Patrick Cockburn Quotes

#1. Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.

Patrick Cockburn

#2. An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.

Patrick Cockburn

#3. Young Shia who have been brought up with nothing, who are pretty anarchic, pretty dangerous. In 2004 when they came close to killing me, and of course they have killed very large numbers of other Iraqis. That's a major source of strength for Muqtada.

Patrick Cockburn

#4. The new post-Saddam Iraq had no secular heros.

Patrick Cockburn

#5. Biden said that in Syria the US had found that there was no moderate middle because the moderate middle are made up of shopkeepers, not soldiers.

Patrick Cockburn

#6. Of the nineteen hijackers that day, fifteen were Saudi.

Patrick Cockburn

#7. But from the moment George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam, the people who were going to benefit here were the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population. So if you were ever going to have an election, then the Shia would take over.

Patrick Cockburn

#8. It's always sort of amazing, sitting in Baghdad, to watch visiting dignitaries being received in the Green Zone by politicians who have usually very little support and seldom go outside the Green Zone.

Patrick Cockburn

#9. Muqtada is radical in the sense that he wants the U.S. occupation to end and has always said so from the beginning. Secondly, his support among the Shia really runs along class lines; it's mainly the poor who support him. His organization runs an enormous social network.

Patrick Cockburn

#10. You know, if you want to meet a lot of Iraqi leaders, the best places are the hotels in Amman or in London. In general the government here is amazingly unpopular.

Patrick Cockburn

#11. Muqtada leads the only real mass movement in Iraq. It's a mass movement of the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population, and of poor Shia - and most Shia are poor. Otherwise the place is full of sort of self-declared leaders, many of whom spend most of their time outside Iraq.

Patrick Cockburn

#12. There are some things that could hold it together, notably oil revenues. But at the moment, the much vaunted surge has had a measure of success primarily, to my mind, because Sunni and Shia Iraqis hate and fear each other more these days than they hate and fear the Americans.

Patrick Cockburn

#13. The Iraqi government had an army with 350,000 soldiers on which it had spent $41.6 billion in the three years since 2011. But this force melted away without significant resistance. Discarded uniforms and equipment were found strewn along the roads leading

Patrick Cockburn