Review: Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War by Sebastian Gorka. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2016

Sebastian Gorka is a well-known academic and foreign policy expert. He has worked for various institutions including the National Defense University, the Hudson Institute and the Joint Special Operations University. He was recently appointed Deputy Assistant for the White House’s Strategic Initiative Group by the Trump Administration. He was an editor for Breitbart News and worked with Stephen Bannon. While not an official statement by the Trump Administration, the author apparently has much influence in the White House.

Gorka begins his book with a biographical introduction. He recounts his father’s travails as an anti-Communist in Hungary in the immediate postwar era. Fortunately, the elder Paul Gorka was able to make his way to England where his son Sebastian was born. He retains connections to Hungary and received his master’s degree from Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration in 1997. His biography does reflect upon the overall thesis of his book. He advocates the policy of “containment” that won the Cold War against the Soviets:

[George] Kennan’s analysis became the basis not only for America’s later “containment” policy—the plan to protect the West from the threat of communism that President Truman eventually announced to a joint session of Congress in 1947—but also for National Security Council Report NSC-68, the top-secret White House plan to defeat Soviet Russia, a plan that would result, forty years later, in the fall f the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War. (p. 22)

He considers these documents of such central importance to his thesis that the full transcripts of Kennan’s famous “long Telegram” and NSC-68 are included as appendixes in the book. However, the author does not discuss the many deviations from containment such as détente and other examples of Western appeasement of the Soviet Union – and Communist China – such as trade and “cultural” exchanges. 

Gorka states that since 9/11 the USA has lacked a threat assessment of the enemy and, therefore, a strategy for victory. One reason he wrote this book is to rectify this notorious evasion of reality and provide a contemporary “Long Telegram” that will guide the nation to victory over its new “totalitarian” enemy.

The first section of the book lays out the failures of the last decades in dealing with the global jihad. He then ably describes the evolution of the modern jihad movement. He argues that 1979 was the key turning point due to three key events: Iran’s Islamic revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the “fundamentalist” takeover of the main mosque in Mecca. The first and second event don’t require much elaboration for informed readers. The last is much more obscure for Westerners. The ruling Saud family was shocked to discover that many of their pet imams supported or were sympathetic to the jihadists. The result was an arrangement where the Saudi regime would fund jihad and subversion around the globe, just so long as their rule was not questioned at home (p. 84). According to Gorka, these events provided jihadists with global ambitions and the resources to carry out their agenda throughout the world.

Another fountainhead of jihad that Gorka discusses is the Muslim Brotherhood. He observes that with the demise of the caliphate after World War One, the Brotherhood developed a doctrine of justifying jihad against infidels and apostates that does not require a caliph’s declaration.

 

His [Sayyid Qutb] ideas on jihad and religious war live on, however. Milestones is found all over the Middle East, in many Islamic “cultural centers” across the United States, and, significantly, in the possession of high-value jihadist targets on the battlefield and of terrorists apprehended here in America. (p. 99)

 

He devotes much more space to the creation, growth and leadership of the Islamic State and Al Shaam (ISIS). However, this is part of the book’s larger problem. He focuses on ISIS as the source of global jihad much as the Bush Administration had earlier declared Al Qaeda as the source of terrorism. It is an overly narrow view that distracts from the much larger picture. Ironically, a larger picture that Gorka had framed in the book’s previous chapters. For example, there are his comments on the recent jihad attack in London on 22 March 2017.  “Nobody should be surprised, this is ISIS’s new method of operation.” Of course, there is nothing new about such attacks, which predate ISIS. But, his penchant for seeing ISIS as the major source of the global jihad skews his policy recommendations.

In the book’s final chapter “What is to be Done? How America wins and the Jihadis lose” three policies are recommended. Frankly, they’re all weak tea and bear little resemblance to a forceful strategy of containment. His three recommendations are: “Deploy the truth: you cannot win a war if you cannot talk honestly about the enemy”; “Take a step back: help other fight their own wars”; “Winning the war at home: education and human intelligence” (pp. 129-132). He elaborates on these points at length. For example, he admits that his last point would require turning the USA into a garrison state: “Every American citizen has a mission to execute if we are to win this war” (p.135). There is not much containment of jihad to be seen here.

The reason for Gorka’s ultimate failure is that he doesn’t heed his own advice about properly identifying the enemy:

 

Today’s threat is hybrid totalitarianism that goes beyond the man-made justification for perfecting society along politically defined lines and instead uses the religion of Islam and Allah to justify mass murder … We are not at war with Islam (pp. 18, 129). (Emphasis in original)

 

This is the core of Gorka’s problem. I’m surprised that he didn’t refer to Islam as a “religion of peace.” Jihadists have no trouble citing the Koran and Hadith to justify their actions. They can do so by simply referring to the actions of Mohammed after the hijra to Medina. The Islamic doctrine of conquest by migration was instituted in 622 A.D. by the religion’s founder. The elephant in the room, that Gorka doesn’t devote a single word to, is the main issue of our time: the current Islamic hijra into Western Europe and America. As an expert on guerrilla war, he must realize that the West’s feckless immigration policies provide the jihadist fish with an ocean of fellow adherents in which to swim. While many Moslems in the West state their opposition to the means of violent jihad, many more support their ends. One question that should be obvious to the author is why doesn’t Hungary suffer from the incessant jihad attacks now common in Western Europe. In the final analysis, Gorka too fails to properly identify the enemy and, therefore, provide a helpful and accurate threat assessment.