In 2016 Robert Ford, U.S. Ambassador to Syria from 2011-2014, said the Obama Administration held a “myopic view of ISIS.” In his book, Degrade and Destroy (2022), Michael Gordon goes further, exposing just how persistent the myopathy around ISIS and counterterrorism was under Obama’s leadership. And with the same cast of characters back at the helm under Biden, it’s no wonder why chaos has once again enveloped the Middle East. Besides Gordon’s fascinating history of the American policy failures that contributed to the rise of ISIS, his book also provides insightful guidance for an impending second Trump Administration, describing important lessons that can be gleaned from the Obama-Biden team’s mistakes.
Gordon’s thorough accounting begins with the initial failure to counter ISIS in 2012, followed by a desire to minimize and obfuscate the magnitude of the threat through 2013 and 2014. As Obama’s second term went on, the genesis of ISIS revealed an absence of any coherent foreign policy strategy in conjunction with the suffocating micromanagement of the military by Obama and his staff. Of note, nearly all of Obama’s advisors described in the book returned under Biden, having been promoted to new heights in response to their failures.
The misadventure continues with the botched withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2013, overseen by then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-commander of U.S. Central Command and later Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. On the heels of the troop withdrawal, Biden and his longtime aide, Antony Blinken, assured the White House that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was a reliable ally who would steward Iraq post-U.S. involvement. Maliki, a Shia, instead inflamed sectarian violence, thus swelling the ranks of ISIS with Sunni fighters while allowing rampant corruption to rot an Iraqi military the U.S. spent billions creating.
From 2012 to 2014, as ISIS rapidly conquered portions of Syria and Iraq, the Obama Administration refused to acknowledge the threat, regularly misleading the press. Obama infamously referred to the group as a “JV team” compared to al-Qaeda, Austin stated ISIS was simply a “flash in the pan,” and Blinken admonished the press for “misreporting” violence levels in Iraq.
Though the failure to stop ISIS early on could have been disastrous, total catastrophe was ultimately avoided due only to the heroic actions of the Kurds of northeast Syria and northern Iraq in addition to Iranian-backed militias arriving to fill the power vacuum left by the rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces. The lack of a long-term regional strategy allowed Iran to effectively take over southern Iraq, ISIS to dominate its western half, and the Kurds to fight unsupported in the north. Iranian influence exploded across the region while the Obama team worked on funneling billions of dollars to Iran through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The result of American incongruity allowed ISIS affiliates to then proliferate around the globe while Europe became overwhelmed by a migration crisis that caused broader instability in the Middle East. Ultimately, this dynamic resulted in a wave of terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Belgium, and the U.K.
Caught flatfooted, the Obama Administration attempted to compensate for its lack of any coherent strategy by overusing U.S. and Iraqi special operations forces. As the terrorist attacks spread—most prominently the Bataclan theater massacre in Paris of November 2015—and the 2016 election loomed, the Obama team finally became more aggressive, though still lacking a cohesive plan of action. In the days after the Paris attack, special operations troops (SOF) were thrown into the fray without clear guidance, authorities, or direction. SOF became the catch-all solution to all military problems.
In late 2015 and into 2016, the Kurdish Peshmerga finally began to see American military advisors arriving, even as the Obama team was reluctant to arm them out of fear that it would upset the Iraqi government. They mistakenly viewed Iranian militias operating across Iraq as the lesser evil, not understanding that the Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) would work to drive a wedge between Iraq and America far larger than the rift that would have developed from arming the Kurds. This is proven by Trump’s decision to arm the Kurds with little blowback. Instead of cooperating with the Kurds to defeat ISIS, the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) became the go-to hammer for every nail, overworking the small, specialized unit. On the Syrian side of the border, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) became the designated ally, even as the Obama Administration refused to supply them with arms until its last week for fear of upsetting Türkiye.
The Trump Administration encompasses the final third of Gordon’s book and has fared far better in hindsight. The Trump team decided to arm the Peshmerga and SDF within a week of being inaugurated, expanding the lethality of forces fighting ISIS while offsetting Iranian militias. Though less structured at times, the Trump team managed to push forward the efficient destruction of terrorist networks in Iraq and Syria while expanding the fight to Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and the Philippines. In contrast with their predecessors, the Trump Administration also worked aggressively to reign in Iranian influence in Iraq, culminating in the killing of Qassem Soleimani in 2019.
Degrade and Destroy leaves its reader with a sense of utter bafflement at the cognitive dissonance of the Obama Administration’s national security team, and particularly those in the orbit of then-Vice President Biden. When a Marine Staff Sergeant was killed and eight others wounded in Iraq in March 2016, the Obama team expended great effort arguing that the U.S. was not involved in combat on the ground. That such an argument over what exactly defines “combat” occurred nearly four years into the fight against ISIS poignantly illustrates America’s disastrously scrambled foreign policy under Obama.
Degrade and Destroy does a wonderful job detailing the rise of the Islamic State as well as the disjointed American response spanning two administrations. That ISIS is still around and has rebounded significantly over the past three years, is an even larger indictment of some of the principal actors in this story. It becomes clear that most (if not all) of Obama’s team, including Secretary of Defense Austin, Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, and National Security Council Coordinator Bret McGurk should have been fired. Yet, years later, amid the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, they had all been promoted instead.
Gordon’s account makes clear that so many American failures in the Middle East stemmed from a handful of experts, with their mistakes continuing to endanger America and our allies to this day. Yet, as Degrade and Destroy shows, all is not lost if the new Trump Administration can learn from Obama and Biden’s missteps by advancing a decisive and effective Middle East strategy.
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