The World

* The drones had been invented during the Yom Kippur War by an Iraqi-born Israeli designer, Abraham Karem, for reconnaissance. In 2001, after 9/11, Cofer Black, chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, proposed arming the Predators to kill Osama bin Laden. The hunter-killer drones fired supersonic Hellfire missiles that hit targets before they could be heard. Keen to avoid hitting their own troops and causing other accidental deaths, Bush commissioned the CIA to run the targeted killing of terrorists using the Predators, later updated to Reapers. Kill lists were collated by the CIA and presented to the president, then the teams – ‘mission intelligence coordinators’, ‘pilots’ and ‘sensor operators’ – sitting in hangars at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada triggered the executions thousands of miles away in the mountains of the Hindu Kush or the deserts of Yemen. The drones were in the ‘humane’ tradition of the guillotine, but early strikes killed hundreds of innocent passers-by. A 2008 strike against Haqqani killed around twenty innocent people, but he survived. They became increasingly accurate, by 2015 used for assassinations by most sophisticated military powers. Artificial intelligence would soon enable drones or high-tech guns to kill targets identified by facial recognition. The future of war will encompass daggers and rifles but also robotic killing machines operated from satellites, and possibly reprogrammed to kill certain individuals on sight.

ACT TWENTY-THREE

8 BILLION

Trumps and Xis, Sauds, Assads and Kims

THE CALIPHATE AND THE CRIMEA

On 21 August 2013, in the Damascus suburbs, Assad used sarin, a nerve gas, against his own people, some of whom were photographed suffocating and foaming – the first of several such atrocities. Obama had promised he would not tolerate chemical weapons; Cameron demanded action. Yet Obama was focused on a Nixonian grand deal with Iran. American hawks and allies led by Israel demanded bombing to stop Iran developing the Bomb. Obama negotiated a delay in Iranian production in return for lifting sanctions. Yet Iran’s maestro of clandestine operations, General Qasem Solemeini, an elegant protégé of Supreme Leader Khamenei, ramped up his help for the Assads, recruiting militiamen from his Lebanese Hezbollah vassals. Assad also requested Russian assistance. Putin dispatched his air force as Kurdish Peshmerga militias carved out their own independent fiefs and much of the country was occupied by jihadist and secular militias.

Closer to home, Putin feared that Ukraine, keen to join the EU and NATO, was slipping from his grasp. In 2010, his thuggish ally, Yanukovych, had won the presidency and enjoyed a short kleptocratic fiesta, looting $70 billion. When, under Kremlin pressure, he withdrew from EU negotiations, 500,000 Ukrainians protested in Kyiv. Yanukovych’s secret police shot seventy-seven protesters before he was driven out. On 22 February 2014, Putin sent troops to occupy Crimea.^* On 18 March, he annexed the peninsula. He then sent his intelligence officers to incite rebellion and back pro-Russian separatist warlords in Donbas. In Russia his popularity soared, but he had missed the opportunity of his career: had he then launched a full invasion of Ukraine to support the legitimately elected Yanukovych, it is likely he would have succeeded. Instead, he tried to destroy Ukraine from within – actions that fostered the very thing he most feared: a passionate pro-western Ukrainian patriotism, backed by a large, committed and experienced military.

As Assad’s survival began to look dubious, he was rescued by Putin but also something even more ghoulish. In neighbouring Iraq, the bullying by the Shiite rulers sparked a new Sunni insurgency, this time backed by a fundamentalist cabal of al-Qaeda jihadists and secular Baathists, a marriage made in American prisons and then organized into a force that aspired to rule actual territory.

On 10 June 2014, riding SUVs down Mesopotamian roads beneath their death-cult black banners, warriors of Islamic State – known to Arabs as Daesh – suddenly emerged out of nowhere to take Mosul in Iraq and then burst into Syria too. Led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Daesh combined medieval Wahhabi ideology with sophisticated internet communications, pragmatic oil financing and bold military manoeuvrability. It appealed digitally to credulous radicalized teenagers in British and French cities, and used spectacular televised beheadings and burnings of western hostages to advertise its surprising conquests. Baghdadi, commander of 30,000 warriors and soon ruler of an Iraqi–Syrian state of around ten million people, declared a caliphate, as Daesh slaughtered Yazidis and members of other sects regarded as heretics, offering their recruits captured women as sex slaves and blowing up ancient non-Muslim monuments.