Osama: The Making of a Terrorist

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		Osama: The Making of a Terrorist
		Osama: The Making of a Terrorist

基本信息·出版社：Knopf
·页码：352 页
·出版日期：2004年08月
·ISBN：0375409017
·条形码：9780375409011
·版本：2004-08-24
·装帧：精装
·开本：20开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：本拉登的崛起

内容简介 Book Description
How is it possible for one middle-aged Saudi millionaire to threaten the world’s only superpower? This is the question at the center 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 collision 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 September 11, 2001, and shows us how, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Osama presented the West with something new in the annals of contemporary terrorism: an independently wealthy entrepreneur with a seemingly worldwide following ready to do his bidding. Randal explores the possibility that Osama offered the Saudis his Al-Qaeda forces to drive Saddam 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 Middle East and his intimate understanding of the region, Randal gives us a clearer explanation than any we have had of the whys and wherefores of the world’s most prominent and feared terrorist.

From Publishers Weekly
This study of the terrorist leader is an outstanding achievement, especially in light of the inherent difficulty in writing at length about so elusive a man, who rarely appears in public, has left few written traces yet has a larger-than-life stature. Randal, a veteran Middle East correspondent, triumphs over this challenge and succeeds in presenting bin Laden's life as representative of a larger regional narrative. Randal gives a thorough and penetrating look into the different stages of bin Laden's life and how each battle hardened his resolve, deepened his sense of struggle and intensified his anger. Randal is systematic in outlining the failures and miscalculations of the U.S. in its attempts to contain and thwart bin Laden—most notably, Clinton's series of bombings in Afghanistan and Sudan, which, in failing to kill bin Laden, led many Muslims to believe that Allah had saved him and boosted his reputation hugely. Randal's writing is lively and rich, and he conveys complicated developments with ease and often grace. At one point he cleverly characterizes Osama as "a cross between the president of the Jihad Incorporated money machine and the head of a maverick Ford Foundation dispensing seed-money grants of a very special nature." Full of sharp prose (Osama as a "Muslim Samson" who "brought the temple down on his Taliban hosts") and shrewd assessments, this is a trenchant look into the life and mindset of one of the world's most mysterious, menacing and important figures.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In the 1980s, in the course of my own reporting, I ran into Jonathan Randal occasionally in places like Sudan and Pakistan. The now-retired foreign correspondent for The Washington Post represented a breed of journalist now gradually going extinct: the seasoned, multilingual man or woman of the world who lives overseas and has an intimate, inside-baseball knowledge of dozens upon dozens of countries and their politics, with the added advantage of being able to write about it all at reasonable length, rather than having to reduce it to television sound bites.

Osama is Randal's third book, and even if it contains relatively little new about Osama bin Laden himself, there are enough interesting asides drawn from a lifetime of reporting in the Middle East to make it a worthwhile venture. "If there is an answer to such an enduring phenomenon as terrorism," Randal writes, "I suspect it lies in needlework, that time-consuming, patient, dull, professional accumulation of detail." In that spirit, he posits that the tactical goal of the United States should be not to stamp out terrorism in its entirety but to confine it to the peripheries of the Third World. For if suicide bombers fail to launch new spectacular assaults on the United States and other major Western countries, "the attraction of jihad may wane."

Randal is at his best when intuiting the nuances of terrorism and the particular Middle Eastern culture from whence it springs, and at his worst when characterizing the United States, which he has visited but not lived in for decades, and which he occasionally reduces to clichés of the very kind he abjures about the Middle East.

He understands how suicidal terrorists desperately need to memorialize themselves as a revenge for their own failures in life, how such failed men often have a need to reinvent themselves, how they are "prone to quarrels, splintering, and new groupings" and how they live drifters' lives in low-end suburbs of the West, divorced from their own cultures. Whether they fall into a productive immigrant existence or an al Qaeda cell is as much a matter of happenstance as it is of personal character, he suggests.

Randal also describes well the panoramic milieu of violence from which, for instance, the Algerian cohorts of al Qaeda have sprung: the beheadings, the kidnappings, the utter anarchy that was rife across the Algeria of the 1990s. Algeria was a country that, as he notes, "Most pale-skinned Westerners had long since deserted." It is a wonder that more immigrants, after coming from such a place and then being thrown into the alienating flotsam and jetsam of immigrant life in the West, do not join al Qaeda. Terrorism, alas, is a vile germ of modernity.

The author also takes us to Sudan, whose capital, Khartoum, became a "rest-and-recreation center for extremist Muslims" in the 1990s, much as Beirut had been the decade before. The impresario of the infamous rise of Khartoum was one Hasan al-Turabi, a well-manicured, Park Avenue ayatollah of sorts, even if he was a Sunni. I interviewed Turabi once in 1984, and Randal describes him perfectly: an "in-your-face" politician full of "intellectual arrogance," who proved too clever by half. Turabi hosted bin Laden and then later sought a rapprochement with the United States by turning over information about him after the terrorist became too hot to handle. The author faults the Clinton administration for not sufficiently following up on such leads.

In addition to geographic scope, Randal explores the many sub-issues that are often more important than the so-called big issues in the Middle East. Like other authors, he notes that Palestine had never been much of an obsession to bin Laden. What bin Laden really cared about -- and what the Saudi establishment did, too -- was the fate of South Yemen, a Marxist satellite that bin Laden wanted to lay low but which the Al-Saud family wanted to preserve because of their fear of North and South Yemeni unification. In fact, it was bin Laden's meddling in his homeland of South Yemen that first brought him to the attention of the Saudi intelligence establishment in the 1980s. Unification happened anyway in 1990, and now Yemen, the volatile and dynamic demographic core of the Arabian peninsula, is where the political future of the region may likely be written.

The problem with Randal's book is that while there are enough useful insights to make it a worthwhile read, its lack of understanding or empathy for the realities in which any American administration -- Republican or Democratic -- is forced to deal reduces the text in many places to the same old, tired criticisms of American policy that, while perhaps justified, insufficiently advance the reader's knowledge or understanding. The author inveighs against the hypocrisy of American support for authoritarian regimes, even as the United States calls for more democracy in the Arab world. The remark shows insufficient understanding of how great powers, even when they seek to advance universalist goals, must also deal with the world as it is. Moreover, if some of those repressive regimes were to collapse, even more turmoil and consequent human suffering might ensue.

Randal frowns upon the dispatch of U.S. troops to places like Yemen and the Philippines, perhaps not realizing that the number of American Marines and Army Special Forces sent to those places has been exceedingly small and used in humanitarian exercises or for the training of local militaries in new democracies that are under siege. His careful and painstakingly sympathetic reportage of places like Algeria too often gives way to easy, broad-brush judgments when he turns to the United States.

Randal the seasoned man-of-the-world is more insightful than Randal the expatriate. Nevertheless, American policymakers would do well to excuse the latter in order to glean perceptions from the former.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Reviewed by Robert D. Kaplan

From Booklist
How did an estranged member of a wealthy Saudi family, with long connections to the royal Sauds, come to lead an Islamic terrorist group that rattles the safety and complacency of the world's only superpower? Randal, a foreign correspondent with 40 years of experience covering the Middle East for a variety of news organizations, offers a detailed and compelling look at the man who has galvanized fears of global terrorism. Based on interviews with sources from diplomats to informants to radicals, Randal assembles a compelling portrait of an intelligent, sophisticated man molded by the tensions and treacheries between efforts to reconcile Islam, Middle Eastern politics, and Western social and political influences. Born the seventeenth of 24 sons of a wealthy construction magnate, Osama bin Laden early manifested an interest in purifying Islamic nations of Western influences. Caught up in the Afghan effort to drive out the Soviets, bin Laden used his wealth and considerable leadership skills to assemble troops and, before the age of 30, turned himself into "something of a religious pop star in a land hungering for inspirational role models." Randal explores the dynamics within bin Laden's family, his personality, and Saudi Arabia and surrounding nations that drove him to join campaigns in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Sudan. Randal also explores bin Laden's elusiveness, his network of resources, and the failure of U.S. intelligence to understand radicalizing influences in the Middle East. This is a fascinating, informative look at the man considered the foremost terrorist threat to the U.S.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Vanessa Bush

From Bookmarks Magazine
Former Washington Post foreign correspondent Randal admits up front that he never met the subject of his book. To bridge that understandable gap, he calls on 40 years’ worth of sources and contacts to elucidate bin Laden’s life and, even more, the world that shaped it. The author eschews journalistic neutrality, favoring a judgmental stance towards the failings of U.S. policy in the Middle East. This stance sounds a dull, tired note for many critics, as does the disingenuous title: Osama bin Laden appears less a subject than as a means to understand the foundations of today’s terrorist culture. However, Randal’s informed, nuanced presentation of the Islamic world makes the book a worthwhile read.

Book Dimension
length: (cm)23.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)16.9
作者简介 Jonathan Randal is a former correspondent for the Washington Post.
编辑推荐 Acclaim for Osama

“The volume does a nimble and often highly compelling job of leading the reader through the labyrinth of information and speculation about Al Qaeda and the broader jihadi movement, showing how Islamic terrorism has evolved and proliferated over the last two and a half decades . . . [Randal] provides a succint account of how the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan brought together Islamic radicals from around the world, inflamed their self-righteousness and anger, and gave them faith in their ability to bring a superpower to its knees.”--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“[A] meticulous account of the emergence and spread of the terror virus [and a] map of world that produced him and his fellow Islamists.” --Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review

“An account that is simultaneously detailed and fast paced . . . witty, opinionated, and highly urbane . . . Of all the flutter of bin Laden and Al Qaeda books, Randal has produced the most readable and informative.” --Richard A. Clarke, Boston Sunday Globe

“Randal is at his best when intuiting the nuances of terrorism and the particular Middle Eastern culture from whence it springs.” --Robert Kaplan, Washington Post Book World


“A detailed and compelling look at the man who has galvanized fears of global terrorism
. . . fascinating, informative.” —Booklist

“An outstanding achievement . . . a thorough and penetrating look”-- Publisher's Weekly (starred)

“A masterful work of reporting.” --Kirkus Reviews (starred)

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