The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to
9/11
Lawrence Wright
(Knopf, 480 pages, $27.95)
You aren’t going to find a better recounting of the events leading
up to September 11th than The Looming Tower, journalist
Lawrence Wright’s meticulously reported account just published by
Knopf.
Wright, who once taught at the American University in Cairo, has
spent almost five years interviewing 600 principles — more than
half of them Muslims — in pulling together his dramatic narrative.
He carries the story all the way from the 1940s visit to America by
Sayyid Qutb — the prissy Egyptian exchange student who became the
spiritual father of the Muslim Brotherhood — to the frantic
efforts of FBI antiterrorist John O’Neill trying to uncover the
plot before being cashiered out of the Bureau and moving over to be
head of security at the World Trade Center — where he perished
three weeks later.
What emerges from The Looming Tower is that we are not
facing a clash of civilizations so much as a conflict with an
educated segment of a civilization that produces some very weird,
sexually disoriented men. Poverty has nothing to do with it. It is
stunning to meet the al Qaeda roster — one highly accomplished
scholar after another with advanced degrees in chemistry, biology,
medicine, engineering, a large percentage of them educated in the
United States.
Ayam Al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s peer in organizing world
jihad, is typical — a highly trained Egyptian doctor who was often
providing sophisticated treatment to his hospital patients even as
he plotted the overthrow of the Egyptian government. And of course
there is bin Laden himself, the pampered child of Saudi Arabia’s
biggest builder who often bankrolled the Saudi royal family the way
the Rothschilds used to bankroll European governments.
As Wright shrewdly observes:
What the recruits tended to have in common — besides
their urbanity, their cosmopolitan backgrounds, their education,
their facility with languages, and their computer skills — was
displacement. Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other
than the one in which they were reared….Like Sayyid Qutb, they
defined themselves as radical Muslims while living in the West….
Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned
to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of
religion. Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more
than a faith — it was an identity.
All this conforms with the work of sociologist Will Herberg, who
theorized in the 1960s that immigrants to America willingly shed
their national languages and customs while regrouping around
religion. What is different about Islam is that the mosques are so
politically radicalized, usually under imams who are accustomed to
contending with secular authorities for political power in their
home countries.
As several people observe throughout the book, jihadists bear a
striking resemblance to American student revolutionaries of the
1960s — overprivileged children who sense they have been coddled
and feel compelled to prove their manhood by embarking on
apocalyptic ventures to remake the world. With Islam, all this is
confounded by a polygamous society where fathers are often distant
from their sons and where men and women barely encounter each other
as young adults. As Wright observes of Mohammed Atta, the vanguard
of the suicide brigade:
Physically, there was a feminine quality to his
bearing: He was “elegant” and “delicate,” so that his sexual
orientation — however unexpressed — was difficult to read…
Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind
were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. [His] will
states: “No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my
funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of
me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do
not touch my genitals.” The anger that this statement directs at
women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that
Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted
sexuality as it did with the clash of civilizations.
Beyond that, what glares through the pages of
The Looming
Tower (the title is taken from the Koran) is the ad hoc,
improvisational way in which al Qaeda settled into its war against
America. Al-Zawahiri, who contributed as much to the organization
as bin Laden, was still dreaming of taking over Egypt in the late
1990s. With no colonial tradition, America often held a soft spot
in the heart of early recruits. Even as they trained for war in
Afghanistan, they were fond of watching Arnold Schwarzenegger
movies.
In the end, however, the David-versus-Goliath imagery won out.
As Wright observes, Osama bin Laden is much more a public relations
specialist than a warrior. It was the image of a single man living
in a cave in the remotest corner of the world bringing down two of
the world’s tallest buildings that eventually won Muslim hearts.
Meanwhile, Bin Laden expected American society to collapse
with the fall of the Twin Towers. So much for his understanding of
the world.
And what about things on this side of the ocean? It is grueling
to read about the missed opportunities, the forgotten phone calls,
the wadded up memos thrown in the wastebasket that could have
uncovered the plot. The failure of the CIA, the FBI and the
National Security Administration to communicate with one another is
dismaying.
Where Wright falls down is in his failure to analyze how this
happened. “The Wall” erected between the FBI and CIA is mentioned
but never illuminated. Completely missing from these pages are the
names of Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick, those Justice Department
stalwarts who decided to erect The Wall even “beyond what the
statute required.” ABC-TV’s efforts to cast a little aspersion this
week on Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger — a stunning
development in the history of television — will pale to
insignificance if the networks ever get around to telling the story
of how Reno and Gorelick turned America into home base for
terrorists by refusing to allow the CIA to inform the FBI when
known conspirators arrived in this country.
Still, the ultimate message that emerges from Wright’s brilliant
recounting is that, while we face a long, long conflict against a
civilization that literally wants to move backward in time, the
situation is not completely hopeless. For one thing, American
security is healed. Until and unless the Democrats get back in and
mess it up again, we will probably not repeat the mistakes of the
1990s.
More important, our conflict with Islam is not a war against a
whole civilization. The jihadists are despised as much in their own
countries as they are in the West. Egyptians are sick to death of
the Muslim Brotherhood and its casual slaughter. The war between
Fundamentalists and secular authorities in Algeria cost 100,000
lives.
What we are at war with is a Muslim intelligentsia —
basically the same people who brought us the horrors of the French
Revolution and 20th century Communism. With their obsession for
moral purity and their rational hatred that goes beyond all
irrationality, these “warrior-intellectuals” are wreaking the same
havoc in the Middle East as they did in Jacobin France and Mao
Tse-tung’s China.
Western and Eastern societies eventually emerged from this reign
of terror. Maybe Islamic societies can do the same.
