Book Review: The Longest War by Peter Bergen on Al-Qaeda

Introduction to Bergen's Chronicle of a Boundless War

As its title suggests, Peter Bergen's The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda is a chronicle of a war that defies the traditional conventions and definitions of warfare. The War on Terror has no clear beginning and no clear end, and it has challenged many of the assumptions about how warfare is viewed and waged within the United States. It is a long war — an unending war — and even though the book was written before the killing of Osama bin Laden, the orchestrator of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the war will continue to rage so long as there are state and non-state enemies willing to attack the United States using the mechanisms of terrorism. The United States has never been the same since those attacks, yet critical deficits still exist in its ability to acquire knowledge about organizations that pose a threat to national security.

Bergen, a journalist, is intimately familiar with the breadth and depth of the struggle to defeat bin Laden. Long before the Twin Towers were destroyed, Bergen was part of a CNN news team that interviewed bin Laden. Rather than focusing on recent events alone, Bergen attempts to offer a broad, all-encompassing history of the past ten years — one that explains why people like bin Laden hate the United States and also shows how the highly regimented, bureaucratic terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda operates.

Understanding Why 'They' Hate 'Us': Ideology and Grievance

One of the great difficulties Americans have in understanding why al-Qaeda's followers hate the United States is a tendency to regard America as a pure exponent of democracy. However, Bergen notes: "there is sufficient truth to aspects of bin Laden's critique of American foreign policy for it to have real traction around the Muslim world," including what Bergen calls American "reflexive" support for Israel, American hypocrisy about promoting democracy while supporting absolute Arab monarchies when convenient, and the invasion of Iraq (Bergen 2011: 28). Yet despite distaste for such actions, a Gallup poll of Muslim countries found that only 7% of Muslims considered the 9/11 attacks to be justified (Bergen 2011: 28). The supporters of al-Qaeda are, in other words, a minority — albeit an influential one.

Bergen also notes that the idea of Islamic fanaticism espoused by al-Qaeda is particular to a specific strand of the faith. He observes that bin Laden could hardly be characterized as a religious scholar, and that his views represent a conglomeration of pathological anti-Semitism and militant Islamism, which bin Laden himself likened to "a burning fire in my intestines" (Bergen 2011: 52). Given his personal experience with bin Laden, Bergen is able to paint a disturbingly intimate portrait of the man. On a personal level, for example, the terrorist mastermind was noted for his kindness to others — so long as they were Muslims.

The type of cultural incomprehension characteristic of both the Bush administration and al-Qaeda was mutual. "Bin Laden disastrously misjudged the possible American responses to the 9/11 attacks, which he believed would take one of two forms: an eventual retreat from the Middle East along the lines of the U.S. pullout from Somalia…or another ineffectual round of cruise missile attacks" (Bergen 2011: 59). Instead, the Bush administration effectively launched a kind of ideological crusade against what it termed an "axis of evil." "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" captured the administration's prevailing mentality (Bergen 2011: 58).

Policy Failures Before and After 9/11

Bergen is highly critical of both previous administrations' responses to terror threats before and after 9/11. "After the 9/11 attacks no Bush administration official took responsibility, apologized, resigned, or was fired for what was the gravest national security failure in American history" — while in contrast, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the admiral and commander of the Pacific Fleet was immediately relieved of command and demoted (Bergen 2011: 59). While President Roosevelt was open to allowing congressional investigations of that attack — ultimately resulting in nine official inquiries — the Bush administration only reluctantly permitted similar scrutiny to take place (Bergen 39). Even after critical structural failures were identified by the 9/11 review commission, it "was largely able to skirt the wider policy failures of the Clinton and Bush administrations' handling of the al-Qaeda threat, subjects that were politically too hot to handle" (Bergen 2011: 40).

On a bipartisan level, there was a general unwillingness to pin responsibility on any specific policy or administration, despite the fact that for decades America had been fighting "the last war" and ignoring the escalating threat of terrorism that its policies in the Middle East were allowing to fester. A frequent criticism of all administrations — both Republican and Democrat — is that they consistently prepare for former threats and shore up defenses against dangers that no longer exist. For the United States, a Cold War mentality persisted, oriented toward combating nationally-based state threats like that of the Soviet Union rather than the diffuse, ideologically-driven menace of international terrorism.

Conclusion: The War Without End

Much still needs to be done to keep America secure and to bridge the cultural gap between the United States and the Middle East. Bergen's book ultimately argues that effective counterterrorism requires not only better intelligence infrastructure but a fundamental willingness to understand adversaries on their own terms — their history, their grievances, and the ideological frameworks that sustain their movements. Until that understanding is achieved and acted upon, the longest war will continue, no matter how many bin Ladens are slain.