This book is frustratingly short-sighted on analysis. Meredith goes all in on proximate cause, focusing almost exclusively on dictatorship and corruptThis book is frustratingly short-sighted on analysis. Meredith goes all in on proximate cause, focusing almost exclusively on dictatorship and corruption within the first generations of African leaders following 20th century independence. The majority of the book describes what happened and lovingly details atrocities committed by despotic African regimes and paramilitaries. Only in the last, very short chapter do we get to the why, with major amnesia around the oppression, disenfranchisement, arbitrary divisions of territorial and geographic lines designed to enrich Western governments, etc., committed by colonizers right up to the point of independence....more
Compelling narrative but a painful read, particularly when it comes to the failure of US intelligence agencies to act on the information they had leadCompelling narrative but a painful read, particularly when it comes to the failure of US intelligence agencies to act on the information they had leading up to 9/11. Bureaucratic red tape and intelligence failures are one thing, but Wright draws harsh causal lines between ego-driven refusals to provide information and god I can't even think about it. The CIA comes off with especially unclean hands; there’s a palpable scene on 9/12 where Soufan (the only Arabic-speaking FBI agent in the late 90s, which alone is bonkers) finally gets the information he’d been hounding the CIA for, namely that the CIA had long known two of the hijackers were in the U.S., and he has to run to the bathroom to throw up.
The biographical studies are interesting, bin Laden most of all. It’s jarring that he comes off as a dreamer with a modest celebrity cache, but who was also manipulated out of his wealth, shuffled around into the custody of whichever country would take him, and not a strategos by any means. There’s even an element of naiveté there, particularly in his belief that bringing down the towers would cause the United States literally to end. On the other hand, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed gets minimal treatment in the book, which is sort of surprising but also not, given bin Laden's mythology in the U.S.
It’s also interesting to look at our own pre-9/11 naiveté again. I can’t imagine un-knowing something like that, but we can wish something didn’t happen without wishing ourselves back into that kind of vulnerability. ...more
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