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The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the new Sunni Revolution
Though capable of staging spectacular attacks like 9/11, jihadist organizations were not a significant force on the ground when they first became notorious in the shape of al Qa’ida at the turn of century. The West’s initial successes in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan weakened their support still further.
Today, as renowned Middle East commentator Patrick Cockburn sets out in this explosive new book, that’s all changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding. They now control a geographical territory greater in size than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands in the north and west of Iraq through a broad swath of north-east Syria. On the back of their capture of Mosul and much of northern Iraq in June 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared the head of a new caliphate that demands the allegiance of all Muslims.
The secular, democratic politics that were supposedly at the fore of the Arab Spring have been buried by the return of the jihadis. As the Islamic State announced by ISIS confronts its enemies, the West will once again become a target. Cockburn cites an observer in southern Turkey interviewing Syrian jihadi rebels early in 2014 and finding that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US.”
How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing in these pages with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West’s greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.
Today, as renowned Middle East commentator Patrick Cockburn sets out in this explosive new book, that’s all changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding. They now control a geographical territory greater in size than Britain or Michigan, stretching from the Sunni heartlands in the north and west of Iraq through a broad swath of north-east Syria. On the back of their capture of Mosul and much of northern Iraq in June 2014, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been declared the head of a new caliphate that demands the allegiance of all Muslims.
The secular, democratic politics that were supposedly at the fore of the Arab Spring have been buried by the return of the jihadis. As the Islamic State announced by ISIS confronts its enemies, the West will once again become a target. Cockburn cites an observer in southern Turkey interviewing Syrian jihadi rebels early in 2014 and finding that “without exception they all expressed enthusiasm for the 9/11 attacks and hoped the same thing would happen in Europe as well as the US.”
How could things have gone so badly wrong? Writing in these pages with customary calmness and clarity, and drawing on unrivaled experience as a reporter in the region, Cockburn analyzes the unfolding of one of the West’s greatest foreign policy debacles and the rise of the new jihadis.
172 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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About the author
Patrick Cockburn
36 books173 followersPatrick Oliver Cockburn is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the Financial Times and, presently, The Independent.
He has written four books on Iraq's recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009.
He has written four books on Iraq's recent history. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006 and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009.
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October 22, 2015
Patrick Cockburn may come as a surprise to American readers who do not follow his reports in the British newspaper, The Independent. This book, published in November 2014, is a collection of his writings on Syria and ISIS and a summation of his opinion to that time. His assessment is not optimistic about stability in the region for some years to come and he is harsh in his judgment of the missteps that led us to this place.
When I first saw the depth and clarity of his analysis, I couldn’t understand why media outlets in the United States weren’t reporting what he was reporting. After I finished the book, however, I could see that Cockburn reserved some of his most lashing criticism for the U.S. government and big media. Cockburn believes Western alliances with states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have precluded a clear-eyed view of those states’ promotion and assistance of regressive Islamic doctrines like Wahhabism that have since taken up by ISIS.
Cockburn is a very experienced reporter; part of this book is the best description of war reporting that I have ever seen. He downplays “the fog of war” excuse for the confusion in the Western press about successes or failures of certain specific battles or even the overall direction of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. Reporting the war from embedded positions cannot capture the important component of political change in these countries, and allows temporary military victories to take on more importance than they warrant in light of the overall situation on the ground. “Irregular or guerilla conflicts are always intensely political.” Cockburn makes the point that, although most reporters are trying to do good work in a dangerous environment, they were being manipulated by rebel factions, their editors, the enemy, etc. and must not so easily accept what is presented to them, in English, by “opposition forces” in media-friendly environments.
It is difficult to imagine that anyone reading Cockburn would not concede, whether or not they agree with him, that he makes excellent points. I wish I had seen his work earlier, for then I could have been more discriminating in my own acceptance of official reports and government decisions.
Some reviews have complained that this work was not sufficiently edited, and that some material is presented twice. Each chapter is a self-standing article. Collected, they comprise this book. Some material is used twice in pieces that examine different aspects of the conflicts from various angles. It was not difficult for me to listen to some of the information twice: this is very complicated stuff and I had not seen some of this information before in my reading about the conflicts in the Middle East.
He does say the United States was disingenuous at best in its targeting Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. It was Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who were funding the militants that had the U.S. in their sights, but because the U.S. was earning millions each year in military contracts with these two, we didn’t even criticize them in a meaningful way. The section on Saudi Arabia and its support for the resurgence of Wahhabism was something I had completely missed in the reporting I’d seen to date. Read it and weep.
Cockburn goes into some depth about the disintegration of Iraq and how that is both fueling and the result of the fighting in Syria. He mentions the corrosive sectarian atmosphere in Iraq as a root cause for the militancy of Sunnis, and cites the corruption in the Iraqi Army as a reason for why the army can’t or won’t fight. His description of corruption has the feel of truth; for years we’d known there were problems with troops unwilling or unable to fight but Cockburn’s description of generals buying their rank at great expense makes it all come together. Now it all makes sense. Cockburn doesn’t have much hope that Iraq can hold itself together.
As for the fighting in Syria, Cockburn thinks U.S. involvement on the side of rebels was a mistake. Assad was not a good guy, but the resistance did not have enough time to pull together a coalition of different interests and was still very splintered when we began sending arms. Saudi and other Gulf states were training and sending in groups which aligned with the more radical elements, causing less damage to Assad than to the populace and Western interests there. Some U.S. arms and equipment showed up in the hands of groups under the ISIS aegis, bought, given or captured.
The situation in Syria was catastrophic before the overt support for Assad by the Russians this year. Cockburn couldn’t address that directly since it happened after his book was published, but he does mention that Russia, Iran, and Turkey have serious stake in stabilizing the region and that the U.S. should never have made Assad’s ouster the linchpin of their policy. Cockburn’s argument is that what comes after Assad may be far worse, is already far worse, than allowing him to regain control.
ISIS in Syria apparently cooperates with lots of Sunni groups with competing interests, some not as radical as those who are spreading fear through the violence of their videos online. Saudi-funded groups, once on the ground in Syria, have surprised everyone by taking up with the “terrorists,” aligning themselves in ways that are making them independent from Saudi. Hence the confusion on the ground and in reporting.
I recently reviewed Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick and am forced to admit that Cockburn’s analysis is far more what I was looking for in terms of discussion of events, analysis, and information. Certainly the recapture of Mosul, Iraq by ISIS affiliates in 2014 was just one of the nasty surprises in store for observers with insufficient information. But unless one works up to familiarity with the players and situations in the region, reading Cockburn is like drinking from a firehose. I’m paying attention now.
By the time I learned about this title, prices for it in used paperback had risen to $3000+ per on Amazon. I downloaded the audible.com version, which I highly recommend. On the Goodreads.com site, different editions of this book have different titles and covers and is called The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. It appears to be available in Kindle format from Verso for less than $3000, I am pleased to report. The two books probably contain the same information, re-edited and re-issued only months after the first one was published. Read either version. This man is enlightening.
When I first saw the depth and clarity of his analysis, I couldn’t understand why media outlets in the United States weren’t reporting what he was reporting. After I finished the book, however, I could see that Cockburn reserved some of his most lashing criticism for the U.S. government and big media. Cockburn believes Western alliances with states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have precluded a clear-eyed view of those states’ promotion and assistance of regressive Islamic doctrines like Wahhabism that have since taken up by ISIS.
Cockburn is a very experienced reporter; part of this book is the best description of war reporting that I have ever seen. He downplays “the fog of war” excuse for the confusion in the Western press about successes or failures of certain specific battles or even the overall direction of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. Reporting the war from embedded positions cannot capture the important component of political change in these countries, and allows temporary military victories to take on more importance than they warrant in light of the overall situation on the ground. “Irregular or guerilla conflicts are always intensely political.” Cockburn makes the point that, although most reporters are trying to do good work in a dangerous environment, they were being manipulated by rebel factions, their editors, the enemy, etc. and must not so easily accept what is presented to them, in English, by “opposition forces” in media-friendly environments.
It is difficult to imagine that anyone reading Cockburn would not concede, whether or not they agree with him, that he makes excellent points. I wish I had seen his work earlier, for then I could have been more discriminating in my own acceptance of official reports and government decisions.
Some reviews have complained that this work was not sufficiently edited, and that some material is presented twice. Each chapter is a self-standing article. Collected, they comprise this book. Some material is used twice in pieces that examine different aspects of the conflicts from various angles. It was not difficult for me to listen to some of the information twice: this is very complicated stuff and I had not seen some of this information before in my reading about the conflicts in the Middle East.
He does say the United States was disingenuous at best in its targeting Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11. It was Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who were funding the militants that had the U.S. in their sights, but because the U.S. was earning millions each year in military contracts with these two, we didn’t even criticize them in a meaningful way. The section on Saudi Arabia and its support for the resurgence of Wahhabism was something I had completely missed in the reporting I’d seen to date. Read it and weep.
Cockburn goes into some depth about the disintegration of Iraq and how that is both fueling and the result of the fighting in Syria. He mentions the corrosive sectarian atmosphere in Iraq as a root cause for the militancy of Sunnis, and cites the corruption in the Iraqi Army as a reason for why the army can’t or won’t fight. His description of corruption has the feel of truth; for years we’d known there were problems with troops unwilling or unable to fight but Cockburn’s description of generals buying their rank at great expense makes it all come together. Now it all makes sense. Cockburn doesn’t have much hope that Iraq can hold itself together.
As for the fighting in Syria, Cockburn thinks U.S. involvement on the side of rebels was a mistake. Assad was not a good guy, but the resistance did not have enough time to pull together a coalition of different interests and was still very splintered when we began sending arms. Saudi and other Gulf states were training and sending in groups which aligned with the more radical elements, causing less damage to Assad than to the populace and Western interests there. Some U.S. arms and equipment showed up in the hands of groups under the ISIS aegis, bought, given or captured.
The situation in Syria was catastrophic before the overt support for Assad by the Russians this year. Cockburn couldn’t address that directly since it happened after his book was published, but he does mention that Russia, Iran, and Turkey have serious stake in stabilizing the region and that the U.S. should never have made Assad’s ouster the linchpin of their policy. Cockburn’s argument is that what comes after Assad may be far worse, is already far worse, than allowing him to regain control.
ISIS in Syria apparently cooperates with lots of Sunni groups with competing interests, some not as radical as those who are spreading fear through the violence of their videos online. Saudi-funded groups, once on the ground in Syria, have surprised everyone by taking up with the “terrorists,” aligning themselves in ways that are making them independent from Saudi. Hence the confusion on the ground and in reporting.
I recently reviewed Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick and am forced to admit that Cockburn’s analysis is far more what I was looking for in terms of discussion of events, analysis, and information. Certainly the recapture of Mosul, Iraq by ISIS affiliates in 2014 was just one of the nasty surprises in store for observers with insufficient information. But unless one works up to familiarity with the players and situations in the region, reading Cockburn is like drinking from a firehose. I’m paying attention now.
By the time I learned about this title, prices for it in used paperback had risen to $3000+ per on Amazon. I downloaded the audible.com version, which I highly recommend. On the Goodreads.com site, different editions of this book have different titles and covers and is called The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. It appears to be available in Kindle format from Verso for less than $3000, I am pleased to report. The two books probably contain the same information, re-edited and re-issued only months after the first one was published. Read either version. This man is enlightening.
December 2, 2014
داعش عودة الجهاديين
كتاب صحافي رديء، لا أكثر، وإن أردنا أن نقسو في الوصف فسنقول أن الكاتب شبيح غربي بامتياز، يتهم الضعفاء والبؤساء في العراق وسوريا وليبيا والذين سحقتهم الأنظمة، ويلتمس للأنظمة الطائفية الأعذار، هذا يجعلك تقرأ الكتاب باشمئزاز، هذا غير أن الكتاب لا يقدم لك أي معلومة مهمة حول داعش وتكونها، لا يوجد فيه أي بعد تاريخي أو فكري، ترجمته ونشره مجرد تضييع لوقت الجميع.
كتاب صحافي رديء، لا أكثر، وإن أردنا أن نقسو في الوصف فسنقول أن الكاتب شبيح غربي بامتياز، يتهم الضعفاء والبؤساء في العراق وسوريا وليبيا والذين سحقتهم الأنظمة، ويلتمس للأنظمة الطائفية الأعذار، هذا يجعلك تقرأ الكتاب باشمئزاز، هذا غير أن الكتاب لا يقدم لك أي معلومة مهمة حول داعش وتكونها، لا يوجد فيه أي بعد تاريخي أو فكري، ترجمته ونشره مجرد تضييع لوقت الجميع.
November 29, 2014
جيش مزانيته أنفق عليها ما يقارب ال 41 مليار دولارأ يفوق في تعداده المليون ما بين جندي وشرطي يتفوق عليه تنظيم من 6 آلاف متطرف وينتزع منه مدينه تعتبر مساحتها ربع العراق
… هذا الجيش الذي غلب على قادته الفساد بمباركة هشة من حكومته المتلئة حقداً بفكرها الطائفي الخسيس ….هدفه تأجيج روح الطائفية البحتة…. وهذ�ا التنظيم الداعشي الذي تقف وراءه دول متورطة بإمداده للوصول إلى مبتغاها الذي لم تستطع أن تصل إليه مباشرة هي اليوم وبنفس الوقت تجد نفسها متورطة بهذا الغول الذي كانت بداياته من مستصغر الشرر…
. بين يدي الجميع أفضل وثيقة تشرح كل الإلتباسات لحال المنطقة بكامل الدقة من خلال الصحافي الذي وصفت كتابه قناة( البي بي سي )نيوز ب ( الرائع) كتاب أنصح به كل متسائل يبحث في تفسير عن ما آلت اليه أمورنا التعيسة اليوم ….سبعة نجوم
… هذا الجيش الذي غلب على قادته الفساد بمباركة هشة من حكومته المتلئة حقداً بفكرها الطائفي الخسيس ….هدفه تأجيج روح الطائفية البحتة…. وهذ�ا التنظيم الداعشي الذي تقف وراءه دول متورطة بإمداده للوصول إلى مبتغاها الذي لم تستطع أن تصل إليه مباشرة هي اليوم وبنفس الوقت تجد نفسها متورطة بهذا الغول الذي كانت بداياته من مستصغر الشرر…
. بين يدي الجميع أفضل وثيقة تشرح كل الإلتباسات لحال المنطقة بكامل الدقة من خلال الصحافي الذي وصفت كتابه قناة( البي بي سي )نيوز ب ( الرائع) كتاب أنصح به كل متسائل يبحث في تفسير عن ما آلت اليه أمورنا التعيسة اليوم ….سبعة نجوم
February 5, 2015
The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni
Revolution
Patrick Cockburn
Verso Books
978-1-78478-040-1
$16.95, 172 pgs
On June 10, 2014 the collection of psychopaths known variously as ISIS, ISIL, DAESH and now as Islamic State, captured Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in only four days of fighting, which is when the western half of the globe looked around and thought, “What the hell?” By the end of June IS declared a caliphate comprising an area larger than Britain that is, in the words of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (aka Head Honcho Psychopath Number 1), “a state where the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the easterner and westerner are all brothers…Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The Earth is Allah’s” (xi). Mr. Kumbaya left out of that statement that Earth is apparently not for Shia, Sufis, Sunni-who-are-not-Sunni-enough, “apostates,” “polytheists” (by this he means Christians, among others), women, girls, journalists, aid workers, or anyone-else-we-don’t-like-today. One hundred five days later the United States began bombing Syria. For most of us these developments seemed to happen overnight. Wrong. The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn will tell you why.
Western support for the overthrow of Assad didn’t unseat him but it did destabilize Iraq (4). The Iraqi government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was riven with corruption from top to bottom (77). The Iraqi army took off their uniforms and abandoned their posts and equipment because they buy their positions so they will have a job and because their generals board helicopters and flee to safety (15). Turkey is guilty of the willful failure to control their 516-mile border with Iraq and Syria (37). The Gulf monarchies have created a monster that they are now afraid poses an existential threat to them (7).
The adage about politics making for strange bedfellows is proved by the current coalition trying to destroy (degrade? who knows exactly?) IS. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Iraq and Iran (this is by no means a complete list) are all playing in the same sandbox, as per usual, but this time they have a common goal. Of course, they all still have lots of other goals, too. Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at Harvard on October 2, 2014 in which 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. (xix)
The Rise of Islamic State is a straight-forward recitation of facts with fairly little analysis. I expected more from a journalist of Cockburn’s stature who has been reporting from the area for more than ten years. The narrative is sometimes difficult to follow as it jumps backward and then forward and then backward again in time; I felt it could have been organized so that it flows better. There are lots and lots of facts and figures; I would have appreciated more anecdotes from individuals living in the region. I got the impression the book was rushed into print to capitalize on current events. It is mostly basic information that any of us could’ve gleaned on our own if we bothered to read news from the rest of the globe instead of watching the vapid talking heads of CNN or Fox. There are long form articles published by American periodicals that are still doing a fine job – see The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The Rise of Islamic State is a great primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention.
I did learn a few things from this book that I didn’t know. Cockburn pins the blame for the surge of fundamentalist Sunni terror organizations squarely on Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, and Pakistan, the enablers of the Taliban – both of which happen to be the closest allies of the United States in the region. The late Richard C. Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country” (5). There are signs that Saudi Arabia is trying to pull back from the brink but the damage is done (97).
The “War on Terror” is an abject failure because, among other factors, the countries responsible for the 9/11 attacks in this country were never held responsible (58). Islamic State now holds far greater territory than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden ever thought about and they are more violent. It’s time to think outside the box. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Revolution
Patrick Cockburn
Verso Books
978-1-78478-040-1
$16.95, 172 pgs
On June 10, 2014 the collection of psychopaths known variously as ISIS, ISIL, DAESH and now as Islamic State, captured Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in only four days of fighting, which is when the western half of the globe looked around and thought, “What the hell?” By the end of June IS declared a caliphate comprising an area larger than Britain that is, in the words of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (aka Head Honcho Psychopath Number 1), “a state where the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the easterner and westerner are all brothers…Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The Earth is Allah’s” (xi). Mr. Kumbaya left out of that statement that Earth is apparently not for Shia, Sufis, Sunni-who-are-not-Sunni-enough, “apostates,” “polytheists” (by this he means Christians, among others), women, girls, journalists, aid workers, or anyone-else-we-don’t-like-today. One hundred five days later the United States began bombing Syria. For most of us these developments seemed to happen overnight. Wrong. The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn will tell you why.
Western support for the overthrow of Assad didn’t unseat him but it did destabilize Iraq (4). The Iraqi government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was riven with corruption from top to bottom (77). The Iraqi army took off their uniforms and abandoned their posts and equipment because they buy their positions so they will have a job and because their generals board helicopters and flee to safety (15). Turkey is guilty of the willful failure to control their 516-mile border with Iraq and Syria (37). The Gulf monarchies have created a monster that they are now afraid poses an existential threat to them (7).
The adage about politics making for strange bedfellows is proved by the current coalition trying to destroy (degrade? who knows exactly?) IS. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Iraq and Iran (this is by no means a complete list) are all playing in the same sandbox, as per usual, but this time they have a common goal. Of course, they all still have lots of other goals, too. Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at Harvard on October 2, 2014 in which 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. (xix)
The Rise of Islamic State is a straight-forward recitation of facts with fairly little analysis. I expected more from a journalist of Cockburn’s stature who has been reporting from the area for more than ten years. The narrative is sometimes difficult to follow as it jumps backward and then forward and then backward again in time; I felt it could have been organized so that it flows better. There are lots and lots of facts and figures; I would have appreciated more anecdotes from individuals living in the region. I got the impression the book was rushed into print to capitalize on current events. It is mostly basic information that any of us could’ve gleaned on our own if we bothered to read news from the rest of the globe instead of watching the vapid talking heads of CNN or Fox. There are long form articles published by American periodicals that are still doing a fine job – see The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The Rise of Islamic State is a great primer for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention.
I did learn a few things from this book that I didn’t know. Cockburn pins the blame for the surge of fundamentalist Sunni terror organizations squarely on Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabism, and Pakistan, the enablers of the Taliban – both of which happen to be the closest allies of the United States in the region. The late Richard C. Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country” (5). There are signs that Saudi Arabia is trying to pull back from the brink but the damage is done (97).
The “War on Terror” is an abject failure because, among other factors, the countries responsible for the 9/11 attacks in this country were never held responsible (58). Islamic State now holds far greater territory than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden ever thought about and they are more violent. It’s time to think outside the box. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
February 7, 2015
A topical book, pulled together at speed and published cheaply, this is not better or worse than some of the lengthy analytical articles available in the press. Indeed, given more time it would have been a useful thing for the book to have borrowed more information from such sources to provide a more coherent and structured picture than it manages to do. An example is this one, giving a lot of information about the origins of ISIS in America's prison camps: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014...
Still, the point is it is not worse and has a lot of interesting insights and arguments. The sponsors for the 9/11 outrage were in Saudi Arabia, that great ally of the US elite if not the American people; the agency which made it possible for the Taliban to control Afghanistan was the Pakistani army and its intelligence service, who are US allies and beyond reproach; the Taliban was not defeated or even properly engaged by the Americans in their invasion of Afghanistan, but stepped out of sight - or parked up over the border in Pakistan, until the American withdrawal; the Iraqi Army - including its elite Republican Guard - were not defeated, but slipped out of uniform and went home when the Americans invaded, providing a large, skilled and unemployed resource for the sectarian violence later sponsored by the US forces in Iraq. The media were treated to exciting images of American rockets destroying unoccupied tanks. The sponsors of violent jihad to the tune of many billions of dollars are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and their motivation is to promote sectarian strife within the Muslim world. The Saudi sponsorship of an extreme, highly sectarian and overtly violent version of Islam known as Wahhabism, is inciting hatred among a growing number of Sunni Muslims towards Shia and Sufi Muslims as well as Christians, Jews and atheists, not only in this region but around the world. The opposition to Assad in Syria is not moderate - the moderate opposition, if it still exists, are shopkeepers, not fighters - so the fighters being funded, equipped and trained by America and its regional allies are jihadists. Sunni Muslims in Syria and Iraq certainly find the ISIS movement excessively violent and intolerant, but are not likely to resist ISIS if the alternative is even worse, and in Iraq they are quite confident that the highly sectarian government of Iraq, its incompetent army and its vicious Shia militas are capable of killing them or reducing them to a condition of oppression that is not to be preferred. Indeed, while ISIS has only small numbers, every indiscriminate air attack against them (killing civilians and destroying their homes, often without harming the fighters, who are experienced in guerilla tactics and can hide very well) produces fresh recruits from young men among the population, wanting to protect and often avenge their own communities not against ISIS but against their common enemies. Looking more widely, the Arab Spring was probably real enough but not capable of transforming the Arab world into secular democracies. In Egypt the counter-revolution has already undone all that was achieved, while in Libya the overthrow of Gadaffi by French, British and American air-power has opened the country to extremist and despotic forces. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the other oil states, any incipient opposition movements are met with violent suppression.
In short, ISIS is not in itself especially fearsome, though it may become so, but what is going on to create the conditions for ISIS to prosper is indeed important and deeply worrying. This ill humoured account emphasises that the War on Terror, which has demonstrably not achieved any of its stated objectives whatever while severely restricting our civil liberties, resembles the drunk who searched for his door keys under a lamp post, because it is too dark to search in the lane where he dropped them. We are being lied to and too many of us appear content to be misled so the problems will multiply and the harm will be immense. But we do have a choice. We can choose not to be deceived.
Still, the point is it is not worse and has a lot of interesting insights and arguments. The sponsors for the 9/11 outrage were in Saudi Arabia, that great ally of the US elite if not the American people; the agency which made it possible for the Taliban to control Afghanistan was the Pakistani army and its intelligence service, who are US allies and beyond reproach; the Taliban was not defeated or even properly engaged by the Americans in their invasion of Afghanistan, but stepped out of sight - or parked up over the border in Pakistan, until the American withdrawal; the Iraqi Army - including its elite Republican Guard - were not defeated, but slipped out of uniform and went home when the Americans invaded, providing a large, skilled and unemployed resource for the sectarian violence later sponsored by the US forces in Iraq. The media were treated to exciting images of American rockets destroying unoccupied tanks. The sponsors of violent jihad to the tune of many billions of dollars are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and their motivation is to promote sectarian strife within the Muslim world. The Saudi sponsorship of an extreme, highly sectarian and overtly violent version of Islam known as Wahhabism, is inciting hatred among a growing number of Sunni Muslims towards Shia and Sufi Muslims as well as Christians, Jews and atheists, not only in this region but around the world. The opposition to Assad in Syria is not moderate - the moderate opposition, if it still exists, are shopkeepers, not fighters - so the fighters being funded, equipped and trained by America and its regional allies are jihadists. Sunni Muslims in Syria and Iraq certainly find the ISIS movement excessively violent and intolerant, but are not likely to resist ISIS if the alternative is even worse, and in Iraq they are quite confident that the highly sectarian government of Iraq, its incompetent army and its vicious Shia militas are capable of killing them or reducing them to a condition of oppression that is not to be preferred. Indeed, while ISIS has only small numbers, every indiscriminate air attack against them (killing civilians and destroying their homes, often without harming the fighters, who are experienced in guerilla tactics and can hide very well) produces fresh recruits from young men among the population, wanting to protect and often avenge their own communities not against ISIS but against their common enemies. Looking more widely, the Arab Spring was probably real enough but not capable of transforming the Arab world into secular democracies. In Egypt the counter-revolution has already undone all that was achieved, while in Libya the overthrow of Gadaffi by French, British and American air-power has opened the country to extremist and despotic forces. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the other oil states, any incipient opposition movements are met with violent suppression.
In short, ISIS is not in itself especially fearsome, though it may become so, but what is going on to create the conditions for ISIS to prosper is indeed important and deeply worrying. This ill humoured account emphasises that the War on Terror, which has demonstrably not achieved any of its stated objectives whatever while severely restricting our civil liberties, resembles the drunk who searched for his door keys under a lamp post, because it is too dark to search in the lane where he dropped them. We are being lied to and too many of us appear content to be misled so the problems will multiply and the harm will be immense. But we do have a choice. We can choose not to be deceived.
February 17, 2015
A bit repetitive and feels a bit rushed (which it probably was). Some of the chapters seemed more like expanded newspaper articles and I suspect this is what happened. A tacked-on afterword brings events up to October 2014.
Still a very useful overview for me as someone struggling to make sense of the IS crisis. The main points are:
- That the Iraqi govt. & military are too corrupt to defend the country properly
- The Iraqi Sunni civilians are stuck between a national army, full of Shia militia members, that thinks nothing of shelling them; or a bunch of medieval-minded zealots who will shoot kids in the face for the slightest misdemeanour
- Saudi Arabia (and the other gulf monarchies) has been funding and supporting the jihadis for years all while pushing Wahabbism throughout the Sunni states and is only now starting to rein it in as the risk to themselves increases. Up until recently the Saudi state seemed happy to see Shias taking the brunt of their extremist flavour of Sunni Islam.
- Assad is nowhere near defeat and has never been but the Americans continue to try to support other rebel groups in Syria which either are so small they have no power or turn out to be aligned with IS anyway and share some of the materiel they receive with them. They've made the removal of Assad such a central pillar of their policy that they are never going to accommodate him even though he's not realistically going anywhere.
- Turkey has only recently decided it would rather deal with the risk of strengthening Kurdish nationalism than ISIS sitting on their border and have started to let some peshmerga fighters through. It's southern border is still the main route for foreign fighters entering Syria.
- Most of the media have no idea what's going on which is why we get such a confusing picture here with what seem like dramatic turn-arounds when really we've been given the wrong impression in the first place e.g. of the strength of the Iraqi army, or how close Assad is to being overthrown (not very) etc.
Still a very useful overview for me as someone struggling to make sense of the IS crisis. The main points are:
- That the Iraqi govt. & military are too corrupt to defend the country properly
- The Iraqi Sunni civilians are stuck between a national army, full of Shia militia members, that thinks nothing of shelling them; or a bunch of medieval-minded zealots who will shoot kids in the face for the slightest misdemeanour
- Saudi Arabia (and the other gulf monarchies) has been funding and supporting the jihadis for years all while pushing Wahabbism throughout the Sunni states and is only now starting to rein it in as the risk to themselves increases. Up until recently the Saudi state seemed happy to see Shias taking the brunt of their extremist flavour of Sunni Islam.
- Assad is nowhere near defeat and has never been but the Americans continue to try to support other rebel groups in Syria which either are so small they have no power or turn out to be aligned with IS anyway and share some of the materiel they receive with them. They've made the removal of Assad such a central pillar of their policy that they are never going to accommodate him even though he's not realistically going anywhere.
- Turkey has only recently decided it would rather deal with the risk of strengthening Kurdish nationalism than ISIS sitting on their border and have started to let some peshmerga fighters through. It's southern border is still the main route for foreign fighters entering Syria.
- Most of the media have no idea what's going on which is why we get such a confusing picture here with what seem like dramatic turn-arounds when really we've been given the wrong impression in the first place e.g. of the strength of the Iraqi army, or how close Assad is to being overthrown (not very) etc.
March 20, 2015
Probably the absolute best thing you can read in an afternoon to come to grips with the nightmare that has befallen the Middle East. About a third of the way in, Cockburn offers his thesis statement:
"The 'war on terror' has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The US did not do so because these countries were important Amercian allies whom it did not want to offend."
Cockburn is the best Western journalist working today in the region. His columns in the Independent are required reading for anyone looking to get an accurate impression of the goings on over there. The present volume is obviously more ambitious in scope than his weekly output, but Cockburn's insight and analysis here isn't diluted by the expanded length.
"The 'war on terror' has failed because it did not target the jihadi movement as a whole and, above all, was not aimed at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two countries that fostered jihadism as a creed and a movement. The US did not do so because these countries were important Amercian allies whom it did not want to offend."
Cockburn is the best Western journalist working today in the region. His columns in the Independent are required reading for anyone looking to get an accurate impression of the goings on over there. The present volume is obviously more ambitious in scope than his weekly output, but Cockburn's insight and analysis here isn't diluted by the expanded length.
August 23, 2014
The most important book you could read this year to understand the conflict in Syria and Iraq resulting from the rising power of ISIS and the Wahabists. The US politics of convenience are once again planting the seed that will in all likelihood cause devastating blowback in the West, not to mention utterly distabilize the lives of millions in the region, just as the Reagan administrations support of bin Laden and the Mujhaideen snaked forward to 9/11.
Cockburn is a veteran journalist of the middle east and there's no better or more sober voice on the topic today. Read this book. Please.
Cockburn is a veteran journalist of the middle east and there's no better or more sober voice on the topic today. Read this book. Please.
April 12, 2015
Terrible. This was clearly rushed to press before the ISIS Crisis falls out of news. The book has no coherent structure. Some of the chapters seem like articles extended by inserting an anonymous source or two. Other chapters seem like first drafts (with amateurish gravitas) and lack of fluency. There is a lot of irritating repetition in every chapter.
Granted, Cockburn's account isn't the black and white narrative of CNN, Fox, BBC & co. but it still simplifies the situation. He also downplays the Iranian involvement and the Israeli one in Syria. Furthermore, Cockburn assumes that the Empire and it's European cronies actually want a strong, democratic, modern Iraq when there is a lot to suggest the opposite.
I suppose the book is fine if you know absolutely nothing about ISIS but if you're looking for in-depth analysis and penetrating insight, you're going to find much less here than you would find by following this whole grotesque circus in the UK Guardian, the UK Independent (Robert Fisk), Foreign Policy, Tikkun Olam blog (for the Israeli and Hizbollah side of things), The Long War Journal, those VICE documentaries and Debkafile (and of course the various ISIS, Iraqi and Syrian government releases).
Granted, Cockburn's account isn't the black and white narrative of CNN, Fox, BBC & co. but it still simplifies the situation. He also downplays the Iranian involvement and the Israeli one in Syria. Furthermore, Cockburn assumes that the Empire and it's European cronies actually want a strong, democratic, modern Iraq when there is a lot to suggest the opposite.
I suppose the book is fine if you know absolutely nothing about ISIS but if you're looking for in-depth analysis and penetrating insight, you're going to find much less here than you would find by following this whole grotesque circus in the UK Guardian, the UK Independent (Robert Fisk), Foreign Policy, Tikkun Olam blog (for the Israeli and Hizbollah side of things), The Long War Journal, those VICE documentaries and Debkafile (and of course the various ISIS, Iraqi and Syrian government releases).
December 1, 2016
This is a quick read which alternates between a few things:
1. the horrifying entanglements between foreign powers,
2. the brutal chaos on the ground,
3. a broader discussion about the importance of truth and accurate journalism.
The reporting on the collapse of the Iraqi Army is disturbing but it's the need to cut through the mess of lies and distortions that is memorable.
1. the horrifying entanglements between foreign powers,
2. the brutal chaos on the ground,
3. a broader discussion about the importance of truth and accurate journalism.
The reporting on the collapse of the Iraqi Army is disturbing but it's the need to cut through the mess of lies and distortions that is memorable.
August 22, 2014
The Saudi plot
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
The book reads the "low impact" conflicts currently taking place in Iraq and Syria exclusively in the light of an old sunni-shia religious rivalry, revamped by Saudi Arabia's own brand of fundamentalism, Wahhabism (which opposes shi'ism and backs sunni movements). Tellingly, the author compares the Syrian conflict to the German Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The Boznia-Herzegovina civil war would probably be a better fit, and would reposition the conflicts in point in the ultra-modernity space to which I think they belong.
The dry, anti-narrative account offered by someone who has been tracking the two conflicts on the ground is harrowingly clear in setting the record of who backs whom. In particular, the author is emphatic in exposing Saudi Arabia's role in globally fostering jihadist groups, including al-Quaeda, of which ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is the military (as opposed to terrorist) off-spring. ISIS is organized as a state-like formation, levying taxes in the territories it controls across Iraq and Syria, thus becoming increasingly independent of the financial support allegedly provided by Saudi Arabia.
The religious hatred strand however can take the interpretation of the conflicts only thus far. Saudi Arabia is described as 'hysterical' in its pursue of shia ruin, and the US as utterly stupid in its misunderstanding of who finances whom.
With Brent crude reaching $116 a barrel after the fall of Mosul in June (and AK-47 bullets being sold at $2 each in Baghdad at the same time, as the author reveals), the suspicion that all this complex plot of alliances and internecine fighting is driven by something other than theological considerations urges further investigations.
At civil war level, a useful framework is provided by Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, which interprets these conflicts as directed by combating elites against the emergence of a civil and potentially democratic society.
At geopolitical level, these conflicts can be interpreted as the low-cost solution for keeping the middle-East as a permanent area of instability (Israel is the expensive alternative) protecting a reservoir of resources that have to be saved for later. More on this in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
The book reads the "low impact" conflicts currently taking place in Iraq and Syria exclusively in the light of an old sunni-shia religious rivalry, revamped by Saudi Arabia's own brand of fundamentalism, Wahhabism (which opposes shi'ism and backs sunni movements). Tellingly, the author compares the Syrian conflict to the German Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The Boznia-Herzegovina civil war would probably be a better fit, and would reposition the conflicts in point in the ultra-modernity space to which I think they belong.
The dry, anti-narrative account offered by someone who has been tracking the two conflicts on the ground is harrowingly clear in setting the record of who backs whom. In particular, the author is emphatic in exposing Saudi Arabia's role in globally fostering jihadist groups, including al-Quaeda, of which ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is the military (as opposed to terrorist) off-spring. ISIS is organized as a state-like formation, levying taxes in the territories it controls across Iraq and Syria, thus becoming increasingly independent of the financial support allegedly provided by Saudi Arabia.
The religious hatred strand however can take the interpretation of the conflicts only thus far. Saudi Arabia is described as 'hysterical' in its pursue of shia ruin, and the US as utterly stupid in its misunderstanding of who finances whom.
With Brent crude reaching $116 a barrel after the fall of Mosul in June (and AK-47 bullets being sold at $2 each in Baghdad at the same time, as the author reveals), the suspicion that all this complex plot of alliances and internecine fighting is driven by something other than theological considerations urges further investigations.
At civil war level, a useful framework is provided by Mary Kaldor's New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, which interprets these conflicts as directed by combating elites against the emergence of a civil and potentially democratic society.
At geopolitical level, these conflicts can be interpreted as the low-cost solution for keeping the middle-East as a permanent area of instability (Israel is the expensive alternative) protecting a reservoir of resources that have to be saved for later. More on this in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
November 26, 2015
It's true what some of these reviews are saying... that this volume seems to have been rushed to publication lest it miss its window of relevance. Nonetheless, I found it to be a very informative introduction to the ISIS calamity.
It is rather discouraging to see how little Western governments and media understand the political situation in the Middle East. We have this assumption that attempts to overthrow a tyrannical and/or corrupt regime are motivated entirely by a thirst for democracy. Yet this seems wholly irrelevant to the people doing the actual fighting and the states that are backing them. For these latter groups, the struggle is between Sunni and Shi'a, with the goal of the revolt being to restore Sunnis to a position of power, thereby allowing them to forcibly convert or murder as many Shi'a as possible.
Wealthy Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia play both positions; on the one hand, they have been funding Sunni insurgents (such as ISIS) in areas of Shi'a strength, while at the same time staunchly supporting Western capitalist interest in the region. The United States, meanwhile, ignores the blatant fact that sectarian unrest in the area is largely generated by anti-Shi'a nations that call themselves US allies.
Cockburn does not really come up with any solutions to this mess, but who can blame him? In hindsight, politicians and journalists who claimed to understand the situation on the ground are mocked by history as tragically naive (think of Dubya's smiling mug in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner). So whence comes hope for a peaceful and permanent outcome? I'm listening. I hope the decision-makers in the region are too.
It is rather discouraging to see how little Western governments and media understand the political situation in the Middle East. We have this assumption that attempts to overthrow a tyrannical and/or corrupt regime are motivated entirely by a thirst for democracy. Yet this seems wholly irrelevant to the people doing the actual fighting and the states that are backing them. For these latter groups, the struggle is between Sunni and Shi'a, with the goal of the revolt being to restore Sunnis to a position of power, thereby allowing them to forcibly convert or murder as many Shi'a as possible.
Wealthy Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia play both positions; on the one hand, they have been funding Sunni insurgents (such as ISIS) in areas of Shi'a strength, while at the same time staunchly supporting Western capitalist interest in the region. The United States, meanwhile, ignores the blatant fact that sectarian unrest in the area is largely generated by anti-Shi'a nations that call themselves US allies.
Cockburn does not really come up with any solutions to this mess, but who can blame him? In hindsight, politicians and journalists who claimed to understand the situation on the ground are mocked by history as tragically naive (think of Dubya's smiling mug in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner). So whence comes hope for a peaceful and permanent outcome? I'm listening. I hope the decision-makers in the region are too.
September 18, 2023
سيء جدا، حتي أنه من الصعب أن أذكر ميزة واحدة فيه، ولم أرَ سببا مقنعا لترجمته
تحيّز واضح جدا للشيعة، وهجوم عنيف جدا على السنة، يرى أن الشيعة ملائكة مساكين، ويتهم السنة بالتشدد والسادية.
كتاب عبارة عن وجبة دسمة للشيعة لإلتماس الأعذار لهم وللطوائف الإسلامية المخالفة للمذهب السني، والمشكلة عند الكتّاب الغير مسلمين خاصة الغير ناطقين بالعربية أنهم لا يفهمون عقيدة المسلمين، لا يفهمون عقيدة الجهاد عند المسلمين وأن الجهاد فُرِضَ علينا.
أنا لا أقصد دعمي لداعش أو غيرها من الحركات الجهادية، فداعش كانت تطبق الجهاد لكن بشكل خاطئ، وكان هناك غلو بيّن في أسلوبهم الجهادي، فقال ص: ( اغزوا باسم الله في سبيل الله، قاتلوا من كفر بالله، اغزوا فلا تغلوا ولا تغدروا ولا تمثلوا، ولا تقتلوا وليدا ) رواه البخاري.
تنويه: هناك فرق بين القتال والقتل؛ فالقتال أو الجهاد هو أن يسعى في جهاد الأعداء حتى تكون كلمة الله هي العليا، أما القتل هو أن يقتل شخصًا بعينه
والحرب بمفهوم الجهاد أو القتال مشروعة في الإسلام بقصد حماية نشر الدعوة الإسلامية، وصون الدعاة إلى دين الإسلام، وردّ الاعتداء.
قال الله تعالى :- (وقاتلوا في سبيل الله الذين يقاتلونكم ولا تعتدوا إن الله لا يحب المعتدين 190)-(البقرة)
ولا ننسى التنويه أنه في كل حروب المسلمين الجهادية كان هناك قيود أخلاقية واجب الالتزام بها:
لا تقطع شجرة
لا تقتل الشيوخ
لا تقتل النساء
لا تقتل الأطفال
لا تقتل المتعبدين
عدم الغدر
عدم الإفساد في الأرض
حماية أرواح غير المقاتلين
عدم التمثيل بالميت
تلك وصاياه صلى الله عليه وسلم
ربما هو على حق في نقده لتصرفات داعش الهمجية، لكن نقده للسنة والجهاد بشكل عام غير مقبول بالمرة
الكتاب عبارة عن تقرير صحفي مطول فيه تدليس، تقريبا استغلوا كثرة سطوره وحولوه لكتاب للبيع أكثر
رأيي أن الكتاب هو نتيجة كتابة كاتب فيما لا يفقه.
تحيّز واضح جدا للشيعة، وهجوم عنيف جدا على السنة، يرى أن الشيعة ملائكة مساكين، ويتهم السنة بالتشدد والسادية.
كتاب عبارة عن وجبة دسمة للشيعة لإلتماس الأعذار لهم وللطوائف الإسلامية المخالفة للمذهب السني، والمشكلة عند الكتّاب الغير مسلمين خاصة الغير ناطقين بالعربية أنهم لا يفهمون عقيدة المسلمين، لا يفهمون عقيدة الجهاد عند المسلمين وأن الجهاد فُرِضَ علينا.
أنا لا أقصد دعمي لداعش أو غيرها من الحركات الجهادية، فداعش كانت تطبق الجهاد لكن بشكل خاطئ، وكان هناك غلو بيّن في أسلوبهم الجهادي، فقال ص: ( اغزوا باسم الله في سبيل الله، قاتلوا من كفر بالله، اغزوا فلا تغلوا ولا تغدروا ولا تمثلوا، ولا تقتلوا وليدا ) رواه البخاري.
تنويه: هناك فرق بين القتال والقتل؛ فالقتال أو الجهاد هو أن يسعى في جهاد الأعداء حتى تكون كلمة الله هي العليا، أما القتل هو أن يقتل شخصًا بعينه
والحرب بمفهوم الجهاد أو القتال مشروعة في الإسلام بقصد حماية نشر الدعوة الإسلامية، وصون الدعاة إلى دين الإسلام، وردّ الاعتداء.
قال الله تعالى :- (وقاتلوا في سبيل الله الذين يقاتلونكم ولا تعتدوا إن الله لا يحب المعتدين 190)-(البقرة)
ولا ننسى التنويه أنه في كل حروب المسلمين الجهادية كان هناك قيود أخلاقية واجب الالتزام بها:
لا تقطع شجرة
لا تقتل الشيوخ
لا تقتل النساء
لا تقتل الأطفال
لا تقتل المتعبدين
عدم الغدر
عدم الإفساد في الأرض
حماية أرواح غير المقاتلين
عدم التمثيل بالميت
تلك وصاياه صلى الله عليه وسلم
ربما هو على حق في نقده لتصرفات داعش الهمجية، لكن نقده للسنة والجهاد بشكل عام غير مقبول بالمرة
الكتاب عبارة عن تقرير صحفي مطول فيه تدليس، تقريبا استغلوا كثرة سطوره وحولوه لكتاب للبيع أكثر
رأيي أن الكتاب هو نتيجة كتابة كاتب فيما لا يفقه.
September 21, 2014
A book about Iraq and Syria that manages to completely sidestep the regime's role in subverting a people's uprising by using indiscriminate violence and the sectarian card. The most controversial claims in the books are dubiously sourced, attributed to "intelligence officer in a neighboring country" (obviously Iran, since Cockburn names every other intel service). Cockburn also goes on to make the curious case that after 9/11, the US should have attacked Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (He appears not to know that the latter has lost over 10,000 soldiers fighting the "war on terror"). Overall a superficial, distroted and partisan account of the conflict, which sheds little light on the conflict.
November 27, 2015
Without question this is the book I'd recommend to anyone trying to get a grasp of what's happening in Syria and Iraq. As reportage it's a year out of date (easily supplemented by following Cockburn's articles for the Independent and The London Review of Books); as background, it's a lucid, perceptive summary.
For anyone reading this review on Goodreads, I'd refer them to Trish's excellent review.
For anyone reading this review on Goodreads, I'd refer them to Trish's excellent review.
September 22, 2019
هذا الكتيب يضعنا امام احد الخياريين لا ثالث لهما.. إما لدي الكاتب سذاجة في القراءة والتحليل واما هو مأجور بشكل او باخر (اعلام النظام السوري يستشهد بكتاباته كدليل عالمؤامرة الكونية على ال الاسد) ففي وصفه مجموعة كبيرة من المغالطات او التشويه المتعمد للحقيقة ونقل فكرة خاطئة للقارئ الغربي فالسوري والعراقي ابناء الحدث لن تمر عليه مثل هكذا توصيفات المقصود منها تلميع وتحسين صورة النظام المجرم في سورية امام الرإي الغربي فاستخدام الفاظ وعبارات معينة لا يمكن امامها الا ان نشعر بالحنق من شخص يدعي انه صحفي ومراسل حربي. فهناك تحليل سطحي بشكل لا يوصف ونأسف على دار كالساقي الملتزمة ان تنشر مثل هذه الترهات
March 17, 2017
Short, easy overview of the larger context of the rise of the Islamic State. This is not an academic study--there are no citations or footnotes or sources, and there isn't a whole lot of depth--but Patrick Cockburn has generally been a reliable journalist with lots of experience with on-the-ground reporting and investigation in the Middle East. This shouldn't be the only thing you read about IS and the ongoing wars in Syria and Iraq, but it is a decent quick read if you have some time to kill and want to get a particular perspective on the region's politics and recent history.
February 5, 2019
Decided to read this to see if it was any different to The Rise of Islamic State, both are basically the same book. The book is so well written and clear that it is something that needs to be re-read anyway, so no regrets.
Read
June 26, 2023Published in late 2014. Approach accordingly.
March 25, 2021
"The swift defeat of the peshmerga, supposedly superior fighters compared to the soldiers of the Iraqi army, was a fresh demonstration of ISIS’s military prowess. Probably the military reputation of the peshmerga had been exaggerated: they had not fought anybody, 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 ambushes.'"
July 3, 2015
This is a clear, unadorned, superlatively informed account of ISIS's rise, the conditions that nurtured and sustained it, and the current situation in the Middle East, in which the existence of IS is increasingly becoming a geopolitical fact. The book is very easy to read, foregoing long theoretical passages or the grinding of tired political axes in favor of well reported, conversational accounts of recent history. The book is easy to read, in spite of its density of information, because the effect is like listening to a competent storyteller who Was There and has no need to embellish or embed his account.
The book is an excellent antidote to historical amnesia and ideological blindspots. Certain facts are repeated throughout -- the war on terror has been a failure and has nurtured al Qaeda-like groups; our allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the number one supporters of Wahhabi-ish ideology; there is no military presence for the proposed "moderate" resistance in Syria; relationships between outside powers (Sunni gulf state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, US, Turkey, Russia) are complex, contradictory, and unlikely to provide grounds for a united response to ISIS -- because they bear repeating. They are facts that are forgotten in many reports, which take at face value the avowed humanitarian causes of intervention (or just accept as a matter of course that the US is everywhere involved and everywhere a force for good), which insist that the US military is a winning military that has a good chance of defeating jihadist groups, that the coalitions we're told can be formed are politically achievable, etc.
The book also reminds us of the recent vintage of hyperviolent Islamic sectarianism, and of its connections to global capitalism. It is oil money, essentially, that is funding this. Saudi Arabia and Qatar send arms and funds to ISIS and like groups (as does the US, indirectly, by trying to support nonexistent "moderates" -- as Joe Biden said, there is no moderate army, because moderates are shopkeepers and not soldiers), Turkey lets ISIS use its border, and then all these states claim to come together to fight ISIS. Iran genuinely hopes to defeat ISIS, for sectarian and geopolitical reasons, but the US will not admit to coordinating directly with Iran. In the Middle East today, there are no good options.
Some of the best parts of the book discussed the Arab spring protesters. Cockburn doesn't have to namedrop Guy Debord to impress upon us the extent to which protesters in Tahrir and elsewhere savvily used global telecommunications, despite failing to build a feasible coalition or party that could lead the way on the proverbial "day after" of the revolution. There is a lesson here for those of us, wary of ideological control and hierarchical organization, that perhaps ostensibly spontaneous, decentralized, ecstatic expressions of negative politics and vague humanitarian principles are unlikely to survive the confrontation with the very real (even in the age of Twitter) forces of police repression, military might, state security apparatuses. Bullets. The conditions that allowed the Velvet Revolutions to succeed, Cockburn points out, are gone; if we're looking for 20th century inspiration, maybe the Vietcong or Bolsheviks would have something to tell us about organization that goes beyond a media event. (Hell, imagine a force as organized as ISIS, but committed to freedom for women, non-sectarianism, eventual constitutionalism, power for workers, and so on. What we are partly living through, perhaps, is a global crisis of liberalism, let alone leftism, in which it cannot sustain the same emotional attachment as base nationalism, sectarian religiosity, self-interested warlordism and cupidity. It doesn't help that there is no state sponsor of such a movement, whereas the US, Saudi Arabia, and others pour many dollars into illiberal, brutal militias).
Chapter 8 in full, on the trade of reporting, the difficulties of giving the public an accurate picture of what's going on, the ways the media is used by various contestants in the Middle East, is absolutely vital reading for anyone who wants to consume media today. Which means you.
This book will take you a couple hours, so read it.
The book is an excellent antidote to historical amnesia and ideological blindspots. Certain facts are repeated throughout -- the war on terror has been a failure and has nurtured al Qaeda-like groups; our allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the number one supporters of Wahhabi-ish ideology; there is no military presence for the proposed "moderate" resistance in Syria; relationships between outside powers (Sunni gulf state sponsors of terrorism, Iran, US, Turkey, Russia) are complex, contradictory, and unlikely to provide grounds for a united response to ISIS -- because they bear repeating. They are facts that are forgotten in many reports, which take at face value the avowed humanitarian causes of intervention (or just accept as a matter of course that the US is everywhere involved and everywhere a force for good), which insist that the US military is a winning military that has a good chance of defeating jihadist groups, that the coalitions we're told can be formed are politically achievable, etc.
The book also reminds us of the recent vintage of hyperviolent Islamic sectarianism, and of its connections to global capitalism. It is oil money, essentially, that is funding this. Saudi Arabia and Qatar send arms and funds to ISIS and like groups (as does the US, indirectly, by trying to support nonexistent "moderates" -- as Joe Biden said, there is no moderate army, because moderates are shopkeepers and not soldiers), Turkey lets ISIS use its border, and then all these states claim to come together to fight ISIS. Iran genuinely hopes to defeat ISIS, for sectarian and geopolitical reasons, but the US will not admit to coordinating directly with Iran. In the Middle East today, there are no good options.
Some of the best parts of the book discussed the Arab spring protesters. Cockburn doesn't have to namedrop Guy Debord to impress upon us the extent to which protesters in Tahrir and elsewhere savvily used global telecommunications, despite failing to build a feasible coalition or party that could lead the way on the proverbial "day after" of the revolution. There is a lesson here for those of us, wary of ideological control and hierarchical organization, that perhaps ostensibly spontaneous, decentralized, ecstatic expressions of negative politics and vague humanitarian principles are unlikely to survive the confrontation with the very real (even in the age of Twitter) forces of police repression, military might, state security apparatuses. Bullets. The conditions that allowed the Velvet Revolutions to succeed, Cockburn points out, are gone; if we're looking for 20th century inspiration, maybe the Vietcong or Bolsheviks would have something to tell us about organization that goes beyond a media event. (Hell, imagine a force as organized as ISIS, but committed to freedom for women, non-sectarianism, eventual constitutionalism, power for workers, and so on. What we are partly living through, perhaps, is a global crisis of liberalism, let alone leftism, in which it cannot sustain the same emotional attachment as base nationalism, sectarian religiosity, self-interested warlordism and cupidity. It doesn't help that there is no state sponsor of such a movement, whereas the US, Saudi Arabia, and others pour many dollars into illiberal, brutal militias).
Chapter 8 in full, on the trade of reporting, the difficulties of giving the public an accurate picture of what's going on, the ways the media is used by various contestants in the Middle East, is absolutely vital reading for anyone who wants to consume media today. Which means you.
This book will take you a couple hours, so read it.
July 2, 2015
A repetitive, poorly organized and confusingly written book.
I expected something that demystified ISIS's success and strategy; instead, this book mostly focused on making a handful of rather obvious points over and over again about the context that has allowed ISIS to flourish (Iraq is a corrupt and mostly failed state; outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan don't prioritize defeating ISIS but instead boosting their own sectarian interests; the war on terror was a failure; everyone got the Syrian Civil War wrong). Although I believe this book was a collection of previous articles, which makes some of its redundancy understandable, it still fails to back up some of its basic assertions with details and facts, leaving truisms like "the Islamic State is a fanatic organization with a skilled military operation" to be completed by the reader's own assumptions or previous (scattered) knowledge.
Cockburn casts aside other opinions about ISIS by foreign analysts (that it is heavily influenced by organized crime, that it is not effective at state formation, that it hasn't appealed to all that many people) without real engagement, just simple negation. With such a shallow overview, there's little to recommend this book to anyone who regularly follows the media with a hint of critical thinking — yes, of course the Arab Spring was misunderstood by the West, especially Western media; of course the War on Terror destabilized Iraq; of course ISIS has emerged in this shattered context of warring powers.
To make matters even worse, his writing is often confusing. As an example, in a chapter on the media's role in making ISIS "appear out of nowhere," Cockburn writes:
"A more substantive charge is that [Western journalists] write too much about firefights and skirmishes, the fireworks of war, while neglecting the broader picture that might determine the outcome. 'My newspaper doesn't do what it calls "bang-bang" journalism,' one correspondent said grandly, explainign why none of his colleagues was covering the fighting in Syria first-hand. But the 'bang-bang' matters: war may not be explicable without the politics, but the politics can't be understood without the war."
Is the problem that Western journalists write too much about war and not about politics, or vice versa? This is just one example of contradictory writing; from someone so dedicated to pointing out what's really going on, the lack of clarity is both unexpected and regrettable.
I expected something that demystified ISIS's success and strategy; instead, this book mostly focused on making a handful of rather obvious points over and over again about the context that has allowed ISIS to flourish (Iraq is a corrupt and mostly failed state; outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan don't prioritize defeating ISIS but instead boosting their own sectarian interests; the war on terror was a failure; everyone got the Syrian Civil War wrong). Although I believe this book was a collection of previous articles, which makes some of its redundancy understandable, it still fails to back up some of its basic assertions with details and facts, leaving truisms like "the Islamic State is a fanatic organization with a skilled military operation" to be completed by the reader's own assumptions or previous (scattered) knowledge.
Cockburn casts aside other opinions about ISIS by foreign analysts (that it is heavily influenced by organized crime, that it is not effective at state formation, that it hasn't appealed to all that many people) without real engagement, just simple negation. With such a shallow overview, there's little to recommend this book to anyone who regularly follows the media with a hint of critical thinking — yes, of course the Arab Spring was misunderstood by the West, especially Western media; of course the War on Terror destabilized Iraq; of course ISIS has emerged in this shattered context of warring powers.
To make matters even worse, his writing is often confusing. As an example, in a chapter on the media's role in making ISIS "appear out of nowhere," Cockburn writes:
"A more substantive charge is that [Western journalists] write too much about firefights and skirmishes, the fireworks of war, while neglecting the broader picture that might determine the outcome. 'My newspaper doesn't do what it calls "bang-bang" journalism,' one correspondent said grandly, explainign why none of his colleagues was covering the fighting in Syria first-hand. But the 'bang-bang' matters: war may not be explicable without the politics, but the politics can't be understood without the war."
Is the problem that Western journalists write too much about war and not about politics, or vice versa? This is just one example of contradictory writing; from someone so dedicated to pointing out what's really going on, the lack of clarity is both unexpected and regrettable.
August 26, 2014
An excellent account of the horrifying battles taking place in Syria and northern Iraq--a cluster fuck of monstrous proportions and unlikely resolution within the next few years. Given that no U.S. administration, Republican or Democrat, will likely develop sane policies regarding military interventions in the middle east, it is very likely we will be there for many years to come, weakening our own security at home.
December 28, 2014
لا يختلف اي انسان عاقل يفرق بين الحق والباطل
على اجرام وظلم وعبث هولاء (مطية البعث )داعش سفهاء الاحلام
لكن هذا لا ينفي ان ايضاً هناك ظلم من الطرف الاخر
الكاتب يلمع للغرب وكأنه يقول ان ما انتصرت اي ثورة الا بمساعدة الغرب
وهذا كلام دجل وكذب
غير ذلك ان كتاب كانك تقرأ اخبار ٢٠١٣+٢٠١٤ انا اتوقع انه راجع لسجلات قناة العربية والبي بي سي
واخذ الكثير من معلومته منها
على اجرام وظلم وعبث هولاء (مطية البعث )داعش سفهاء الاحلام
لكن هذا لا ينفي ان ايضاً هناك ظلم من الطرف الاخر
الكاتب يلمع للغرب وكأنه يقول ان ما انتصرت اي ثورة الا بمساعدة الغرب
وهذا كلام دجل وكذب
غير ذلك ان كتاب كانك تقرأ اخبار ٢٠١٣+٢٠١٤ انا اتوقع انه راجع لسجلات قناة العربية والبي بي سي
واخذ الكثير من معلومته منها
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 5, 2015
I guess more or less most of this is fairly accurate, though it is fairly disjointed. I think that I only found it useful because I haven't been following the events closely myself; if I had more of a solid grasp of things I imagine I'd find this book incredibly frustrating. So, all in all, a disappointing book, seemingly hastily put together.
February 10, 2015
That whole region is so fucked, and pretty much every sovereign or revolutionary entity involved (including the West) is just making it worse. ISIS is pretty much like if the KKK took over the entire South.
July 31, 2015
Not a very "readable" book but definitely a treasure trove of information about the region and the success ISIS has had! Doesn't have much information on the group itself but reads like a reportage on the Iraq, Iran and Syria regions with large doses of politics of the world thrown in.
Read
December 9, 2015Very good analysis of the conditions that lead to ISIS. Cockburn is one of the best journalists writing about the middle east today and even if a book on ISIS is a bit premature this is an excellent read.
January 3, 2016
i was told it focuses to much on the sectarian politics and underplays american and western influence in the rise of isis. apart from the chapter on the failure on the war on terror it is the case. it's still a decent, readable and fairly short primer on the subject
Read
February 25, 2016The bitter truth
Truth........we will never find the truth
Truth........we will never find the truth
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