Summary of the Author’s Main Arguments
As do most of the authors who have written about the events of the September 9, 2001 terrorist attack on the US, Lawrence Wright describes the events that culminated in the heated hatred of the West by the Islam world. However, he avoids the common narrative that most of the authors use; the idea that strong jihadist stances of leaders in the Arab world spurred the events that resulted in the deadly attack. Nevertheless, he recognizes the direct effect of individual players on the attack that revolutionized the manner in which the US perceives terrorism today.
His first point is the vision and charisma of only a few people resulted in the success of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He notes a few people whom he considered played a critical role in the siege. First, as everyone would guess, he focuses on Osama bin Laden. He takes a rather different approach to his perception of bin Laden from what the mainstream thinkers would imagine. According to Wright (2006), Osama did not have feelings of hatred towards the US for the fact that he had childhood connections with the country. The author argues that he needed the influence of Ayman al-Zawahri to develop his radical stance that he did towards the end. The books seems to suggest that the root of the extremist tendencies that the two leaders of the Al-Qaeda developed related to the forms of treatment they had experienced at some points in their lives. For instance, Wright suggests that al-Zawahri had spent some time in Egyptian prisons, which had caused him to consider that peace would never solve any conflict. Therefore, he influenced bin-Laden into considering that they needed to be violent if they were to deal with the ‘injustices of the US towards the Islamic nations (Wright, 2006). Bin Laden, as Wright still suggests, only provided the leadership skills required to keep the fabrics of the Al-Qaeda in place.
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Another significant argument in the book is the idea that the events of 9/11 were not inventible; they were bound to happen since a series of factors had made it almost too easy for the attackers to access their ultimate target. He suggests that the attacks resulted from a combination of three factors, bad luck, a conflict among the intelligence units, and chance encounters (Wright, 2006). By then, as the book notes, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA were involved in feuding, which caused them to avoid sharing information on intelligence among themselves when they should have done so with the required levels of consistency. In fact, the author suggests that it was not possible for the intelligence units to stop the 19 hijackers that were involved in the crash of the three planes into the World Trade Center Towers when some individuals, especially John O’Neill had such information (Wright, 2006). By then O’Neill had been made chief of security at the towers after the end of his tenure at the FBI where he acted as the Chief Director. Therefore, the security and security forces of the country made a series of bad decisions that exposed the US citizenry to one of the deadliest attacks in recent history.
The blame appears to be on the US, not bin Laden or the jihadist stances synonymous with terrorist groups in the Islam world. For example, Wright suggests that Osama was never opposed to the US because of differences in his cultural orientation or religious beliefs. In fact, he was fan of the US products, such as Hollywood movies, which his fighters watched in training, cosmetic products that one of his wives wore, and other products that his sons enjoyed (Wright, 2006). As reported earlier, al-Zawahri ‘opened’ bin Laden’s eyes by pointing at the political activity of the US in the Islam world. He pointed the US existence in Saudi Arabia and a later entry into Somalia as some of the events that provoked Al-Qaeda and bin Laden into attacking the US. He accepted the belief that peace was not an appropriate way of solving conflicts. The book notes this element, which the author symbolizes in the title of the book as having a dual meaning. First, he uses the ‘looming towers’ to refer to the congratulatory messages that Osama had sent to the nine hijackers after the attack when he said, “…whenever you are, death will find you, even in the looming towers,” (Wright, 2006). The second meaning referred to the towers he had bombed using his suicide bombers.
In summary, the author suggests that the US was unconscious of the danger it faced before the attack. He noted that the nation’s two regimes, one before and the other during the attack, had not prioritized terrorism as one of the major threats to the well-being of the country. Therefore, while bin-Laden was busy bombing US embassies around the world, in Nairobi, Dar-el-Salaam and others, the planners at the White house and the Pentagon did not anticipate an attack of such a magnitude. These accounts, though the author does not mention, blame the White House for its unconscious political activity in the Islam world and all the administrative units in charge of national intelligence and security for poor planning.
Assessment of Evidence
The credibility of information that Wright cites in his work has one fundamental strength, the fact that he uses primary data to argue himself out. For example, he conducted more than five hundred face-to-face interviews with some crucial people in the build-up of the terrorist event. Among the most notable people that he interviewed were Jamal Khalifa, who was bin-Laden’s best friend in college, Yorsi Fouda, an Al-Jazeera report, and Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the era (Wright, 2016). The interviews provide a chance for the author to convince his readers that his account of the story is credible, in fact, the most credible. The author also uses evidence from documents written in Arabic to make the evidence he presents credible and plausible among his readers. The first-hand information that utilizes in writing his work makes him have more understanding of life inside the Al-Qaeda training camps, as well as a comprehension of the factors that motivated the attack on the US. This review does not recognize any element of the evidence he used in his work as requiring improvement since it has the personal appeal created from direct quotes.
Assessment of Argument
The arguments drawn from the book are credible to a significant extent. The most significant of such arguments is the fact that the US drew hatred from the Islam world to itself through its foreign policy. This argument resonates with most authors who point out the idea that the US violated the provisions of an agreement it had entered with Al-Qaeda during its resistance of a possible Soviet influence on the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia (Atwan, 2008). The proponents of this argument appear to suggest that the US and the CIA enhanced the resurgence of the Al-Qaeda because of its foreign policy during the Cold War to defeat the Soviet forces from landing in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. Therefore, when Wright mentions the involvement of the US in missions within the Islam world, he makes his argument substantive and plausible among historians.
Significance of the Argument
Much as diverse approaches might be adopted for explaining the significance of the arguments in the book, the author of this essay finds that the evidence and arguments advanced provide a new way of approaching the study of political violence. Specifically, one might appreciate that it is never plausible to blame one player in the event of terrorist attacks because the activities culminating in the final attack are always broad-based. For instance, some people might have been quick to blame religious extremism in the Middle East for the emergence of terrorist militia. On the contrary, some might want to adopt the idea that the US was paid for its activities in the region, which is still plausible. Lastly, another school of thought might blame the planners of the US for having been ignorant of the threat that the country faced from attacks on US allies that was ongoing while Al-Qaeda planned the attack. The argument also places pressure on the political players of the nation to be conscious of their involvement with foreign countries since being unconscious of such activities might fuel animosity between the government and its foreign counterparts. This issue is quite critical since it reminds the US of its ‘forgetfulness’ of the effects of its interventions on political affairs of other countries. It appears that having too many foreign interests might continue to influence the relationship between the country and others, which is quite dangerous, especially when the intelligence service remains relaxant.
References
Atwan, A. B. (2008). The secret history of al Qaeda . Univ of California Press.
Wright, L. (2006). The looming tower: Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 . Alfred a Knopf Incorporated.
