Afterword

Since this volume of essays was first published in Small Wars & Insurgencies the political and military landscape in the Middle East and North Africa has already undergone some significant change, making a generally dismal situation even more alarming as the major powers, with the apparent exception of Russia, lack either the resolve or the ability to intervene in any decisive way to end long-running conflicts. This is an era considerably distanced from the naïve simplicities of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” though it is difficult to make any sort of clear prediction on where it might be heading over the next decade or more. One might almost imagine we are in an insuperably complex set of interlocking narratives like the film Syriana (2005), scripted by the imaginative Hollywood director Stephen Gaghan. But the narratives of the film are far outrun by the myriad forces we see throughout the world inhabited by jihadist insurgencies: Gaghan posited that the two central dynamics of Middle Eastern politics are oil and weapons, commodities closely linked and interchangeable. ¹ The real world is far more complex, with not all Middle Eastern states having oil to sell.