The War So Far

The best reporting on the Iraq War over the past four years has been done by the Irish journalist Patrick Cockburn, and his 2006 book "The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq" should be required reading for anyone who sincerely wants to be well informed about the complex reality of this conflict.

What makes Cockburn's analysis particularly accurate is his familiarity with both the people, culture, and politics of the region (he's been a mideast correspondent for the Financial Times and the Independent since 1979) and the simple-mindedness and ignorance of the Bush regime's architects of the war. Cockburn sneaked across the border from Kuwait in 2003 and, completetly unembedded, covered the invasion. He wrote at the time:

[T]he civilian leadership of the Pentagon… are uniquely reckless, arrogant and ill informed about Iraq. At the end of last year [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz was happily saying that he thought the Iraqi reaction to the capture of Baghdad would be much like the entry of the U.S. Army into Paris in 1944. He also apparently believed that Ahmed Chalabi…, then as now one of the most unpopular men in Iraq, would be the Iraqi Charles de Gaulle.

These past mistakes matter because the situation in Iraq could easily become much worse. Iraqis realize that Saddam may have gone but that the United States does not have real control of the country.

And as, "The Occupation" chronicles, they never did gain control of it.

Cockburn has written a new forward to his book which will appear in the paperback version, slated for release this coming fall. This essay is reproduced in full in Tom Engelhardt's column of May 9, which ran at WorkingForChange.com and elsewhere, and is the best short synoptic history of the war -- its disastrous course and the reasons for this tragedy -- that anybody has yet produced.

Cockburn spends a lot of time in country; he's been in and out of Iraq since the conflict began, and was there for the entirety of Gulf War I. But his understanding of the intricacies of Iraqi reactions to the invasion and occupation are matched by his grasp of the simplicities of the regime which spawned the war. His new essay contains this razor-sharp observation:

America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.

At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

"The Occupation" has been nominated for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. It's already been nominated -- and won -- my personal award for the only book anyone has to read in order to know everything one needs to know about the Iraq War. And if you don't have time to read the whole book, you can get by with just the book's new forward, published in Engelhardt's column and linked above.