And the demons unloosed

An explosive book that details how millions have been killed by a series of disastrous Western interventions in West Asia, and a media’s complicity by silence

May 07, 2016 04:00 pm | Updated 05:14 pm IST

Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East; Patrick Cockburn, OR Books, $28.00/£18.00.

Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East; Patrick Cockburn, OR Books, $28.00/£18.00.

Patrick Cockburn of the Independent has worked in West Asia and North Africa for over 15 years, facing physical hardship, the continual danger of violent death, and the loss of friends in war and sectarian killing, over which he also recalls his time in Northern Ireland. He provides harrowing detail and incisive analysis of a terrible period, in which the U.S. and its allies have persistently repeated disastrous policies, leaving millions dead, wrecking country after country, and spreading lie after lie.

Cockburn starts with Afghanistan in 2001, after the September 11 attacks on the US; the U.S.-led occupiers trumpeted their success, but the Taliban had simply moved to southern Afghanistan. The occupiers failed to see that Afghan warlords change alliances ‘as swiftly as any Duke in the English Wars of the Roses’, and they failed to see that the Taliban at least ensured stability. The Taliban were back by 2006, boosted by Afghans’ hatred of the warlords and by the weakness and corruption of Hamid Karzai’s government.

As for Iraq, no tenable reason has yet been given for the illegal 2003 invasion, though Cockburn says the aim was to remove Saddam Hussein (which would itself make the invasion illegal). The claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was a blatant lie; the United Nations had eliminated Iraq’s WMDs, and a decade of U.N. sanctions driven by the U.S. and the U.K. had brought the country to its knees. Two senior U.N. officials resigned, calling the sanctions ‘genocidal’.

The invaders again thought they had won easily, but they had no further plan, and old hatreds between extremist Sunni and Shia leaders soon resurfaced; yet almost all Iraqis hated the occupiers above all else, and indiscriminate killing by foreign troops pulled outsiders in, including the al-Qaeda for the first time in Iraq. Secondly, the occupiers, thinking all Iraqi officials, including schoolteachers, were fanatical Baathists, abolished the military and most civic institutions, and a relatively stable society became a murderous sectarian hell. In the three years following Saddam’s removal, three or four thousand people, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed every month; in the 9/11 attacks, about 3,000 died. The suicide bombings have not stopped.

The post-invasion condition of the country, except possibly for Iraqi Kurdistan, was catastrophic. Tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. provided for reconstruction disappeared. Officers who had refused to fight for Saddam joined the new Sunni militias; others joined the inchoate Islamic State. The U.S. and the U.K. were hated less for the invasion than for the occupation and the brutalities they inflicted and for the civil war they had made almost inevitable.

As the body bags came back, and evidence of torture and murder by Western troops emerged, Washington and London had to withdraw. No invading country recorded Iraqi civilian deaths, which may well total over a million. The occupiers kept up the fantasies; the U.S. would not ask Iran to restrain Shia militias, and paid for former al-Qaeda members’ help against the local Shia. Yet a Shia alliance won the 2005 election; Nouri al-Maliki’s mainly Shia party won in 2006 and again thereafter. Washington had to accept Iran’s influence on Iraq’s Shia prime ministers, and in 2008 al-Maliki rejected the idea that U.S. troops could stay indefinitely and do anything they wanted. That gave President Barack Obama the chance to pull out.

Cockburn then looks further afield. He uttered warnings as the so-called Arab Spring started in 2011; only Tunisia has seen a second peaceful election since then. Elsewhere, the lies continued; Western governments which had oil deals with Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi knew the insurgents were ‘totally dependent’ on NATO support, but they intended solely to remove Gaddafi, who kept the country stable and used oil money to ensure that Libya’s annual per capita income of $12,000 was the highest in Africa.

Again the U.N. was traduced; Russia and China were persuaded to abstain when a Libyan no-fly zone was approved. That meant nearly 7,500 NATO air attacks as Libya imploded and tribal militias went berserk. As British forces in southern Iraq had done, the purported Libyan government took militias into the police and military, which made things worse. Amnesty International has also exposed Western claims of Gaddafi-inspired mass killings as lies.

The consequences have been global. Russia and China, livid over the U.N. episode, blocked U.N. military intervention in Syria; after Iraq, the Western public will not brook ground intervention. Meanwhile, weapons from Libya flood in to Islamist terror groups in West Africa, and in Syria, Western governments find themselves in effect on the same side as the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic State (IS) — five different conflicts are occurring there, including a new Cold War. Four million have fled the country; the death toll is over a quarter of a million, and atrocities continue on all sides. Some groups have rounded up children and cut their throats. President Bashar al-Assad still rules, years after Western leaders said he would be gone in weeks. Unlike Gaddafi, Assad has powerful associates.

Cockburn is sharp about Western journalists who think free expression and honest elections will solve every problem; he adds that the Western media bear a responsibility for seeing Libya as a simple clash between good and evil and then going silent when the Libyan state collapsed. Over Syria, Cockburn names the BBC and al Jazeera as two of many media bodies that have uncritically reported opposition denials of atrocities. The media, moreover, has generally avoided reporting repeated Western policy disasters.

Yemen, the poorest state in the region, was the only one where a long-established dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, went quietly – but a terrible civil war continues. The new president, Mansour Hadi, has fled to Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, al-Qaeda has long had a Yemeni presence; Washington’s 2009 deployment of troops showed how easily al-Qaeda (by its own admission) provokes the U.S. into exaggerated responses. Washington cannot then admit misjudgment and failure; al-Qaeda now runs a mini-state in Yemen.

Of course, the region’s own powers are deeply involved. American anger that Qatar and Turkey allowed funding to go to Syrian militants meant Saudi Arabia took over as the rebels’ main funder; Cockburn says Riyadh seems to dislike IS more for its independence from Saudi Arabia than for anything else. Since then, IS has taken a quarter of Iraq and a third of Syria, including oil fields and refineries. The U.S. and the U.K. have had virtually no domestic criticism for policies that could hardly have turned out worse.

Cockburn fears that dividing the region will repeat the horrors of Partition, and very recently he wrote that the U.S. and its allies set their Saudi Arabian and Gulf alliances above combating terrorism. Bahrain’s ruling al-Khalifa family crush dissent, but U.S. threats to remove the Fifth Fleet are ‘empty’.

Cockburn does not go into the reasons why the U.S and its allies have kept repeating disastrous and destructive policies, but the American journalist Kurt Eichenwald noted in his book 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars (Simon & Schuster/ Touchstone 2012) that shortly after the attacks on Afghanistan started, a general with the Joint Chiefs of Staff picked up a memo from the office of the Secretary of Defense (then Donald Rumsfeld) and told his visitor, retired general Wesley Clark, that the U.S. was going to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years – [Afghanistan], Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Clark told his host not to show him the memo.

Eichenwald also notes that in 2001, the then Gaddafi aide Moussa Koussa told the CIA’s Ben Bonk, in the London home of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, ‘You know, of course, that your biggest problem is the Saudis and what they’re doing with the spread of their philosophy.’ For Cockburn, the demons released in the Middle East are now unstoppable.

The writer is a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

Chaos & Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East; Patrick Cockburn, OR Books, $28.00/£18.00

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