Counterterrorism’s Counternarrative
By Nehal Amer
Sobering dispatches make the case that “the demons unleashed by the age of chaos and war in the Middle East have become an unstoppable force”
The legacies and consequences of U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East have left many Americans wary of involvement in the region. With the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the emergence of the Islamic State (IS), and multiple state collapses in the region, it’s not difficult to see why. Today the Middle East is embroiled in a prolonged geopolitical conflict involving a multitude of states — the U.S. and Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Turkey, and other regional powers and nonstate actors. The U.S. is now involved in at least six conflicts in Muslim-majority countries in addition to the current escalation of tensions with Iran.
That is precisely why Patrick Cockburn’s The Age of Jihad is a must-read for policymakers and the American public. Cockburn began covering the region in the early 1980s during the Lebanese civil war, and has since then covered the Arab region, Afghanistan, and Chechnya as foreign correspondent for the Independent. The Age of Jihad, originally published as Chaos and Caliphate, consists of Cockburn’s journalistic dispatches and subsequent analyses. It charts the role Western powers have played in the region from 2001 to the present, documenting the ramifications of American and European interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the aftermath of the Arab uprisings.
In a 2016 interview with Vice Cockburn explains that his book is meant to elucidate the drivers of state collapse in the region. At the heart of it all, Cockburn argues, is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “It is a failure of historic proportions,” he told Counterpunch at the time. “The aim of the war in Iraq was to establish the U.S. as the world superpower which could act unilaterally, virtually without allies inside or outside Iraq.” He insists it is impossible to explain the Syrian conflict, IS, or the NATO-led intervention in Libya without addressing the Iraq War and its destabilizing effects on the region as well as the war’s potency as a spur to terrorists acting abroad.
Reflecting back on the pre-Iraq War era, Cockburn spends the first part of his book offering insights into the international sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s. He somberly recounts that while much of the world ignored the United Nations sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, “Iraqis saw their social and economic standards fall from the same level as Greece to those of Mali.” Indeed, sanctions killed more Iraqis than did the subsequent military occupation.
The dispatches contain a series of revelatory pieces of information from the Iraq War that illustrate the far-reaching and lasting impact the occupation had on the region. Cockburn reveals that many who enlisted in Al-Sahwa, an anti–al Qaeda Sunni militia armed and paid for by the U.S. in 2007, had previously belonged to al Qaeda. Moreover, he reveals little-known information about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of IS’s predecessor al Qaeda in Iraq, and the ways in which American forces exaggerated his role to craft a narrative about the conflict. Al-Zarqawi, he explains, “was an obscure figure until Colin Powell made him famous” to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Cockburn identified the emergence of IS much earlier than most journalists and policymakers, and he frequently foresaw — accurately — how interventions in the region would play out. A year before IS occupied Mosul in 2014, he predicted the rise of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Throughout his account, Cockburn focuses on the role of sectarian identity in the Middle East. Still, he is careful to explain that these rifts were intensely exacerbated by foreign occupation, drawing Iran and Saudi Arabia into an escalating series of proxy wars. However, the focus on sectarianism and militant jihadism in the book often overshadows other important fault lines in the region, including class, social movements, and the roots of sectarianization beyond Iraq. There is a flip side that frequently gets lost in the discussion. For example, progressive movements in the region are inadequately addressed in The Age of Jihad, particularly in its coverage of the Arab uprisings.
The impact of foreign intervention spread well beyond the exacerbation of sectarian fault lines and militant jihadism, but can also be traced on existing social movements and local politics. For one, there is a rich conversation on the adverse impact of U.S. intervention on women’s rights movements in the Middle East and Afghanistan. See such important books as Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out by Malalai Joya and What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq by Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt. If we do not speak honestly about what else is happening in the region and the impact of these policies on social movements, class, and local politics, then we risk falling into the same Orientalist tropes with which the region is too often characterized.
The Age of Jihad contains valuable lessons for those wishing to learn from the history and consequences of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Cockburn often refers to the failures of American foreign policy and the country’s disastrous intervention as “mistakes” and “miscalculations,” perhaps suggesting a sense of hopefulness about the potential for future policymakers to learn from the mistakes of the past. He is one of a handful of journalists who have the ears of policymakers. In an email to Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal said that Cockburn “was almost always correct on Iraq.” However, the book’s final line reminds readers that the damage and destruction wreaked on the region is profound: “The demons released by this age of chaos and war in the Middle East have become an unstoppable force.” Cockburn’s account serves as a much-needed lesson to policymakers and a sobering chronicle for American audiences.
Patrick Cockburn | The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East | Verso | 449 pp. | 2016 | ISBN: 978–1–78478–449–2 | More about this book
