Title Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War
Author Sebastian Gorka
Publisher Perseus Books Group, 2016
ISBN 1621574571, 9781621574576
Pages 256 By: Nate Madden

By: Nate Madden in Conservative Review

2015 was the deadliest year for jihadist terror activity on American soil since the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. In the decade and a half since that tragic day in New York City, the world has been forced to come to grips with a widespread and insidious enemy that poses an existential threat not only to the safety of freedom loving people, but their very way of life.
Despite the grim and urgent reality that has been in front of our faces for over a decade, the global stage is still plagued by a host of supposed “lone wolf” attacks animated by a self-declared caliphate in the Middle East, as well as the same lingering enemies of seasons past.
Nonetheless, the question remains: how is the rest of the world meant to best confront and destroy an enemy that cares not about national borders, sovereignty or diplomacy in the very least?
In his recent book, Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University, seeks to answer these questions and others by not only compiling centuries of military history into a concise battle plan, but by analyzing the very ideologies and strategies that animate the legions of seemingly faceless combatants behind the struggle of global jihad. “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War” is a succinct tract that will be prove to indispensable in the United States’ and the rest of world’s coming efforts against the hydra-like enemy that is Islamic extremism.
A harsh, bitter, and necessary critique
A necessary initial step in fixing an ineffective strategy is to do a fearless and thorough inventory of the methods that have proved ineffective so far. Dr. Gorka conducts an insightful and honest post-mortem of the United States’ approach to jihadism in the years since the “annus horribilis” of 1979, which saw both the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as approaches taken by the Bush and Obama administrations to jihadist threats originating in the Middle East and Central Asia. From the flotsam and jetsam, Dr. Gorka provides an honest and scathing critique of the war so far that both castigates the neoconservative imperative to build secular democracies where unworkable and the contrasting failure of a drone-heavy war of attrition against the same aggressors, while proposing a new way forward that eschews the premises of both failures.
“It is time for the America that vanquished the Third Reich and the Soviet Union to rise from its slumber,” writes Dr. Gorka. “It is time for us to speak truthfully about those who wish to kill us or enslave us. It is time again to speak the words ‘evil’ and ‘enemy.’ And it is time to draw a plan for victory, calling on strategies that have proved themselves against other totalitarian foes.”
Know thy enemy
One of the greatest temptations for Western thinkers and policy makers in the war to destroy Islamic Extremism is that of seeking to reduce the animating ideologies behind it into news-friendly sound bytes and buzz words. The reality of the matter is that jihadism is backed up by a strategic, theological, and historic school of thought reaching back almost 1000 years, the roots of which are over a millennium in the making. Dr. Gorka devotes a sizable portion of “Defeating Jihad” to presenting the actors and writings behind this tradition of thought in a way that is accessible, informative and chilling to readers of all expertise levels. At the same time, he does so in a way that also provides a comprehensive timeline of warfare from the time of the Mongolian Empire to the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, whose genocidal rampage has dominated headlines since the summer of 2014.
“Just as one must study Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and Napoleon to understand the modern Western way of war,” explains Dr. Gorka, “So one must be intimately acquainted with certain key jihadi writers and thinkers if one wishes to defeat our current enemy.”
Quite simply, it has never been sufficient policymakers and strategists to utter the platitude that the terrorists ‘hate our freedom’ without thoroughly understanding why they do and how they systematically plan to snuff it out. “Defeating Jihad” offers a quick primer to fill the informational gap.
What can be done?
After a tense, nerve-wracking and decades-long Cold War, the Soviet Union eventually crumbled before the resolve and resiliency of the freedom-loving West, held together by the leadership of the United States across a host of ideological and strategic theaters. Likewise, Dr. Gorka sees a way forward for the war on jihad, if the free world were to adopt a similar paradigm. The author references the immediate threat that the West faced following the collapse of the Axis Powers and the end of the Second World War, proposing that the time has come for a “‘Long Telegram’ for the jihadis.” That message would be similar in scope to the one sent by U.S. diplomat George Kennan, which would outline “who the enemy is and why it is so dangerous.”
“In the postwar world, the existential threat to America came from communism—in particular from the Soviet Union, the most powerful embodiment of that totalitarian ideology,” writes Dr. Gorka. “The existential threat to America today comes from the global jihadi movement, of which the Islamic State is the most dangerous expression.”
In the following pages, the author provides a chilling assessment of the real threat posed by the self-declared caliphate, warning that it will not “run out of steam” if ignored. Rather, he sees a strategy that focuses not only on the international and stateless nature of the threat, but also on the moral and strategic imperatives of the United States provided by our founding documents. Shooting the gap between neoconservative and internationalist paradigms, Dr. Gorka’s proposal takes what has worked in the past and tweaks it for the present situation.
The road to come
It doesn’t take an expert to see that the western struggle against global Jihadism has been found wanting, nor to acknowledge that sticking to failed paradigms would be nothing short of folly. In its strategic outlook on the current global landscape, “Defeating Jihad” avoids the contrasting temptation to repeat the mistakes of the immediate past and the hopeful approaches of the present by relying on tried and true strategies, drawn from a sober outlook on military history. In short, rather than yet another re-invention of the wheel, the book provides a refresher course on how the wheel is meant to turn, and a primer on how it can be adjusted to meet the demands of its present terrain.
– Courtesy: Conservative Review

(*The reviewer is a Staff Writer for Conservative Review, focusing on religion and culture)
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/defeating-jihad-book-review