The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist 2006. In March 2003, Patrick Cockburn secretly crossed the Tigris river from Syria into Iraq just before the US/British invasion, and has covered the war ever since. In The Occupation, he provides a vivid and disturbing picture of a country in turmoil, and the dangers and privations endured by its people. The Occupation explores the mosaic of communities in Iraq, The US and Britain's failure to understand they country they were invading and how this led to fatal mistakes. Cockburn, who has been visiting Iraq since 1978, describes the disintegration of the country under the occupation. Travelling throughout Iraq, from the Kurdish north, to Baghdad, Falluja and Basra, he records the response of the country's population - Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd - to the invasion, the growth of the resistance and its transformation into a full-scale uprising. He explains why deepening religious and ethnic divisions drove the country towards civil war. Above all, Cockburn traces how the occupation's failure led to the collapse of the country, and the high price paid by the Iraqis. He charts the impact of savage sectarian killings, rampant corruption and economic chaos on everyday life: from the near destruction of Baghdad's al-Mutanabi book market to the failure to supply electricity, water and, ironically, fuel to Iraq's population. The Occupation is a compelling portrait of a ravaged country, and the appalling consequences of imperial arrogance.

About the Author :
Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent and has worked previously for the Financial Times. His work on the crisis in the Middle East include the National Book Circle Awards- shortlisted The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (with Andrew Cockburn), The best-selling The Rise of the Islamic State and The Age of Jihad. He won the Martha Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. More recently he has been awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year at the 2013 Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards, Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year in British Journalism Award 2014, and Foreign Reporter of the Year in Press Awards 2014.

Review :
Cockburn's eye for the telling detail lifts The Occupation above the usual journalist's account of the Iraq war. Cockburn's account of the evolving conflict ... is informed by his keen personal observations and understanding of the complexities and horrors of daily life in Iraq. Of the raft of books about the calamitous mismanagement of the intervention in Iraq, The Occupation is probably the most readable and certainly the only one that-even if only in the driest possible way-manages to be amusing. Required reading ... a masterpiece of journalism. Cockburn will be read when the rest of us are long forgotten.