United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists, by Peter Bergen (Crown, 400 pp., $28)
Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, by Michael V. Hayden (Penguin, 464 pp., $30)
In mid-April, President Barack Obama boasted that America and its allies were winning the fight against the Islamic State. In a rare visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, Obama noted that though ISIS could still inflict “horrific violence,” America’s 11,500 air strikes had put the group on its heels. “We have momentum,” the president said, “and we intend to keep that.” Only days before, however, senior administration officials sounded gloomier about the state of the war. While American air strikes and other operations had killed 25,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, incinerated hundreds of millions of dollars that ISIS had stolen from banks and seized from kidnappings and extortion, forced it to cut salaries by a third, and taken back some territory it had seized in Iraq and Syria, the terror group now had roots in 15 countries and continued to expand its reach in Europe, North Africa, and Afghanistan. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told senators that despite the progress, America and its allies had failed to stop “the recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization of people, especially young people, to engage in terrorist activities.” In February, James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified that ISIS remained not only the nation’s “preeminent terrorist threat,” but that al-Qaida and its affiliates were “positioned to make gains in 2016.” ISIS, he said later, was a “phenomenon.”
Is the threat of ISIS to Americans at home and abroad growing or waning? What has prompted its rise and that of like-minded militant Islamists? And most crucially, how can America and its allies defeat them and their seductive extremist ideology?
No shortage of books has appeared on the issue of Islamic terrorism since al-Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. The rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq, which evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is compellingly described in Black Flags, Joby Warrick’s riveting account of how ISIS, aided partly by the strategic errors of Presidents Bush and Obama, managed to seize and impose its barbaric, authoritarian rule on a territory the size of Great Britain. Published last year, the book won a Pulitzer Prize. It was a worthy successor to The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright’s majestic 2006 account of the rise of al-Qaida. Now, new books by Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst and professor at Arizona State University who was the first reporter to interview bin Laden for an American broadcast network, and Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the National Security Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, enhance our understanding of the spread of ISIS and like-minded jihadi groups; the appeal of the extremism underlying them; how law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and American Muslims have responded to the threat of Islamist terror; and how that appeal might be reduced.