Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
David Kilcullen
Hurst and Company, £9.99
Islamism: What it Means for the Middle East and the World
Tarek Osman
Yale University Press, £20.00
The year that George W Bush’s team devised their strategy for the global war on terror was the year the iPhone came on the market. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the big idea was ‘disaggregation’ to break up and isolate terrorist groups and threats. The iPhone negated much of that, and the terrorists of the various incarnations of Al-Qaeda quickly understood that it gave them connectivity as never before.
