HOW IS IT POSSIBLE for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world's only superpower? This is the question at the cen-ter of Jonathan Randal's riveting, timely account of Osama bin Laden's role in the rise of terrorism in the Middle East.
Randal--a journalist whose experience of the Middle East spans the past forty years--makes clear how Osama's life epitomizes the fatal col-lision between twenty-first-century Islam and the West, and he describes the course of Osama's estrangement from both the West and the Saudi petro-monarchy of which his family is a part. He examines Osama's terrorist activities before Sep-tember 11, 2OOl, and shows us how, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Osama pre-sented the West with something new in the annals of contemporary terrorism: an indepen-dently wealthy entrepreneur with a seemingly worldwide following ready to do his bidding. Randal explores the possibility that Osama of-fered the Saudis his A1-Qaeda forces to drive Sad- dam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991; he traces the current sources of Osama's money; and he tells us why the Iraq war has played into the hands of the terrorists.
With his long-maintained sources in the Mid-dle East and his intimate understanding of the region, Randal gives us a clearer explanation than any we have had of the whys and where-fores of the world's most prominent and feared terrorist. |
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