Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East
by Gilles Kepel (Harvard University Press, £18.95)
Beyond Terror and Martyrdom—a new book by the noted French scholar Gilles Kepel—is a long polemical essay about what the west might now do in the middle east. Its theme is that the two “grand narratives” of our day—the war on terror and its obverse, the jihad against the west—have both failed and that a third narrative now has to emerge: one with the potential to deliver peace and prosperity.
Kepel takes his readers through the Bush administration’s failure to understand the implications of the developments in the middle east that led to 9/11. Starting from this weakness, the administration launched its war on terror—from which flowed the folly of the Iraq war and the rise of Iran as a regional power broker. The US then lurched into the disasters of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, providing easy propaganda tools to use in further radicalising would-be terrorists, while allowing Israel to carry out its own war in Lebanon. These developments left Hezbollah stronger than ever in Lebanon, and Hamas likewise in Gaza, gaining the support of Sunni and Shia across the Muslim world at the cost of the west.
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