The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror

The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right
Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani The New York Times
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2005

Nonfiction. By Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon 330 pages. $26. Times Books/Henry Holt & Co.

'We are losing. Four years and two wars after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, America is heading for a repeat of the events of that day, or perhaps something worse. Against our most dangerous foe, our strategic position is weakening."

So begins Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's sobering new book, "The Next Attack." The authors, two of President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism aides, draw a persuasive and utterly frightening picture of the current state of America's war on terror.

They see more and more Muslims, many of whom had no earlier ties to radical organizations, enlisting in the struggle against the West, and they also point out the proliferation of freelance terrorists, self-starters without any formal ties to Al Qaeda or other organized groups. They see local and regional grievances (in places like Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Southeast Asia) merging into "a pervasive hatred of the United States, its allies, and the international order they uphold." And they see in the Muslim world traditional social and religious inhibitions against violence and even against the use of weapons of mass destruction weakening as a growing number of radical clerics assume positions of influence.

Like the CIA officer Michael Scheuer, the author (under the pseudonym "Anonymous") of the 2004 book "Imperial Hubris," Benjamin and Simon regard the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a kind of Christmas present to Osama bin Laden: an unnecessary and ill-judged war of choice that has not only become a recruitment tool for jihads but that has also affirmed the story line that Qaeda leaders have been telling the Muslim world - that America is waging war against Islam and seeking to occupy oil-rich Muslim countries.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq toppled one of the Mideast's secular dictatorships, the authors write, and produced a country in chaos, a country that could well become what Afghanistan was during the years of Soviet occupation: a magnet for jihads and would-be jihads from around the world.

In their last book, "The Age of Sacred Terror" (2002), Benjamin and Simon looked at how bureaucratic infighting and a lack of urgency on the part of government officials contributed to the failure to prevent 9/11. This volume also draws on the authors' experience in counterterrorism and their inside knowledge of the national security apparatus. Much of their narrative ratifies judgments made in recent books by other intelligence experts and journalists.

Like Seymour M. Hersh ("Chain of Command") and James Bamford ("A Pretext for War"), Simon and Benjamin note the Bush administration's penchant, in the walk-up to the war, for cherry-picking intelligence to bolster its own preconceptions and for setting up alternative intelligence-gathering operations that would produce evidence supporting ideas that higher-ups like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld already believed to be true.

Like George Packer ("The Assassins' Gate") and Larry Diamond ("Squandered Victory"), they suggest that the shocking lack of planning for a postwar Iraq stemmed in large measure from the administration's assumptions about an easy American triumph and its reluctance to listen to experts in the military and the State Department.

Much of the planning for the occupation, Benjamin and Simon write, was also done "out of channels," with officials "issuing directives without ever having their plans scrubbed in the kind of tedious, iterative process that the government typically uses to make sure it is ready for any contingency."

In addition, the authors write, the Bush administration also squandered the post-9/11 years by failing to beef up homeland security: In overemphasizing "the offensive side" of the war on terror, they argue, the White House has been diverted "from the imperative of a sound defense." The authors enumerate the many familiar targets that have not been secured, and they point to the reasons for these failures, including bureaucratic infighting; bungling at the FBI and a failure to look at tactical decisions within a larger strategic picture. Indeed, one of the most disturbing charges that the authors level at the Bush administration is that it has failed to "look beyond Al Qaeda" and "recognize the multiplying forms that the jihadist threat is taking."

In sum, Benjamin and Simon warn, these failures mean "we are clearing the way for the next attack - and those that will come after."
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The Next Attack
Daniel Benjamin. Hardcover
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