Inside track on Iraq

Fabulous interview in RedPepper with Patrick Cockburn, veteran Middle East correspondent from the UK. He's been covering Iraq since 1978, before Saddam rose to power. He's living in Baghdad and gives us an inside look at life in the Green Zone, and outside of it, but not far. It's too dangerous to leave the city - for anyone. He has some fascinating observations.

You see people being killed merely because they don’t understand American hand signals for directing traffic, which look like somebody giving signals to the deaf.

..There is enormous paranoia on their part, combined with enormous firepower. If there's any sort of attack, their orders are to open fire in all directions. If there's a roadside bomb, treat it as an ambush. So, almost invariably, some Iraqi, sometimes inside a house or walking on the street, gets killed when there’s any attack on American troops.

..And does the resistance claim any popular support locally?

Before the capture of Saddam, the US and British generals in Baghdad all emphasised that the resistance was all remnants of Saddam's regime. Then they had a bit of a problem when they actually captured Saddam. It actually validated what all of us believed, that there was never any real connection with Saddam.

..At last count, I think there are 38 different organisations that are claiming attacks on the Americans. It's a very complicated jigsaw. It is important to realise that, in the beginning, the main motive is a very simple one. The Iraqis – like everyone else in the world – don't like to have their lives controlled by foreigners and foreign troops. All this happens in the context of an understandable and predictable hatred of occupation felt by anybody who's being occupied.

..Why is there sufficient sympathy amongst large groups for these often pretty ruthless brutes? This is the most important question. The antipathy to the occupation is, aside from Kurdistan, universal.

..The last poll I saw showed that 82% of the Sunni Arabs want the US Army to withdraw now or in the near future. That is somewhat predictable, but the figure for Shi'a Arabs was also 69%.

..Even when I have travelled in the Shi'a areas, often after a bomb directed at say police recruits, people I speak to around the site say, 'Why are they attacking Iraqis like this, why don't they kill Americans instead?' The first part of the sentence often appears on American television. The second part is very seldom mentioned.

So they are fine with insurgents attacking Americans?

Yes, in fact that’s what they invariably say.

..Everyone gives too much credit to American policy as being highly sophisticated. First of all, what has happened has been pretty disastrous for the US. Iraq, if we stand back a bit, was meant to be a demonstration of power – of the military and political ability of the US to act alone and destroy its enemies. In fact, the opposite has happened. Two years on, the US army doesn't even control the roads between Baghdad and its base at Baghdad airport.

They do not have the military strength to control Iraq, or to turn whatever military strength they do have into political victory.

There's much more. Cockburn speaks about the targeting of journalists, the fallacy of a free press and the transfer of power that hasn't really happened other than symbolically.

Leaving aside the Kurds, who are a special case, the members of this government would have to leave the country if they didn't have Western bodyguards.

It's a realistic and sobering picture of the daily life of Iraq. Read it in full for yourself.