The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11 Book

September 11 marked the beginning of a new era- an age of terror in which counter-terrorism will be one of the highest priorities of national governments and international institutions. While the resolve to do whatever necessary to combat terrorism will remain undiminished, a great debate has already begun: What exactly is to be done? The answer will depend, in large measure, on the answer to a prior question: What happened here and why? In The Age of Terror, an agenda-setting team of experts begins to answer this question and examines the considerations and objectives of policy decisions in post-September 11 America. In pondering the dilemmas that burst into our lives on September 11, a knowledge of history helps. Clear thinking about what lies ahead means, among other things, rethinking what has gone before, since there was obviously plenty that we had misunderstood or missed altogether. Hence the participation of four historians along with a career diplomat, a professor of law, a political scientist and a molecular biologist in this book. John Lewis Gaddis asserts that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers will prove to be as consequential as the fall of the Berlin Wall twelve years earlier. He finds in the U.S.'s conduct of the cold war and its nameless sequel ("the post-cold war era") guidelines for waging the struggle ahead. Paul Kennedy appraises the long-term prospects for American power. Abbas Amanat traces the roots of Islamic extremism to the Muslim experience with colonialism and its aftermath. Charles Hill puts the onus for the instability in the Middle East on the backward and autocratic ruling structures in the region, and on what he believes to be a decade of American vacillation and neglect. Niall Ferguson assesses America's role as the sole economic and military superpower, a mature Empire, facing a crucial test of its will and leadership. Harold Hongju Koh sees September 11 as a test of America's commitment to democracy, rule of law and human rights, both at home and abroad. Paul Bracken focuses on the failure of the U.S. intelligence and defense establishments, urging that the new Office of Homeland Security adopt some of the management techniques of corporate America to fix a system that was broken even before September 11. Maxine Singer looks for a model of how the U.S. should mobilize the nation's scientific, technological and medical expertise to battle terrorism. The book's working premise is that the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable. The purpose here is to capture what eight cutting edge thinkers think happened that day, and what each of them believes are the principal lessons, goals and caveats that should guide us as we recover.Read More