BLACK FLAGS: THE RISE OF ISIS - JOBY WARRICK

ISIS is a perennially interesting subject to me, their rise and brutality really helps illuminate and sharpen a number of contemporary trends. It helps one think about quasi-state and non-state actors, there is a through line between their filming of brutal beheadings and those done by various Mexican drug cartels (tho, I believe the cartels were first). Their funding and origins remain somewhat mysterious and shrouded in the sort of mystery that we won’t see the answers to for a dozen or so more years. They ways the Kurds were used by Western forces, and specifically Western media, to help halt their advance is another story that I’m very interested in and confused by. The way they act as a stand-in for Obama, Mr. I-believe-in-smart wars aka Mr. Nobel Peace Prize, is also very helpful as a tool to think about the modern world. So, as you might imagine, I was pretty excited to read this book. Sadly, it did not really deliver and mostly infuriated me. Warrick is a WaPo reporter and a Pulitzer winner, so I guess I shouldn’t have expected something really thought provoking and incisive, but this was one of the most morally cowardly books I’ve read in a while. Not to say that it was all bad, it’s well-researched and he’s a good writer. There are interesting anecdotes, like McChrystal feeling like maybe he was a bad guy while he watched an Iraqi family, with hate and fear in their eyes, held at gunpoint while Special Forces goons “searched” their house and another story about him showing his commanders “The Battle of Algiers” (what the fuck does he think the moral of that movie was?). The book is also somewhat misleading since, based off the title, one would think it was mostly about ISIS, when, in fact, ISIS features briefly towards the end and the vast majority of the book is about Al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorists who fought against the American occupation at the beginning of the decades-long Iraq war. Again, that’s not my problem with the book, Zarqawi is a fascinating figure who deserves books written about him, my issue is the tone of the tome. I guess I’m surprised the mainstream consensus on the Iraq War, apparently, remains, “tragic and honest mistakes were made by Americans who were trying to do their best but, gosh darn it, just didn’t understand these confusing and brutal Arabs.” This is the grossest sort of propaganda. The war was a bloodthirsty genocide, American troops and their allies routinely massacred civilians, engaged in torture and rape, killed without remorse or consequences and all in the service of lies and nothing more noble than a desire to increase American hegemony. These weren’t honest mistakes made by good men, which we knew at the time and we know even more clearly now. So when Joby writes things like “Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English” he’s being really weasley (lol at “reflexively shot at”) to obscure the reality that American troops were routinely executing civilians for the crime of driving in their country. “There had been many instances in U.S. history where well-intentioned decisions to arm a guerrilla movement had horribly backfired” is another great example of giving the US the benefit of the doubt when a sober reading of history absolutely gives the lie to this world-view. Likewise, multiple times he refers to the Libyan intervention as a success, which is also an insane way to view the complete destruction of one of Africa’s most prosperous countries, the fallout from which we are still seeing as just this week the Libyan death-toll from flooding has climbed above 20,000. I could go on, but the review is already too long. This book is a good overview of some of the issues surrounding ISIS. It is insufficiently ‘noided on a number of topics (the gassing, the Nick Berg stuff, the early funding for ISIS), but that is to be expected. The tone towards America’s involvement and conduct in the war was truly shocking and disgusting to me. I guess that's why this guy has a job working at the WaPo but it was really depressing.