“The result of an alliance gone sour, 9/11 needs to be understood first and foremost as the unfinished business of the Cold War.”

Mamdani seeks to reappraise the American response to 9/11, particularly with regard to Muslim identity. A key part of this is asserting that 9/11 was not the beginning of something new, but the continuation of “unfinished business.” Mamdani’s analysis of the events of September 11, 2001 does not begin with that date: Rather, he views the 9/11 attacks as the product of decades of war, otherization, and propaganda. Mamdani asserts that 9/11 is not a catalyst but a consequence of American involvement in the Middle East.

“For William Lind, the Cold War was the last in a series of ‘Western civil wars’ that started in seventeenth-century Europe; with the end of the Cold War, he argued, the lines of global conflict become cast in cultural terms.”

A key part of Mamdani’s argument is that America’s foreign policy exists relentlessly in the moment. Identities, alliances, and enemies are deemed immutable, only to be changed and reexamined several years later. The Cold War should be understood on a broader scale, Lind argues, which mirrors Mamdani’s argument that understanding the War on Terror demands the audience understand the context in which the war began. The current moment is not unique, Mamdani suggests; it is only the latest iteration of an age-old pattern.

“Written from the vantage point of a modern power that had exploded into global dominance in the centuries following the Renaissance, civilizational history gave ‘the West’ an identity that marched through time unscathed.”

As a lecturer at an American university and as a writer for an American publisher, Mamdani is addressing a largely Western audience. The idea of “the West” as global hegemon, he posits, is not a historical default. It is an identity asserted by centuries of military domination. Rather than consign this history to the past, Mamdani wants the audience to think about the way in which modern military power extends and consecrates this identity, particularly in opposition to the identities that it otherizes.

“In its North African colonies, France drew a legal distinction between ‘Berber’ and ‘Arab.’”

Mamdani centers his argument around modern American imperialism, but his work is situated in a history of Western colonialism. The history of France in North Africa provides a useful rubric with which to analyze the modern politicization of Muslim identity, as the French ruling authorities created a similarly binary metric which was imposed on a more nuanced, fluid populace. The current moment is not unique, Mamdani argues.

“Derided as fundamentalists, conservative Protestants were humiliated by the outcome of the Scopes trial, which marked the beginning of their exile from American public life.”

Describing the Scopes trial of 1925, which vindicated the teaching of evolution in public schools, Mamdani frames the fundamentalists’ late-20th century re-entry into American political life as a quest for vengeance. The same liberal, atheistic forces which the fundamentalists blamed for their humiliation were to become the enemy, leading to an alliance with the neoconservatives. The fundamentalist American Christians, Mamdani implies, wrought havoc in the Middle East as revenge for humiliation at home.

“In their preoccupation with political identity and political power, Islamist intellectuals were like other intellectuals, whether religious or not.”

Mamdani does not deny that there are Muslims who seek political power and use political identity to do so; he does not wholly reject the broadest possible strokes of the “Good Muslim/Bad Muslim” binary. Instead, he criticizes the idea that this is a uniquely Muslim quality, citing internal disagreements among scholars to show that power, identity, and discussion are the true focus points, just like in any other demographic. That some Muslims would adhere to the binary does not make them different; rather, it makes them just like everyone else, “religious or not” (59).

“To defend the freedom to trade opium, the empire sent gunboats up the Yangtze River and fought the ignoble Opium War. Similarly, in neighboring Indochina, the French used officially sanctioned opium revenues to pay the cost of their colonial occupation.”

When Mamdani describes the behaviors of the American state, he is careful to note that very little is new. The use of narcotics to fund imperial ambitions is not novel; it is the latest iteration of an ongoing imperial tradition. Rather than being uniquely immoral, Mamdani frames the United States as merely the latest example of an ongoing process.

“Interestingly, when General Pao decided in 1969 to bring in Chinese master chemists from Hong Kong and set up an enormous heroin plant to manufacture fine-grain, high-grade, 80 to 99 percent pure, number 4 heroin […] and began to supply it to the growing concentration of US troops in Vietnam, the CIA still looked the other way.”

The CIA’s tacit permission of the drug trade as a means of conducting foreign operations has a direct impact on American soldiers. The soldiers become addicted to the very narcotic that is funding a war ostensibly intended to keep American citizens safe. The circular illogic of the situation, Mamdani suggests, demonstrates how the destructive foreign policy of the United States was not even effective in its stated goals.

“The American press, however, was loathe to report any of this.”

Much of Mamdani’s analysis describes the cyclical nature of Western history, in which the same dynamics are repeated. The American press’s refusal to comment accurately and objectively on American involvement abroad in the 1960s prefigures the same American press refusing to do so for Israeli actions, while contrasting with the actually effective—and, for Mamdani, moral—reporting of the truth that helped to end the Vietnam War. So often, Mamdani laments, the American press is complicit in failing to wield the power of reportage for good.

“Its first success was a regional alliance called the Safari Club, put together with the blessing of Henry Kissinger.”

The Safari Club was technically a private endeavor, separate from government policy. Yet Mamdani uses the figure of Henry Kissinger to indicate the involvement and the blessing of the government apparatus. The Safari Club may have been technically independent, but Kissinger’s involvement—Mamdani suggests—means that its goals were closely aligned with those of the American state.

“Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas to operate unhindered during the first intifada—letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly helping it with funding—only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.”

Mamdani points to Israeli’s actions as a reflection of the United States. Operating under the umbrellas of American patronage, Mamdani suggests, Israel employs tactics similar to those used by the US. At the same time, however, this exposes Israel to the blowback from which the United States also suffers. The cycles, reflections, and repetitions across Western history emphasize Mamdani’s point that foreign policy should be analyzed in terms of historical patterns rather than discreet actions.

“Sensitive to the critique from within the religious right that they had failed to support the Palestinian struggle meaningfully, members of the Saudi establishment encouraged local dissidents to join the Afghan jihad.”

The United States’s assortment of allies is a network of competing interests. Since the United States is associated with Israel, for example, the Saudi establishment turns to Afghanistan as a venting device for pro-Palestinian sentiment. The Saudi involvement in Afghanistan (which leads to Osama bin Laden and then 9/11) is a consequence of the contradictions within the patronage network of the United States, consequences which cannot be ignored indefinitely.

“In the United States, too, the CIA took cover behind legitimate charitable and religious Muslim organizations.”

The pragmatic nature of the American state is evident in the CIA’s use of Islamic institutions in the United States to further the proxy war against the Soviet Union, only to turn on those same institutions in the post-9/11 world. The United States, in this sense, is shown to be a pragmatic, cynical, and short-sighted ally, whose allegiance is conditioned on momentary self-interest. The Muslim organizations, even after helping the CIA, were alienated unless they showed fealty to the American state by adhering to the “good/bad Muslim” binary.

“The number of officially registered heroin addicts in Pakistan rose from 130 in 1977 to 30,000 in 1988, but the UN Drug Control Program estimated that the actual heroin-addicted population had gone from negligible in 1979 to 1.3 million by 1985, ‘a much steeper rise than in any [other] nation.’”

The alliance between Pakistan and the United States means that Pakistan must suffer the same risks as its patron state, including the threat of blowback. By permitting heroin production to fund war Afghanistan, the Pakistani state created a market for drugs which simply did not exist before. The Pakistani people suffered from the flood of narcotics into the country which was permitted with geopolitical goals in mind. Pakistan hyper-accelerated a domestic narcotics issue to support the United States’s imperial endeavors.

“Tragically, though, the Taliban, born of a brutalized society, was to brutalize it further.”

The concept of blowback operates within national borders as well as internationally. The generations of traumatized people in Afghanistan give rise to the movement which will inflict future trauma. The brutalized society produces an organization, the Taliban, which knows only brutality and so makes brutality its central pillar. This recurrence of violence is what Mamdani would like to end; not only does the policy trap people in cycles of violence, but it evidently does not work.

“After 9/11, Iraq, more than Afghanistan, became the real launching pad for a brazen U.S. intervention undertaken in the midst of international opposition, including in the halls of the UN.”

Mamdani outlines why the Iraq War was not related to 9/11 except as a vague, empty justification for military action. Tendentious claims about Saddam Hussein’s covert support for terrorism were so flimsy a pretext for the invasion that the contradictions and hypocrisies are even more pronounced than in the Afghanistan war. If the invasion of Afghanistan was predicated on revenge for a terrorist attack, then the invasion of Iraq on the same grounds pulls the mask of legitimacy off the entire endeavor, Mamdani suggests.

“On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic U.S. support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.”

Mamdani emphasizes both the United States’s support for Iraq and Iraq’s use of chemical weapons (with American approval) as an ironic foreshadowing of what is to come. The audience knows that this alliance will turn sour, but the particular way in which is turns sour adds to the irony. Once Iraq is no longer useful for the American state, the United States will accuse Iraq of possessing the same weapons that it once supported. There is no American moral objection to weapons of mass destruction, just immediate political opportunity.

“In reality, it unleashed the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, mainly children, in the full and callous knowledge that the victims were not the target and a cynical acceptance that sanctions so effectively centralized the official export-import trade that it put the surviving population at the mercy of the very regime it claimed to target.”

Throughout the book, Mamdani’s tone is largely academic. When discussing the devastating effect of the sanctions on Iraq, however, he cannot contain his distaste. His prose becomes invective, describing the American policies as cynical, callous, and murderous. To Mamdani, the irony of the United States sanctioning a country for abusing human rights is such that he breaks from his academic tone to reveal his subjective horror.

“Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.”

Even though there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the events of 9/11, Mamdani regretfully notes, the effort to convince the American people that there was such a link was terribly effective. The propaganda efforts of the regime, when placed in an academic analysis such as this, reveal the extent to which the public was knowingly deceived, Mamdani argues. This illustrates the effect 9/11 had on the American political consciousness and why Mamdani faces such a challenge in debunking the myths that were built in its aftermath.

“Nonetheless, Washington asked the Security Council to approve a complete and indefinite exemption for U.S. nationals from the court’s jurisdiction and even threatened to veto the renewal of UN peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and elsewhere if it did not get its way.”

Mamdani is highly critical of the foreign policy of the United States, but the hypocrisy of the United States is presented as similarly lamentable. In its dealings with the United Nations, Mamdani points out, the United States expects to wield the bureaucracy of the organization against its apparent enemies but feels exempt from any oversight. The rules are weapons, to be used by the powerful, Mamdani implies. As such, Mamdani suggests that any US claim of moral superiority is hollow.

“Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”

Earlier in the book, Mamdani outlined the untold suffering that American sanctions in Iraq caused for hundreds of thousands of children. The deaths caused by sanctions, as well as the effects of blowback, should be considered, Mamdani believes, in the same way that suicide bombing is considered. Both cause death and suffering, yet suicide bombing is deemed uniquely barbaric. Mamdani believes that such a distinction only serves to prop up American foreign policy; he does not believe that it is justified.

“But for the Bush administration, 9/11 offered a rare historical opportunity to turn a widespread social concern for security in the face of terrorism into an opportunity to pursue a factional neo-Reaganite agenda.”

Mamdani’s choice of language illustrates his belief that the purported moral concerns of the United States government are little more than posturing. The events of September 11, 2001 were a terrible tragedy, yet—Mamdani implies—the neoconservatives of the Bush administration regarded this tragedy as an opportunity. For the Bush administration, Mamdani suggests, 9/11 was not the tragic beginning of a new era, but the relished opportunity to settle old scores. Terrorism becomes a useful excuse at the expense of the Muslim population.

“At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims.”

Mamdani’s criticism of Israel exists in the context of decades of American intervention in the Middle East. In this context, Israel is not uniquely at fault. Rather, Israel is repeating a pattern experienced by Pakistan and Afghanistan. This cycle repeats, much to Mamdani’s chagrin, but it is not a uniquely Israeli phenomenon.