119Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever
did and compiling a secret “kill list,” President
Obama’s administration took the view that al-
Qaeda was like an or ga nized crime gang— disrupt
the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a con-
certed and dogmatic attempt at pretending that
al- Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group,
and not a concrete realization of an ideological
phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took
this view in part because of how successful Islamist
“fellow- traveler” lobbies had been in infl uencing
Obama’s campaign after the mistakes of the Bush
years. For Islamists and their allies, the prob lem
was “al- Qaeda inspired extremism,” and not the
extremism that had inspired al- Qaeda. Such an
approach left us here at Quilliam incredibly frus-
trated. We gave many interviews and published
many papers calling out the rise of this ideology for
what it was: a full- blown jihadist insurgency.
This fundamental misdiagnosis and the US gov-
ernment’s failure to recognize the jihadist insur-
gency led to jihadist groups metastasizing as the
ideology continued to grow entirely unchecked. Re-
cently, and only after the Islamic State’s lightning
successes in Iraq, did President Obama come to
recognize the role ideology plays, and again this was
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