Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn, Baghdad correspondent (from the Red not the Green Zone) for The Independent, has penned a new introduction to his collection of essays on his 4 years of war reporting in Iraq titled: The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq.

The new introduction is up at Tomdispatch here. Read the whole thing. (Hat tip Juan Cole).

A key quote among many (my emphasis):

There was a central lesson of four years of war which Bush and Tony Blair never seemed to take on board, though it was obvious to anybody living in Iraq: the occupation was unpopular and becoming more so by the day. Anti-American guerrillas and militiamen always had enough water to swim in. The only community in Iraq that fully supported the U.S. presence was the Kurds -- and Kurdistan was not occupied. It is this lack of political support that has so far doomed all U.S. political and military actions in Iraq.

And his analysis of the surge or rather the lack of a political strategy connected to the changed tactical surge:

Could the new strategy succeed? It seemed very unlikely. The U.S. had failed to pacify Iraq between 2003 and 2007. Now, with much of the American public openly disillusioned with the war, Bush was to try for victory once again. Common sense suggested that he needed to reduce the number of America's enemies inside and outside Iraq, but his new strategy was only going to increase them. As with so many U.S. policies under Bush, the new strategy made sense in terms of American domestic politics, but in Iraq seemed a recipe for disaster.

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tags technorati : iraq