We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“ISIS – THE
STATE OF TERROR” by Jessica Stern and J.M.Berger (Harper-Collins, $NZ34:99)
Is it ISIS, ISIL
or simply IS? Early in the piece, the authors of this book explain that IS
(Islamic State) is the designation they prefer, but many Western governments
choose not to use this term as it implies that these radical Sunni jihadists
have already achieved their aim of creating an autonomous state. ISIL is the term
that the US government prefers (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and that
President Obama often uses in his speeches. However Western journalists prefer
ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), which is now the best-known designation.
So, willy-nilly, the authors opt for ISIS.
What sort of
book is this book? Of course it’s the higher journalism, and like all
journalism (as the authors openly acknowledge) it is provisional and
perishable. Being published this year, it is up-to-date enough to mention the
fall-out from the Charlie Hebdo
murders. But it is an investigation into an ongoing situation that is unlikely
to be resolved any time soon. Doubtless that situation will look very
different, and require a very different sort of book, in two or three years’
time.
It is also a
book aimed principally at non-Muslim infidels like you and me. The text is
preceded by a twelve-page glossary of Muslim terms and a timeline of recent
relevant historical events. After the 256 pages of text, but before the 25
pages of index and the 84 pages of notes and the 5 pages of acknowledgements in
which Jessica Stern and J.M.Berger separately thank their sources, there are 44
pages of Appendix, written by a doctoral student in religious studies, on the
core beliefs of Islam and its various factions.
Finally I have
to note that it is not boots-on-the-ground journalism. Jessica Stern is a
lecturer on terrorism at Harvard. J.M.Berger is a fellow of the Brookings
Institution and contributor to Foreign
Policy magazine. Their report has been researched through secondary
sources, interviews, declassified information and (as parts of the text make
very clear) very close gleaning of what is – or has been – available on the Internet.
Stern and Berger view the situation from a distance, but with a clear sense of
the real danger ISIS entails.
ISIS – The State of Terror
opens with the horror of televised ISIS executions of hostages and prisoners, who
are dressed provocatively in orange, consciously echoing the garb of prisoners
at Guantanamo Bay. ISIS revels in publicising such public violence, as a sign
of its resolve and its refusal to compromise, but also as a means of both
provoking and intimidating the West. Immediately the authors describe the
shocked Western reaction where:
“In corner stores and restaurants, on
television and radio broadcasts, over dinner tables and on social media, people
began to ask: Why can’t the most powerful nations on earth stop these
medieval-minded killers? The question soon transformed into an anger not seen
since the days after the 11 September 2001 attacks.” (p.5)
Rather than
being a parade of such horrors, however, the book becomes an enquiry into how
ISIS operates, to whom it appeals, what its aims are and what the appropriate
response of the West should be. In their account, the group that eventually
became ISIS was founded by Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al Kalaylah, whom they
characterise as “a Jordanian thug turned
terrorist”. He adopted the name Abu Mursala al Zarqawi. As a Sunni Muslim,
he was motivated by the American occupation of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s
dictatorship had been supported by Iraq’s minority Sunni Muslims. They were the
backbone of his Ba’athist Party. Under the US occupation, however, over 100,000
Sunnis were dismissed from their government positions, and Iraq’s Shi’ite
Muslim majority waged a campaign against Sunnis. Sunnis were a great recruiting
ground for a jihadist movement that opposed both the new Iraqi government and
the American occupation. Enter Abu Mursala al Zarqawi to recruit them. He was
killed in 2010 and succeeded as the head of the new movement by Abu Bakr al
Baghdadi who “began on the path of jihad”
during the US-led invasion.
As the authors
note, ISIS got another major boost in recruits when it was able to infiltrate
and take over groups fighting against Assad’s dictatorship in the ongoing
Syrian civil war. One could say that the initial Western delusions about an
“Arab spring” finally died in this civil war. Those who oppose dictatorships
are not necessarily seeking to replace them with anything resembling
democracies. ISIS was also able to access huge funding for propaganda once it
captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and looted the wealth of its banks. It is now
probably the best-funded terrorist organization in the world.
At first ISIS
was affiliated to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, but there were tensions between
the two groups. Basically al Qaeda, backed mainly by wealthy Saudi Arabians,
was concerned to wage war on foreign infidels. They were happy to have ISIS as
their followers but were very concerned that ISIS was as eager to pursue
Shi’ite Muslims as infidels. To al Qaeda, ISIS seemed a bit of a rabble and, much
as it may surprise non-Muslim Westerners, al Qaeda had qualms about Muslims
killing other Muslims, or attempting to impose strict Sharia law too soon on
converts to Islam. The authors of ISIS –
The State of Terror quote an intercepted caution sent by one al Qaeda cell
to another: “AQAP … advised AQIM to
refrain from immediately instituting the jihadists’ harsh interpretation of
Islamic law. ‘you can’t beat people for drinking alcohol when they don’t
even know the basics of how to pray,’ one letter stated.” (pp.114-115)
There were
broader issues on which ISIS eventually broke with al Qaeda, refused to see it
as its superior, and embarked on its own course.
Al Qaeda saw
itself as a “vanguard” group, carrying out acts of terror against the West on
the assumption that this would lead to Western retaliation, which in turn would
lead to a massive popular Muslim uprising. This was the concept of a
“leaderless” Muslim revolution, where al Qaeda was simply lighting the populist
spark.
ISIS had, and
has, no such strategic approach. Its aim is quite simply the set up a specific
territorial area as the base from which a new unified and international
caliphate will spread. ISIS has no faith in a spontaneous Muslim popular
uprising. Within this new caliphate, the people will be ruled strictly by the
caliphate’s hierarchy. The propaganda presented to potential recruits is that
the caliphate (proclaimed by ISIS in June 2014) is already here and is building
and has a place for all classes of (strictly Sunni Muslim) society. The caliph
will, of course, claim headship of the whole Muslim world. To make a crude
analogy (mine – not the authors’), al Qaeda is like Trotskyists aiming for
permanent international revolution. ISIS is like Stalinists building “socialism
in one country”. The authors most concisely identify the difference between al
Qaeda and ISIS thus:
“In the end, al Qaeda’s failure was the
failure of all vanguard movements – an assumption that the masses, once
awakened, will not require close supervision, specific guidance, and a vision
that extends beyond fighting. Al Qaeda’s vision is – often explicitly –
nihilistic. ISIS, for all its barbarity, is both more pragmatic and more
utopian. Hand in hand with its tremendous capacity for destruction, it also
seeks to build. Most vanguard extremist movements paradoxically believe that
ordinary people are afflicted with deep ignorance, yet such movements also
expect that once their eyes have been opened, the masses will instinctively
know what to do next. ISIS does not take the masses for granted; its chain of
influence extends beyond the elite, beyond its strategists and loyal fighting
force, out into the world. Its propaganda is not simply a call to arms, it is
also a call for non-combatants, men and women alike, to build a nation-state
alongside the warriors with a role for engineers, doctors, filmmakers,
sysadmins, and even traffic cops.” (pp.73-74)
Surprisingly, a
very large part of this book is not taken up with further analysis of how the
ISIS “state” runs, though atrocities, reported by defecting jihadists, are
covered. What concerns the authors more is how ISIS is able to recruit, using
social media, the Internet and television. Al Qaeda pioneered this, but did not
quite get the electronic approach right:
“The terrorist group [al Qaeda] had generally kept up with the technology of
the day, but in the realm of social media, it was slightly slower to adopt the
latest trends. The centre of gravity for jihadist extremists online had settled
onto password-protected message boards, highly structured discussion forums
that were carefully moderated by activists who were members of al Qaeda, or very
closely aligned with such.” (p.65)
In contrast,
ISIS rapidly adopted “a feedback-loop
model” for disseminating their propaganda on the ‘net, with as many
accounts as possible fully open to comment by anyone who wished to look at
them. The result was tens of millions of ISIS-affiliated tweets on Twitter and
images shared on Facebook and a huge audience of potential recruits. As Stern
and Berger tell it, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter were very slow to close down
ISIS-related accounts, and some Western security services advised against
closing them down because, they argued, such accounts provided intelligence
information and helped our official Watchers to keep track of potential
jihadists. To which the authors reply tartly
“… allowing child pornographers to operate on
line without impediment would undoubtedly yield tremendous intelligence about
child pornographers. Yet no-one ever argues this is a reasonable trade-off.”
(p.141)
For Stern and
Berger, ISIS’s public executions and dissemination of atrocity images are meant
to serve a twofold purpose. The first is to warn what awaits anyone who resists
(a bit like the old German military doctrine of Schrecklichkeit). The second is to inure ISIS followers and
subjects to the murder, rape and torture they themselves might be required to
commit:
“While ISIS may not articulate its reasons in
this manner, we believe it is deliberately engaged in a process of blunting
empathy, attracting individuals already inclined towards violence, frightening
victims into compliance, and projecting this activity out to the wider world.
The long-term effects of this calculated brutality are likely to be severe, with
higher rates of various forms of PTSD, increased rates of secondary
psychopathy, and, sadly, more violence.” (p.218)
What I find
deficient in this book is a long term explanation of why jihadists in general
(of which ISIS is the latest and, apparently, most virulent example) have come
out of longer historical conditions. Yes, there is an account of how ISIS arose
in reaction to the US-led war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; but the book scarcely
glances at the longer history of Western exploitation of what we call loosely
“the Middle East”.
For all that, ISIS – The State of Terror does not function
as a drumbeater for Western intervention. By and large, the authors are
critical of US foreign policy up to this point; and they speak negatively of
earlier interventions, as when they declare:
“Armed with irrational exuberance and a
handful of dubious pretexts for war, the United States and its allies invaded
Iraq on 20 March 2003. The invasion had been justified by exaggerated claims
that Iraq possessed or was close to possessing weapons of mass destruction, and
by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was allied with al Qaeda. While Iraq had
a long history of sponsoring terrorist groups, al Qaeda was not one of them.”
(p.17)
They note the
huge wasted effort, and wasted money, spent trying to build up credible
post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi armed forces:
“The
United States had invested $25 billion in training and equipping the Iraqi army
over the course of eight years. That investment evaporated in the blink of an
eye as Iraqi soldiers turned tail and fled in the face of ISIS’s assaults on
Mosul.” (p.45)
The reasons
given for the 2003 invasion are refuted and the results criticised:
“Terror can make us strike back at the wrong
enemy, for the wrong reasons, or both (as was the case with the 2003 invasion
of Iraq). We want to wage war, not just on terrorism, but also on terror, to
banish the feeling of being unjustly attacked or unable to protect the
blameless. We want to wage war on evil. Sometimes the effect of our reaction is
precisely what we aimed to thwart – more terrorists and more attacks, spread
more broadly around the world. While some politicians wanted to see Iraq during
the allied invasion as a roach motel, we see it more like a hornets’ nest –
with allied bombs and bullets spreading the hornets ever further, throughout
the region and beyond.” (pp.199-200)
There are also
these chilling, but necessary, words:
“The
only thing worse than a brutal dictator is no state at all. The rise of ISIS
is, to some extent, the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq.
Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power, but they also broke the
Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will, and the wisdom to build a
new, inclusive one. What remained were ruins.” (pp. 237-238)
The authors also
quote (on pp. 239-240) the disillusioned words of General Daniel P. Bolger
(ret.), a senior commander in Iraq, on how little intervention in Iraq achieved
and how foolish intervention was in the first place. I can imagine his words
appearing in many an anti-war pamphlet should we once again be asked to furnish
boots-on-the-ground in Iraq.
So what, finally,
is the authors’ view on how the powerful part of the West should respond to
ISIS? They suggests a rigorous surveillance of all social and electronic media,
a blocking of all ISIS propaganda in any format, a complete ban on travel to
ISIS-controlled areas, prosecution of anyone recruiting jihadists and arrest of
suspected recruits before they can leave. They also imply an economic blockade.
But they strongly suggest that any armed intervention would simply give
credence to the apocalyptic ISIS scenario of a crusade by infidels against
their holy state, and would thus serve only to recruit more jihadists to the
ISIS cause.
I’m not sure
that all will agree with this scenario. But despite both its provisional nature
and its defects (including some passages that look like rhetorical “padding”), ISIS – The State of Terror is a very
good primer on a major current issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment