Slate and 9/11

For those who haven't seen it, Slate this week has featured a fascinating exchange between Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll, discussing Wright's new book, The Looming Tower. (Coll's Pulitzer prize winning study of the US, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan from 1989 until 9-10-2001 is for my money the standard work on the topic; I've used the book in several classes and am using it again this spring for a course on the US and the Middle East.) We hear a lot, correctly, on how little we know about our enemies in this struggle. Yet people like Coll and Wright--and the publications of the 9/11 Commission Report--suggest that, in fact, there's extraordinary contemporary history being done on this conflict. Whether this scholarship has any effect on policy is, of course, another matter.