Bin Laden--The Man Who Declared War on America. (Books: the death worshippers).

Bin Laden--The Man Who Declared War on America, by Yossef Bodansky; Prima Forum/Random House, 2001, $39.95.

THIS BOOK, which was first published in 1999, was rush-reissued after September 11, but without new material--which in fact makes it even more relevant and chillingly prescient. The author is the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and a former senior consultant to the US Departments of Defense and State, as well as the author of eight books on international terrorism and global crises. He really knows his stuff--and makes it quite clear that there was a mountain of evidence about bin Laden and the terrorist networks of the Middle East, but that the very nature of terrorism makes it impossible for governments to predict accurately where, how and when terrorists might strike.

The focus here is on the Middle East and North Africa, and the complex web of intrigue linking both state and "freelance" terrorism, as well as the recent historical background to the Islamist movement, and its sponsorship in various Middle Eastern states, chief amongst whom are Iran, Syria and Iraq. This is a complete riposte to those myopic commentators who seek to pin the blame for everything on a failure of US foreign policy--the reality is that the Middle East has always played its own games regardless.

Bodansky painstakingly traces the unholy alliances of terror that exist between groups such as Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and others, as well as their differences, and the ghastly ways in which they have been building up their networks through the help of local warlords in places as diverse as Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and Afghanistan. It profiles many of the main players, not only bin Laden (who is, as the author points out, the only terrorist leader ever to have actually declared war on America, the first time in 1996) but his many associates and acolytes all over the Middle East and Africa.

Bodansky points out that the goal of exporting Islamic revolution had its roots in Khomeini's Iran, but has also managed to garner all kinds of non-religious terrorist support, as well as reinvent itself as the new messiah for the Islamic world. He details the deep involvement of Iran in funding and organising terrorist attacks, and also shows how compromised are many "moderate" Muslim states, which seek desperately to get protection from the iconoclastic revolutionaries by basically paying protection money to them as long as they go and fight elsewhere. This is the situation of Saudi Arabia, for instance, where the ruling Al Sauds are now seeing all their chickens coming home to roost at once.

He does point out too that although the USA bears no responsibility for the growth of ...