IRAQ. Patrick Cockburn
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FINAL DISINTEGRATION OF IRAQ?
IRAN INCREASES HOLD IN IRAQ
WHAT NEXT FOR AL-QA’IDA?
AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST INFLUENCE IS PAST ITS PEAK
A NATION IN CRISIS (2013)
DISINTEGRATING AS A COUNTRY
CITY OF CORRUPTION
THE SUNNI RISE AGAIN
THE SHIA ARE IN OFFICE BUT NOT IN POWER
IRAQ’S KURDS STRIKE IT RICH
A DISASTER WAITING TO REPEAT ITSELF
CONFRONTING ISIS (2014)
ANARCHY IN IRAQ
IRAN MAKES ITS MOVE
HOW SAUDIS HELPED ISIS TAKE OVER NORTHERN IRAQ
OBAMA SENDS BOMBERS INTO IRAQ
SUNNIS AND KURDS REJOICE AS HATED AL-MALAKI RESIGNS
AIR POWER IS NOT ENOUGH TO WIN THIS WAR
THE LAST CHRISTIANS IN IRAQ
IRAN JOINS THE ‘GREAT SATAN’S’ WAR ON ISIS
THE WEST NEEDS MORE THAN A WHITE KNIGHT
FROM HOPE TO HORROR (2015)
WRONG AGAIN IN THE FIGHT AGAINST TERROR
ISIS: ONE YEAR ON
WHO IS STRONG ENOUGH TO FIGHT ISIS?
ARE DRONE EXECUTIONS WORKING?
NATIONAL LOYALTY IS IN RUINS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA
ON THE MIDDLE EAST, DONALD HAS IT RIGHT
HILLARY CLINTON IS GUILTY, BUT NOT AS CHARGED
A NEW TYPE OF WARFARE
THE PARTITION OF THE MIDDLE EAST
CONSTANT CYCLE OF VIOLENCE (2016)
ISIS BOMBS
ISIS CAN ONLY BE CRUSHED IN IRAQ IF DEFEATED IN SYRIA
LACK OF OIL REVENUE MAY RUIN IRAQ BEFORE ISIS
MEDIA COVERAGE IS MASKING DISASTEROUS POLICIES
CORRUPTION PAVED THE WAY FOR ISIS
SHAKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF IRAQ’S GOVERNMENT
AFTERWORD
CHILCOT INQUIRY SUMS IT UP
PHOTO CAPTIONS AND COPYRIGHTS
FOREWORD
It is over 13 years since the start of the war in Iraq which led to the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The diplomatic map of the world has been redrawn as a consequence. Inquiry after inquiry has studied the legality of the conflict. Political reputations have been made and lost. But what of Iraq itself and the rest of the Middle East? What has been the impact of the West on Iraq and the region as a whole? Who have been the winners? Who have been the losers? In what direction is the region headed?
A remarkable feature of the wider Middle East over the past 15 years has been that the most radical instruments of change have been the US and its allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, which should have had the greatest interest in maintaining the status quo.
Provoked by 9/11, a US-led coalition overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. The West had disposed of two of Iran’s worst enemies without Iran having to lift a finger.
In 2011 the West, led by the US and Sunni states, saw the uprisings in the Arab world as a chance to get rid of regimes with whom they were at odds. The war in Syria was an opportunity to weaken Iran by eliminating its biggest ally in the Arab world. Instead the war, and likewise the one in Yemen, may end up doing more damage to Iran's rivals such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies.
Patrick Cockburn, The Independent's internationally acclaimed foreign correspondent and 2015 British Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year, has analyzed and reported extensively on the Middle East and Saddam's former empire in hundreds of articles since 2001. The best of Patrick Cockburn’s analysis and commentary is compiled in this book, providing first-hand insight into what is really happening in this critical region of our world.
MESSING-UP THE MIDDLE EAST (2003-2006)
USS Abraham Lincoln, site of President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May 2003
Thursday, 24 July 2003
CHAOS AND RAGE
There used to be a mosaic of President George H W Bush on the floor at the entrance to the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. It was placed there soon after the first Gulf War in 1991 and was a good likeness, though the artist gave Bush unnaturally jagged teeth and a slightly sinister grimace. The idea was that nobody would be able to get into the hotel, where most foreign visitors to Iraq stayed in the 1990s, without stepping on Bush's face. The mosaic did not long survive the capture of the city on 9 April, 2003 and the takeover of the al-Rashid by US officials and soldiers. One American officer, patriotically determined not to place his foot on Bush's features, tried to step over the mosaic. The distance was too great. He strained his groin and had to be hospitalised. The mosaic was removed.
Almost all of the thousands of pictures of Saddam which used to line every main street in Baghdad have gone, though for some reason the one outside the burned-out remains of the old Mukhabarat (intelligence) headquarters survives. My favourite was straight out of The Sound of Music: it showed Saddam on an Alpine hillside, wearing a tweed jacket, carrying an alpenstock and bending down to sniff a blue flower. Other equally peculiar signs of Saddam's presence remain. The Iraqi Natural History Museum was thoroughly ransacked by looters, who even decapitated the dinosaur in the forecourt. In the middle of one large ground-floor gallery almost the only exhibit still intact is a stuffed white horse which, when living, belonged to Saddam. Wahad Adnan Mahmoud, a painter who also looks after the gallery, told me the horse had been given to the Iraqi leader in 1986 by the King of Morocco. The King had sent a message along with it saying he hoped that Saddam would ride the horse through the streets of Baghdad when Iraq won its war with Iran. Before this could happen, however, a dog bit the horse, and it died. Saddam issued a Republican Decree ordering the dog to be executed.
"I don't know why the looters didn't take the horse - they took everything else," complained Mahmoud, who was in the wreckage of his office painting a picture of Baghdad in flames. "It isn't even stuffed very well." The horse, he added, was not the only dead animal which had been sent from Saddam's Republican Palace to be stuffed by the museum. One day an official from the palace had arrived with a dead dolphin in the back of a truck. He said the leader wanted it stuffed. The museum staff protested that this was impossible because a dolphin's skin contained too much oil. Mahmoud laughed as he remembered the terrified expression on the official's face when told that Saddam's order could not be obeyed.
Saddam had three enthusiasms in the 1990s, two of which still affect the appearance of Baghdad. Soon after defeat in Kuwait he started obsessively building palaces for himself and his family. None of these is likely to be knocked down since they now serve as bases for the US Army and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, has his headquarters in the enormous Republican Palace beside the Tigris, where he and his staff live in an isolation comparable to Saddam's. Then, in the mid-1990s, Saddam began to build enormous mosques, the largest of which, the Mother of Battles mosque at the old Muthana municipal airport, was only beginning to rise from