Strategy for peace

You won’t win a war against Isis if you don’t know what the peace looks like

The second world war lasted six years. The war on terror is now in its 15th year. And yet things are demonstrably no better. Why? Because we still have no vision of what peace might look like. For instead of trying to figure out what the politics of a relatively settled Middle East might be, and then working towards that, we think first about dropping bombs from the sky – bombs that will inevitably destroy both Islamic State and its non-Isis neighbours, bombs that will inevitably recruit new forces of vengeance against the west. Carl von Clausewitz famously said that war is politics by another means. And that puts its finger on the problem: we don’t have the politics sorted out. We don’t really know what we want to achieve other than to hear the sound of bombs falling on Raqqa, thus satisfying the need to do something. We can’t win if we don’t know what winning looks like.