The Age of Jihad Quotes

“What you do to your enemies today, you will do to your friends tomorrow.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“An economic blockade may cause more deaths by a factor of a hundred, but it does so silently and behind closed doors. Its first victims are the very young, the very old and the very sick. The numbers of children dying before their first birthday increased from one in thirty when sanctions were imposed to one in eight seven years later. Many Iraqis were simply not getting enough to eat. I”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“He destroyed Iraq. When he became president in 1979 he gained total control of a country with a well-educated population, an efficient administration and extensive oil reserves. In a quarter of a century, he impoverished his people, drove many of them into exile and left the Iraqi oilfields in the hands of foreign troops.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“This book is primarily about the armed conflicts that followed 9/11, but UN sanctions may have killed more Iraqis than any of the wars that followed.”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“The career of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was very strange. He was an obscure figure until Colin Powell made him famous by denouncing him before the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. Powell claimed that Zarqawi was not only a member of al-Qa’ida but linked to Saddam Hussein’s regime. Neither allegation was true, but together they met the political need to pretend that the invasion of Iraq was part of the war on terror. The”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“The aim of the war in Iraq was to establish the US as the world superpower which could act unilaterally, virtually without allies, inside or outside Iraq. The timing of the conflict had nothing to do with fear of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and everything to do with getting the war won in time for the run-up to next year’s Presidential election in the US. The”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East

“«Cuando Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y sus aliados invadieron Iraq en 2003 dieron comienzo a una revolución. No era esa su intención, pues su objetivo era acabar con Sadam Hussein y su régimen, y no se apercibieron de la radicalidad de lo que estaban haciendo. La invasión y ocupación del país suponía un cambio revolucionario porque ponía fin a la dominación suní, vigente sin solución de continuidad durante cientos de años bajo los otomanos, los británicos y tras la independencia. Los americanos disolvieron el Ejército y los cuerpos de seguridad, que habían sido los principales instrumentos de control suní sobre el 80 por ciento de la población, que era chií o kurda. (...) Las potencias invasoras nunca asumieron el hecho de que la identificación del nuevo gobierno post-Sadam con los americanos y con un antiguo poder imperial como Gran Bretaña lo deslegitimaba desde el primer momento a ojos de los iraquíes».”
― Patrick Cockburn, The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East