David French says the War on Terror was a success. He ties it to his experience in the Iraq War, which he continues to believe was justified. Is he right?
Mostly no. It is true, as he says, that Islamic terrorism is no longer the problem that it was a decade or so ago, and that the success of American troops in fighting IS contributed to that victory. As I noted at the time, however, history shows us that terrorism is a spasm that disappears when it fails to bring about meaningful positive change. It didn’t work for anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th century for the same reason that it didn’t work for IS.
As for Iraq, prior to the war, it was a brutal and somewhat unpredictable Sunni dictatorship that nonetheless was a reliable check on the ambitions of the ayatollahs in Iran and did not support terrorism. French tells the story from the middle of the book, not the beginning; the Bush invasion caused the Sunni backlash that resulted in the creation and spread of IS. In other words, the American military was both the arsonist and the fireman in Iraq.
In the long run, the invasion may well have improved the lives of Iraqi Shiites to some extent. It also turned Iraq into, for the most part, an Iranian client state. That totally predictable outcome was hardly a success for American foreign policy.