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The truth is that Cockburn can barely conceal his contempt for Iraq’s Arab Sunnis, whom he often lumps together in a homogeneous category ‘the Sunni’, facing a no less homogeneous ‘the Shia’. Thus, he tells us that ‘the Sunni’ are ‘unlikely to be satisfied’ with regional autonomy and a larger share of jobs and oil revenues, and would not be content with less than a ‘full counterrevolution that aims to take back power over all of Iraq’. One is left wondering how an informed author like Cockburn could attribute the fantasy of an excited fringe of Iraqi Arab Sunnis to a whole community. The fact is, however, that he seems to have taken that fantasy for a fait accompli since he asserts that, after ISIS’s offensive in Iraq, the Shia leaders have ‘not grasped that their domination over the Iraqi state… was finished’ and that ‘only a Shia rump was left’—an astonishing overstatement indeed.
Patrick Cockburn’s pro-Assad bias is also blatant in the double standard with which he judges ‘conspiracy theories’ depending on which side they emanate from. Thus, says he, ‘a conspiracy theory much favoured by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that ISIS and Assad are in league, was shown to be false as ISIS won victories on the battlefield’. But Cockburn does not tell the reader by which logic ISIS’s victories on the Syrian battlefield were in and by themselves a refutation of the claim by the Syrian opposition and Western diplomats that the Assad regime had favoured ISIS’s establishment and expansion in Syria in order to weaken and discredit the Syrian insurgency.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/03/01/three-different-takes-on-isis/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
