bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America [Paperback]

Bodansky posits how Bin Laden has become a hero to scores of radical Muslim youth. He recounts the litany of his terrorist attacks on American embassies in Africa and on India while in league with the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. Sponsorship of Islamic terrorist movements has become a part of Paki national security policy and Bin Laden plays no small part in this exercise. The role of Pakistan in recruiting and soliciting radical Islamic militants is a chilling forecast of things to come.

The Taliban has now taken its religious views to the extreme and has "taken its show on the road". This will unfortunately lead to resolute retaliation by the West which will in turn lead to much blood letting. This book will provide the interested reader with a lot of the history of what has made up and what has gone into the resistance by Bin Laden to the UN forces in Somalia and elsewhere . It will also provide an in depth view of the operations of terrorist networks as they have become spread across that section of the world that borders the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Read this book and prepare for what is sure to come.

To be honest, I did not understand what the Islamist movement was before reading this book. Nothing in newspapers or on television has explained this movement as clearly and comprehensively as Bodansky has with this book. Essentially, it is a totalitarian political movement cloaked by Islam. It has many similarities to communism - a utopian view that their philosophy will make life/the world perfect, lack of civil rights, no free press, no freedom of religion, only the Islamic movement makes it especially bad for women. Examples of this type of government can be seen in Iran, Sudan and Taliban-era Afghanistan. Its religious cover makes it attractive to many devout Muslims, some of whom seem to believe the whole world should be either Muslim or dead. Many of the leaders of the Islamsist movement have said that the ultimate goal of the Islamist movement is world domination. And that seems to be how they are behaving.

The most shocking thing about this book is that it was written before 9/11 and predicted some sort of "spectacular" and "devastating" attack on the US, either in New York or Washington, DC.

I was disappointed to read about the US/Clinton Administration's response to attacks prior to 9/11 (this book was written long before 9/11 and ends in 1999). While the Clinton Administration did attempt some retaliation, it was, from the terrorists' standpoint, laughable and accomplished nothing more than making the US look ridiculous. This seems to be mostly due to the incredible naivete of that administration with regard to the growing threat of the Islamist movement.

I feel as though this book has allowed me to read the news about the Middle East now with some comprehension of what specific events really mean. I understand the difficult situation we are in and expect that it will probably last for many more years. This is not an easy book - it is detailed and complicated to read and contains information that is hard to digest. Still, it was the most important book I have ever read.