ISIS: The State of TerrorBy Jessica Stern and J.M. BergerEcco, 2015Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't IgnoreBy Jay Sekulow, with Jordan Sekulow, Robert W. Ash, and David FrenchHoward Books, 2014Americans, like people everywhere, don't know much about the foreign lands where their country goes to war, but the conventional wisdom today is that they don't want to invade any more of them. So when would-be Presidential candidate Jeb Bush bungled the question of the moment – “knowing what we know now,” Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked him in May, “would you have authorized the invasion” of Iraq – his competitors sped to the nearest camera to denounce him for it.It took Bush a while to find his footing. First he said he misheard the question, the kind of response no one believes even when it's true. Next he reached for an old stalwart: answering hypothetical questions is an insult to the troops—but avoiding a question about troop deployment could also be an insult to the troops, so that didn't work either. Chris Christie, a blustery man who governs New Jersey but does not work there, told CNN's Jake Tapper, “I want to directly answer your question, because that's what I do,” and then he gave the answer everyone else is giving. Finally, Bush reached solid ground:

But the simple fact is that under the last few years of my brother’s presidency, the surge was quite effective to bring stability and security to Iraq, which was missing during the early days of the United States’ engagement there. And that security has been totally obliterated by the president’s pulling out too early. And now these voids are filled by this barbaric asymmetric threat that endangers the entire region and the entire world.

This was a fine piece of political jiu-jitsu. One can't say anything bad about the Surge (the troops, the troops!), defend President Obama (not quite American, is he?), or express skepticism about the danger of ISIS (that's being soft on terror). Bush was also drawing on popular ideas among what currently passes for the Republican intelligentsia. Charles Krauthammer, writing from the hallowed offices of the National Review, took up the cudgel for Jeb and fantasized about the kinds of questions he'd like to ask Hillary Clinton:

The Iraqi government had from Basra to Sadr City fought and defeated the radical, Iranian-proxy Shiite militias. Yet today these militias are back, once again dominating Baghdad. On your watch, we gave up our position as the dominant influence over a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” — forfeiting that position gratuitously to Iran. Was that not a mistake? And where were you when it was made? Iraq is now a battlefield between the Sunni jihadists of the Islamic State and the Shiite jihadists of Iran’s Islamic Republic. There is no viable center. We abandoned it. The Obama administration’s unilateral pullout created a vacuum for the entry of the worst of the worst. And the damage was self-inflicted. The current situation in Iraq, says David Petraeus, “is tragic foremost because it didn’t have to turn out this way. The hard-earned progress of the surge was sustained for over three years.”

Krauthammer has a lot of company. A similar piece appeared a few days later in the even more august Weekly Standard, and the people who are advising the Republican contenders – those not clamoring for a re-invasion – have been arguing this way for years. Hawkish Democrats say identical things, and it would not be surprising if Hillary Clinton, who travels to the right of Obama in foreign policy, makes similar comments when she wins the primary and is free to ignore the left. Americans should be worried, then, that so many of their presidential candidates and advisers endorse so much of what was quoted above. Two new books about the rise of ISIS – one excellent, one atrocious – make clear that almost none of it is true.ISIS: The State of Terror, by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger, takes a methodical, almost academic approach to its subject, tracing its history, dissecting its appeal, explaining its ideology, and analyzing its behavior. The authors include a useful glossary of terms and a splendid twenty-page appendix, which constitutes the most succinct and clear explanation of modern jihadist ideology that I know—and for all their thoroughness, the book is never dull. Anyone looking to understand ISIS will find it the best place to start.The story of ISIS itself starts long before the withdrawal of US combat troops in 2011. It begins with the ascension of Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the leadership of AQI, al Qaeda in Iraq. “Many diverse factors contributed to the rise of ISIS,” Stern and Berger write, “but its roots lie with Zarqawi and the 2003 invasion of Iraq that gave him purpose.”Zarqawi was born in Jordan, where he was a drunk, dissolute and brutish young man. After several arrests he joined an Islamic revivalist group and decamped to Afghanistan in 1989, arriving just in time to miss jihad against the Soviet Union. But he fought in the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal and came under the tutelage of a radical Sheikh, Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, who though still active today has, like many other jihadist thinkers, been left behind by the more violent men he inspired. Zarqawi returned to Jordan and was arrested after taking part in several failed terrorist attacks. He served five years and botched yet another terrorist attack in 1999 (the infamous “Millenium Plot,” where he planned to bomb three Jordanian hotels), but escaped to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden. “By most accounts,” Stern and Berger write,

the meeting with bin Laden did not go well. And why would it? The two men were united only by a broad commitment to violent jihad. Bin Laden and his early followers were mostly members of an intellectual, educated elite, while Zarqawi was a barely educated ruffian with an attitude.

It was an early sign of an evolving split in the jihadist movement, one that would finally culminate in 2014, almost fifteen years later, when ISIS declared a new caliphate in Syria and Iraq.After his meeting with bin Laden, Zarqawi began training and recruiting Muslims in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Al Qaeda supported him but he operated independently, focusing on the “near enemy,” the Western-backed authoritarian regimes, while bin Laden focused his energies on the “far enemy,” the West generally and the United States specifically. It is crucial to note that, as Stern and Berger explain, the differences between bin Laden and Zarqawi were never bridged: “In the days prior to September 11,” the authors write, “bin Laden repeatedly sought bayah, a religiously binding oath of allegiance, from Zarqawi, who refused to comply.”Zarqawi was wounded during the American invasion, and fled by way of Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he joined Ansar al-Islam. (Ansar al-Islam, no matter what the Bush Administration and credulous armchair warriors like Christopher Hitchens said in the run-up to invasion and after, was an unaffiliated terrorist group that aimed to overthrow Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship and establish a state governed by Sharia law.) Announcing his presence with a series of devastating suicide bombs, Zarqawi quickly won a following of Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters. Osama bin Laden finally got his bayeh in 2004, and al Qaeda in Iraq was born. But this allegiance was only nominal. Zarqawi still beat his own path, killing more Muslims than infidels, and when al Qaeda Central chastised him for it they were largely ignored. Zarqawi was finally killed by an airstrike in June 2006, leaving behind an organization and a model for militant jihad that endures to this day.It had always been al Qaeda's intention to draw the United States into a ground war in the Middle East. A US invasion would confirm bin Laden's depiction of its imperialist ambition and serve as a boon to recruitment, the seed of a mass Islamic resistance that could be molded into a future caliphate—an idea bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and the rest of the al Qaeda leadership believed would not come to fruition in their lifetimes. (In that, at least, bin Laden was right.) But al Qaeda, devastated by attrition through American air strikes and killing raids, was hardly in a position to control the Iraqi insurgency, and the young men who it had inspired were, in their cruelty and violence, already moving beyond it.There is a fundamental difference between a small group like al Qaeda and an insurgency. Al Qaeda was exclusive, even intellectual, peopled with rich and educated men who recorded long, hectoring videos studded with citations from the Koran and the Hadith. They saw themselves as a vanguard and they chose their associates carefully. Insurgencies, on the other hand, need bodies, as many as possible. Their violence is harder to direct and their policies are more subject to the flux of events on the ground. When al Qaeda in Iraq began its mass attacks on Shi'ite Muslims, it took a long time for al Qaeda Central to respond with councils of (relative) moderation, advice that Zarqawi was disinclined to follow anyway. Even if he was, the logic of events broke against rapprochement: reprisals from Shi'ite militias completed the circle, and Iraq approached something resembling civil war. Al Qaeda could do little besides talk, so it grudgingly accepted its position and lent its name to Zarqawi's massacres. As Stern and Berger put it, “differences over tactics and ideology [were] fought out in private and papered over in public.”Al Qaeda’s next move unwittingly laid the groundwork for a further decline in influence. During his eulogy for Zarqawi, Zawahiri called on AQI to establish an Islamic state in Iraq (not, it is crucial to say, a caliphate, with its universal connotations of religious obedience), instructions which he had sent privately to Zarqawi the year before. “Within a few months,” the authors write,

a coalition of jihadist insurgents known as the Mujahideen Shura Council announced the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The council’s formation had stemmed in part from AQI’s recognition that it could not simply compete against other jihadist factions in its sphere of influence, and that at least some appearance of accommodation was needed… for a time, Zawahiri’s influence took hold. The ISI distanced itself from the sectarian slaughter and committed to the goals Zawahiri had sent to Zarqawi.

But the violence reduced by mere degrees. Only the 2007 uprising of Sunni tribes against the insurgency (the Awakening Movement), supported by the Iraqi government and coupled with a surge in American forces using clear-and-hold tactics, brought down the violence.It started creeping up again after the US wound down its troop deployments and was replaced by the less formidable and more corrupt Iraqi Army. But the American withdrawal in 2011 was much less important to Sunni-Shi'ite relations than the elections that took place the year before. Nouri al-Maliki’s government had never been fair with Iraq’s Sunni population, but when his coalition failed to achieve a decisive victory in the 2010 parliamentary elections, he turned to hard-line Shia groups, including Iranian proxies like the Badr Organization. He’d already favored Shias with the most lucrative and powerful position in his government, and he’d already been harassing the Awakening groups. When he arrested the Sunni vice president, Tariq Hashimi, on charges of terrorism, Sunni politicians boycotted the parliament. “In addition,” Stern and Berger explain, “to costing the Iraqi government the support of the Awakening militias, many disenfranchised Sunni fighters (whose salaries had started to dry up) were now dropped into a boiling cauldron of radicalizing influences.”By 2012 the Arab Spring was taking down governments across the region. Over the next year Sunni protest camps sprung up in Iraqi cities, and Maliki sent in soldiers and militia, massacring hundreds, perhaps thousands. Who then did the Sunnis have to protect them but the tribes, the insurgents, and the ex-Baathists? ISI had been reduced to a small core of veteran fighters, but Maliki’s stupidity and paranoia gave them new life.If one is to lay any blame on the Obama Administration, it should rest here, with its hands-off approach to Maliki, not with the withdrawal of troops, whom the Iraqis did not want there anyway. Having nearly destroyed a country, and set into motion events that killed and displaced thousands and millions, it could be argued that the United States at least had an obligation to stem further violence. Yet when Maliki told Obama of his intention to arrest President Hashimi, as his own Foreign Minister told PBS’s Frontline, Obama assured Maliki that he considered it an internal matter. According to both Iraqi and American officials, the Obama Administration’s attitude was disengaged at one of the few times in recent history when American interference in the Middle East might have had a positive effect. So in a sense, those who argue that Obama should have kept troops in country are saying that American soldiers should have been there to deal with the result of choices that ought never to have been made.And yet, this counterfactual should not be pushed too hard. Obama was not handed “victory” in Iraq when he took office, as many of his critics glibly claim. Iraq’s governing structure was inherently flawed: the Prime Minister had wide latitude to abuse his power by staffing the military with partisans and distributing the spoils of oil money. It was the Bush Administration that was responsible for rushing Iraq’s constitution to completion, for favoring the corrupt exiles and the parties they created, and most of all for its fatally incompetent occupation, which dumped thousands of previously employed soldiers and bureaucrats into the insurgency and left Sunni and Shia sectarians murdering each other on a daily basis. And the Obama Administration faced one other development beyond its control: the collapse of Bashar Assad’s government in Syria.ISIS was born out of ISI, but it came of age, so to speak, in Syria. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, about whom little is known, was a former guest of the US military at its prison in Camp Bucca. He rose to the head of the Islamic State in Iraq in May 2010, stocked the organization’s leadership with contacts he made while in prison, and formed an alliance with Baathist leaders, who provided ISI with valuable military skills. Baghdadi staged large-scale suicide attacks and broke thousands out of Iraqi prisons. In late 2011 he sent operatives into Syria to form another terrorist group to fight the Assad government, which was meeting peaceful protests and a hodgepodge of ad-hoc rebel groups with mass bombings and snipers. One of the men Baghdadi sent was Abu Mahammed al Jawlani, who became the leader of Jabhat al Nusra. It soon became the dominant rebel group.Al Nusra was technically independent; it had declared allegiance to no one. “On April 9, 2013,” write Stern and Berger,

Baghdadi announced a merger of ISI and al Nusra, calling the new group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). [“al-Sham” is Arabic for the Levant] In effect Baghdadi was unilaterally establishing himself as the leader of both organizations (ISI and al Nusra), now merged into one. The announcement surprised both Zawahiri [by now the leader of al Qaeda] and Jawlani. Neither of them had signed off on the decision, and neither was enthusiastic about it. Al Nusra immediately announced its allegiance to Zawahiri and al Qaeda Central, placing al Nusra and ISIS in direct confrontation.

Zawahiri tried to overrule Baghdadi, but the latter said he had “many legal and methodological reservations” about the former’s argument, which was as polite disagreement as they were ever going to have. ISIS grew quickly, recruiting all over the countryside, often out of the ranks of its rebel competitors, and attracting unprecedented numbers of foreign fighters. Al Qaeda disavowed ISIS in February 2014, and ISIS responded by assassinating Zawahiri’s emissary in Syria, who had been trying to resolve the dispute. ISIS’s spokesman derisively asked Zawahiri why they should model itself on a failed organization. “We await your wise reply,” he said, twisting the knife.

ISIS was making progress in Iraq, too, by allying itself with many of the Sunni tribes Maliki had alienated. Its blitzkrieg victories surprised everyone. In less than a year, it won Raqqa, its new Syrian capital, the surrounding area, and then Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. ISIS pushed further, even into Kurdish territory, inflicting defeats on the vaunted peshmerga (“those who face death”). In August they surrounded fleeing Yazidis (who practice an old mélange of different religious traditions; ISIS considers them infidels) on Iraq’s Mt. Sinjar. It is here, finally, that the Obama Administration decided to intervene—but only if Nouri al-Maliki stepped down. By this point even Iran agreed that Maliki had to resign, and when he did America embarked upon a campaign that continues to the present.ISIS responded by beheading an American hostage named James Foley. It broadcasted the execution to the world, and this won them as much attention in the West as any of their military victories. ISIS was carefully following a strategy known as “paying the price,” which calls, Stern and Berger note, for responding “to any hint of aggression with extreme violence.” The strategy came from a book called The Management of Savagery, and the book explains, as much as any text, how ISIS was able to expand and conquer. “The hostages,” it recommends, “should be liquidated in a terrifying manner, which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy and his supporters.”Its author is known pseudonymously as Abu Bakr Naji. The Management of Savagery was posted online in 2004 and had a tremendous influence on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his successors. As Stern and Berger explain,

The Management of Savagery was a compilation of lessons learned from previous jihadist failures, as well as an advancement in thinking about the movement’s future direction. …Al Naji recommended drawing the United States into a continual series of conflicts in the Middle East to destroy its image of invincibility, and he endorsed an embrace and wide broadcast of unvarnished violence as a tool to motivate would-be recruits and demoralize enemies.

The United States had already played its part: Zarqawi put the rest of al Naji’s philosophy into practice, and ISIS perfected it. ISIS’s ability to rule, as Sarah Birke noted recently in the New York Review of Books, depends “overwhelmingly on outright repression,” and it relies on fear to tip the balance of combat in its favor. (Mosul was stationed with thousands and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and yet an ISIS force of 800 took the city unopposed.) Brute violence is also, paradoxically, a key to ISIS’s ability to attract recruits. The Management of Savagery was translated into English in 2006, and Stern and Berger quote an especially pertinent passage:

Those who have not boldly entered wars during their lifetimes do not understand the role of violence and coarseness against the infidels in combat and media battles. . . . The reality of this role must be understood by explaining it to the youth who want to fight. . . . If we are not violent in our jihad and if softness seizes us, that will be a major factor in the loss of the element of strength, which is one of the pillars of the Umma of the Message.

This is why ISIS makes videos of crucifixions, mass executions, and children playing with severed heads. “Ultraviolence,” Stern and Berger note, “sold well with the target demographic for foreign fighters—angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates.” Roughly 40 to 50 percent of ISIS’s foot soldiers come from outside Iraq and Syria, and its message is aimed disproportionately at foreign audiences. It has been extremely effective.Al Qaeda’s forays into media were long and dull. Zarqawi and ISI pioneered a more sensationalist approach, filming their atrocities and sharing them with the world. ISIS, through trial and error, has refined its messaging with slick graphics and sharp editing, which it uses to present a shrewd, two-part message: ISIS is killing its enemies, and ISIS is building a utopia. The videos, which spread quickly over the Internet through message boards and social media, combine scenes of graphic violence in equal measure with visions of an Islamic paradise on earth. They exhort recruits to come and fight—or simply share their medical, administrative, or technical expertise. The flummoxing arcana of religious disputation – hallmark of an older generation of jihadist videos – is hardly in evidence. “When it is expedient,” Stern and Berger explain,

ISIS indulges in religious argument, for example, to justify its capture and sale of sexual slaves.... But its messaging betrays a different kind of sophistication. Where al Qaeda framed its pitch to potential recruits in more relatable terms as “doing the right thing,” ISIS seeks to stimulate more than to convince. Its propaganda and recruiting materials are overwhelmingly visceral, from scenes of graphic violence to pastoral visions of a utopian society that seems to thrive, somehow, in the midst of a war zone.

The overall contrast with Al Qaeda is stark: one is an exclusive organization that hides from the infidels, while the other welcomes all true believers and operates in the open; one asks its recruits to wage a defensive jihad, while the other asks its recruits to conquer and build. Compared with Al Qaeda, ISIS’s message is in a way a very positive vision; it projects strength and forward movement. The power of that message has depended in large part on ISIS’s astonishing military victories. As it meets stronger resistance, the success of its message will be tested. But its ultimate goal, we must realize, is unattainable.America’s leaders are under tremendous political and diplomatic pressure to intervene more decisively. They would do well to heed the Stern and Berger's advice:

ISIS's goals are impossible, ludicrous, but that does not mean it can be easily destroyed...certainly the history of ISIS and al Qaeda before it show that overwhelming military force is not a solution to hybrid organizations that straddle the line between terrorism and insurgency. Our hammer strikes on al Qaeda spread its splinters around the world. Whatever approach we take in Iraq and Syria must be focused on containment and construction, rather than simply smashing ISIS into ever more virulent bits.

So far, with the exception of his risky plan to arm “moderate” Syrian rebels (the first 5,000 are not projected to be ready until at least 2016, when they will face about 35,000 from ISIS and 75,000 loyal to Assad), this seems to be what President Obama is inclined to do: contain ISIS, push allies to engage, stay off the ground.That could be the best approach. But even limited engagement breeds unforeseen consequences. To take one possibility, it could be that ISIS and its enemies will bring to fruition something that has until now been merely theoretical: the de facto or de jure partition of Iraq into religious and ethnic enclaves. It does not appear so theoretical anymore. The most diverse and least effective fighting force in Iraq today is the Iraqi military, and it is not very diverse at all. This leaves ISIS, which is Sunni, the peshmerga, who are Kurdish, and the Shiite militias, which have innocent Sunni blood on their hands and are supported by Iran. What's more, each group’s respective area of control reflects their religious and ethnic makeup to an uncomfortable degree. Iraq's new president, Haider al-Abadi, is making overtures to the Sunnis, and some Sunni tribes are fighting ISIS, but it may be too late—to win back the Sunnis, or to prevent the most extreme Shi'ite groups from dominating what’s left of the Iraqi government's fighting force.The key for America is to avoid the mistake its leaders and would-be leaders keep making, of seeing every action taken by someone they despise as a threat to American “credibility,” of giving in to the impulse to control and rearrange, of seeing everything – and every actor – through the prism of America's network of alliances. Every single one of these errors, among others, is present in another book, Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore, by Jay Sekulow, his son Jordan, and two others, whose role in the book (which is written in the first person) is unclear.“Jihad is on the march,” the authors write. “Jihad is on the march,” they write again a few pages later, and then again, the exact same phrase. The book was obviously dashed off quickly in the wake of ISIS's march through northern Iraq last year, so it could be an editing mistake, but after taking in the whole volume it's pretty clear those five words could summarize all of its hundred pages—those five and “strength,” which is the authors' one-word answer for jihadis and their marching.“Jihad” seems to encompass Islamic extremists everywhere. Rise of ISIS is ostensibly about ISIS – it's in the title, after all – but nearly half of it is devoted to Hamas, which we are supposed to believe is a kindred organization. There are a few differences, the authors concede, between a group that kills Israelis and a group kills everyone, “But it is a mistake to think of these groups as entirely separate. Indeed, they are motivated by the same hate, the same faith, and employ many of the same tactics.” “We have done our homework,” they assure us—but who was passing out the assignments? Hamas has no global ambition: its aspirations are local, and so is the brunt of its hatred. Its “faith” is extreme but very different from the ultraviolent Salafism of ISIS; its tactics are vile, but again, not in the same league as its supposed fellow travelers in Iraq and Syria. It is also, for an extremist jihadi organization, relatively flexible. Hamas' Islamization efforts are largely unpopular among Palestinians, and it has frequently backed off its own policies in the face of local resistance. It has even, at times, signaled a willingness to negotiate with Israel. ISIS does not compromise in this way.But for Jay Sekulow and company, who speak in eerily sectarian terms (they say Jews and Christians as often as they say Israel and America), Hamas and ISIS are simply jihadis, and they are tied together in another way: both receive aid and comfort from the UN and the “international left,” who “often want to see terrorists prevail.” Also, the UN and the international left sometimes receive aid from President Obama. “When the U.N., Red Cross, and—sadly—even our own American President and State Department appease jihad, they do so with eyes wide open, fully aware of the evil they empower.” All three, the authors, believe, are trying to win a “legal argument” (protecting civilians from disproportionate response, they mean) that would prevent Israel and the United States from using force against the terrorists who threaten them.And force – or “strength” – is really the only answer the authors have for anything. Their policy recommendations (which strangely do not include a ground invasion “at this time” – perhaps they're closet lefties?) are these: bomb Hamas, bomb ISIS, investigate the UN, and stop complaining about the human rights violations of our allies. “You will notice,” they write, “a consistent theme in all these points: unwavering strength.” But strength, it seems, also affects memory: with the exception of investigating the UN, which they usually just ignore, America and Israel have done all of these things, and yet they seem to have gotten to a place where they are supposed to do them all once again.I could go on – the book is studded with crackpot ejaculations – but we shouldn't dismiss Sekulow and his compatriots for clowns. The sad truth is that they are only a more extreme example of a very popular current in American thought. Recall Charles Krauthammer's conflation of Sunni and Shia jihadists in Iraq, or Dick Cheney's repeated assertion that Obama is aiding terrorists, or the ubiquitous claim by Republicans and Democrats that the United States must bomb this country or that terrorist group in order to maintain its “credibility.” Those sentiments were churning in the background when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq. The conflation of different terrorist groups motivated his decision to give Israel carte blanche to bomb Gaza and build settlements. The demonization of the “international left” undergirds neoconservative distaste for international law to this day. “Strength” has wrought an awful lot of destruction and pain for Israel, the United States, and people of the Muslim world.There are, outside of these extreme domestic corridors, well-intentioned humanitarians who claim that the United States, by virtue of its great power, has a moral obligation to intervene and save lives. But America should balance this instinctive humanism against what Andrew Bacevich calls “the moral obligation... to take history seriously,” to consider the lives devastated by intervention itself. After all, as Stern and Berger write, “The West has spent decades trying to impose structures of politics and governance in the Middle East, and the results sadly speak for themselves.”____Greg Waldmann is the Editor-in-chief of Open Letters Monthly, and a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs.