Customer Reviews

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Patrick Cockburn was deeply familiar with Iraq for twenty-five years before the US invasion and occupation, and his coverage of the first three years of the war is perhaps the most informed and passionate reporting to come out of Iraq. The Occupation combines a journalistic immediacy with a long view of the Iraq War and its place in US history, and Cockburn lays out the case that the current disaster was not just a matter of bad luck or bad planning, but should have been obvious before the war began.

There is a very human sensibility to the book, as Cockburn made every effort in his time in Iraq to get to know and talk to ordinary Iraqis as well as major figures. He is constantly able to provide an immediate and compelling illustration of the large-scale events going on, and his book manages to be both personal account and broad history.

The picture Cockburn paints is not one friendly to the US or British governments; he shows that the occupation was handled without even a modicum of expertise in the region among military or civilian leadership, especially the Coalition Provisional Authority. He shows how through a series of miscalculations, poor communication and outright blunders, the occupying army has managed to turn the bulk of Iraqis against it, and how all the large set-piece battles and elections only deepened the resistance and the growing civil war. He also shows that the unrealistic Pollyannaish view that the US wanted to paint of Iraq in 2003-2004 actually exacerbated the situation, primarily because it was actually believed by some commanders.

There is no "solution" for the US to win in Iraq in The Occupation, because Cockburn makes it clear that winning is simply impossible. Although it never says as much, the book's straightforward account is a compelling case for withdrawal. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand what the forces of the Iraq War are, or what its human face looks like.

Of the twenty or so books that are coming out every season now on the experiences in Iraq, this one stands out: it is dense, compact, to the point, no fluff, very little dialog. In 213 pages, felt I learned more about it than those 800 page bricks that are not in the New Books section of your neighborhood pub library. Warning to hollywood moviemakers: there are no heroes in this book, so don't look in it for a possible film adaptation.

Patrick Cockburn, the Independent's Middle East correspondent, has written a vivid first-hand account of the US-British occupation of Iraq. He notes of the war's prelude, the 1990s sanctions on Iraq, "Imposing sanctions on all ordinary Iraqis was a cruel collective punishment, one of the great man-made disasters of the last century."

He shows that opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq radicalized most of the suicide bombers in Iraq. An Israeli study also concluded that almost all the foreign fighters in Iraq had been radicalized by the invasion. A Saudi investigation showed that few suicide bombers had any contact with al Qaeda before 2003.

Cockburn details the brutalities of the occupation, the imperial arrogance, the use of mercenaries, the deepening religious divisions, the vile sectarian killings, the lawlessness and insecurity, the rampant corruption and the economic chaos (oil, electricity, water and sewerage are all still worse than they were pre-war). All lead to growing national resistance.

The Bush administration claimed that toppling Saddam would stabilise the Middle East. Instead the invasion and occupation have destabilised all the region's countries. The war has destroyed Iraq, worsened the prospects of peace and justice for the Palestinian people and strengthened the al Qaeda terrorists.

The war was `a terrible mistake', as the Royal Institute for International Affairs recently noted. US General William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency, called the war `the greatest strategic disaster in American history'. We need our troops back home, to defend our borders against the terrorists, people-smugglers and drug-runners generated by the Labour government's criminal wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Very well written, detailed and inciteful, highly recommended for anyone who wants more than the "embedded" corporate media perspective.

This is a really first rate piece of journalism and beautifully written. Cockburn, like very few Western journalists, gets out into life as it truly is for ordinary Iraqis, not as it is portrayed from the Green Zone or sycophantic pro-American exiles that haven't lived in Iraq in decades. It is hard to find a better antidote than this book to the criminal lying of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gates, Rice, McCain, etc. that security is decent in most parts of Iraq, freedom is expanding, etc.

One measure of the U.S. occupation is what the Iraqi people think about it, though to mainstream liberal critics of the war such opinions are irrelevant compared to the seeking of a more competent imperial strategy for Iraq. Cockburn notes that in Spring 2007, a USA Today/BBC/ABC/ARD poll found that 78 percent of Iraqis opposed the presence of U.S. troops, up from 51 percent three years earlier, while 51 percent thought attacks on U.S. troops were legitimate, up from 17 percent three years earlier. Only 34 percent thought that the Iraqi government was independent of U.S. control. By 2007, only a small number of Iraqis could receive electricity more than a few hours a day or clean drinking water. The electricity problem had been particularly evident since the first days of the occupation, Cockburn notes, particularly during the torridly hot Iraqi summers. W/o refrigeration power food rotted and air conditioners and medical equipment could not work. Cockburn compares the American inability to resume essential services very unfavorably to the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945 and even Saddam's restoration of electricity supply after the U.S. bombed civilian infrastructure in 1991

. The "conservatives" (statist reactionaries) running our government have shown no concern whatever for how the money of the U.S. taxpayer has been thrown around in Iraq. Little records have been kept. Cockburn notes that Stuart Bowen, U.S. inspector general for Iraq, stated that close to nine billion went unaccounted for under the Bremer administration. At least 2 billion was stolen during the Iyad Allawi, including money for arms purchases, which government ministers probably used for themselves and patronage. Corruption has also been rife in the carrying out of contracts by U.S. companies. Cockburn gives an example of an American company that was supposed to rebuild the civilian security system at Baghdad airport but seemed to simply take the money and do nothing. He notes the case of a British security man who reported that the local office of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the parties in the governing Shiite coalition, was siphoning petrol from a local refinery for sale on the black market. SCIRI complained to the British and the security man was dismissed



Then there is the heavy handedness of U.S. troops of which Cockburn certainly does not give some of the worst examples available. He describes an old man nearly beaten to death, famers killed when they went to remove flares in their fields U.S. soldiers had put there, a man shot dead on the roof of his house when he went to fix his TV antenna, the brother of a pro-American tribal leader in Saddam's region of Tikrit shot dead when he opened his front door to US troops, etc. There have been cases, Cockburn notes, of U.S. soldiers roughing up Iraqis at checkpoints or even shooting them dead when the civilians did not understand the orders being screamed at them in English. One particular vivid case Cockburn gives is based on interviews with people in villages fifty or sixty miles north of Baghdad whose orchards, the source of livelihood for many of them, were destroyed in an act of collective punishment by U.S. troops. This punishment was ordered on the ground that the villagers did not tell troops about insurgent activity in the area, though the villagers told Cockburn that the troops did not find any weapons or insurgents.

Cockburn describes in vivid detail how Sunni and Shia cleanse each other from their neighborhoods. The Badr brigades took over the interior ministry in the freedom loving democratically elected government after mid-2005 and proceeded to engage in mass death squad activities against Sunnis. A thousand Sunnis may have been executed in one orgy of killing by the authorities in Najaf after the Al-Askari mosque bombing in February 2006. The ascension of Shiite power and the death squads have encouraged Sunni attachment to the barbaric Zarqawi type insurgents. Cockburn describes how the U.S. was forced away from its plans for "advisory" caucuses of appointed notables to give a façade to its rule and to hold democratic elections under pressure from Ayatollah Sistani. Iranian influence is very large in the country, and particularly in Southern Iraq, always touted, as a model of stability by the U.S. Cockburn notes that Shiite militias are the real rulers in the South and the local authorities often refused any contact with British forces. He notes that a prime example of the U.S. not trusting the Shiites is that the CIA, not the Iraqi government, provides the budget for the Iraqi intelligence service, which contains few Shiite members and whose files the CIA has blocked access to by the government. The author talks to two post-Saddam Iraqi ministers, Mahmud Othman and Ali Allawi, who warn that Iraqi is turning into an oil kleptocracy on the model of Nigeria and that the Iraqi people think their govt. is illegitimate, etc.


I remember most from this book the vividness of its anecdotes.. There is the account of the author's detainment by Mehdi army, the doctor who escaped from a kidnapping only to have the perpetrators released by U.S. officials, the middle class people seeking to leave the country, the fate of the poor squatters in a formerly rich neighborhood of Baghdad. I also admire the author's account of Al-Mutanabi street in Baghdad, once the center of Baghdad's book selling but now taken over by criminal gangs.

I won't give it 5 stars because the writing style is too informal and he doesn't follow a chronological line; he jumps back and forth in time between chapters. Still, this is a valuable account of daily events in the lives of Iraqis, which have largely escaped our news services. It's tragedy piled upon tragedy, and if it weren't a situation full of death, destruction, desperation, and horror, it'd almost be comical.

It is certainly an easy read and it's hard to put down... you'll be done with it in no time.

Definitely a valuable contribution to anyone with an interest in the history of the second war against Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn is a British journalist who has lived in Iraq for a long time--and who supplements that with having been close to and covered the similar occupation by Britain of Northern Ireland.

So he is miles ahead of U.S. journalists who were "embedded" with the U.S. military.

The "embedded" journalists saw only what the U.S. military wanted them to see.

The U.S. military had learned an important lesson in Vietnam: NOT to avoid invading a country and alienating its people, but to avoid letting journalists see it and report it. One of the big factors in opposition to the Vietnam War was that every night on TV, people saw burning villages, killed civilians, wounded and dead U.S. soldiers.

Cockburn saw what he wanted to see.

But even in that, he was limited--because Iraq has become so dangerous that even journalists are fair game for kidnappers and killers.

Still, he does a good job.

His reporting (because of the danger of traveling) is anecdotal, but it is telling.

And he understands the politics and ethnic dynamics in Iraq--which the U.S. administration either did not understand or did not care about.

He also understands nationalism: no nation, no matter how bad its government, likes to have outsiders invade and take over.

This lesson is all-important. It is the lesson of Vietnam. It is the lesson of the American Revolution. And, now, of course, it is the lesson of Iraq.

Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds hate each other and without Saddam's fierce repression, civil war was inevitable. But they all hate the invading U.S. soldiers and administrators (and contractors, who take their work, when Iraqi unemployment is 50% to 70%) more.

Cockburn states that the U.S. occupation was bound to fail, given the tribalism and sectarianism of Iraq. Be he also outlines how the stupendous arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence of the Bush administration made it far worse.

On the other hand, we should all be glad that Bush IS incompetent. If he were competent, he would be Hitler.

Excellent review of events in Iraq from the invasion through 2006, by a journalist who knows Iraq like few others. He reviews not just the key political events, but the practical impact on the daily lives of Iraqis.

His continuing reports in the Independent and Counterpunch are second to none.

The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

I thought this book lived up to all the reviews I had read about it in various magazines.

For anyone who is interested in facts, not fiction, about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, this book will more than suffice. It is filled with relevant, and verifiable facts, and if you believe, as I do (and have from the very beginning) that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake, this will just add fuel to your fire.

Along with "The Ugly American," this should be required reading for anyone in DoD, State and Congress. It's dense, hard-hitting and powerful. If you want to understand why the Iraqi insurgency exploded in the summer of 2003 and then continued to grow, read this book. Some vignettes in this book are also in Mr. Cockburn's other book about Muqtada al Sadr, but it doesn't detract from it's quality. You read it and just shake your head in disbelief and the lost opportunities.

But like his other book about Muqtada, it's clear Mr. Cockburn is no fan of the Bush Administration. Although this book is more measured, particularly through the first 3/4's of the book, by the end he's practically histrionic in his anti-Bush/Neo-con rants - which detract from the book. I get he has seen up close the impacts of American and British policies, and has lost friends because of them, but if he wants to truly do great work that will be accepted by a more general centrist audience, he's got to tone down the biases.

Still, the book is full of great and insightful information about Iraq. Worth the read.