One of his many responsibilities during the Iraq war was to watch the beheading videos and track al-Qaeda in Iraq’s media output for the CIA. Aki Peritz co-author of the excellent book “Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns that Killed bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda,” is also a former CIA counterterrorism analyst.
Today Iraq is on the boil and accroding to Peritz ISIS is merely following a decade old playbook. In this interview with rediff.com, Aki Peritz says sadly, the government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki decided to pursue a sectarian agenda, alienating the Sunnis and driving the current conflict.
You have captured the evolution of counter terrorism post 9/11. How effective has it been? Has it helped only America or even the rest of the world.
The U.S. has become a lot more sensitive to the threat of terrorism, and the US government has taken some pretty radical steps over the past 13 years to restructure itself in order to fight this menace. Prior to 2001, we were still structured to fight large nation-states such as the Soviet Union, and 9/11 undid much of that.
Generally I think it has been a pretty effective process– while the US made some bad missteps at the very beginning, and then made a terrible, terrible blunder by invading Iraq, American counterterrorism efforts have been good at hunting down terrorists that threaten this country.
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