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Introduction

The rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and the US war against it have exploded into a regional and global conflagration. Once again, civilians are paying the price for both extremist attacks and US wars.

When ISIS swept across northern Syria and northwestern Iraq in June 2014, occupying cities and towns and imposing its draconian version of Islam on terrified populations, to many around the world it looked like something that had popped up out of nowhere. This was not the case, but the complicated interweaving of players, places, and alliances make understanding ISIS seem almost impossible. Yet ISIS has a traceable past, a history and a political trajectory grounded in movements, organizations, governments, and political moments that form a long story in the Middle East: from Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda, from the US invasion and occupation of Iraq to the Arab Spring, regime change in Libya and the chaos of Syria’s civil war.

The US war against ISIS, President Obama’s iteration of George Bush’s much-heralded and long-failed ‘global war on terror’, presents us with an equally complex set of paradoxes and contradictions. The US is fighting against ISIS alongside Iran and the Iranian-backed Baghdad government in Iraq, and fighting in Syria against ISIS alongside (sort of) the Iranian-backed and US-opposed government in Damascus. And all the while, the US and its Arab Gulf allies are arming and paying a host of largely unaccountable, predominantly Sunni militias that are fighting against the Syrian government and fighting – sort of – against ISIS. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Iranian government is arming and training a host of largely unaccountable, predominantly Shi’a militias that are fighting against ISIS and – sort of – alongside the US-backed Iraqi government.

It’s a mess.

That’s why this book came to be written. It’s designed to help readers sort out the history and the players, identify who’s doing what to whom, who’s on what side, and most of all, figure out what we can do to help stop the killing. That’s why the last questions in the book are perhaps the most important – what would alternative policies toward ISIS, toward the region, toward war and peace, actually look like? What can we all do to bring those alternative approaches into the light of day?

For more than a century, US policy in the Middle East has been rooted largely in maintaining access to and control of oil. For roughly three-quarters of a century, in addition to its oil agenda, US policy has had a Cold War-driven strategic interest in stability and US bases to challenge competitors and project power. And, for almost half a century, US policy has been built on a triple play of oil plus stability plus Israel.

While each component of this triplet played the dominant role at different times, overall US interests in the region remained constant. But some changes are under way. Oil is still important to the global economy, but as the threat posed by oil’s role in global warming becomes better understood and sustainable alternatives continue to emerge, it is less of a factor than it once was. And where it comes from is changing too. The US is producing and exporting more oil than ever, and while the Middle East is still a huge exporter of oil, Africa surpassed the Middle East as a source of US oil imports in 2010.

The US continues to pay more than $3.1 billion every year of taxpayer money to the Israeli military, and continues to provide absolute protection to Israel in the United Nations and elsewhere, assuring that no Israeli officials are held accountable for potential war crimes or human rights violations. But with rising tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv over settlement expansion and especially over Israel’s efforts to undermine Washington’s negotiations with Iran, President Obama in 2015 for the first time hinted at a shift, indicating that the US might reconsider its grant of absolute impunity to Israel. With public opinion shifting dramatically away from the assumption that Israel can do no wrong, and influential, increasingly mainstream campaigns pushing policymakers in that direction, a real shift in US policy may be on its way. We’re not there yet, but change is coming.

That leaves strategic stability, military bases and ability to ‘project power’ – read: send troops and bombers – as the most important ‘national interest’ driving US policy in the Middle East. This means that the war on terror, the seemingly permanent US response to instability in the region, is strategically more important – and far more dangerous – than ever.

That war is rooted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks – the US invasion of Afghanistan, and especially the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. Twelve years after the invasion of Iraq, several groups of physicians attempted to accomplish what the ‘we don’t do body counts’ Pentagon had long refused to do: calculate the human costs of the US war on terror. In ‘Body Count: Casualty Figures After Ten Years of the War on Terror’, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Physicians for Global Survival together reached the staggering conclusion that the war was responsible for the loss of at least 1.3 million lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from the September 11, 2001 attacks until 2013.

And that total didn’t take into account the more than 500,000 Iraqi children killed by US-imposed economic sanctions in the 1990s in the run-up to the war. It didn’t take into account the expansion of the wars to Libya and Syria, or include President Obama’s expanding drone war in Somalia and Yemen. It didn’t take into account the rapidly escalating casualty figures in 2014 and 2015 throughout the theatres of the war on terror. But the shocking death toll is still a vital reality check on those who would assert that somehow the war on terror is ‘worth the price’, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described the death of half a million Iraqi children under sanctions.

This book aims to help probe behind the propaganda, help sort out the facts from the mythology, help figure out what we need to know to build a path away from war as the default option. There may be some duplication between some of the questions, and some sections provide different levels of detail than others. The questions are organized by subject, designed for readers to pick and choose, find a subject of interest and delve into the questions most relevant to that subject, then come back later to other issues.

Inevitably, writing a book like this presents enormous challenges, not least the rapid pace of events. Just when you think you’ve got most of the region covered, Yemen explodes. Just when you think you’ve clarified the possibilities and dangers for the Iran nuclear talks, the interim agreement is announced and anti-diplomacy hardliners in Tehran and especially in Washington start their campaigns to undermine it. This is not a full, definitive account of ISIS, its theology, or its strategy. This is an overview, designed to provide a basic understanding so we can move toward identifying and implementing new alternative strategies, instead of war.

Ultimately, that is the reason for this book: to help activists, policymakers, journalists, students – and all the people in their orbit – with the hard task of changing the discourse and turning Western policy around. The basic assumption underlying this book is that you can’t bomb extremism – you can only bomb people. And even if some of the people you bomb are extremists, those bombing campaigns cause more extremism, not less. We need to move away from war as an answer to extremism, and instead build a new approach grounded in diplomacy and negotiation, arms embargos and international law, the United Nations, humanitarian assistance and human rights.

Phyllis Bennis

Washington DC

October 2015