Patrick Cockburn > Quotes

“Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.”
― Patrick Cockburn

“For America, Britain, and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to unseat Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria, run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organized than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

“An economic blockade may cause more deaths by a factor of a hundred, but it does so silently and behind closed doors. Its first victims are the very young, the very old and the very sick. The numbers of children dying before their first birthday increased from one in thirty when sanctions were imposed to one in eight seven years later. Many Iraqis were simply not getting enough to eat. I”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“Schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder are often spoken of by laypeople – I used to do it myself – as if they were definitions as precise as those for hepatitis or appendicitis. In reality, the names are no more than those given to a collection of symptoms observable at a certain moment in time.”
― Patrick Cockburn, Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story

“that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“What you do to your enemies today, you will do to your friends tomorrow.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“When US air strikes began the US did tell the Syrian government when and where they would be, but not the “moderate” rebels whom the US was publicly backing. The American military presumably calculated that anything they told the Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel units, would be known to ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra within minutes.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The conflict has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany four hundred years ago. 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. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid a defeat. In Syria, as in Germany between 1618 and 1648, all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory. Many Syrians now see the outcome of their civil war resting largely with the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In this, they are probably right.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“Of the nineteen hijackers that day, fifteen were Saudi.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“This sharp increase in the strength and reach of jihadist organizations in Syria and Iraq has generally been unacknowledged until recently by politicians and media in the West. A primary reason for this is that Western governments and their security forces narrowly define the jihadist threat as those forces directly controlled by al-Qaeda central or “core” al-Qaeda. This enables them to present a much more cheerful picture of their successes in the so-called “war on terror” than the situation on the ground warrants.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“the Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which it had spent $41.6 billion in the three years since 2011. But this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.” These are not empty boasts. Arms supplied by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to anti-Assad forces in Syria have been captured regularly in Iraq.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The new post-Saddam Iraq had no secular heros.”
― Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq

“US policy of recruiting Syrian “moderates” to fight both ISIS and Assad, Biden said that in Syria the US had found “that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.” Seldom have the real forces at work in creating ISIS and the present crisis in Iraq and Syria been so accurately described.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“In retrospect, military defeats and victories acquire a false sense of inevitability about them, whether we are looking at the German defeat of France in 1940 or the claimed elimination of the last vestiges of Isis in 2019.”
― Patrick Cockburn, War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran

“He destroyed Iraq. When he became president in 1979 he gained total control of a country with a well-educated population, an efficient administration and extensive oil reserves. In a quarter of a century, he impoverished his people, drove many of them into exile and left the Iraqi oilfields in the hands of foreign troops.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“This book is primarily about the armed conflicts that followed 9/11, but UN sanctions may have killed more Iraqis than any of the wars that followed.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The Syrian crisis comprises five different conflicts that cross-infect and exacerbate each other. The war commenced with a genuine popular revolt against a brutal and corrupt dictatorship, but it soon became intertwined with the struggle of the Sunni against the Alawites, and that fed into the Shia-Sunni conflict in the region as a whole, with a standoff between the US, Saudi Arabia, and the Sunni states on the one side and Iran, Iraq, and the Lebanese Shia on the other. In addition to this, there is a revived cold war between Moscow and the West, exacerbated by the conflict in Libya and more recently made even worse by the crisis in the Ukraine.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The aim of the war in Iraq was to establish the US as the world superpower which could act unilaterally, virtually without allies, inside or outside Iraq. The timing of the conflict had nothing to do with fear of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with getting the war won in time for the run-up to next year’s Presidential election in the US. The”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“«Cuando Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y sus aliados invadieron Iraq en 2003 dieron comienzo a una revolución. No era esa su intención, pues su objetivo era acabar con Sadam Hussein y su régimen, y no se apercibieron de la radicalidad de lo que estaban haciendo. La invasión y ocupación del país suponía un cambio revolucionario porque ponía fin a la dominación suní, vigente sin solución de continuidad durante cientos de años bajo los otomanos, los británicos y tras la independencia. Los americanos disolvieron el Ejército y los cuerpos de seguridad, que habían sido los principales instrumentos de control suní sobre el 80 por ciento de la población, que era chií o kurda. (...) Las potencias invasoras nunca asumieron el hecho de que la identificación del nuevo gobierno post-Sadam con los americanos y con un antiguo poder imperial como Gran Bretaña lo deslegitimaba desde el primer momento a ojos de los iraquíes».”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“As so often during the US military intervention in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, there was excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis in both countries.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“US Vice President Joe Biden gave the US government’s real view of its regional and Syrian allies with undiplomatic frankness when speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on October 2. He told his audience that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and UAE were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“aside from each other, for a quarter of a century, and an observer who knew them well always used to refer to them as the “pêche melba,” adding that they were “only good for mountain”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“Biden said that in Syria the US had found “that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

“The career of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was very strange. He was an obscure figure until Colin Powell made him famous by denouncing him before the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. Powell claimed that Zarqawi was not only a member of al-Qa’ida but linked to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Neither allegation was true, but together they met the political need to pretend that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror. The”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution