BOOK REVIEW

An End to Al Qaeda:

Destroying Bin Laden's Jihad and Restoring America's Honor

By Malcolm Nance

An Ideological Wonder Weapon

Nance's authoritative and well-documented thesis offers humanity a long-awaited wonder weapon for defeating Al Qaeda.  Dismissing the generational struggle envisioned by militarists, Nance optimistically observes that Al Qaeda's global insurgency can be terminated on the ideological battlefield within two years.  Considering that Osama bin Laden’s movement depends primarily on the strength of its ideals to rally supporters, an information operation to dissuade these adherents appears to be the key to vanquishing Al Qaeda.

While standard counterinsurgency doctrine emphasizes the importance of winning the battle for hearts and minds, the Bush administration ignored this arena in favor of a belligerent approach that inflamed anti-American sentiment.  As a result, six years after 9/11 the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate classified Al Qaeda's anti-American insurgency "as strong as ever".  Nance wisely advises us to abandon the reckless course chartered by Bush in favor of a strategy that destroys Al Qaeda's popular support. 

Instead of an open-ended and costly military commitment, we need to convince the Muslims who willingly support Bin Laden’s war that Al Qaeda poses a far greater danger to them than do its avowed enemies.  By hijacking the agendas of anti-imperialism and Islamic revivalism, Al Qaeda’s leadership has sought to deceive the Muslim world into supporting a death cult that actually aims to destroy Islam.  Once Muslims understand that Bin Laden's network represents the greatest threat to them, self interest will compel former supporters to provide the intelligence and local militias necessary for dismantling the stateless global network.

Having reframed the 9/11 War as a battle of ideas, Nance recommends that we vilify the Al Qaeda high command as a deviant cult bent on rewriting the Islamic faith.  In direct contradiction to the professed beliefs of over 95% of the Muslim world, Al Qaeda advocates a puritanical theocracy based on offensive holy war, seventh-century Arabian social norms and the subjugation of the vast majority of the human population.  Along with other leading exposes into Al Qaeda’s ideology, such as Raymond Ibrahim’s “The Al Qaeda Reader” (Broadway, 2007), Nance provides persuasive evidence about this nefarious agenda that can serve as a pillar for the proposed information operation to unveil Al Qaeda’s true nature. 

Nance’s provocative thesis elicits the crucial question: What is Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal?  Does Bin Laden’s grand design end with the destruction of America and Israel?  Or are these events intended to serve as the foundation for an Islamic empire led by Al Qaeda’s high command?  Or does the megalomaniac who started the 9/11 War pursue an even more ambitious agenda?  A growing body of counterterrorism experts contend that Al Qaeda is in fact a millennialist cult that aims to provoke the Apocalypse War predicted to kill billions of people.  By engineering this conflict while concealing its own monstrous motives from the Muslim world, Al Qaeda seeks to usurp the superpower's global authority and achieve world domination through nuclear terrorism.  This villainous strategy depends on two of Al Qaeda's most valuable assets, Bin Laden's growing reputation as the awaited Muslim Messiah of the Apocalypse, as well as his stateless army's invulnerability to nuclear counterattack.

Along with the religious threat to Islam posed by Al Qaeda, the mortal threat to the Muslim world is an indispensable factor in any effort to discourage Bin Laden’s followers from supporting his movement.  On the one hand, verification of Al Qaeda’s murder of Muslim civilians does exist in extensive records of war casualties, from both direct terrorist attacks by the syndicate and retaliatory strikes by America that Bin Laden intentionally incited.  However, the most damning revelation into the motives of his millennialist global war arises from disclosures that the syndicate's leadership represents an apocalyptic cult masquerading as a righteous insurgency.  A critical adjunct to Nance’s work exists in David Malone’s information operation at BLPLAN.org, which offers such proof that Al Qaeda’s leadership seeks to spark a conflagration inside the Muslim world that kills billions of people worldwide.

The independent initiatives launched by “An End To Al Qaeda” and Binladensplan.com have helped chart a new course for the 9/11 War that can save Westerners and Muslims from the ominous continuation of Bin Laden’s apocalyptic conflict.  Armed with these ideological silver bullets, the low-cost information operation proposed by Nance and Malone provides America with the best opportunity for developing the Muslim intelligence sources that are essential for destroying Bin Laden's terrorist syndicate.  It is now incumbent upon a diplomatically astute President Obama to seize upon this patriotic call for ideological change in order to fulfill his own obligation as a Nobel Laureate for world peace.