Boots On The Ground

Patrick Cockburn is a journalist working for the Independent operating out of London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 (he has celebrated seven birthdays there), and has won numerous awards. Unlike most American journalists, he works outside the Green Zone. He is the author of the book Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.

Seymour Hersh has referred to Cockburn as “quite simply, the best Western journalist working in Iraq today.”

The following snippets are taken from an interview with Cockburn by Bob McChesney aired on April 27. It’s a different view of why the U.S. invaded Iraq, and one that makes quite a bit of sense. I was also quite surprised by the gun ownership situation in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

McChesney: The first question that most Americans have had – we see in the United States politicians and think tanks eager to pursue this war and to defend it and push it even when the factual basis of the arguments doesn’t seem to hold together especially well. And we’re left to wonder. why exactly is the United States in Iraq? What is the motivation, because the stated reasons don’t really hold up. So you’re left wondering why does this war exist? You’ve been there as much as anyone – I suspect you’ve thought about this. What is your sense about why this war took place and why we’re there now.

Cockburn: A number of reasons, I’ve always felt. One, everyone thought it was going to be a very easy war, and governments are always tempted by the thought that they’ll have a short, victorious war that’s going to secure their power at home. I think that the U.S. government thought they had what appeared to them to be an easy war in Afghanistan (they hadn’t really won that war in the way they thought they had), but they thought this was going to secure their power at home.

I think also fair to say that if the main product of Iraq was asparagus rather than crude oil that enthusiasm in Washington to invade the place would be less. They thought there would be enormous opportunities there for U.S. oil companies. They also felt they would dominate the Gulf by installing a client regime in Baghdad. They lived very much in a sort of world of fantasy, above all, of hubris and of thinking that they were far stronger than they were. After all, this war was to prove that America was the sole great superpower of the world, to prove the enormity of its strength. In fact, it’s proved exactly the opposite.

McChesney: Iraq is such a complicated place politically. Even Saddam Hussein, a fairly unsavory figure, had difficulty In running the country as a police state. To think that the United States, as an outsider could come in and govern it …

Cockburn: Yeah – it’s an extraordinary country. That’s the reason I kept going back there over the years. You had this very brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, but at the same time, everybody in Iraq had a gun, usually an assault rifle, not a shotgun. I remember after the fall of Baghdad talking to an Iraqi neurosurgeon whose hospital had almost been looted, and I remember him saying to me, “just remember that Saddam Hussein had great difficulty running this country. It’s not going to be easy for the Americans or anybody else.”