XXe siècle

The twentieth century is treated not as a closed historical period but as the background to a political reversal: powers long accustomed to inflicting violence abroad confronted attacks at home. In the book’s account, the September 11 attacks were historically significant because they struck innocent people on United States territory, while also bringing into view a longer history of imperial force, proxy warfare, and policies whose effects outlasted their original purposes.

Imperial violence and the reversal of direction

The discussion places the experience of the United States and Europe against the violence their powers had exercised elsewhere. European states endured devastating internal wars, yet, the book argues, their overseas conquests were rarely followed by attacks from the populations they had subjugated. It names India, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Algeria to make the contrast concrete: England was not attacked by India, Belgium by the Congo, Italy by Ethiopia, or France by Algeria. Against that history, the September 11 crimes shocked Europe not because their scale had no precedent, but because the direction of violence had changed.

For the United States, the attacks were described as the first assault on, or even threat to, the national territory since the War of 1812. The book rejects an easy comparison with Pearl Harbor: the military bases attacked in 1941 stood on colonies, not on the national territory as it defines it. It sets that distinction beside centuries of Indigenous dispossession, the conquest of half of Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii and the Philippines, and the extensive use of force abroad. The cumulative contrast is captured by the image of guns pointed the other way: what had long been an experience imposed on others had, for the first time in this account, reached the United States at home.

A later reflection sharpens the point. Industrial powers were expected to lose some of their near-monopoly on violence as technology changed, though they would retain overwhelming preponderance; no one, the book says, could have predicted the precise form that shift would take. The attacks thus marked a rupture in established patterns, while leaving open what wider political order might follow.

From Cold War recruitment to dispersed networks

The book traces part of the network associated with Osama bin Laden to the forces assembled during the 1980s. It describes United States intelligence working with Pakistan and other partners, including Saudi Arabia and Britain, to recruit, train, and arm militant Islamist fighters for a holy war against Russian forces in Afghanistan. It also cautions against a later effort to portray the United States as an innocent observer of that history, pointing readers to John Cooley’s Unholy Wars as a source on the subject.

A separate account carries the chronology back to 1979. Drawing on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s claim that covert support for mujahideen fighting the Afghan government began before the Soviet military intervention, it describes the policy as an attempt to draw the Soviet Union into what Brzezinski called the “Afghan trap.” The book reports that the United States and its allies built a force that may have numbered one hundred thousand or more, recruiting militants from many countries; many of those later called “Afghans” were not from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden joined the forces during the 1980s and became involved in financial networks that, the book suggests, may have persisted.

The consequences did not end with the war in Afghanistan. The account links elements of the same forces to the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, the 1983 suicide attack that helped prompt the United States to leave Lebanon, and later activity across several regions. After the Soviet forces were expelled, volunteers turned their attention to places including Chechnya and Bosnia; the book says they received tacit United States support and notes that many Islamic volunteers in Bosnia obtained citizenship in recognition of their military service.

The network is described as decentralized, lacking a clear hierarchy, and dispersed so widely that it was difficult to penetrate. The book therefore distinguishes the symbolic figure of Osama bin Laden from the broader forces associated with him. Whether or not he was directly involved in particular attacks, it argues, the network had roots in forces created and supported by the United States and its allies while those forces served their interests. Personalizing an enemy as a singular emblem of evil, in this analysis, can distract from the network’s history and from the conditions that help sustain recruitment.

Terrorism, state policy, and the politics of naming

The book tests the meaning of terrorism against official definitions rather than treating the term as applicable only to a state’s enemies. It presents the United States definition as calculated violence, or the threat of violence, used to advance political, religious, or ideological aims through intimidation, coercion, or fear. By that standard, it calls the September 11 attacks a terrible terrorist crime, while objecting to the separate propaganda convention by which terrorism means violence committed by enemies against oneself or one’s allies.

That distinction frames the book’s comparison between non-state attacks and state conduct. It argues that the official doctrine of “low-intensity warfare” closely resembles the official definition of terrorism: both involve coercive means directed at civilian populations for political or other purposes. On this reasoning, terrorism is not simply an “weapon of the weak” but can also be a component of state action. The argument’s force comes from applying one stated definition across different actors, rather than allowing the identity of the perpetrator to determine the category.

The book also resists describing the response simply as a “war on terrorism.” It regards that name as propaganda if the war does not actually target terrorism according to the same standards applied to others. A consistent application, it says, would implicate powerful states and their clients as well as their adversaries. This is not presented as a claim that the September 11 crimes were anything other than terrorism; rather, the distinction exposes the political work performed when the label is applied selectively.

Retaliation, strategic power, and historical consequence

The account describes the attacks as an indirect consequence of United States policy, not as a straightforward result of a single decision. It connects the network to the mercenary forces organized, trained, and armed with the involvement of the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, and Saudi funding. It also describes the recruitment environment as one shaped by despair, anger, and frustration among people across economic and ideological lines. The book’s emphasis is on a chain of policies and consequences, not on reducing the attacks to one cause.

In its account of the aftermath, the book argues that the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time. It connects those bases both to control of regional resources and to a broader strategic position around the Gulf: before the Afghanistan war, it says, Diego Garcia was the safest base in a system stretching from the Pacific to the Azores. The new deployments, in this reading, made forceful intervention easier and strengthened the United States’ capacity to shape access to energy resources and regional influence.

The book further interprets the new phase of the “war on terrorism” as an opportunity for the Bush administration to consolidate its existing military superiority and pursue global dominance. It recounts Saudi Prince Abdullah’s request that the United States pay greater attention to Arab responses to its support for Israeli repression, and the refusal, as reported in the book, to let those views constrain United States policy. The response is set beside the claim that Afghanistan demonstrated American military capacity and would secure respect through firmness. The episode links the language of counterterrorism to an overt assertion of power, rather than treating the two as separate matters.

The comparison with the NATO bombing of Serbia makes that strategic reading broader. The book says that the principal stated purpose there was to establish NATO’s credibility, as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained it, while arguing that the credibility at stake was primarily that of the United States and its principal arms client. It presents the Afghanistan campaign and the Serbia bombing as instances in which a public rationale and a demonstration of power could operate together, without claiming access to confidential records of decision-making.

The closing judgment is therefore double-edged: the September 11 attacks altered established patterns and were likely to have far-reaching consequences, but the underlying international problems remained largely in place. The twentieth century supplies the historical depth for that conclusion. Earlier intervention, the creation of armed networks, and the pursuit of military advantage form a history that the book sees continuing into the new century—not as a simple, inevitable line of causation, but as a record whose consequences cannot be separated from the policies that helped shape it.