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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
“Terrorism wins only if you respond to it in the way that the terrorists want you to, which means that its fate is in your hands.”
– David FromkinThis book is an attempt to understand and explain America's reckless response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It builds on many previous efforts to get the story straight about the al Qaeda attack, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and American counterterrorism policy more generally. Learning how to think clearly about the 9/11 provocation and America's response to it is an obvious first step toward correcting the tragically misguided course on which the nation has embarked. What follows is my modest contribution to that collective and ongoing endeavor.
A few prescient sentences, written in 1990 by Bernard Lewis to downplay the threat posed at that time by radical Islamists to the West, succinctly convey the extent to which America's response to 9/11 has grievously backfired:
We should not exaggerate the dimensions of the problem. The Muslim world is far from unanimous in its rejection of the West, nor have the Muslim regions of the Third World been the most passionate and the most extreme in their hostility…. Certainly nowhere in the Muslim world, in the Middle East or elsewhere, has American policy suffered disasters or encountered problems comparable to those in Southeast Asia or Central America. There is no Cuba, no Vietnam, in the Muslim world, and no place where American forces are involved as combatants or even as “advisers.”
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