How To Fight Al Qaeda Now

Bruce Riedel was in the White House Situation Room on 9/11. For 30 years he was one of the CIA's senior analysts of the Middle East, rising to be a special assistant to the President on the National Security Council staff. Now he has written an analysis of Al Qaeda—and a critique of America's strategy in combating it. He outlined his concerns to NEWSWEEK's John Barry. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why this book now?
Bruce Riedel: I starting writing this book two years when I retired from CIA, because I think Al Qaeda is still the No. 1 threat to America; but there is still much that is misunderstood or not understood about the nature of that threat.

After seven years?
The Bush administration deliberately conflated the Al Qaeda threat with the problem posed by Saddam's Iraq. Then [they] deepened the confusion with the claim that Al Qaeda hated the United States because of our freedoms and our way of life. As [Osama] bin Ladin has said, if that were the case, Al Qaeda would have attacked Sweden. So what is it that motivates AQ and the terrorists that belong to it? A sense that the Islamic world has been under systematic attack by the West for the last century, and that in order to defend itself from Western attack, the Islamic world has to take thewar to the United States and its allies in order to drag them into quagmires that will bleed them until they finally admit defeat and leave Islamic world.

By that analysis, Iraq and now Afghanistan suggest Al Qaeda isn ' t doing badly.
Oh, from their standpoint they think they are doing quite well. The world economic financial crisis we are going through now is exactly what Osama bin Ladin predicted would happen when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

Really?
Yes, he warned that the "bleeding wars"—as Al Qaeda refers to them—were going to produce economic chaos in the West. And he pointed specifically to the home-mortgage bubble in the United States. For this he was parodied by many here at the time.

So we ' ve underestimated bin Ladin?
Osama bin Ladin is very bright, however retrograde his analysis. I think it's an evil genius: clever and extraordinarily ruthless, willing to kill thousands to achieve his objective. There is no doubt in my mind that if Al Qaeda could get a nuclear weapon or some other weapon of mass destruction, it would use it. For them, an end has long justified the means.