Osama Bin Laden
Michael ScheuerBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
9/11 almost instantaneously remade American politics and foreign policy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, water boarding and Guantanamo are examples of its profound and far-reaching effects. But despite its monumental impact--and a deluge of books about al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism--no one has written a serious assessment of the man who planned it, Osama bin Laden. Available biographies depict bin Laden as an historical figure, the mastermind behind 9/11, but no longer relevant to the world it created. These accounts, Michael Scheuer strongly believes, have contributed to a widespread and dangerous denial of his continuing significance and power.
In this book, Scheuer provides a much-needed corrective--a hard-headed, closely reasoned portrait of bin Laden, showing him to be a figure of remarkable leadership skills, strategic genius, and considerable rhetorical abilities. The first head of the CIA's bin Laden Unit, where he led the effort to track down bin Laden, Scheuer draws from a wealth of information about bin Laden and his evolution from peaceful Saudi dissident to America's Most Wanted. Shedding light on his development as a theologian, media manipulator, and paramilitary commander, Scheuer makes use of all the speeches and interviews bin Laden has given as well as lengthy interviews, testimony, and previously untranslated documents written by those who grew up with bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, served as his bodyguards and drivers, and fought alongside him against the Soviets. The bin Laden who emerges from these accounts is devout, talented, patient, and ruthless; in other words, a truly formidable and implacable enemy of the West.
Acclaim for Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism
"Pulls few punches...a fascinating window on America's war with Al Qaeda."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"No serious observer of the war on terrorism can ignore this scathing critique."
--Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.
"A powerful, persuasive analysis of the terrorist threat and the Bush administration's failed efforts to fight it."
--Richard A. Clarke, Washington Post Book World
"A fire-breathing denunciation of U.S. counterterrorism policy."
--Julian Borger, The Guardian
"Presents overwhelmingly persuasive evidence to buttress a host of significant and controversial arguments."
--Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly
"Destined to become a classic in the field of counterterrorism analysis."
--Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism
Synopsis
9/11 almost instantaneously remade American politics and foreign policy. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, water boarding and Guantanamo are examples of its profound and far-reaching effects. But despite its monumental impact--and a deluge of books about al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism--no one has written a serious assessment of the man who planned it, Osama bin Laden. Available biographies depict bin Laden as an historical figure, the mastermind behind 9/11, but no longer relevant to the world it created. These accounts, Michael Scheuer strongly believes, have contributed to a widespread and dangerous denial of his continuing significance and power.
In this book, Scheuer provides a much-needed corrective--a hard-headed, closely reasoned portrait of bin Laden, showing him to be a figure of remarkable leadership skills, strategic genius, and considerable rhetorical abilities. The first head of the CIA's bin Laden Unit, where he led the effort to track down bin Laden, Scheuer draws from a wealth of information about bin Laden and his evolution from peaceful Saudi dissident to America's Most Wanted. Shedding light on his development as a theologian, media manipulator, and paramilitary commander, Scheuer makes use of all the speeches and interviews bin Laden has given as well as lengthy interviews, testimony, and previously untranslated documents written by those who grew up with bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, served as his bodyguards and drivers, and fought alongside him against the Soviets. The bin Laden who emerges from these accounts is devout, talented, patient, and ruthless; in other words, a truly formidable and implacable enemy of the West.
Acclaim for Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism
"Pulls few punchesa fascinating window on America's war with Al Qaeda."
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"No serious observer of the war on terrorism can ignore this scathing critique."
--Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.
"A powerful, persuasive analysis of the terrorist threat and the Bush administration's failed efforts to fight it."
--Richard A. Clarke, Washington Post Book World
"A fire-breathing denunciation of U.S. counterterrorism policy."
--Julian Borger, The Guardian
"Presents overwhelmingly persuasive evidence to buttress a host of significant and controversial arguments."
--Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly
"Destined to become a classic in the field of counterterrorism analysis."
--Bruce Hoffman, author of Inside Terrorism
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
This propulsive biography is not bin Laden for beginners, but its central point is clear. Scheuer (Imperial Hubris), chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, argues that the West chronically underestimates bin Laden’s “piety, generosity, personal bravery, strategic ability, charisma and patience.” In creating a cartoonish enemy, the U.S. has “mindlessly” played into bin Laden’s plans to provoke a war on Muslim soil to catalyze a jihad to “obliterate America from within, by making it economically weak, until its markets collapse.” The depiction of bin Laden’s evolution from devout student to militant leader is deeply detailed and dense, and readers unable to keep up with a dissection of Islam’s diverse creeds and doctrines will feel overwhelmed at times, but Scheuer’s project is lucid and important. Bin Laden “anticipated a war of attrition that might last decades” and has planned ahead. He has cultivated a multigenerational cadre of between 5,000 and 7,000 loyal warriors, many from the educated upper classes. The conflict with al-Qaeda will, by bin Laden’s design, likely be multigenerational, and Scheuer takes a crucial step in revealing how the West keeps itself vulnerable by persisting in demonizing rather than understanding its formidable opponent. (Feb.)Library Journal
Since the events of 9/11, Osama bin Laden has been the subject of numerous books and articles of varying quality, but the U.S. intelligence community's assessment of bin Laden and al-Qaeda continues to be based on information before the attacks of 9/11. In this highly readable and jargon-free book, Scheuer (Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror), head of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, updates the issues he had covered in his previous publications and offers a serious and nonideological treatment and analysis of bin Laden's thinking. Unlike many Western analysts who dismiss bin Laden as simplistic, uncouth, and incompetent, Scheuer portrays him as a patient, devout, and talented, albeit ruthless, leader who remains a formidable enemy of the West. VERDICT This informative book is one of the most detailed biographical sketches of bin Laden available in the West and is useful for both the general public and specialists.—Nader Entessar, Univ. of South Alabama, MobileKirkus Reviews
Want al-Qaeda to win? Then let the Pentagon handle the fight against that Islamist faction, which just won't go away.
Scheuer (Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, 2008, etc.), former chief of the CIA unit charged with tracking al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden, writes that the Western powers have "failed miserably in every conceivable way" in containing the terrorist group and eliminating the threat it poses. Instead, its growth appears constant, while the United States, he argues, "remains largely undefended." Indeed, he writes, the American-led handling of the fight seems almost calculated to ensure Islamist victory, inasmuch as it helps accomplish the aims of bleeding our treasury, stretching our military to the breaking point and isolating us by destroying former alliances with other powers. The U.S. government has known of bin Laden's commitment to destroy the West and kill Westerners, and particularly Americans, since 1996, but we have come no closer to accepting that the man is serious; our understanding of him and his cause barely moves beyond caricature. Scheuer examines the various "narratives" that have been constructed and finds them wanting in the face of known realities. One, apparently favored by the Saudi government in an effort to distance itself from bin Laden, born of an influential Saudi family, was that he was a wastrel and the son of a "Syrian-born outsider," charges that are laughably untrue. Another, advanced by Victor Hanson Davis and other neoconservatives, throws around words like "Islamofascist" and turns a deaf ear to anything the Islamists have to say about their situation, which may turn up a legitimate complaint or two. Rightist media commentators in particular, writes Scheuer, are useless but influential—"they offer politicians an easy way out." The author paints a careful portrait of his subjects and notes the ideological disagreements that divide elements of the Islamist movement, offering a program by which to combat "a formidable enemy, one whom we have almost willfully misunderstood."
Of vital interest to many kinds of readers, particularly those who share the author's view that we are fighting a war that may soon reach our shores.