[lbo-talk] From a report about P. Cockburn's visit to Australia...

[Mike Ballard]

> Katharine Viner
>
>
> May 28, 2007 4:00 PM |
> 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."

An injury to one is an injury to all
http://www.iww.org.au/

       
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