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
Political Islam in its modern form, as Mahmoud Mamdani states in Good Muslims, Bad Muslims, is ‘more a domestic product than a foreign import’. It was not, he reminds us, ‘bred in isolation… Political Islam was born in the colonial period. But it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War.’ The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was born almost a century ago. Its followers in neighbouring countries contested for power (rarely winning any) with governments across the region. The mobilization against the US-backed Shah in Iran in the 1970s resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in perhaps the most powerful, self-defined Islamic government of the 20th century. But today’s movement known as political Islam, with its military mobilizations holding pride of place ahead of its political formations, emerged in its first coherent identity with the US-armed, US-paid, Pakistani-trained mujahideen warriors who fought the Soviet troops in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards. Continuing in the post-Vietnam Cold War 1980s, the Afghanistan War ended with the defeat and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.
The specific origins of ISIS, also variously known as ISIL, Daesh or the Islamic State, lie in the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The country was already in terrible shape, following decades of war (the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-89, then the first US Gulf War in 1991) and a dozen years of crippling economic sanctions imposed in 1990. Even after the first wars, and despite brutal repression of any potential opposition and the long-standing political and economic privileging of the large (20 per cent or so) Sunni minority, the majority of Iraqis lived middle-class lives, including government-provided free healthcare and education, with some of the best medical and scientific institutions in the Arab world. The sanctions, imposed in the name of the United Nations but created and enforced by the US, had shredded much of the social fabric of the once-prosperous, secular, cosmopolitan country. The Pentagon’s ‘shock and awe’ bombing campaign that opened the US invasion destroyed much of Iraq’s physical infrastructure, as well as the lives of over 7,000 Iraqi civilians.
How did the 2003 invasion of Iraq affect the growth of ISIS?
Among the first acts of the US-UK occupation were the dissolution of the Iraqi military, the dismantling of the civil service, and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party. All three institutions represented core concentrations of secular nationalist interests in Iraq, and their collapse was part of the reason for the turn toward religious and sectarian identity that began to replace national identity for many Iraqis. At the same time, in all three institutions, particularly at the highest echelons, Sunni Iraqis were more likely to suffer from the loss of income and prestige – since Sunnis held a disproportionate share of top jobs and top positions in the military and the Baath Party. So, right from the beginning, a sectarian strand emerged at the very centre of the rising opposition to the occupation.
Despite the Bush administration’s dismissals of the opposition as nothing but Baathist leftovers and foreign fighters, the Iraqi resistance was far broader. Within months
