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The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East, by Patrick Cockburn. London and New York: Verso, 2016. 464 pages. $29.95.
Reviewed by Michael Christopher Low
Patrick Cockburn, the much-acclaimed Middle East correspondent for the British online newspaper, The Independent, is among the most seasoned veterans of the region and its conflicts. Cockburn has been covering the region since the Lebanese Civil War in the 1970s, but he has spent much of the last decade and a half documenting the disastrous consequences of American and European foreign interventions in the greater Middle East following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. In this volume, he offers up what might be best described as a collection of "greatest hits," taking readers on an episodic journey from Afghanistan and Iraq to the "Arab Spring" in Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen, culminating with the Syrian Civil War and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.
Cockburn argues that while "the roots of these conflicts are longstanding," spasms of violence "have become more frequent and destructive since 2001." As he explains, the planes crashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 acted as
the starting pistol for a series of calamitous events which destroyed the old status quo. The attack provoked - as it was probably intended to do - US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, actions which transformed the political, sectarian, and ethnic landscape of the region and released forces, the power of which went beyond anything imagined at the time (p. 2).
As Cockburn acknowledges, there were already fault lines and fissures...