The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda

We talked last week with The Washington Post's William Arkin about the overgrown military/intelligence complex that has grown so large since 9/11, that it may actually be putting America at greater security risk. The other side of this same coin is that the bureaucracy is so large and it’s need to self sustain so great, that maybe it cannot allow itself to see success or even something akin to victory in the war on terror. Fawaz Gerges Director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, argues in his new book The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda that even before the killing of Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda had lost much of it’s viability. Rather than getting stronger, it seems that Al-Qaeda peaked with the events of 9/11 and that the current winds sweeping the Middle East, have left little room for Al-Qaeda. My conversation with Fawaz Gerges: var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6296941-2"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}