Assessing the War on Terror: An Ambivalent Polemic

Abstract

Assessing the War on Terror. Edited by Mohammed Ayoob, Etga Ugur. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2013. 225 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 988-1-58826-978-2). Assessing the War on Terror argues that the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars have been disastrous, but its evidence is selective and ambiguous. According to Mohammed Ayoob's opening chapter, the book endeavors to evaluate the War on Terror and its cross-regional effects. The book's contributors argue that America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened US power and emboldened its adversaries. Some of the book's contributors offer important insights. Fawaz Gerges' excellent critique of Al Qaeda makes a strong contribution. He debunks the myth that Al Qaeda commands a mass following of jihadists. Instead, bin Laden's organization is presented as an elitist aberration whose far enemy strategy of attacking the United States has little following among extremists. Gerges portrays a fragmented, dysfunctional post-9/11 Al Qaeda. He argues the group's loss of its terror sanctuary after 9/11 created a diffuse organization impervious to central direction. Gerges persuasively argues that Al Qaeda's affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, the Maghreb, and Yemen are committed to ultraviolent takfiri doctrines that have killed thousands of Muslims and diminished the organization's popularity across the Islamic world. Having sketched a debilitated Al Qaeda, Gerges paradoxically concludes that the War on Terror has propped up the organization. Beyond his depiction of the Iraq War as …