Editor’s Note: This article is one of three WPR features on the theme “The Al-Qaida We Don’t Know.” Two months ago, on the seventh anniversary of the attacks of 9/11, dozens of American scholars published articles trying to determine whether al-Qaida is stronger or weaker today than it was seven years ago. Nearly all of the analysis, though, viewed al-Qaida exclusively through the theoretical lens of counterterrorism, an approach that essentially defines the organization by its choice of tactics. But ignoring the many social, cultural and historical factors that effect al-Qaida’s relation to its principal constituency, the “Arab street,” skews [...]
Editor’s Note: This article is one of three WPR features on the theme “The Al-Qaida We Don’t Know.” Salim Hamdan was not a typical al-Qaida prisoner. For seven years prior to his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, Hamdan had been Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard. He had been caught red handed on an al-Qaida film carrying an AK 47 while protecting the al-Qaida chief, and as if that weren’t enough, pictures of Hamdan’s car at the time of his arrest showed two SAM 7 heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles there on the backseat. Hardly the normal accoutrement for an [...]
On Oct. 16, 2002, President Bush signed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution into law. But six years later, neither the political left nor the political right has internalized the key lessons we should have learned from the run up to the Iraq War. Both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain deserve credit: Obama for his skepticism and opposition to the war in 2002 and 2003, McCain for supporting the Surge which has helped make the decision to invade Iraq marginally less disastrous than it appeared in 2006. But the debate over those two questions this [...]
