BOOKS: The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America & Al-Qaeda. Peter Bergen (Jim Miles)

[Tace]

The Longest War -- The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda. Peter L. Bergen. Free Press, New York, 2011.

Sept. 25, 2011 (Palestine Chronicle) -- Writing history is a matter of placing points in time as bookends or markers for significant events that have occurred around the world.

Generally this is done by the winners of the particular struggles that create the events of history in order to highlight their own prowess and beneficence compared with the other parties backwardness and ignorance. Peter Bergen, representing the U.S. as putative winner of the war on terror, bookends the “war on terror” with the dates spanning Sept 11, 2001 to the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden May 2, 2011.

The latter date is not written in stone yet, as Bergen’s last statement is “In 2011, the Longest War, finally, began to wind down.” I will return to that final statement later, partly because of the convenient name change from the “war on terror” and partly because of the “winding down” aspect.

First, to the book cover, with its laudatory recommendations for the value of the work. The front cover has a recommendation that it is better than a novel, that it is a “history of our time.” True, but when combined with a comment from the back cover about it being “wide-angled” view of the “war on terror” -- note the nomenclature -- this history of our time suffers from myopia and narrow perspectives.

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