When the JV team went pro

Gordon’s experience and his years spent accumulating sources are evident throughout the book. A veteran reporter, Gordon has spent decades chronicling America’s involvement in Iraq. Along with the late Gen. Bernard Trainor, he authored deeply researched books on Desert Storm, as well as two volumes on the second U.S.-Iraq War and its aftermath. Few correspondents, or historians for that matter, are as versed in the strange, and often troubled, relationship between the two nations.

Several great books have been written about ISIS, but many were authored when the terror group was still at its height. Degrade and Destroy is the first post-mortem examination of U.S. and coalition efforts to fight ISIS. And unlike other works, many of which analyze the group’s ideology or history, Gordon’s book is focused primarily on the decision-making of U.S. policymakers. Gordon makes full use of the access that was granted to him, carefully constructing a story of warfare that was chaotic and complicated.

From the start, it was a war driven by compromise. Some trade-offs were inherent to fighting a nonstate actor in a volatile and complex region, but others were self-imposed.

ISIS benefited from both a war-weary West and a president eager to leave the Middle East. The Obama administration was eager to draw down forces in 2011, before the next presidential election. In one infamous example of the administration’s initial aloofness, when ISIS began to garner strength, Obama was dismissive, telling the New Yorker’s David Remnick: “If a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

But the sports analogy was more than tone-deaf — it was also revealing. Obama initially viewed ISIS as a terrorist threat confined to the Middle East. As he told Remnick in a January 2014 interview: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Yet ISIS proved to be more than capable of launching international terrorist attacks, murdering hundreds in onslaughts that spanned the globe, from Paris to San Bernardino and beyond. In the Middle East itself, ISIS murdered thousands, perpetrated genocide, and forever changed the map of the region. Indeed, far from being a localized matter, as Gordon ably documents, the rise of ISIS helped expand Russian, Turkish, and Iranian power in a part of the world that has long been a battleground for empires, both foreign and native.

When Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the group’s leader, stood at Mosul’s Al-Nouri Mosque and proclaimed the establishment of a “caliphate” in June 2014, many in the West were perplexed. The idea of religiously motivated terrorism aspiring to build a society akin to one from the 7th and 8th centuries was truly foreign. More than a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Islamism remained an elusive concept to many Westerners, just as it is nearly a quarter-century later. And one can hardly defeat an enemy one doesn’t understand.

But if you’re looking to understand the ideology of ISIS, look elsewhere. That is not this book’s purpose. Other works have sought to analyze ISIS’s medieval ambitions. Gordon’s book covers different ground. It is arguably the first work of diplomatic history on Operation Inherent Resolve, as the campaign to defeat ISIS was called.

From allying with Josef Stalin to defeat Nazism to a partnership with Mao Zedong’s China to pressure the Soviets, compromise isn’t new to either U.S. strategy or warfare. The fight against ISIS was filled with innumerable trade-offs, too. The U.S. decision to install troop caps, an attempt to limit U.S. casualties, necessitated some strange and unsavory bedfellows.

The U.S. would come to rely on ground forces that included Iranian Popular Mobilization Units and various Kurdish groups, some with documented ties to U.S.-designated terrorist groups. Suffice to say: This strategy had significant drawbacks, including angering Turkey, a NATO ally that made its displeasure known throughout various points in the campaign.

However, the chief beneficiaries of the war’s endgame were arguably Russia and Iran. Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene in the Syrian civil war and prop up Bashar Assad was hailed as a “quagmire” in the making by several Obama officials, including the president himself. Yet such predictions didn’t come to pass. Instead, Russia’s influence in the Middle East expanded considerably. Moscow would become another complicating factor in an already complicated war. Deconfliction methods were set up to prevent an accidental war between the two nuclear superpowers. Indeed, in one instance, U.S. troops fought Russian mercenaries — the first such occurrence since the end of the Cold War.

Iran would also intervene to save Assad. Gordon covers the Islamic Republic’s influence in Iraq and with several Iraqi lawmakers. Ditto for the brutality of the PMUs, whose sectarian bloodletting was a constant concern for several U.S. military officials, who understandably feared that it would be a boon for ISIS recruitment.

One curious aspect of the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS strategy was the president’s expressed interest in including, and even at times elevating, the role of Iran. As Gordon documents, there were several occasions on which Obama suggested expanding cooperation with Tehran beyond what already existed.

Unfortunately, Gordon’s book doesn’t address the role that the Obama team’s hopes for its negotiations with Iran may have played in formulating the strategy to destroy ISIS and whether the hopes for a world-historic rapprochement with Tehran were placed over strategic goals in the fight against ISIS. But the willingness of many in the administration to rely on state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran, or terrorist groups, such as the PKK, was and is disconcerting.

It could be argued, of course, that a U.S. that was reluctant to field combat troops wasn’t able to be picky about alliances, temporary or otherwise. But this too was at a cost beyond that of great power politics. Iraqi and Kurdish forces bore the brunt of the casualties, and the campaign was far from quick — certainly not for the many civilians who lived and died under ISIS’s barbaric rule. In Degrade and Destroy, these relatively recent events at the grandest level have finally graduated from coverage by journalism to history writing. Whether they stay that way depends on a complex series of factors that readers of this book will, at least, understand better.

Thankfully, Gordon’s book largely avoids both judgment and partisanship. He lets the facts speak for themselves and resists the urge to editorialize. We need more foreign correspondents, and more history books, like this.

Indeed, one of the strong suits of Degrade and Destroy is its ability to highlight policy debates within each U.S. administration. No administration is a monolith. Each is filled with people who have good faith disagreements. Too often works of military and political history forgo this fact. The truth, as always, is more complicated — and, as Gordon proves, more interesting.

Gordon has said that he hoped to write a book that will “withstand the test of time” — one that will be a reference for future works on the subject. He has succeeded. Degrade and Destroy is more than just superb reporting. It is also the first draft of history on a war whose consequences we will be living with, both today and for the foreseeable future.

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.