A History of the World Since 9/11
Disaster, Deception, and Destruction in the War on Terror
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
To understand why, you'll need to know how ...
- an Australian metals trader named Garry-with help from the CIA-inadvertently triggered the invasion of Iraq
- coalition troops were killed by bombs made with explosives that, according to the White House, never existed
- the United States Air Force bombed a wedding in Afghanistan by mistake
- the U.S. gave material support to the president of Uzbekistan, who, as it happens, boils people alive
These are not merely random disasters from an otherwise effective war. A History of the World Since 9/11shows us just why, a decade after the horrifying attacks on New York and Washington, we are no closer towinning the war on terror than we were on September 10, 2001. We failed to find Osama bin Laden or quellextremism. We sparked civil wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Around the world, innocents were incarcerated,tortured, and murdered-all in the name of justice.
Acclaimed author and journalist Dominic Streatfeild traveled across the world for years in pursuit ofanswers for this stunning collapse of international law. The results of his search form the most fully realized study of the war on terror yet written. Piercing reportage blends with sobering human drama, woven into eight narratives of how our world went wrong after 9/11.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Some poisonous fruits of America's response to the September 11 attacks are inventoried in this forceful but tendentious critique of the "war on terror." Journalist Streatfield (Cocaine) examines eight post-9/11 injustices and tragedies and links them, with varying degrees of plausibility, to the Bush administration's wars, intelligence operations, tactical blunders, and general hubris. Some cases he investigates are open-and-shut: an American air strike on an Afghan wedding party kills dozens; explosives looted by Iraqis in the postinvasion chaos end up in terrorist bombs; the CIA conducts a brutal extraordinary rendition of the wrong man. Others, however, like the Uzbekistan government's 2005 massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators, seem only coincidentally related to American policy. And was the murder of an Indian-American cashier, Vasudev Patel, during a convenience-store heist really the fallout of President Bush's call for " pre-emptive action'" against terrorism, as the author suggests, or a tragic robbery-homicide? Streatfield combines gripping reportage with analysis that's frequently more deterministic than the facts warrant. The result is a history that's vivid and insightful, but also sometimes blinkered and unreliable.
