The Benefit of Hindsight

Patrick Cockburn, Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East

O/R Books, 428pp, £19.00, ISBN 9781682190289

reviewed by Dominic Davies

In the last few years, articles and books by Patrick Cockburn, which have offered keen and thoughtful accounts of political and military events in the Middle East and North Africa for a long time, have become increasingly popular. It seems this is likely due to in the rise of Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria and Iraq. His 2014 book, The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising, was the first of his several publications to enter a second print run. Unsurprisingly, it appears that people have looked to Cockburn one of the few knowledgeable commentators able to explain – and thus perhaps make less frightening – the now notoriously violent caliphate which is currently establishing itself in the region. However, whilst Cockburn’s most recent offering might sound, from its rather tacky title, Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East , like it is another book about ISIS, it is in fact much more than that.

If it garners more attention than Cockburn’s earlier writings because of the rise of Islamic State, and if, indeed, his publishers have exploited the West’s semi-morbid fascination with IS in order to sell more books, those aspects of Chaos & Caliphate actually serve as gateway hooks into an astonishingly comprehensive picture of the region that visualises places, peoples, wars and cities with a clarity that counters a weary sense in Western media coverage that the geopolitical and local forces at play in the region are somehow ‘too complex’ to be properly understood. No doubt they are complex, but the bafflement that news discussions usually induce in readers and viewers is shown by Cockburn’s writing to be as much a politically convenient obscuration than it is a documentary necessity. Chaos & Caliphate achieves this by bringing together a series of the author’s short essays, articles and informal (though edited) diary entries that combine ‘contemporary description’ with ‘retrospective explanation’, all of which were written between 2001 and 2015 – a decade-and-a-half that is described by Cockburn as an ‘era of civil wars.’ Through these, Cockburn balances local specificities with cautious generalisations and comparisons in a part of the globe where national boundaries are porous and conflicts spill over and intersect with one another in complex but comprehensible ways.

Whilst Chaos & Caliphate’s opening introduction is surprisingly brief given the fact that this is something of a doorstopper, these first few pages provide valuable insight into some of the key philosophical underpinnings of Cockburn’s journalistic practice. (Thankfully, the book is also broken up into geographically and chronologically organised sections which are accompanied by shorter regional or country-specific introductory overviews.) Here, he explains how he has always approached every news story with the delicate combination of a journalist’s hunger and a historian’s scepticism. He is aware of the value of the documentation of an individual event, whilst always cautious to situate it within a wider (geographical) and longer (temporal) view. Such a method is more easily explicated and professed than it is practiced, but Chaos & Caliphate testifies to Cockburn’s ability to nimbly plait these two perspectives together. He humanises his narratives through compelling accounts of individual experiences and deadly bomb blasts, terrifying road blockades and irrational murders, but never allows the structural and global forces implicit in all of these to slip from his analysis. This is basically to say that Cockburn never lets the US, Britain and other European powers, whose foreign policies have been so disastrous for the majority of the region’s inhabitants, off the hook. If, even in these personal diaries, he mostly avoids controversial descriptions of Western intervention as a new kind of ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’, he repeatedly compares the 21st-century occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and airstrikes in Libya and Syria with British and US imperial activities in the 20th century, from the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa to the Suez Crisis. In so doing, he implicitly suggests their neo-imperial nature and reveals the a-historical naivety of Western politicians who seem surprised when their foreign meddling is viewed as a continuation of imperial history by liberal Iraqis, revolutionary Syrians and Jihadi groups alike.

Cockburn’s journalistic philosophy is woven into Chaos & Caliphate in two ways. Every essay or diary entry is very concise, never lasting more than a few pages, and they are also dated, so that as the reader moves through the collection, one gets a snapshot of a very specific historical moment that is nevertheless built, cumulatively, into a more comprehensive picture of an ongoing conflict. Edited and compiled with hindsight, the pieces thus concede to the ‘great demand for a reporter’s output during the fighting because it is melodramatic and appeals to readers and viewers’, but also show how a ‘single-minded preoccupation with combat may be deceptive, because such exciting events are not necessarily typical; neither do they always tell one who is winning or losing the war.’ Simultaneously, each individual entry follows a compelling formula, beginning with short specific stories of no more than a few paragraphs that are gripping to read, before widening out into a broader geopolitical commentary.

If these wider insights are illuminating, it is the accounts of daily life with which each entry begins that are most interesting, as they humanise a region that has systematically been reduced, both literally and journalistically, to rubble. Because of the emphasis on ‘caliphate’ and ‘jihadis’ implied by the title, there is something about the gradual, chronological developments of the region as they are told through these momentary snapshots that invites a reading informed by the benefit of hindsight – progressing through these accounts of the various catastrophic Western interventions and the subsequent failure of the US, Britain and others to replace their destruction of existing regimes with anything infrastructurally or politically robust, it is tempting to view the rise of radical Islamist groups such as ISIS as inevitable. But Cockburn is wise to this retrospection as well; though he has clearly edited his diary entries to make them more readable and polished, he retains the speculations that he entertained at the specific historical moment in which they were written, and through these repeatedly points to what the West could (not) have been doing at the time, rather than what it could (not) have done in the past, to create more stability in the region.

Furthermore, because Cockburn is a journalist, he always writes with an eye on international media coverage of the region, and is thus perfectly positioned to comment on its selectivity and mistruths. For example, the inclusion of a long section on Libya re-situates that country in the midst of these other foreign interventions, re-emphasising that this was yet another European-led, and largely catastrophic, imperial venture, but that, because of Obama’s and Cameron’s rhetoric of success and subsequently swift withdrawal, has largely been forgotten by media outlets in the West. Yemen and Bahrain, too, which received sporadic coverage before being dropped by the wayside in the West’s narrative of the region, are given their own sections. But because these are diaries and other writings, and not simply straightforward journalism, they also take the time to paint a picture of these countries that is omitted from the Western media even when they do make the headlines. Whilst the topics of Cockburn’s writings about Bahrain and Yemen are still ultimately about war and politics, he takes valuable moments simply, for example, to describe the landscape of these countries. He realises that most of his readers won’t in fact know what Yemen actually looks like, with its ‘cut-stone villages perched on mountain tops on the sides of which are cut hundreds of terraces, making the county look like an exaggerated Tuscan landscape.’ In this way he not only corrects the conspicuous omissions of the Western media’s coverage of conflict, but also its obsessive construction of the Middle East as a region of turmoil and savagery that plays so conveniently – and lazily – into centuries-old orientalist tropes.

The only reservation that might be advanced about Cockburn’s analysis of the Middle East and North Africa during this time is what appears to be an extremely pessimistic take on the Arab uprisings of 2011, the period that has since become known as the ‘Arab Spring’. Cockburn takes an almost entirely negative view of these uprisings, which, though he acknowledges were informed by genuine, civilian-led movements that wanted to replace elite dictatorships with democratic governments, have led ultimately to a surge in violence, conflict and war. For Cockburn, the momentary mobilisation for democratic freedoms that were, perhaps unsurprisingly, celebrated unconditionally in the West, is just one very temporary narrative in a much bigger story that has not ended well. Of course, it is hard to argue with him from the perspective of 2016, but given that he does not allow the benefit of hindsight to shape his other writings, it is difficult not to view his scepticism of the Arab Spring movements as retrospectively imposed. However, this in fact might simply be testament to the selectivity and ignorance of other journalistic coverage of the region; after all, Cockburn was unfortunately, but definitely, correct in 2011, when he predicted that the momentary victories of that year’s revolutionary activities would lead only to more war and increasing violence. If his dismissal of the Arab Spring seems to ring with a certain conservatism that, on occasion, borders on nostalgia for the stability of, say, the Gaddafi regime in Libya, after soaking up decades of Cockburn’s travels through and writings about conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East, readers will have to admit that there is no one better placed to offer an analysis of contemporary events in this part of the world. If politicians genuinely want to ‘defeat ISIS’ and ‘create stability’ in countries such as Iraq and Syria, then Chaos & Caliphate is evidence enough that they must begin to pay some serious attention to commentators such as Cockburn.




Dominic Davies is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. His first monograph, Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature (1880-1930), will be published by Peter Lang in 2017.