How to fight terror.

• Author: Byman, Daniel
• Position: America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies - A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism - The Receding Shadow of the Prophet: The Rise and Fall of Radical Political Islam - Book Review

George Friedman, America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies (New York: Random House, 2004), 368 pp., $25.95.

Adam Garfinkle, ed., A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2004), 230 pp., $15.

Ray Takeyh and Nikolas K. Gvosdev, The Receding Shadow of the Prophet: The Rise and Fall of Radical Political Islam (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 187 pp., $24.95.

AFTER OVERTHROWING the Taliban and embarking on an impressive worldwide police and intelligence campaign against Al-Qaeda, there are no more obvious steps to take in the War on Terror. Unfortunately, though Al-Qaeda itself may be on the defensive, many observers believe the ideology it champions has become stronger since September 11. We continue to pour money into intelligence, homeland defense and the military, but this spending is primarily to defeat today's terrorist cells. More spies and better defenses do little to defeat a hostile ideology.

The United States needs to go beyond these traditional tools and develop a long-term strategy for defeating the ideological movement we face. Admittedly, we talk the talk. We can all agree with the 2003 White House National Strategy for Combating Terrorism that the United States must "win the 'war of ideas'", "support democratic values" and "promote economic freedom", and we can all endorse the 9/11 Commission's call for improving America's global appeal by correcting ignorant or distorted portrayals of the United States. But what do these proposals mean in practice? Is it truly possible to win the "hearts and minds" (or, more realistically, the minds) of citizens of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, where those holding favorable opinions of the United States are as out of the mainstream as Nader voters in America? Even more difficult, how should the Bush Administration and its successors balance these efforts with other U.S. priorities? Is the jihadist threat uniquely existential, requiring the United States to bend its policy toward Iraq and Israel to meet this larger concern, or is it simply one danger among many?

Unfortunately, many books related to the War on Terror offer answers that are a soporific combination of soft analysis and weak policy recommendations. George Friedman's work typifies the rather pedestrian studies that have emerged in recent years. In contrast to the 9/11 Commission's definitive account of Al-Qaeda's emergence, the U.S. response, and the various intelligence failures, America's Secret War offers an anecdotal and often shallow review of several key events before and after September 11. For example, Friedman contends that the fundamental pre-September 11 weakness of U.S. intelligence was a lack of language skills and analysts. Although a real deficiency, the reader is left to imagine how more Arabic-speaking analysts would have uncovered the plot beyond Friedman's generic words about using logic and intuition. Similarly, he notes that "a civil war broke out in Saudi Arabia", engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq--an interesting contention, but one that dramatically overstates the scale of violence in the kingdom. Friedman also makes many statements that are simply wrong. For example, he contends that the Saudis only really discovered the Palestinian issue in 2002 and that Crown Prince Abdullah's peace plan was risk free for him, both of which reflect a remarkable ignorance of the kingdom and its politics. (The comparison with F. Gregory Gause III's informed and subtle chapter on Saudi Arabia in A Practical Guide to Winning the War on Terrorism is worthwhile.) Making mistakes about Saudi Arabia is forgivable, as the ruling family is both secretive and enigmatic. Friedman, however, also embraces some bizarre theories about U.S. policy. Among other things, he contends that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was designed primarily to put pressure on Saudi Arabia--a revelation that both Washington and Riyadh would find surprising. Aside from such mistakes and simplifications, Friedman's work is frustrating because he provides neither references nor context for his controversial points, making them much less convincing than the 9/11 Commission's exhaustive study of a similar period.

Most painfully, Friedman dodges the hardest questions. He does not ask, for example, why there have been no follow-on terrorist attacks on the United States so far, or what measures the Bush Administration should...