Free The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising by Patrick Cockburn Page A

the same journey in 2011, I could go no farther south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul. In Tripoli two years ago, hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gaddafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored there. In the summer of 2013, Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized as a result of a mutiny among militiamen. The Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb “from the air and the sea” the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market. Soon Zeidan himself was forced to flee the country
    Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media. They had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently to Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaus, has also dropped off the media map, although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month, mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January, the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage. In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought heroically to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.
    It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term “war reporter,” though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. Irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-and-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but only that it requires interpretation. In 2003, television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam. It also pointed to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: a year later the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.
    In one respect, war reporting is easier than other types of journalism: the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to a camera with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him knows his report will feature prominently in any newscast. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old American media adage. The drama of battle inevitably dominates the news, but is oversimplified if only part of what is happening is disclosed. These oversimplifications were especially stark and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonized first the Taliban and later Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate. They helped cast the conflict in black and white, as a struggle between good and evil, something that was particularly easy in the US amidst the hysterical atmosphere following 9/11. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition in these countries were simply ignored.
    By 2011, the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to