The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right - Hardcover

Benjamin, Daniel; Simon, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805079416 ISBN 13: 9780805079418

Publisher: Times Books, 2005

Synopsis

The authors of the bestseller The Age of Sacred Terror show how the United States is losing the war on terror and what we need to do if we're serious about winning it.

We are losing. Four years and two wars after September 11, 2001, the United States is no closer to victory in the "war on terror." In fact, we are unwittingly clearing the way for the next attack.

In this provocative new book, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon show how the terrorist threat is evolving, with a broadening array of tactics, an army of new fighters and, most ominously, a widening base of support in the global Muslim community. The jihadist movement has been galvanized by the example of 9/11 and the missteps of the U.S. government, which has consistently failed to understand the nature of the new terror. Left on this trajectory, much worse faces us in the near future.

It doesn't have to be this way. The Next Attack makes the case that America has the capacity to stem the tide of Islamic terrorism, but Benjamin and Simon caution that this will require a far-reaching and creative new strategy, one that recognizes that the struggle has been over-militarized and that a campaign for reform must be more than rhetoric and less than bayonets. And they point out how America's increasing tendency to frame the conflict in religious terms has undermined our ability to advance our interests.
Is America is truly equipped to do what is necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, or are we too blinded by our own ideology? The answer to that question will determine how secure we will truly be, in the years and decades to come.

About this title

About the Author

DANIEL BENJAMIN is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He previously served as director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff and as special assistant and foreign-policy speechwriter for President Clinton. He is a former Berlin bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and foreign correspondent for Time. He is a graduate of Harvard and Oxford universities.

STEVEN SIMON teaches at Georgetown University, having previously been assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He served on the National Security Council staff for five years following a career at the U.S. Department of State in Middle Eastern security affairs. He holds degrees from Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton and was an international affairs fellow at Oxford.

Reviews

Starred Review. The chilling first words, "We are losing," capture the tone of this scathing evaluation of the Bush administration's responses to the September 11 attacks. Benjamin, a Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow, and Simon, an instructor at Georgetown University, authors of the award-winning Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam's War Against America, do not mince words; America's foreign policy vis-a-vis the Muslim world is bankrupt and has "cleared the way for the next attack-and those that will come after." By invading Iraq, the authors argue, the U.S. demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the scope of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, and has turned Iraq into a "country-sized training ground" for terrorists. The authors also explore terror's philosophical roots, analyzing how salafism, a strain of Islamic fundamentalism, dominates jihadist beliefs, as well as how the Internet helps facilitate global dissemination of its tenets, strategies and tactics. The authors' remedies for this baleful state of affairs include fostering an understanding that independent cell-based terrorist units, not state sponsors, are the backbone of the movement; dispensing with reflexive use of military solutions; improving links with foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies; and recognizing the limitations of democracy in solving developing nations' problems. Not a book that'll appeal to readers whose politics are right of center, it's nevertheless a sobering analysis of compromised American security.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Another terrorist attack on the U.S. is inevitable, according to analysts Simon and Benjamin. Based on interviews with current and former government officials, they warn that actions by the Bush administration are only energizing radical Islamist groups and paving the way for further terrorist attacks even as we squander resources in the war in Iraq. Despite unsubstantiated and overstated claims of success in apprehending al Qaeda members, the group remains elusive. And many self-started terrorist groups that have patterned themselves after al Qaeda have attacked targets from Madrid to London to Kuwait. With the aid of technology and the Internet, the threat to the U.S. has become more agile and mobile. Exploring the long history of Islamic tensions with the West, the authors note that jihadists applaud U.S. difficulties in occupying Iraq and the benefits to their recruitment efforts, as they compare the troubled U.S. occupation with that of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This is a fascinating, though deeply troubling, look at the U.S. strategy against terrorism. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805079416
• ISBN 13: 9780805079418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352