Mick Hartley

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror, by David Kilcullen. Review by James Rubin, assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Clinton, in the Sunday Times (£):

Kilcullen is a former Australian military officer and adviser to the State Department and the US army in Iraq during the administrations of George W Bush and Barack Obama. He is a man who has seen the West’s policy on terrorism from the inside, which makes his analysis of recent strategy (a potent mix of clarity, candour and criticism) all the more telling.

What makes Blood Year particularly valuable, however, is that Kilcullen manages to recount the events of 2014 and 2015 without succumbing to the pull of political correctness or the push of conventional wisdom. In a world where extreme views garner all the attention, and everyone is an instant expert, it is a genuine pleasure to get a practitioner’s perspective from someone who knows what they are talking about yet still manages to tell it like it is.

Kilcullen describes the situation in the Green Zone in Baghdad on his arrival there in 2005 as “Ground Zero for the greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia”. He then proceeds to explain how President Bush and General David Petraeus salvaged America’s reputation with the “surge” in US forces in 2007.

On Bush, the man responsible for the historic screw-up and then the surge, Kilcullen is remarkably even-handed: “I found myself hugely impressed by the man’s leadership, willpower and grasp of detail.” At a coalition conference in Tampa in May 2007, Bush had “a clear understanding of what was and what was not working on the ground” and “a deep knowledge of what nations were already providing and of the political constraints on their contributions. It was a tour de force of coalition leadership.”

He answers a question that has always puzzled me. Did the surge itself succeed or was it the Sunni uprising against al-Qaeda in Iraq that happened at the same time? His take is convincing. This was the “fifth attempt to throw off AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and the reason this attempt succeeded where the previous four failed, was the surge. We finally had enough troops to protect people where they slept, led by commanders willing, able, funded and authorised to partner with [Iraqis]” and “the support from the White House to do whatever it took to end the violence”.

What all this means is that, by the time Obama took office, Iraq was in good shape. Al-Qaeda was virtually gone and violence in the country was at its lowest point. Ordinary Iraqis saw their government cracking down on both Sunnis and Shi’ites, so they gave authorities their trust and, when necessary, intelligence information. It didn’t last.

Kilcullen goes on to recount the decline of Iraq, the outbreak of civil war in Syria, and the rise of Isis in both those countries, as well as the new terrorist group’s appeal in nations as far apart as Afghanistan and Libya. It is not an edifying tale, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

But the account feels fair. The Syria story is particularly painful. Bashar al-Assad and his intelligence services really did promote the growth of Isis on their own territory. The jails were emptied of Islamic extremists at the start of the uprising, precisely to infect a moderate opposition with extremism and make Assad the only alternative to this new terrorist scourge.

While supportive of much of Obama’s early rhetoric, Kilcullen paints a grim picture of an administration reluctant in the extreme to take risks and unwilling to follow up its powerful hyperbole with concrete actions. Policies are incoherent, military strength and staying power are absent.

According to this narrative, the Syrian opposition was at its strongest when Obama issued his threat to use military force if Assad crossed the “red line” of using chemical weapons against his own people. Had the red line been enforced in 2013, we are told, Assad’s regime might not have survived, and just as important, Islamic State would have been still-born in Syria.

That "greatest strategic screw-up since Hitler’s invasion of Russia" comparison seems misplaced, I have to say. In marked contrast to the Germans in Russia, the Allied forces in Iraq reached Baghdad and overthrew Saddam with remarkable ease. The problems started then, when it became apparent that no one had really thought in depth about what to do next. Still, though….interesting. And some good words for Bush, too. Whatever next?