Reviews of Osama by Jonathan Randal

Book Summary

How is it possible for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world's only superpower? This is the question at the center of Jonathan Randal's riveting, timely account of Osama bin Laden's role in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. Randal–a journalist whose experience of the Middle East spans the past forty years–makes clear how Osama's life epitomizes the fatal collision between twenty-first-century Islam and the West, and he describes the course of Osama's estrangement from both the West and the Saudi petro-monarchy of which his family is a part. He examines Osama's terrorist activities before September 11, 2001, and shows us how, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Osama presented the West with something new in the annals of contemporary terrorism: an independently wealthy entrepreneur with a seemingly worldwide following ready to do his bidding. Randal explores the possibility that Osama offered the Saudis his Al-Qaeda forces to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991; he traces the current sources of Osama's money; and he tells us why the Iraq war has played into the hands of the terrorists.

With his long-maintained sources in the Middle East and his intimate understanding of the region, Randal gives us a clearer explanation than any we have had of the whys and wherefores of the world's most prominent and feared terrorist.

Behind The Book

With his long-maintained sources in the Middle East and intimate understanding of the region, Jonathan Randal sheds light on Osama bin Laden's role in the rise of terrorism. Here, Randal uses his years of research to separate fact from fiction when it comes to basic questions Americans have about Osama.

3 reasons why Osama is happy with the Bush administration's war in Iraq

1. The ideology-driven war dreamed up by Bush's neoconservative advisors allows foreign jihadi terrorists to blend in with a legitimate nationalist resistance movement against a western military occupation. That's hard to beat for no cost piggybacking.
   
2. Participating in the Iraqi resistance to the United States allows the jihadis a foothold in the very heart of the Middle East. Iraq is rich in water as well as oil and is right next door to Osama's birthplace, Saudi Arabia, which remains his principal target.
   
3. The presence of foreign jihadis may not please many Iraqis, but in the rest of the Arab and wider Muslim worlds they are seen as hurting the world's only superpower.
   

4 myths about Osama

1. He was a boozing skirt chaser as a young man–pure disinformation.
   
2. He is a religious authority. Not so, he needs more learned Muslims to formulate his fatwas.
   
3. He hated all things western from his earliest youth. He got on well with Westerners, including Americans, when he was a young man working for his family's giant construction company, which employed many Western engineers.
   
4. He is rich as Croesus. The American government created the myth that he was worth $300 million dollars back in 1996, years after his much more modest inheritance was frozen.

5 facts about Al Qaeda

1. It has survived the capture of as many as two thirds of its top cadre, but still presents a formidable force.
   
2. Al Qaeda needs far less money to function than the United States believes to be the case.
   
3. Despite American government suggestions that it has staunched the money flowing into Al Qaeda coffers, in fact that is far from true because informal transfer systems and cash are its stock in trade and the United States has little idea what to do on this score.
   
4. Although Al Qaeda certainly has trained and financed at least some of the men involved in terrorist operations from Morocco to Istanbul and Bali to Kenya, many of the foot soldiers are locals who were never trained in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Such is the power of emulation that Osama and September 11th exert.
   
5. Most of its operations are standard low-tech straight out of western military manuals for guerrilla warfare. September 11th was the main exception. The Madrid train bombings in March 2004 used cheap electronic wristwatches to set off explosives on multiple trains, and that suggests the terrorists are getting smarter and outgrowing suicide car bomb operations.