In the summer of 2004, a small group of Americans and Europeans had a series of quiet but meaningful meetings with senior officials of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Beirut, Lebanon. Several months later, in early 2005, a larger group of former senior American and European government officials and diplomats travelled to Lebanon for wide-ranging talks with these 'terrorist leaders'. The discussions were detailed, wide-ranging, blunt - and often uncomfortable, but they touched on a wide variety of political subjects: on democracy, Israel, al-Qaeda, violence ... and terrorism. The result was startling: a conviction among the participants that the United States and its allies had gotten the war on terrorism wrong, dangerously wrong.
Now, in this first-hand account, one of the leaders of these delegations details how those unprecedented discussions - and an opening that he learned of that was engineered between American military officers and Iraqi insurgents based in Amman, 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 a 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.
Based on first-hand accounts with the participants, as well as interviews with leading American and European policy-makers, How to Lose the War on Terror is a dramatic narrative of the crippling strategic and intellectual mistakes that have mired the West in an unwinnable war - but that suggests a way forward in a conflict whose victory depends less on force than it does on a realistic understanding of the true enemy and a comprehension of the challenges we all face. After seven years of getting it wrong, are the US and its allies finally getting it right? Mark Perry's startling account helps to answer that question.
