War in the Age of Trump

by Patrick Cockburn

In this successor to his bestselling The Rise of Islamic State, which was translated into 16 languages, and the widely-acclaimed The Age of Jihad, prize-winning foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn provides a clear-sighted and closely-observed account of the Middle East wars conducted by Donald Trump during the first term of his presidency.

From interviews via a weak cellphone link with soon-to-be killed Iraqis in Isis-besieged Mosul, to the gunshots heard in his Iraqi hotel room, not far from a Tahrir Square where protests were swelling into a brutally-repressed national uprising; from the destruction of Raqqa, Afrin, and Eastern Ghouta, to Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of Kurds in north-east Syria, Cockburn opens a vivid window onto the end of the Isis Caliphate, the successive defeats of the Kurds, and America’s escalating confrontation with Iran, culminating in the world-shaking assassination of General Qasem Soleimani.

Donald Trump claimed that his would be a presidency that brought to an end American engagement in “messy” foreign wars. In this vital and necessary book, Patrick Cockburn exposes how his on/off adventurism has not only continued widespread intervention, but added a dangerous layer of chaos and unpredictability.


“The greatest living foreign correspondent in English, a writer of understated integrity and compassion, with the necessary balance of indignation and detachment” —Richard Lloyd Parry, New York Times

Genres: Middle East, Nonfiction, History, Politics, War, Iran, Family

324 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Patrick 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.

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think among the many, many things I learned in 2020 is that these 21 century wars and warfare are so much more complex than what they appear to be (duh, I know) because they are actually so many smaller wars in one with constantly shifting, often opaque, agendas and alliances within the same wars, and of course competing narratives, with almost no way of knowing which ones are true, to some extent. You only really know there’s some real bullshit going on when white people start hashtagging names of far-away places, hashtag Aleppo, hashtag East Ghouta. I also love it when white folks call for a #noflyzone in the middle east from their sofas. Hashtag lol.

In the case of Syria this becomes even trickier as there are no foreign journalists and much of the media narrative is driven by accounts from people who, of course, also have a stake in the war. So, this book “War in the Age of Trump. The Defeat of ISIS, the fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran” (VERSO, 2020) by Patrick Cockburn (described by the NYT as ‘the greatest living foreign correspondent in English’) filled in many missing pieces. He also describes the Syrian war(s) as ‘nightmarishly complex’ and I could not agree any more. Of course there is a ‘bigger picture’ , super power rivalry etc., but the bigger picture doesn’t make any sense without understanding the smaller pieces, which are often conflicting, including in the way these are being perceived by the west (e.g, coverage of East Ghouta versus Afrin).

It’s also been a good read on the issue of 21st century ‘warfare’, including the many sieges of urban centres, not so precision bombing of entire populated cities and of course the issue of who is actually supporting and arming competing ‘rebels’ and ‘opposition forces’ to what smaller and bigger ends.

There are a few issues on which I shall not comment too much online, such as the conflict in Syria, at least for now, so I leave it as such but it’s been a fascinating read, as ‘unbiased’ eye-witness account as it possibly gets.

[Padraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read. It covers the period 2016 - 2019 and is a mix of contemporary pieces gathered together under broad headings and a much smaller amount of retrospective analysis which introduces each thematic section.

I would love to read an original volume, entirely made up of analysis and a telling of the history of the period with the benefit of hindsight but to be fair that would be a different book.

The author writes clearly, his English is wonderful and he is honest and upfront about the difficulties there are in an honest reporter witnessing, understanding and explaining what goes on at any one time.

I think it's a vital book for anyone wanting to understand what is happening in the region. Very much recommended.

[Ali Hassan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the critical three years after the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Its central themes are the US-Iran confrontation, the defeat of isis and the fall - some say betrayal - of the Kurds. The election of Trump coincided almost exactly with the start of the nine-month siege of Mosul by the Iraqi army, which was to be the decisive battle in the defeat of isis. The terminal date of the book is early 2020 with the assassination of Iranian General Qasam Soleimani by the US in Iraq and the impact of this in Iraq and Iran. This followed closely on Trump's announcement in the fall of 2020 of US military withdrawal from Syria and opened the door to a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. At the same time, mass street protests in Iraq and Lebanon were beginning to shake the political dominance of Iran and its allies in the Shia heartlands. Much of the book is concerned with the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish states in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared isis caliphate, which culminated in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

[Ben Gerber · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Did you ever think, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?" TJ "Stonewall" Jackson

This book is a collection of Patrick Cockburn's writings from 2016 to early 2020. Trump's inclusion in the title is a great attention grabber, but Trump and his foreign policy are only a small part of the book. The greater part concerns the diplomatic and military back and forth of the Syrian Civil War and the catastrophic fighting in Mosul and Raqqa in 2016-17. There are also passages discussing war reporting itself, and how reporting in the Syrian Civil War differs from other conflicts in the past. During the Troubles, Cockburn recounts, every armed group made sure to have a press corps along with it. The situation could not be more different in Syria, where combatants (particularly the rebels) kidnap and kill journalists or are forced to do so by their radical allies. Cockburn pitches into partisan western journalists, who rely upon unreliable sources (in the absence of others, he concedes) and are willingly deceived about the course of the war and the atrocities committed.

There are some very moving passages amidst the pages of analysis. A trapped civilian in Mosul, in touch with Cockburn on a cellphone, cries in pain from a leg wound and cannot sleep due to the noise of the constant aerial bombardments. Like all of Cockburn's contacts during the Siege of Mosul, this man was killed (either by ISIS or the coalition's bombs) before the end of the fighting. Many sieges in history, such as Alesia, saw women, children, and the elderly starving to death between the lines. There were many such scenes in Mosul and Raqqa - people trapped between the terrorists, bombs, and the soldiers who feared that anyone coming towards them was a suicide bomber or infiltrator.

The book closes with a recounting of Turkey's invasion of Kurdish territories in northern Syria and the Iraqi protests of 2019-2020. The final section discusses British involvement in Iraq going back to Townshend's catastrophic 1915 campaign.

Cockburn is an excellent writer, but the book has little structure. Many anecdotes and what appear to be entire articles are lifted from The Age of Jihad (another Patrick Cockburn book). The author's conclusion - that 2016-2020 have served to further solidify the victories of factions (the Assad government, Iraqi Shi'i) which were already winning in 2016 - could have been its own book.

Cockburn has written better books: The Occupation, Muqtada, and The Age of Jihad (which is very similar to this book, being a series of articles). I recommend this book to anyone who has read the aforementioned works and is looking for more Cockburn commentary.

[Robert Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A peculiarly structured book, but a very good one. Patrick Cockburn is a highly regarded correspondent who has been covering the Middle East since the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s and 80s. This book covers developments in Iraq and Syria on US president Donald Trump's watch. Rather than tell a single coherent narrative, the book is broken up by subsets of the greater regional conflict. Each section has a broader overview of the questions at stake, and then what I assume to be tidied up excerpts of Cockburn's journals and dispatches as the mini-conflicts or events unfolded. It's a bit disjointed, but Cockburn's knowledge of the subject matter is so comprehensive that it makes for compelling reading. He often predicts the course that events eventually took within the journal entries. Or perhaps that's tidied up after the fact?

Regardless I found this book tremendously useful. I was covering some of these events quite closely on my Youtube channel. Two to five years later, it is very useful to look back at what happened and take stock. As one example, I had completely failed to connect the dots on what a colossal blow the 2018-2019 period was for Kurdish aspirations in both Iraq and Syria. An over-ambitious stab at independence caused the Iraqi Kurds to lose ground they had held, not just since the rise of the Islamic State in 2014, but since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. I was more aware of the attacks Kurds had suffered in Turkey and Syria, but I hadn't really put the whole story together in my head quite as forcefully as Cockburn does here. I'm a bit of an advocate for Turkey in this conflict, so am unaccustomed to seeing the Kurds in quite this light. The book also provides some decent summing up of Iraq's politics during this period, something else I was missing.

This book was most important for me in emphasizing, not just that the US taking of Mosul and Raqqa was as horrible as anything that Assad was doing, I already knew that, but also that the Turks had committed large scale ethnic cleansing in Afrin and Rojava as well. I have tended to gloss over that in my coverage thus far, and I should correct it. What a nasty, nasty war the Obama administration launched. I get the sense that Cockburn is much more partial to the Kurds than I am, but even he has trouble blaming Trump for wanting to get out of Syria. He, as do all sentient humans, is appalled by how poorly executed Trump's policies were, but he knows that the US needs to leave.

Cockburn does a great job of centering just how strange the situation was from ca. 2012-2018. Not just the two Kurdish states, but the Islamic State itself were similar in odd ways. None had official, recognized status as independent states, and all three wanted it. By 2019 they were all sorely disappointed. I am sympathetic to the author and his team. It seems like they were close to publishing multiple times, before Trump did something that set them back to square one, with the last being the assassination of the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in the beginning of 2020. It's an odd book, but it functions well as a record of these miserable years.

[Rohan Crickmar · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first I was a little put off by the tone of Cockburn's otherwise highly readable account of the follies of Iraq and Syria over the last 5 years. There is always something a little off in reading any British / American account of foreign policy ventures in the Middle East - however, learned and experienced the journalist / historian may be. Yet what starts of as a potentially toxic old imperial view of realpolitik, increasingly becomes a highly convincing and insightful account of the myriad conflicts of culture and history that frequently intersect around global power plays in the Middle East.

Cockburn's approach is to contextualise real-time foreign reporting on Syria, Iraq, Isis, Iran and the Kurds, with his own measured and left-leaning assessments of what each staging point of the conflicts mean for US, Turkish, Iranian, Saudi and Russian interests. At one point in the discussion of Syria he drops the horrendous statistic that 6million people have left Syria since the start of the conflict and a further 6million have been internally displaced. Those numbers are sobering in their sheer enormity. The reporting that he gives from Raqqa embeds the reader in the heart of a terrible siege that went much under-reported. The plight of the Kurds threads its way through the book as a particularly painful and elegiac counterpoint to all of this. The successive power plays of Russia, Iran and Turkey after so much of the Isis horrors had been cleared up by Kurdish troops, effectively leaves Syria and Iraq carved up among those three powers and the remnants of State governance. It is noteworthy that Cockburn doesn't rush to easy and crude judgement of Trump as a foreign strategist - even demonstrating that some of his policy around withdrawal was actually spot on. However, the US are very much the losers in Cockburn's eyes and it is a fitting coda that he brings in the hubristic failures of British imperialism in Iraq during WWI as an all too eerie echo of the decline that may well be about to befall the premiere 'super power' of the last 70 years.

Required reading for anyone interested in getting a quick survey of the intricacies of a region that is still unfortunately the playground of other powers and their vested interests.

[Aamer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book from one of, if not the, best journalists covering the Middle East. Patrick Cockburn has never failed to cover Middle Eastern affairs with a tenacity and courage that is sadly all too rare in the field. Unlike the frauds and grifters at the NYT, Cockburn devotes his energy into covering the wars in Syria and Iraq on the ground, as they happen.

It is a telling sign when reading articles in the press with bylines from Beirut or Istanbul. Cockburn however wrote this book following extensive trips across Iraq and Syria, from Baghdad up to Kirkuk and across to Raqqa. Patrick also spoke to local Syrians and Iraqis as people, equals with dignity befitting their humanity, not as exhibits at a zoo (looking at you Thomas Friedman).

For anyone interested in the Middle East, I cannot recommnend this book, and Patrick Cockburn's work in general, enough.

[Matt Fuller · Rating 2 out of 5]

basically just a collection of newspaper columns so very quickly out of date

[Juan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to this on audiobook and learned that, mercifully, the “ck” in the author’s last name is silent(?). This will definitely make it easier to discuss his books in my classes.

I loved his last book, *Age of jihad* and have used it in my classes. I was also more familiar with The time period that that book covers — starting with the us invasion and onto the emergence of Isis — than the period covered here. That might be one reason why I didn’t enjoy it as much.

The other reason is that Cockburn’s ideological viewpoint — anti-imperial, reminiscent of the views you get from the intercept, radio war nerd, that crowd — was less heavy in the first than in this one. That’s probably because the anti-imperial take on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are pretty vanilla, closer to the norm. But with the war in Syria, the anti-imperial crowd went off in weird directions, taking the “if a country / group confronts the USA / west then that’s anti-imperial and therefore good” to incredible conclusions.

Chapter 3 was probably my favorite. It covers Al Baghdadi’s disastrous rule over ISIS from 2014 onwards. It’s an interesting case study of ideology → suboptimal behavior: at first, the Kurds stay neutral on ISIS, using the jihadis conflict with central gov’t as opportunity to grow Kurdish holdings. But ISIS attacks Kurds in Syria, turning them against ISIS and ultimately linking them to the US. This was seemingly done because al-Bhagdadi viewed everyone as an enemy, at least partially on religious / sectarian grounds.

Other notes: the format of his books is interesting. There’s parts that are pure war diary / war correspondent (and these are a treasure) and usually the leading chunk of each section is cockburns post-hoc analysis. A funny thing about reading this book now is that cockburns intense conviction that the us and their allies are on a fools errand, that Assad would not fall to some ragtag jihadis, looks silly now that we know he does in fact fall to such a group. The future is hard to predict

[Brett Warnke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cockburn's work, like his memoir about his son or the bungled occupation of Iraq were written with clarity and hard realities for the reader to face. Can imperial powers use their power effectively? If so, how? What is a way out of disaster? Cockburn has few easy answers in the Middle East and demands we see, like Phil Klay's "Redeployment" book of short stories, the corruptions and absurdities along the way. Cockburn's recent books like "Age of Jihad" and "War in the Age of Trump" are comprised of journals, notes and thoughts while traveling the Middle East in a time of war. These are articles written by a man on the move. Cockburn is the perfect foreign correspondent: a skeptic, weathered by wars who has seen it all. The son of a Communist, the brother of two radical journalist brothers, Cockburn is less strident and irascible and loquacious than Robert Fisk. Instead, Cockburn's writing is sharp, critical, forever skeptical about "change." I found myself sometimes wishing he had the polish of a Hitchens or his brother Alexander, but when I go back to those authors I find many of their gripes airy and stylish but lacking in the real things I want to know about other settings--the stink of an alley, political power centers, a paragraph without filigreed phrases made only for themselves. I find myself loving Patrick Cockburn's work because he doesn't really care what you think of what he's writing. Like Orwell, he won't ignore a gift of phrase, he's a skilled and excellent writer, but he is writing to be clearly understood. He is always on the side of the victims, a skeptic of all of the means we maintain our illusions: our indifference, our empire, and cynical "Realism." Read everything Cockburn writes, like Robert Fisk, he is a master.

[Chase Metcalf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read and at times interesting look at complexities of Middle East and the conflicts of the last five years. Examining the major actors and the importance of understanding the biases in play the author warns readers to be skeptical of surface level answers or appearances. As a lifelong journalist a chapter of the book is spent highlighting the importance of media reporting while pointing to the many challenges that increasingly limit fair and professional reporting of on the ground events. Having been involved in, or having studied, many or all of the events the author describes I believe this book is worth reading for the average American. That said the author does not include footnotes and sources limiting the readers ability to fact check or dig deeper into the multitude of assertions the author makes throughout.

[Begum Zorlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book posses a lot of reflections from the field, it touches upon multiple dynamics, and the author makes the voice of the unheard visible.

The book also provides a review of the context, sections on Turkey and how the aftermath of the referendum in Northern Iraq led to losses for the Kurds. It also unpacks Turkey’s interventionist tone, negotiation and the disagreement of US elites on the Kurdish issue.

The book also has a section on the challenges of journalism and tells a lot about how common citizens related to the process of the rise and fall into of ISIS.

The chapters did not always flow well but it is definitely a good read for those who are interested in the region and contentious politics.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book appears to be a collection of reports originally published in the London Review of Books and elsewhere by a war reporter very familiar with the complex and ever-changing politics of the Middle East in general and of Syria and Iraq in particular--so complex that I often got lost. The period covered begins with the first Iraq war and ends in 2019 but focuses on the late 2000s, during Trump's first term, when the author was present in the area. Trump's policies, if one can call them that, are characterized as incoherent.

For me, the parts of greatest interest concerned the Kurds, used and then betrayed by various actors including the U.S.A.

[Madelyn]

"He has the well-developed knack of always saying something the media cannot leave alone. An example of this is his tweeted retort this week to a claim by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon that he could 'beat' Trump in a presidential election and is tough and smarter than him. This silly boast was not much of a news story, until Trump tweeted: 'The problem with banker Jamie Dimon running for president is that he doesn't have the aptitude or "smarts" and is a poor public speaker and nervous mess—otherwise he is wonderful.' Not many politicians or journalists could put so much punching power into a single sentence." (66)

"It is always a weakness of journalists that they pretend to excavate the truth when in fact they are the conduit rather than the originator of information produced by others in their own interests. Reporters learn early that people tell them things because they are promoting some cause which might be their own career or related to bureaucratic infighting or, just possibly, hatred of lies and injustice." (155)

"...there is more at work here than 'the fog of war' that is so often conveniently blamed as the cause of misinformation. This over-used phrase exaggerates the accidental nature of the confusion and understates the extent to which propaganda, the deliberate manipulation of information, has always been a central component of warfare but never more so than at present. ... The fashion popularised by President Trump for denouncing news contrary to one's own interests as 'fake news' has heightened perception that information, true or false, is always a weapon in somebody's hands. This is correct, but this does not mean that objective truth does not exist and that it cannot be revealed by good journalism." (237)

[Valeriano Diviacchi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a conceptual analysis of how Trump used war as a political tool in comparison to other Presidents. This book is a collection of news stories written during the first Trump Presidency and compiled into this book. Cheap way to create a book, but does provide a decent chronology and description of wars fought during Trump. Writer does not seem to like Trump but honest enough to admit that Trump did not get us into another war as his predecessors did but tried to get us out of them.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Patrick is a smart Cockburn. He is also a fear monger, but that makes sense, after all, if it bleeds, it leads.

[Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very important work of journalism on the last few years of the Syrian conflict. Along with the late Robert Fisk, Cockburn is among the most valuable correspondents on the Middle East in English.

[Mason Cheatham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened on audiobook. Really good descriptions of the Syria war. Loved it

[Simon Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relentless misery and madness brilliantly explained

[Philip Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting survey of middle eastern conflicts in 2017-2020 time period. I knew almost nothing about these skirmishes before reading this. Enjoyed it.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh man DT is such a loser first pres in over a century not to successfully overthrow another country and the first to try to overthrow his own and fail at that too

[Henry Hakamaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a 3 1/2, but I'm rounding up.

In brief, an interesting look at how Iraq and Syria were unfolding during the Trump era. Comprised of some post-mortem analysis, but mostly contemporaneous "diary logs" of what was going on/being reported in real time. This provides a good temporal view of how things were unfolding (or at least, how they were appearing to unfold), I would have preferred the balance of contemporaneous to reflective analysis to have been flip-flopped. While the "in the moment" looks are interesting, more analysis of these disparate events would have helped string together a bit more of a cohesive view and narrative here.

I previously read The Rise of ISIS, which takes place immediately before this book, and found it to be a bit of a stronger work (despite being out of date after the fall of ISIS (see what I did there?)) simply because of the more in depth analysis that was carried out. Nevertheless, two books that are interesting to read in tandem.