How to Lose the War on Terror

In 2004 a small group of Americans and Europeans held a series of meetings in Beirut with senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. And in early 2005, a larger group of former senior American and European government officials and diplomats travelled to Lebanon for talks with these ‘terrorist leaders’. The discussions were detailed, wide-ranging, blunt, and often uncomfortable, but they touched on a wide variety of subjects: on democracy, Israel, Al-Qaeda, violence and terrorism. The result was astonishing: a conviction among the participants that the United States and its allies had got the ‘War on Terror’ wrong, dangerously wrong.

Mark Perry, one of the leaders of these delegations in this inside account details how those unprecedented discussions – and an opening that was engineered between American military officers and Iraqi insurgents based in Jordan – has helped to convince American and European policymakers to recast the war on terrorism, providing a fundamental shift in Western strategy. How to Lose the War on Terror is not only an on-the-ground, real-time account of how ‘talking’ and ‘listening’ to the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood is beginning to shift American and European perceptions, but how groups that the West once viewed as ‘dead enders’ and ‘enemies of freedom’ are now slowly being recruited in the war against America and Europe’s real enemies – Al-Qaeda and its Salafist allies.