Reviewed by Thomas Joscelyn:

Not only does Washington have a hard time properly naming our jihadist enemies, it still fails to understand that terrorist-sponsoring regimes have long backed them. Here, McCarthy has been at the forefront of explaining how jihadist terrorism is frequently, but not exclusively, a tool of hostile regimes: Writing in these pages in 1998 (“The Sudan Connection”), he explored the many ties between the 1993 plotters and the Sudanese regime then led by an Islamic radical named Hassan al-Turabi. Indeed, Turabi and Rahman were longtime friends and allies. McCarthy returns to this aspect of the story in Willful Blindness to show how Sudan’s U.N. delegation provided material support to Rahman’s terrorists as they plotted to blow up New York’s landmarks. (The Clinton administration even expelled two Sudanese delegates because of their involvement.)

Sudan’s sponsorship went far beyond Rahman’s goons. In the early 1990s Turabi forged a broad terrorist coalition that included Osama bin Laden’s core group of followers, all of al Qaeda’s affiliates, and a number of other organizations. Turabi envisioned bringing all of these parties together in one grand anti-American terrorist coalition. And he received the support of the two leading state sponsors of terrorism: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran. Out of this witch’s brew of state and nonstate actors grew the network that we commonly call “al Qaeda.”

It is beyond my scope here to summarize all of the evidence that supports this thesis, but suffice it to say that McCarthy is exactly right when he asserts,

It is not difficult to find some current or former intelligence official ready and willing to opine that Sunnis [such as Rahman and bin Laden] would never cooperate with secularists or Shiites–overlooking abundant evidence of the Ba’athist Saddam Hussein coddling Sunni jihadists and a years-long history of collaboration between al Qaeda and Shiite Hezbollah.

McCarthy argues that, more than a decade after the Blind Sheikh was convicted of inspiring terrorism on American soil, America remains largely blind. Even the September 11 attacks did not fully awaken our nation, or its leaders, from their slumber. An implacable hate drives our enemies to never-ending violence. For them, we are the “other,” infidels who deserve to be slaughtered as victims of a religious jihad, and there are many who are willing to support their war on us.

In other words, the book demonstrates the futility of trying to lawyer the Islamists to death. But remember: there’s no controlling legal authority for operational connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda.