The Moron's Model Middle East Democracy: Worse than you can ever know. Worse than you can ever imagine

Worse than the worst

The Hay audience heard from Patrick Cockburn how the difficulty of reporting Iraq means we can hardly imagine how bad things really are.

Katharine Viner

Iraq: it's worse than you can possibly imagine, and worse than we can possibly know.

That was the message when the brilliant Middle East reporter, Patrick Cockburn, spoke on stage today at Hay, publicising his book about the British and American occupation of Iraq.

Iraq, he said, is a country that's been "hollowed out". Two million people have left. At least 3,000 civilians are murdered every month. The rest live in terror.

He told of details that give a real sense of what's going on. Because there are no more open-air markets, since so many have been bombed, people have set up stalls in side streets or their back gardens instead. Before the war, there were 32,000 doctors in Iraq; now 2,000 are dead, 12,000 have left, and the remainder, who are seen as having money and are thus targets for kidnappers, must work from armed-guarded clinics.

He reminded us about the Green Zone, the giant fortified area in the centre of Baghdad - while most of the city doesn't get electricity or water or sewage disposal, the Green Zone gets plenty, so the occupiers who live there have no idea what it feels like to live anywhere else.

He discussed "one of the great thefts in history", the "enormous kleptocracy", that started with Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, which, infamously, didn't keep accounts. (They believed that all money spent would miraculously "trickle down".)

Cockburn is one of the brave few British journalists who still report from Iraq. He described just how difficult it is to do so: he can't go anywhere for more than 20 minutes; he can't make an appointment; he can't mention to anyone where he might be going, he meticulously avoids traffic jams. And those measures are just to "increase the odds in your favour", he said.

There may have been a plethora of books on Iraq, but most see the country as only a "backdrop" for what is "real and significant" - ie, Washington politics. But Cockburn, thank goodness, is different; he tries to see the occupation the way Iraqis see it.

He talked of cities that reporters rarely get to, such as Mosul and Kirkuk, where we don't know just how bad the violence is; he stressed that even the conservative official figures record that at least 3,000 civilians are murdered every month. It is a "society pulsating with fear the whole time".

Someone in the audience wondered if really the situation isn't so bad, that this is just the "Iraqi way of going about things" and it would all even itself out.

"That's baloney," said Cockburn. "This is the worst thing to happen to Iraqis since 1258, when the Mongols invaded and took Baghdad."

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Original article posted here.