Patrick Cockburn: ‘An effective terrorist attack requires the complicity of governments’

Saturday, January 24, 2015

The morning I meet foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn is, appropriately enough, one that will reverberate in world politics for some time to come. As I step off the train in Canterbury, news has just broken of murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Such is the seriousness of the attack, the location and the nature of the target, it’s immediately clear millions will be drawn into the drama: western governments and their Middle Eastern counterparts, Muslims living unexceptional lives and, indeed, journalists everywhere. A web of reaction and counterreaction, of just the kind Cockburn has spent his life examining, will extend from Washington to Lahore.

Events are still unfolding as I reach his ancient house, half a mile or so from the cathedral, and I explain breathlessly what has happened. “Let’s watch the news for five minutes, and then we’ll talk,” he suggests, wondering whether Sky or the BBC will be better, and settling on the latter. “Of course, there’s often very little to say at times like this, so you end up with a certain amount of speculation.” We watch in silence as video of what appears to be a shootout on a Parisian street is played over and over again. Cockburn sits impassively, absorbing what information there is, then asks me to press the mute button. He calls the newsdesk at the Independent and leaves a message offering to weigh in as needed, particularly if it emerges that there are links with Isis, the subject of his latest book.

My head is swimming, but Cockburn is matter-of-fact. This is, after all, the grim stuff of his trade, albeit a little closer to home than usual. He has reported from the Middle East, with interludes in Moscow and Washington, for 40-odd years. He witnessed the civil war in Lebanon, the first and second Gulf wars, the Afghan war and, more recently, Syria’s descent into bloody chaos. His work includes in-depth studies of Saddam Hussein and Muqtada al-Sadr, and of the US occupation of Iraq. His reporting has earned him the Martha Gellhorn and James Cameron prizes, among others. Quick to size things up, to put them in context, he is precise, methodical, almost detached. I wonder out loud whether the attack on Charlie Hebdo will be treated as a question of law enforcement, rather than an existential challenge to be met with an overwhelming political response. Perhaps it’s a forlorn hope? “It is forlorn,” he says. “Actually this sort of thing is geared towards making sure it’s forlorn. To have an effective terrorist attack, you require the complicity of governments – through creating an overreaction, the collective punishment of communities that are deemed to be responsible, torture, wars and so on. This is true whether it’s the American government after 9/11, or the tsarist government at the end of the 19th century.”

That flash of history – Russian history, no less – reminds us of Cockburn’s roots in a tradition of learned but politically engaged reporting. His father, Claud, was a foreign correspondent for the Times before leaving to found the Week, an anti-fascist newsletter that ran from 1933-41. He was a communist who fought in the Spanish civil war, and sent dispatches to the Daily Worker back in London.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jan/24/patrick-cockburn-the-rise-of-the-islamic-state-books-interview-isis