America's War Against Jihad

摘要

George bush will leave office in January at the end of a presidency that was looking ignominious even before America's recent economic train wreck. Nothing contributed more to Mr Bush's failure than al-Qaeda's audacious multiple terrorist attacks on the American homeland on September nth 2001. This book, from one of France's shrewdest interpreters of the Muslim world, provides a highly readable end-of-term conspectus of the subsequent violent encounter between America and the jihadists. It also offers an intriguing argument.rnIn Gilles Kepel's telling, it is not only Mr Bush whose strategy failed after September nth. Osama bin Laden's strategy failed too. The Bush administration's "global war on terror" encompassed not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but also a project to spread democracy to the Arabs and remake the dysfunctional Middle East in America's image. It was, in Mr Kepel's phrase, "a vision of global rectification through violent means". That was precisely al-Qaeda's project as well. Mr bin Laden did not intend only to inflict pain on America and force its armies out of the Middle East. Martyrdom was also supposed to lead the Muslim masses to identify with al-Oaeda, to hasten a general uprising against "apostate" governments like Saudi Arabia's, to precipitate the establishment of an Islamic state and destroy Israel.