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

xvii, [1], 330, [4] pages. Notes. Index. Inscription signed by the Dan Benjamin on the half-title page. The inscription reads To Janie--With gratitude for all you're doing to prevent the next attack. All best wishes. Dan. Daniel Benjamin (born October 16, 1961) is an American diplomat and journalist, and was the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2012, appointed by Secretary Clinton. He is Director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. From 1994 to 1999, as a member of President Clinton's staff, Benjamin served as a foreign policy speech writer and special assistant. During that period, he also served on the National Security Council. From 2009 to 2012, Benjamin was the US State Department's Coordinator for counter-terrorism, with the rank of Ambassador-at-Large. The Next Attack received high-praise from Bill Clinton. Steven Simon is a former United States National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa.[1] He also previously served as the Executive Director IISS-US and Corresponding Director IISS-Middle East [2] and as a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute based in Washington, D.C.[3] He was Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Spring 2008 Berlin Prize Fellow. We are losing. Five years after the September 11 attacks, America finds its strategic position deteriorating in the global war on terror. In The Next Attack, former White House counterterrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon show how the terrorist threat has evolved since 9/11 and how America has undermined its own goals through our failure to understand the jihadists' ideology. Our actions have confirmed Osama bin Laden's message in the eyes of disaffected Muslims in the Middle East, Europe. Benjamin and Simon argue that America needs a far-reaching and creative new strategy in combating Islamic radicalism, one that sets realistic priorities for homeland security. We ignore this warning at our peril. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: 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 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. It is a sobering analysis of compromised American security. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated].…