A History of the World Since 9/11: Disaster, Deception, and Destruction in the War on Terror

Some poisonous fruits of America's response to the September 11 attacks are inventoried in this forceful but tendentious critique of the "war on terror." Journalist Streatfield (Cocaine) examines eight post-9/11 injustices and tragedies and links them, with varying degrees of plausibility, to the Bush administration's wars, intelligence operations, tactical blunders, and general hubris. Some cases he investigates are open-and-shut: an American air strike on an Afghan wedding party kills dozens; explosives looted by Iraqis in the postinvasion chaos end up in terrorist bombs; the CIA conducts a brutal extraordinary rendition of the wrong man. Others, however, like the Uzbekistan government's 2005 massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators, seem only coincidentally related to American policy. And was the murder of an Indian-American cashier, Vasudev Patel, during a convenience-store heist really the fallout of President Bush's call for "%E2%80%98pre-emptive action'" against terrorism, as the author suggests, or a tragic robbery-homicide? Streatfield combines gripping reportage with analysis that's frequently more deterministic than the facts warrant. The result is a history that's vivid and insightful, but also sometimes blinkered and unreliable. (Aug.)