The Wright Stuff

Lawrence Wright's, The Looming Tower, is the essential primer on the rise of al Qaeda. Leave it to a screenwriter to illuminate the obvious fact that this is a war of imagination. Every American should read this book. Your failure to do so compromises your usefulness in the War on Terror.

Mr. Wright made hundreds of observations, calmly expressed, which bring to mind President Lincoln's efforts to get the Northern people focused on the task at hand: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

(Perhaps I will place a long list of specific reactions at the end of this essay. But there are two things I must comment upon.)

First, on the partisan level, it occurred to me that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations have made stupid decisions driven by mass angst. Clinton reacted to the Embassy bombings in Africa by sending cruise missiles after a pet food factory in Sudan. True, he had some intelligence suggesting the production of chemical weapons, but it was poorly vetted. Yet, at the same time, Sudan was trying to open a diplomatic channel to us promising the capture of bin Laden. This offer was spurned, in part, because a diplomatic success lacks the pyrotechnic splendor of a bombing. In sum, Clinton, like Bush, sought to appease American angst. We keep telling our leaders: "Sling some bombs around! Tell those towelheads, DON'T FUCK WITH US!!" The upshot is, of course, that we keep providing bin Laden with recruiting posters. More terrorists, not less.

Mr. Wright, I remind you, remains calm. Even when he describes the appalling failure of the C.I.A. to share (with the F.B.I.!) the Agency's knowledge of Mihdhar's and Hamzi's presence in the country, Mr. Wright maintains his composure. The Agency, perhaps, assumed that Saudi intelligence was trying to turn Mihdhar and Hamzi into double agents. They didn't want the F.B.I. charging in with arrest warrants. Instead, they permitted a team of doggedly motivated investigators working for a brilliant team of prosecutors (including Patrick Fitzgerald, by the way) to labor in semi-darkness. Astonishing stupidity! If it wasn't so stupendously tragic, it would bring to mind Captain Flagg from the M.A.S.H. television series.