Leaving Without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan.

• Author: Smith, Anthony
• Position: Book review

LEAVING WITHOUT LOSING: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan

Author. Mark N. Katz

Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2012, 147pp, US$19.95.

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Leaving Without Losing might at first blush seem like another volume in what is now a vast literature on 'the war on terror', but Mark Katz's rare contribution here is to place the US struggle with militant forms of Islam into a wider historical and strategic context. Katz, a professor at George Mason University, is an expert on Soviet/Russia foreign policy and the Middle East, and very well versed in the contemporary history of radical and revolutionary movements. (Katz was invited to be one of several overseas scholars who participated in the NZIIA'S Arab Spring conference in August 2011.)

As the title suggests, Katz examines the prospects for the United States after the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq and the winding down of the contribution in Afghanistan. Katz judges that the problem of extremism will be with us for years or decades, and al-Qaeda affiliates may view these drawdowns as examples of the West's lack of resolve. As the book's title suggests, however, on balance, the United States can weaken extremism in the longer run. The example of the US drawdown from Vietnam is an apt one; seen at the time as American weakness, it resulted in communist bloc countries over-reaching and ultimately establishing bitter rivalries with each other. One might reflect on the supreme irony that Vietnam, one of the few extant Marxist states, is currently one of America's strongest boosters in the Asia-Pacific region.

Although this is a point rarely made these days, Katz credits the Bush administration with having something of a vision for spreading democracy in the Middle East, in spite of a view amongst some conservative commentators that it could not work in Muslim majority countries. This is not to ignore the significant ethnic and sectarian barriers to workable representative entities in the Middle East, as Katz notes, of which Iraq's fissures are a troubling example. But drawing the comparison between Bush and Obama, Katz also finds major differences between these two administrations. The drawdowns lessen the 'over-extension' problem that historically has spelled trouble for global powers, while the Obama administration has pursued multilateralist solutions and rejected the idea that political change is driven by the imposition of American hard...