Book Review
By Michael F. Duggan
Patrick Cockburn, War in the Age of Trump, the Defeat of ISIS, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran (Verso, London, New York). 311 pages. $29.95
From the first paragraph it is clear why Patrick Cockburn is widely regarded to be the greatest correspondent covering the Middle East. His on-the-ground fluency with the details, the groups and players and their relative interests is superlative as is his grasp of the big picture. When reading Cockburn, you become self-conscious of just how little you know about what is really going on there. It also underscores just how bad the coverage of the region is by the corporate media.
Cockburn [KOH-burn] comes from a family of celebrated Anglo-Irish aristocrats that included Sir George Cockburn, the British admiral who was created Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for burning Washington D.C. in August 1814. His father was the communist journalist, novelist, and Spanish Civil War correspondent, Claude Cockburn. His brothers are the late gonzo mainstay of the left and editor of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn (A Colossal Wreck), and Harper’s Magazine editor, Andrew Cockburn. His niece is the actress, Olivia Wilde.
He is the author of nine books and is the recipient of the Martha Gelhorn Prize, the James Cameron Prize, the Orwell Prize, and too many other awards to list here.
The book is a collection of essays—a dispatches—from the Middle East from 2016 to 2019. It covers the war in Syria, the sieges of Mosul and Raqqa, the Turkish offensive against the Kurdish enclave of Afrin, the worsening relations between the United States and Iran, the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, the abandoning of the Kurds by the United States, “the rise and fall of the de facto Kurdish sates in Iraq and Syria and the final elimination of the self-declared ISIS caliphate, which culminated in death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Cockburn also shows how local players are proxies for great powers. He destroys the illusion that the impulsive and erratic polices of the 45th President of the United States in the region—ostensibly flowing from a revitalized “America first” sense of isolationism—were less problematic than those of previous American leaders. Although each of the book’s ten parts begins with an introduction, each dispatch is a standalone piece grouped by events and the reader jumps into each without additional preparatory context. The writer assumes the reader to have some fluency with the events he describes. It is not a book for beginners.
As a friend of mine observed, where the late Robert Fisk was “hot” in his dispatches from the region, Cockburn is cool, analytical, detached. His writing comes off as neutral—like Hemingway, in a sense—painting a detailed picture by describing events in detail and letting the reader come to his conclusions that are anything but neutral in siding with the truth. On his approach, he writes:
“As in a previous volume, I look at events from two angles. One is contemporary description using writings and diaries I produced at the time; the other is retrospective explanation and analysis from the perspective of today. Both have their advantages: it is important to know how events looked like when they were still happening, but also to see retrospectively ‘how things panned out’ and what was their true significance.”
On the difficulties of covering wars, he writes:
“War reporting is easy to do but difficult to do well. It faces many of the difficulties of peacetime reporting, but in a more acute—thought more revealing—form. No one taking part in an armed conflict has an incentive to tell the whole truth and every reason to say only what benefits their side. This is true of all journalism, but in times of military conflict, the propaganda effort is at its most intense and is aided by the chaos of war, which hobbles anybody searching for the truth about what is really happening.”
The book covers a lot of ground in detail, but for me a powerful overarching theme is that America’s post-September 11 wars of choice have been especially pernicious in that, after years of death and destruction in already unstable regions, they eventually create no-win choices between cutting one’s losses in defeat or else delaying defeat with continuing losses. From a policy perspective, the only thing worse than abandoning allies in the never-ending wars of the Middle East, is staying. The problem is that when the U.S. pulls out of a fight (whether it is in Iraq, the abandonment of the Syrian Kurds, and now the withdrawal from Afghanistan), it necessarily means leaving allies who risked everything. The result is that the United States has garnered a reputation for being a bad friend. As Cockburn observes, there is a “saying spreading across the Middle East” that goes: “[n]ever go into a well with an American rope.”
The book also underscores the apocalyptic dangers of intervening in regions with long histories (and equally long historical memory) and enormous sectarian ethnic and religious complexities at the urging of planners with little or no intimate understanding of the region, simplistic goals, and eschatological ideologies, like neo-conservatism.
As my friend, David Isenbergh observes, a failed policy is one where eventually no good options remain. Under this criterion, the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and the abandoning of the Kurds are paragon examples of policy failure. In exposing the “no good options” situation of how post-2001 U.S, policies in the region devolved during 2016-19, Cockburn frames the dilemma for those of us who opposed these wars from the start: since withdrawal is a lesser of evils, how do you minimize the leaving of allies in the field, a tidal wave issue now mounting as the U.S. pulls out of Afghanistan. If there is a point that those favoring withdrawal from the endless wars (e.g. Andrew Bacevich and the Quincy Institute) and Cockburn could agree on, it is not to get into these wars to begin with.
Cockburn is a writer of the first order, but this is not an easy book for the causal reader. It is so laden with important details that it requires the reader’s full attention. There is no index and so it is hard to skim (other than to judge from the titles and events of the book’s ten sections). None of these observations are meant to be a negative criticism, only a cautionary notice of the book’s seriousness.
Although War in the Age of Trump is a little over 300 pages, its specifics and in-depth regional intimacy make it slow going; to be honest, I am still reading it, taking it on one dispatch at a time. Anyone who wants to really know the recent history of the Middle East must take Cockburn into consideration. They must read him, but first they must work their way up to the level of this book. I only hope that I am almost there.