The Price of Fear: The Truth behind the Financial War on Terror [Paperback]

Ibrahim Warde (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0520258150 | ISBN-13: 978-0520258150 | Edition: 1

When the State Department claims to have struck a blow at the heart of the international terrorist finance network, even the most hardened of commentators takes the statement at face value. But as Ibrahim Warde argues in this myth-shattering book, the post-9/11 series of financial crackdowns initiated by the U.S. government has had virtually no impact on terrorism. This is because, as he demonstrates, these actions are based on a fundamental misconception of how terrorism works. Warde shows how operations such as the 9/11 attacks were actually financed, and he brilliantly juxtaposes the reality of shoestring budgets and envelopes of cash against the prevailing fantasy of a buzzing transnational network of seamless electronic transfers.
Copub: I.B.Tauris Books

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Ibrahim Warde exposes the Bush administration's much ballyhooed, but often duplicitous 'war on terrorist finances' which has nabbed few bad guys, ruined many innocents, frozen little hot money and vastly complicated worldwide banking for the greater glory of a burgeoning American bureaucracy."--Jonathan Randal, author of Osama: The Making of a Terrorist

"Ibrahim Warde takes a long overdue skeptical look at the widely held view that money is the 'oxygen' of terrorism. That conclusion has resulted in a financial war on terror launched by the US government that in many cases has produced meager or even counterproductive results. Warde writes with great clarity, and his book is very well reported. It is a welcome addition to a field that has been largely the preserve of alarmists with little interest in the kinds of reporting done by Warde."--Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know

"A pleasure to read . . . remarkably informative about a subject that the press seems to have mangled. This ought to have a big impact."--Chalmers Johnson, author Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

"Is it any wonder that with thinking like this, American policy went adrift in the war on terror, not able to find a solid base on which to move forward?"--Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, author of North Atlantic Civilization at War

"A witty, irreverent analysis of the financial 'war on terror' . . . A must read for anyone interested in the Middle East and the global economy."--Clement M. Henry, co-author of Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East

About the Author

Ibrahim Warde is Adjunct Professor of International Business at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is a contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and the author of Islamic Finance in the Global Economy.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520258150
• ISBN-13: 978-0520258150
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,682,850 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A highly readable and thorough study, February 3, 2008

By 

Saleem Ali (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Price of Fear: The Truth behind the Financial War on Terror (Hardcover)

Much has been written about the current war on terror that tends to be polemical rather than analytical. Entrenched opposition to one political view or another usually mars most academic or popular writing on the matter. It is thus refreshing to read a book which takes a very strong position but only after careful and dispassionate scrutiny of the facts. Ibrahim Warde is eminently suited to write this monograph on the financial aspects of the war on terror and its ramifications, given his experience in working on business transactions and Islamic finance across the Middle East. Warde is fluent in Arabic, English and French and has worked on this theme for over a decade as a consultant and a researcher at MIT and Tufts. The book shows how well the author can craft a narrative for an academic audience as well as for a business clientele or for the general public. Each chapter is preceded with insightful quotations and the text is peppered with substantiated anecdotes and examples.

The Price of Fear makes a clear case for how policy-makers can very easily be led astray by fear in their scrutiny of financial assets. Money becomes the focus of attention because there is an implicit assumption that war is expensive and numbers give the false allure of accuracy. What the analysts fail to appreciate is that only organized military warfare is expensive and much of the informal militancy that characterizes Al Qaeda is cheap and hence financing is hardly consequential. For example, the London bombings of 2005 that killed 52 civilians cost less than $1,000; the Madrid train bombings that killed almost 200 people cost less than $10,000; and even a devastating attack like September 11, cost less than half a million dollars in total planning and implementation expenditure.

Why then was so much of the attention after this national tragedy focused on Islamic financial networks? Starting with the usually quoted figure for the total assets of Osama bin Laden, the frequently cited estimate of $300 million Warde deconstructs the process by which this estimate was achieved and proves how it is wildly exaggerated. He then lays out a detailed ethnography of how a sense of panic spurred by individual politicians and influential analysts led to so many dead-end trails on the hunt for Al-Qaeda's finances. Warde also holds journalists culpable for this march to no avail. For example, he documents how Washington Post journalist Douglas Farah hypothesized with scant evidence that gold and diamonds were a supposed mechanism for money laundering by Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 commission had to eventually admit that this was a highly unlikely source of revenues for the organization.

Such actions could be exonerated as precautionary strategies if they did not adversely impact community relations or have a major adverse financial impact. But unfortunately the analysis suggests that the financial war on terror met with "catastrophic success" in terms of paralyzing genuine charities, souring relations between the West and the Muslim world and reducing the efficiency of our law enforcement. It is important to note however, that Warde recognizes that the finances of countries such as Iran or Iraq do merit scrutiny because they have the potential to finance much larger scale military expenditures. However, his analysis focuses on the micro-level financial war that was waged after 9/11. As the author concludes: "the formidable array of forces, combined with a near total absence of scrutiny, explains why financial warriors have generally chosen to err on the side of recklessness."