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Watch the full event here.

“This is the last issue Biden’s administration wants to spend time thinking about, knowing that its greatest efforts are likely to produce nothing but political self-harm.”

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“Two fervent Donald Trump supporters die and go to heaven. Soon after their arrival they meet God. ‘Please can you tell us,’ they ask him, ‘did President Trump really win the presidential election or did he lose it because of fraud?’

‘I can definitively tell you that Joe Biden won the presidency fairly by 306 to 232 votes in the electoral college and there was absolutely no fraud,’ responds the Almighty. The Trump supporters look at him suspiciously for a moment before one turns to the other and whispers: ‘I can see that the conspiracy goes even higher than we thought.'”

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The pandemic is accelerating the shift of power to nation states and an Asia-centred world, writes Patrick Cockburn.

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The Democrats’ loathing for Trump blinded them to his political skills, which almost kept him in the White House

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The toxic Trump era is unfortunately not an aberration and is all too well rooted in American history

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New restrictions will not stop the epidemic because most people do not comply with the old ones

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Idlib is one of the last remaining opposition strongholds in Syria

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Covid-19 is only one of multiple threats to life and livelihoods that confront Iraqis, writes Patrick Cockburn.

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Soaked in blood, sectarian strife & fanaticism, mired in Great Power hypocrisy & betrayal, this may not be everyone’s idea of feelgood lockdown literature but for anyone interested in the Middle East it is essential reading.

Read the full review (with subscription) here.

There is much of interest to peace activists in the book. For example, those who wonder if Western air strikes were the only option for dealing with ISIS will be interested to read that NATO member Turkey allowed around 40,000 ISIS fighters to cross its border into ISIS territory.

Cockburn is also keen to highlight the skewed, propagandistic nature of much mainstream news reporting of the wars, noting ‘copious media coverage of civilian casualties caused by Syrian and Russian airstrikes’ in Aleppo and Ghouta (both in Syria).

Read the full review here.

The latest book from veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn presents a detailed analysis of key events in the Middle East since Trump’s election.The major themes are the ever-deepening confrontation between the US and Iran, the defeat of Isis in Iraq and Syria and the incredibly complex relationship between the different Kurdish factions and the US.

Cockburn’s rare quality as a journalist is his insistence on engaging in actual journalism by doing the hard work of uncovering evidence and trying to make sense of contrasting narratives, as opposed to simply picking up on the Tweets and press releases of a few “reliable” (pro-Western) sources, as is the way of so many.

Read the full review here.

The award-winning British journalist analyzes and criticizes Donald Trump’s handling of wars in the Middle East and Asia.

Independent Middle East correspondent Cockburn opens as he closes, with an account of the assassination of Iranian military strategist and supposed terrorist Qasem Soleimani, which was followed by a declaration that the Islamic State had been defeated and by the abandonment of America’s Kurdish allies in Syria. The author considers Soleimani less a threat than the administration believed, though his killing provided a convenient martyr around whom Iran could plant a flag. There’s a schizophrenia at play here; writes Cockburn, “the US has always been keen to hide the degree to which it has been Iran’s de facto partner, as well as its rival, ever since Saddam Hussein…invaded Kuwait in 1990.” Many of Trump’s moves seem calculated to improve Iran’s standing in the region: “It does not take very much to destabilize Iraq and the signs are that Trump does not care if he does.” IS seems to be flourishing, mounting attacks on peace demonstrators in Turkey, blowing up a Moscow-bound airliner, attacking a mosque in Egypt, and detonating a suicide bomb beside a Pakistani polling place—“not to mention,” adds Cockburn, “the eight killed in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge.” Cockburn gives Trump some credit for attempting to project American power less with military strength than with “commercial and economic” blandishments. He further reserves some of his critical asperity for journalists who are too willing to accept party lines, though he allows that a reporter in the field lacks the clout of the suits back home: “Usually, it is…the home office or media herd instinct that decides the story of the day.” Even so, his own reporting on the ground, interwoven into his narrative, proves the power of a well-informed and serious pen.

A well-placed critique of both an inept presidency and an uncritical media.

Read the review here.

Cockburn (The Age of Jihad), a foreign correspondent for the Independent, delivers a nuanced, deeply informed account of recent events in the Middle East. Chronicling the period from the 2016–2017 Battle of Mosul to the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Cockburn details tensions between Iran and the U.S., fallout from Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and the “rise and fall of de facto Kurdish states in Iraq and Syria,” among other inflection points. Though careful to note that the forces reshaping the Middle East are larger than any one U.S. president, Cockburn faults the Trump administration for changing policies on a whim, believing in “self-serving conspiracy theories,” and being “peculiarly ill-equipped” to deal with the complexities of the region. He also notes parallels between Trump and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including “manic sensitivity to criticism,” and takes the White House to task for failing to stop “the ethnic cleansing of Kurds by Turkey” after U.S. troops withdrew from northeastern Syria. Balancing on-the-ground reporting with big-picture analysis, Cockburn writes with deep empathy for the people whose lives have been reshaped by these events. Readers with a deep interest in the Middle East will appreciate this incisive look behind the headlines.

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Revulsion at atrocities committed is not the only reason for seeming worldwide amnesia about the eight-year conflict, Patrick Cockburn writes.

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The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.

The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.

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The US president again faces a lacklustre Democratic candidate but his real opponent is Covid-19, writes Patrick Cockburn.

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Had the German invasion of Britain gone ahead in 1940 – with Churchill deploying mustard gas – the Second World War would have taken a very different turn, writes Patrick Cockburn.

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Patrick Cockburn is an acclaimed journalist specializing in conflicts in the Middle East. He has published numerous books on Iraq and Syria, having worked as a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times from 1979 before starting with The Independent in 1990. He has received multiple prizes for his work, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009, Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year at the 2014 British Journalism Awards, and Foreign Reporter of the Year at the 2014 Press Awards.

Cockburn has just published a new book entitled War In the Age of Trump. He recently sat down with Monia Al-Haidary to discuss the US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his observations on the role of history and journalism in these long-running conflicts.

Read the interview here.

Listen to the interview here.