Abstract
Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, websites, blogs, vlogs, YouTube and Twitter all feature more reporting than anyone could consume about the jihadis known as Isis, which has occupied swathes of Iraq and Syria. You might then ask what more you could learn from a slim volume like this. The answer: plenty.
Patrick Cockburn, an old-style reporter who wears out shoe leather on the streets of Baghdad and Damascus before consulting generals, politicians and analysts, critiques not only western policy but also the role of journalists, pumping out half-baked information 24 hours day.
“There is no alternative to first-hand reporting,” he writes, lamenting the danger that has deterred so many from being there. More importantly, he challenges how we report in an age that prioritises emotion over understanding, and immediacy over context and accuracy. Poor journalism, he believes, has bolstered ill thought out government policies. Journalists got carried away by the excitement of the Libyan revolution and the early days of the uprising in Syria. An eyewitness in the thick of battle who provides no context or historical understanding is no better than an armchair pundit.
As a longtime contributor to The Independent and the London Review of Books, Cockburn is made of more sober stuff. He has little pity, however, for the TV journalist trying to engage a fickle audience in a far-off war of which they know little. At times I found myself squeaking, “But I did predict there would be a guerrilla war after Saddam fell!” or “But I did say the Libyan revolutionaries would have collapsed without Nato bombing.” Moving pictures overwhelm the spoken word – we TV reporters are not all stupid, but our medium does not lend itself to nuanced analysis. Thank goodness, then, for the LRB.
Cockburn takes as his starting point the summer of 2014 when Isis overran Mosul, and the Iraqi army, after a decade of being lavishly funded, armed and trained by the US, fled. This was not a surprise to those few journalists, including Cockburn, who had covered the disintegration of Iraqi institutions under the corrupt, Shia chauvinist rule of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. It was, however, generally reported as a bolt from the blue, and western governments also reacted as if taken by surprise.
Cockburn excoriates policy based on wishful thinking, such as yet more training for the Iraqi army. He has little time for Syria policy based on hoping that the impotent “moderate opposition” crushed between the hammer of Bashar al-Assad and the anvil of Isis will somehow prevail.
The complexity and multiple interests involved in the Syria crisis are well explained, and compared to the Thirty Years War in Germany in the 17th century: “Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time.” This is as lucid an explanation as I have read of why peace initiatives have failed and are set to fail for the foreseeable future.
Cockburn is rightly critical of the US refusal to confront allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan about their ideological and, at times, financial sponsorship of jihadism, and makes a link between Saudi-financed Wahhabi mosques in countries such as Bangladesh and the rise of jihadism, which has its roots in Wahhabism.
I would, however, have liked more acknowledgement of Iran's role in supporting both Maliki and Assad. The idea that Assad and Isis are in league is dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but there is no explanation of the fact that Assad released Syria's jihadis from prison at the start of the conflict, which some argue was a ploy to make sectarian struggle inevitable, and draw the west to his side.
Cockburn wants his readers to understand rather than empathise. Nonetheless, one emotion rises through the clear, unadorned narrative: despair. There is, it seems, no way out, at least not for a long time. Cockburn's only hope for Syria, shared by UN workers on the ground, is local ceasefires that save lives but which he admits are frequently akin to surrender to Syrian government forces by besieged, starving non-jihadi rebels and civilians.
As for Iraq, he says from the start that “it is probably too late” for the inclusive government envisaged by the west. Iraq is broken, he concludes, with Sunnis, Shias and Kurds no longer living in a unitary state in anything but name, and years of turmoil to come. For that, western policy – and by extension, in Cockburn's view, western reporting – is much to blame.