Review of To Prevail: An American Strategy for the Campaign Against Terrorism

In an impressive display of institutional agility and responsiveness, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, undertook in the weeks immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to produce a book that would outline a strategy for the American struggle against terrorism. A substantial and diversely expert team of CSIS researchers, headed by principal authors Kurt Campbell and Michele Flournoy, completed this thoughtful and comprehensive volume remarkably quickly. It stands both as a testament to the historic moment and as an analytical framework for understanding and assessing the efforts of the Bush administration to combat terrorism. Indeed, it provides a benchmark for comparing what has been done with what could and possibly should be done to fight terrorism.

Written in the shocked aftermath of the attacks, this volume is visibly touched by the high emotion and deep patriotism of those early weeks after September 11—literally so in the form of nostalgic photographs that accompany the opening of each chapter. The book begins with a brief chapter focused on September 10, “The Way We Were,” which portrays a pre-attack vignette of innocence. From beginning to end, this book adopts the voice of the collective American “we”: “This is a struggle we must win...” (p. 19). In some passages, it reads more like the inspirational rhetoric of a presidential speech than the output of a think-tank: “We cannot go back to September 10—innocence lost can never be regained. But we can set our sights on a future in which the sense of optimism, hope, and boundless possibility that defines us as a nation is restored” (p. 35). This volume very much reflects the American mood in the fall of 2001, echoing and exemplifying the outrage, the drama, the tension, the fear of a profound threat newly understood, the reassuring upsurge of national cohesion, the unnerving but exhilarating sense of high challenge and fateful choice, the urgent desire to prevent future attacks, and the extraordinary collective resolve to retaliate against the attackers and to avenge the dead. Future historians seeking to understand the impact of September 11 will find this an illuminating document.

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