“With Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda discredited and on the run, the terrorists clearly did not win. But neither did we,” writes Editor Gideon Rose in the introductory chapter of a new collection of essays published by Foreign Affairs magazine. Released to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. vs. al Qaeda offers a history of the War on Terror as told through Foreign Affairs’ incisive coverage.
The edition features groundbreaking articles by thinkers such as Princeton University’s Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University, and Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid, as well as newer voices, including the Norwegian defense analyst Brynjar Lia and William McCants, an expert on al Qaeda at the Center for Naval Analyses. A documents section supplements the essays with major speeches by President George W. Bush—for instance, his January 2002 State of the Union Address and his September 2002 National Security Strategy, which codified the administration’s new foreign policy—as well as statements by President Barack Obama, private correspondence between Osama bin Laden and his deputies, and pivotal U.S. legislation.
In “The War on Terror in Retrospect: Anatomy of an Overreaction,” Rose draws on the collected articles to examine America’s decade-long response to the 9/11 attacks. The Bush administration’s waging of the war on terror was, he writes, “not the heroic success story supporters claimed, nor the nefarious conspiracy its harshest critics charged.” The U.S. government’s policies were “well intentioned and its enemies were worth opposing.” The problem was that “Washington could not keep its head.” The book offers perspective on that tale of “unchecked power goaded into hubris, followed by folly, followed by nemesis.” It exposes the bitter tale of the last decade, writes Rose—a story of how a “country that had entered the new millennium riding high sunk as low as it had been in more than a generation.”
