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Understanding Al Qaeda
declarations in poorly translated excerpts missing context, the attempted communication is muted. The martial configuration of the conflict can then proceed uninterrupted with an enemy irremediably beyond the pale. The present book starts with this perceived disconnection between such notional continuity and a practical discontinuity. In helping break through the opacity of the issues, it seeks fundamentally to contribute to remedying the gap between perceptions and realities of the conflict between the United States and Al Qaeda. Those realities include, as well, a context of transformed war wherein the traditional framework depicting international armed conflict is fast proving inadequate in the face of momentous transnational changes. Chapter 1 sets the issues in context and reviews the historical evolution in which the domestic societal characteristics of the United States have long allowed foreign policy matters to escape reasoned national examination. As the twentieth century closed and as the country’s enemies reorganised in novel, unexpected forms, the United States accelerated that blinding sense of exceptionalism. In so doing, America set the stage which enabled maximum exposure for what was objectively a dramatic innovation in international military terms, namely the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That revolutionary transformation, and more generally the changed alchemy of conflict, is the subject of Chapter 2. That section delves into not so much a new conceptualisation of war but rather it seeks to grasp the implications of the new grammar of war grounded in the autonomisation and privatisation of the use of force. Those tectonic changes herald the coming into being of a generation of war and at the same time they echo the warrior ethos of transnational, non-state armed groups that seek to displace the state by conducting war and foreign policy in its stead. Al Qaeda is the flagship organisation of this mutation playing out before our eyes in the early twenty-first century. Chapter 3 examines the history of the organisation since its
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