Abstract
The attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 started a sequence of events that have torn the Middle East apart, humiliated the US and, by way of the refugee crisis, undermined the EU. It is hard to think of any comparable example of a few men with knives having, through their actions and the reactions they provoked, such a radical effect on the world. This is a story marked by extreme violence, by the loss of traditions of tolerance and civilised behaviour that had largely prevailed for centuries and by the repeated failure of interventions – western, Arab, Iranian, Turkish and now perhaps Russian – designed to bring order out of chaos, but which have instead made the situation worse.
Patrick Cockburn of The Independent has covered this story from the beginning, not in the western and other capitals where politicians, diplomats and generals make their plans, but on the ground, where those plans almost invariably went wrong. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the region he has been a witness to the folly, arrogance, muddle and short-sightedness of all the actors, and to the devastating consequences for ordinary people.
His sensibility – sceptical, rational, witty in a mournful way, dismissive of public relations cant, and anxious to record the stories of those who have suffered rather than the self-justifications of those who haven't – is exactly right for these dismal times. At one point in his new book he recalls visiting diplomats in the fortified green zone in Baghdad who would tell him that the violence in Iraq was greatly exaggerated. But when he asked them to come to lunch in his hotel, they “threw up their hands in horror and said their security men would never allow it”. It is a particularly neat example of that distance between illusion and reality that, throughout the book, he is so good at identifying.
The Age of Jihad is a compilation of some his dispatches over the years and his later reflections on events. With another author that might be a recipe for rearranging the material so as to look more prescient than was actually the case. But with Cockburn that doesn't arise because his honesty is patent; he includes reports that were not that far-sighted and, most important, because he was indeed right most of the time. The benefit for readers is that the immediacy of the on-the-spot reporting is balanced by the retrospective analysis. The two work together well.
That analysis is convincing, with some reservations. He shows how each failure of intervention led to a larger crisis, both in the sense of intensity and geographical range. Afghanistan was mismanaged but it might have been confined in its effect had it not been followed by Iraq. “Successful invasion is different from successful occupation,” he notes. Because the US did not understand that crucial difference, it set in train a process of sectarian (and ethnic) civil war in Iraq that it simply could not control. Whether the story could have been different had the Americans not made mistakes is another argument. Jeremy Greenstock, the principal British representative in Iraq in those days, has suggested in his account, Iraq: The Cost Of War, that the Americans were almost closed to advice, not only from the British but also from the more shrewd in their own ranks.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of that argument, the result was an alienation of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority that opened the gates to Islamic State (IS). Miscalculation in Iraq was matched by equally catastrophic miscalculation in Syria, not only by the US, with the assumption that the Assad regime would fall. American (and European) policy came to be based on a complete fiction, which was that there was a moderate opposition rebel faction ready to take over if Bashar al-Assad is displaced, whereas in reality jihadi groups would move into any vacuum. That was allied to a denial that the regime has the support or acquiescence of all the Syrian minorities and of a significant section of the Sunni majority.
Cockburn was one of the first journalists – or indeed experts of any profession – to point out that the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars were “cross-infecting” one another. His observations lead him towards a solution of the connected conflicts in Iraq and Syria that will not appeal to those whose priority is the removal of the Assad regime. He writes of the need for “a partnership” between the US, Russia, Iran, Assad, Hezbollah, Iraq and the Kurds to defeat IS and other jihadists. Clearly he is no admirer of Assad, whose repression, at once foolish and vicious, of peaceful protests in 2011 paved the way to civil war. But, he seems to argue, facts are facts. Western (and Turkish, Saudi and Gulf) policies are like Alice in Wonderland, believing two impossible things before breakfast. And you don't end wars in Wonderland, but in the real world.
Cockburn's weary wisdom has been hard-won. The personal cost of this kind of work is high. His account of the loss of a friend in a suicide bomb attack, for example, is not tear-stained. It is sparse, but all the more moving for that reason. He doesn't often include personal details, but the description of the sad, immured life of correspondents in their Baghdad hotels, eating terrible food in their rooms because it was no longer worth the risk of going out is chilling. Anybody who has been in these situations knows, too, the feeling he has when contemplating a trip from Damascus to Homs. “When I think about it I feel a tightening of the muscles in my stomach,” he writes, later describing the constant eye the veteran war reporter keeps on the other side of the road. If there is oncoming traffic, you can relax; if not, maybe you should think again.
The point is that the road can get you to where you want to go, but it can also get you dead. Again and again these estimates of risk have to be made – where and when to go, where to stay, even how to dress – and it is a wearing process. Too insouciant and you will probably die; too careful and you won't get the story, won't be able to do the job you have been sent to do. Cockburn has done the job he was sent to do, and deserves our gratitude for doing it so well.
