Book Review: "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright (2006)

This much-acclaimed title tells the story of how al-Qaeda was formed. Beginning with the voyage of Sayyid Qutb to America in the late 1940s, where he was appalled by the licentiousness of the era (!), and his later attempts to establish a purely Islamic state in Egypt (which resulted in imprisonment, torture, and his eventual hanging in 1966), it moves forward to detail how Qutb's movement became the inspiration for Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon who later married up with Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s to establish al-Qaeda. Other now-familiar elements to the story such as the House of Saud and various counter-terrorism officials in the United States such as John O'Neill of the FBI and the White House's Richard Clarke also figure prominently.

Those who have immersed themselves in analyses of the how and why of the September 11 attacks will find recognizable themes here, but "The Looming Tower" still gleans new insights in addition to the expected bureaucratic infighting, Sunni theology, and duplicity all around. For instance, Zawahiri and Bin Laden are portrayed as hardly brothers in arms but suspicious allies who seem to view each other along the lines of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Moreover, Wright suggests quite clearly that the warriors who shamed Russia in the Afghanistan war of the 1980s are quite a different group from the modern-day Taliban, in addition to the flirtations between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq throughout the 1990s.

The prose of "The Looming Tower" is lucid and lively, and while the depth of the analysis is unquestionable, it doesn't collapse under its own weight. You're not flipping back and forth between the appendix, glossary and main text a la "Shake Hands with the Devil" to keep track of who's who, something which also handicaps the otherwise excellent "Guests of the Ayatollah" at times.

Here's a sample passage from the beginning of Chapter Ten, titled "Paradise Lost":

Young men from many countries came to the dusty and obscure Soba Farm, ten kilometers south of Khartoum. Bin Laden would greet them, and then al-Qaeda trainees would begin their courses in terrorism. Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam - pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics - would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.

Given the diversity of the trainees and their causes, bin Laden's main task was to direct them toward a common enemy. He had developed a fixed idea about America, which he explaned to each new class of al-Qaeda recruits. America appeared so mighty, he told them, but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. For all its wealth and resources, America lacks conviction. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death. The warships in the Gulf will retreat to the oceans, the bombers will disappear from the Arabian bases, the troops in the Horn of Africa will race back to their homeland.

The author of these sentiments had never been America, but he liked to have people around him ... who had lived there. They reinforced the bloated and degenerate American of his imagination. Bin Laden could scarcely wait to drive a spear into the heart of the last superpower. He saw his first opportunity in Somalia.

Fast-paced, clear-eyed and complete, "The Looming Tower" is the thinking person's history of al-Qaeda and is very deserving of the accolades it has received. Quite rightly, it's becoming the gold standard of the genre.

At a time when sound argumentation, logic, and detailed knowledge of the subject takes a back seat to emotionalism, personal attacks and hyper-partisanship, this book is definitely deserving of a spot on the bookshelf of any credible observer of the war on terror.

Overall rating: 9.5/10