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

journalists in Baghdad and Kabul, if not necessarily to their editors in London and New York. But by then the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different, though equally potent, form of naïveté. A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the internet, traditional forms of repression—censorship, imprisonment, torture, and execution—could no longer secure a police state’s power; they might even be counterproductive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs and mobile phones; YouTube provided the means to expose, in the most graphic and immediate way, the crimes and violence of security forces.
    In March 2011, mass arrests and torture effortlessly crushed the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Innovations in information technology may have changed the odds marginally in favor of the opposition, but not enough to prevent counterrevolution, as the military coup in Egypt on July 3, 2013 underscored. The initial success of street demonstrations led to over-confidence and excessive reliance on spontaneous action; the need for leadership, organization, unity, and policies that amounted to more than a vague humanitarian agenda all went by the wayside. History, including the histories of their own countries, had little to teach this generation of radicals and would-be revolutionaries. They drew no lessons from what had happened when Nasser seized power in Egypt in 1952, and didn’t ask whether the Arab uprisings of 2011 might have parallels with the European revolutions of 1848, easy victories that were swiftly reversed. Many members of the intelligentsia in Libya and Syria seemed to live and think within the echo chamber of the internet. Few expressed practical ideas about the way forward.
    Conviction that a toxic government is the root of all evil is the public position of most oppositions, but it is dangerous to trust one’s own propaganda. The Iraqi opposition genuinely believed that Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic problems stemmed from Saddam and that once he was gone all would be well. The opposition in Libya and Syria believed that the regimes of Gaddafi and Assad were so demonstrably bad that it was counterrevolutionary to question whether what came after them would be better. Foreign reporters have by and large shared these opinions. I recall mentioning some of the failings of the Libyan militiamen to a Western journalist: “Just remember who the good guys are,” she replied reprovingly.
    Good guys they may have been, but there was something troubling about the ease with which oppositionists provided media-friendly locations, whether in Tahrir Square or at the frontlines in Libya. Protesters in Benghazi would hold up placards written in perfect English, which they often could not read themselves, for the benefit of television viewers. At Ajdabiya, two hours’ drive along the main coast road south of Benghazi, foreign journalists often outnumbered opposition fighters, and cameramen had to maneuver their correspondents so the predominance of the press wasn’t evident to their audience. The main danger there was being run over by a pickup truck fitted with a heavy machine gun: the drivers often panicked when a shell exploded in the distance. The Libyan militiamen were effective when they were fighting for their own cities and towns, but without an air umbrella they wouldn’t have lasted more than a few weeks. Media focus on colorful skirmishes diverted attention from the central fact that Gaddafi was overthrown by military intervention on the part of the US, Britain, and France.
    There is nothing surprising about all this. Public appearances by Western leaders with smiling children or cheering soldiers are invariably contrived to show them in a