"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."

"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."