Quote Originally Posted by Rex Brynen View Post
These might seem nitpicks, but they all point to an inclination to shoehorn data to support a grand thesis, and in so doing distorting the former.
You're probably right, I am not all that familiar with Hamas to evaluate her or your claims. Her thesis is probably too board to be proven but at the same time i think there is some worth to trying to explain events on the level of world systems. It's nice to have frameworks to locate events within even if the framework flattens some of the complexity.

I would like to know if anyone else knows of another work that tries to explain the macro-economics of the war on terror?

As far as her analysis being tainted by her politics, i don't think that makes different than any other person who has ever written anything. Jedburgh, maybe it just seems like more of a problem becuase you don't agree with her politics? Either way, calling a well researched book by written by a former Fulbright scholar and London School of Economics PhD "junk" is a bit misguided. Every work has it flaws and personal biases but if we only read what we agree with were not really interested in solving problems as much as perusing political agendas and I think therein lies the fundamental dilemma of the war on terror but that is another topic.

At the end of the day, though, I think her basic argument is spot on: that corrupt dictatorships, supported by foreign powers, have kept an increasingly dynamic business class down in the middle east. This political situation, coupled with Cold War meddling in wars of national liberation, created very real motivations for armed to groups to form and try to out-administer their state and create a economy that can provide for the population better than the formal one. These economies came to be linked becuase they operate in the same clandestine space and often share the same broad political goals. The fact that Islamist banks filled the power vacuum in the Central Asia and the Caucuses--two places were the War on Terror existed in a very dramatic fashion before 9/11--after the USSR collapsed and Soviet subsides dried up speaks for itself. I think conflating this with the crusades is a bit much but I think an ambitious economic analysis of the War on Terror is needed and, as far as I know, this is the only work that attempts to do so.