Five years into the War on Terror, it’s remarkable how few credible voices have questioned the operating assumptions of an enterprise that Pentagon generals ominously warn will carry on for the rest of our lives. To be fair, there have been numerous challenges, both by former government insiders and liberal critics, but their conclusions usually call for a mere tactical change in fighting the bin Laden behemoth.

R.T. Naylor rejects altogether the notion that there’s a centrally financed and directed Al-Qaeda terror network, an idea as unlikely as an international network of “organized crime.” Documenting the reality behind scores of scare headlines, he illustrates how the Al-Qaeda phantom serves the same role – and shares as little substance – as the Red Scare bogeyman of the Cold War. Indeed, Naylor is quick to point out how both phenomena have served well the bottom lines of weapons dealers while allowing the erosion of civil liberties around the globe.

With his detailed knowledge of the international monetary system, Naylor – a McGill economist and the author of Hot Money and the Politics of Debt and Bankers, Bagmen, and Bandits, among other books – has no problem skewering the idea that billions are laundered annually to support non-state acts of terror. But that myth, Naylor contends, has been useful in enacting a lengthy series of raids and prosecutions that have severely disrupted the perfectly legitimate activities of the hawala system of money transfers (which wires funds, often remittances, to parts of the world where no banks exist), as well as Islamic charities.

Naylor is a passionate and dedicated writer, but, like Noam Chomsky, he sometimes forgets that not all of his readers share his sense of anti-authoritarian cynicism and bitter humour. His frequent veering into sarcasm and blanket statements could lose him uninitiated readers. At times, he is so intent on proving a point that he almost drowns the reader in details, but this is perhaps a forgivable sin, given the facile hyperbole that continues to drive this neverending war.