A book to really explain the war on terror?

I’ve been writing a piece on the book that really could explain the war on terror. Won’t say which one — hopefully, you’ll read the article when it appears — suffice to say there’s so much that needs to be understood about how the war on terror should not have been prosecuted in the past 20 years.

The book I pick out is not of our time but of all time. The one key point it makes is the essential equality and humanity of human beings — from east and west.

That’s worth noting when one considers the massive enterprise that the war on terror became. As the Washington Post put it, “Bush declared the advent of a global ‘war on terror’, warning every nation that ‘either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’. The American war machine was deployed across a wide swath of the planet and got mired after two regime-changing invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States built clandestine networks to detain, rendition, interrogate and, yes, torture suspected Islamist extremists. From the military facility in Guantánamo Bay to cells in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, keeping America safe meant installing a security apparatus with fuzzy international legality and documented human rights abuses.

The American public grew desensitized to the protracted battles fought in its name, which directly caused the deaths of at least 900,000 people and cost American taxpayers some $8 trillion, according to an analysis by researchers at Brown University.”

There is an inescapable, a sickening sense of being sucked in to something that can only bleed. And that’s why one has to read the book I picked out. Watch this space.