Book notes

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

• The founder of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, believed that Capitalism/Christianity would fall to Communism/Atheism and that Islam would succeed as the only integrated system of state and religion. Perhaps this is partly why Islamicist hostility to the West intensified after the fall of Communism. The game plan wasn't working out.
• Wright suggests that Qutb was not scandalized by 1949 Greeley, Colorado, as a den of sexual debauchery (as Qutb himself claims in his own writings). Rather, he was scandalized by Greeley's heavily female influence as a Western agrarian town founded by Victorian teetotalers.
• When Mohammed bin Laden divorced Osama's mother, he married her off to one of his employees, Mohammed al-Attas. Osama and his mother left the bin Laden family compound and "moved to a modest two story villa." Despite Osama's worship of his father, Mohammed routinely "married" and "divorced" a teenage girl on the same day, while Osama was chaste.
• Islam's retreat against the West started in 1638 on Sept. 11 when the King of Poland began the counter attack in Vienna.
• Bin Laden claimed that his men crashed the Black Hawks in Somolia in October 1993. Although the claim is probably false, Clinton's bugging out of Somolia on account of 2 helicopter crashes and televised brutality to the remains of the pilots very much emboldened Al Qaeda.
• To most of the world the embassy bombings seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response. But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point.
• Several of the Tomahawk missiles [that Clinton fired at bin Laden] failed to detonate. According to Russian intelligence, bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for $10 million. Pakistan may have used some of the ones on their territory to design their own cruise missile.