have seen (many posted to OSS.Net news and reference section) regarding the active involvement of the Pakistani intelligence service in funding and training and facilitating travel for bin Laden personally, for his top lieutenants, and for terrorists in general.

The author's focus in the conclusion on the potential for Central Asia (all former khanates, all Muslim, all angry separatists from the Soviet Union) is especially interesting, as we see the beginnings of a "third front" there, with India-Pakistan being a fourth front, and South Asia a fifth front. Latin America and Africa are the sixth front. In brief, the author is one of those documenting the depth and scope of a global terrorism threat that the Bush Administration has unwisely chosen to attack with conventional military means, on six different fronts, none of which is sustainable in the medium or long term.

The author anticipated terrorist attacks against the UN and NATO when he discusses, on page 403, the Muslim declarations that include the UN and NATO in the fatwas against the USA, because the Muslim world "is being deceived by [these organizations], because they are hostile to Muslims and are responsible for all the massacres being perpetrated against Muslims in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, Albania, and Kosovo." The UN in Iraq has been hit twice. I expect NATO in Afghanistan to be hit several times between now and the end of 2003, and I expect US special forces units to be massacred in detail in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Bin Laden, dead or alive. Right. Bin Laden could not, in his wildest prayers to Allah, have imagined a better partner for fostering terrorism around the world than hip-shooting cowboy and unilateralist George W. Bush. Bin Laden created a global system of terrorism, the fire if you will, and George W. Bush and his neo-conservatives are blindly pouring $250 billion worth of tax-payer funded gasoline on that fire.

The author has recently been the recipient of the Golden Candle Award from the international open source intelligence committee. His citation reads:

"For his global multi-lingual open source investigations into terrorism, and his extraordinary professional achievement in writing and publishing "BIN LADEN: The Man Who Declared War on America", years before the 9-11 World Trade Center demonstration of what well-funded suicidal terrorism can achieve when intelligence and policy both fail to focus on the threat."

Whatever research or opinion flaws might be contained in this book, it is an essential reference in understanding both the dangers of terrorism, and the futility of the current US "strategy" for defeating terrorism by hammering and then abandoning Afghanistan and Iraq.

Rating:
Summary: Chock full of information
Review: This book contains everything you ever wanted to know and then some. It does tend to get bogged down in the details and to the Western reader following all the names and places can be a task.
Overall however it is a good read.