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 about the British and American occupation of Iraq. Iraq, he said, is a country that's been "hollowed out". Two million people have left. The rest live in terror.
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 center 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".)
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".
Said Cockburn. "This is the worst thing to happen to Iraqis since 1258, when the Mongols invaded and took Baghdad."
[Excerpt of an article by Katharine Viner, The Guardian]
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