If ever an army could claim to possess ‘strength in numbers’, it was the Iraqi security force in June 2014. The Americans’ strategy for rebuilding the Iraqi army, after its near instantaneous dismantlement in 2003, displayed great faith in the power of big numbers to resolve a tricky situation: by the time they withdrew in 2011 they had spent £25 billion on the creation of a million man army to keep the country stable. Yet when in June 2014 the fifty thousand man garrison of Mosul found themselves besieged by thirteen hundred Islamic State militants, they were as quick to rout as Saddam’s forces in 2003. Their doing so, at the time, made no sense. It seemed like an anti-miracle: an event too fantastically dreadful to be explicable.
The purpose of Patrick Cockburn’s book, The Rise of Islamic State, is to make sense of this catastrophe as the product of American blunders, Iraqi prejudices, and the calamitous geopolitical situation in the Middle East generally. One might think his strident belief that America is partially culpable for the rise of ISIS would blur his account of it with polemic. But Cockburn’s style is not that of the highfaluting rhetorician; his prose consists almost entirely of the sober accumulation of hard facts, and these do not cast a favourable light on Washington. ‘Big numbers will solve everything’ wasn’t the only article of faith the Americans mistakenly held – big corporations too, it was insisted, should sell supplies to Iraqi commanders instead of the government giving them to them. By making Iraqi commanders responsible for purchasing their own soldiers’ supplies, Washington accidentally provided them with the opportunity to profiteer on a major scale. He writes:
“It started when the Americans told the Iraqi army to outsource food and other supplies around 2005. A battalion commander was paid for a unit of 600 soldiers, but had only 200 men under arms and pocketed the difference.”
This kleptocracy was driven by need as well as desire: until very recently officers had to pay for their commissions, the cost of which they then had to recuperate. No matter how assiduously Obama tries to disassociate ISIS from Islam, this book makes clear that the war against it was caused by faith – his own government’s faith in the private sector. Cockburn doesn’t let off the Americans easily: in his view this failing was just one of many within a disastrous foreign policy, which has stage managed the situation in Iraq to create a farce, and then a tragedy. For instance, he incorporates into the book an interview with a jihadist who rejoiced when the Americans armed the ‘moderates’ in Syria because his war band was immediately able to buy or steal them.
The attempt to write a history of the present is one especially likely to be thwarted by its author’s subjectivity, yet throughout his book Cockburn maintains a near magisterial perspective, identifying the blind spots in the Western media’s portrayal of the rise of ISIS as cogently as he provides own view. He writes that:
“[In the summer of 2014] there was an excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis.”
It is perfectly understandable why Western governments would comfort themselves with this solipsistic fiction given how rapidly the situation evolved in the second half of 2014. The best evidence for the success of Cockburn’s account of ISIS’s evolution is that his argument has not itself been made obsolete by the rapid changes in the Middle East since its publication. The Western media is still solipsistic, and this is best borne out by the recently concluded siege of Kobane. A battle of little strategic importance, it was portrayed to be crucial not only because, unlike most of the fighting, it could be easily reported on by Western journalists, but because it provided hard, if misleading evidence, of the effectiveness of coalition airstrikes. The avidity with which the media reported on the fighting made the eventually Kurdish victory seem momentous. It was not, and the media saw in it what it wanted to see.
That a book so hastily written could also be so prescient shows that Cockburn is one of our sanest and most disenchanted foreign correspondents writing about the Middle East today. I started his book because I didn’t trust the news, and I finished it wishing I could, wishing Cockburn was wrong about the West’s part in the creation of Islamic State.
