“War is peace,” wrote George Orwell in his seminal work 1984. In 1948 when he used these words as the fictional motto of a dystopian future state, he was positing the absolute worst possible outcome of political and revolutionary thought: the establishment of an omnipresent state that would deceive its people into believing that contradictory precepts could be logically reconciled. Orwell noted that the state of perpetual warfare was in fact simply establishing a certain permanent level of violence as the norm, hence “War is peace” if you have been taught that war is all that exists. The cogs of the permanent state of warfare, in Orwell’s mind, were individuals who were inherently attracted to order and would go to any length to establish what they believed order should constitute. Scruples, he maintained, were not part of their thinking. In his dystopian future the currency of life was violence, and an individual’s status was determined by their capacity for violence, rather than their material wealth. The capacity to direct war meant a person was infinitely wealthy. If this is beginning to sound familiar, that is because in the twenty-first century, a state of perpetual warfare euphemistically called the ‘War on Terror’ exists despite its official abandonment, and over time we have seen how the capacity for violence has become the deciding factor in international relations. Violence is what the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) used to force its way to the negotiating table. Violence is the sole reason for the recent successes on both the narrative and military fronts of the extremist group known as the Islamic State (IS). Its sheer brutality made it a factor in the ongoing Syrian civil war and its reputation preceded it into Iraq, where Iraqi soldiers threw down their weapons and abandoned their posts when they heard IS was coming. The tragedy that is Iraq was building prior to the 2003 US invasion: for 20 years between the end of the Cold War and its eventual disengagement in 2011, the US tried various forms of coercion to force Iraq into becoming the kind of state it wanted, including the judicial murder of Saddam Hussein. It finally received carte blanche after 9/11 to use ‘shock and awe’. This was to be the beginning of the ‘American century’, a proposal to reorder the world that former US President Bush and his neo-con advisors were already inclined towards. The hubris that the supremacy of the American ‘way of life’ would win over the world predominated. Yet despite its capacity for violence, it remained unable to tyrannise a population into doing its bidding, leading eventually to the fragmentation of Iraqi society into warring sects, militias, and ethnic groups. This script played out in Libya too. Today it is Syria, where US President Barack Obama said the US military is prepared to carry out airstrikes against IS fighters and is readying even more military and non-military aid for Syrian ‘rebel’ groups. These include the Islamic Front and undoubtedly aid will also end up with the al Qaeda-affiliated Jamaat al Nusra. Despite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s call for cooperation against IS, the US insists that his regime is illegitimate, and that it will continue attempting to subvert it. It ignored Iranian proposals to cooperate for similar reasons. Repeating its mistakes in Afghanistan then is how the US intends to respond to its mistakes in Afghanistan. This tendency indicates that if lessons were learnt after 9/11 they are restricted to better and more efficient ways of killing. Instead of cluster-bombs there are precision drones, instead of boots on the ground there are ‘partners’ to do the real fighting. In other words, in order to win the war we must first win the war. Who precisely the war is against does not matter. The jihadist monster that reared its head to occupy the vacuum left by the collapse of the USSR is today’s enemy where it was yesterday’s friend. It is inevitable that if IS is defeated, the ‘liberal’ Democrat President Obama will find a new enemy to occupy his time. Keeping the peace demands that a war is always available. *