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Today's Stories February 15, 2008 George Szamuely The Absurdity of "Independent" Kosovo February 14, 2008 Kathleen and Bill Christison Palestine in the Mind of America Mike Whitney Swan Song for NATO Clancy Sigal Strike Notes from a Screenwriter George Wuerthner A Bloody Sham: the Yellowstone Bison Slaughter Peter Morici Is Bernanke Headed for the Exit? John Ross Drug War Mayhem Boils Over from Border to Border Allan Nairn Mafia Rules in the Middle East: If You're Big Enough, You Can Whack Anyone Rannie Amiri Lebanon's Warmongers Niranjan Ramakrishnan The New Tractatus: Where Wittgenstein Meets Feinstein Donna Volatile Be Careful What You Vote For, You Just Might Get It Seth Sandronsky The Student Squeeze: Fighting California's Tuition Hikes Website of the Day Conventions: the Land Around Us   February 13, 2008 Nikolas Kozloff Meet John McCain: Mr. Big Stick in Latin America Alan Farago Hell to Pay: Warren Buffett on the Goal Line Christina Kasica King's Dream Foreclosed: the Subprime Crisis in Black America Vicente Navarro How to Read the U.S. Primaries Hall Greenland Australia's Finest Hour Lee Sustar Strange Stimulation: Too Little for Those Who Need It Most David Macaray The Writers' Strike Finally Ends Roderick Frazier Nash Celebrating Wilderness Patrick Irelan Hugo Chávez and High Anxiety at the NYT Anthony Papa Mean Mister Mukasey: AG Tries to Block Crack Cocaine Releases Carl Finamore Another Parade Passes Me By: Don't Let Your Movement be Coopted by Politicians Website of the Day John He Is   February 12, 2008 Frank J. Menetrez The Case Against Alan Dershowitz Paul Craig Roberts War Without End Dr. Trudy Bond The Elephant at Gitmo: Camp 7 and the Torturer's Shrink Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Six: Why Charge Them Now? What About the Torture? Col. Dan Smith The Psychology of Killing: Close In or Far Away? Ronnie Cummins Globalization: Standing at the End of the Road Ralph Nader Open the Government John V. Walsh Antiwarriors, Divided and Conquered Dave Lindorff Obama and Progressive Change: Let's Hope the Movement Transforms the Candidate Michael Donnelly Who's Pimping Whom? The Clintons' Selective No Talk Rules Ron Jacobs La Lucha Continua: Castro's "Life" Ben Tripp Beggars Collide Website of the Day Springsteen and Youngstown   February 11, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Lessons for Obama: When is a Delegate Not a Delegate? Wajahat Ali A Discussion with Walt and Mearsheimer on the Israel Lobby Ray McGovern Waterboarding for God and Country Allan Nairn The Shooting of Jose Ramos Horta Uri Avnery An End Foreseen? Chris Floyd American Psycho: the Meaning of Mitt Romney's Exit Speech Martha Rosenberg School Lessons in a Lunchbox: Lunchmeat from Tortured Cows Stephen Fleischman The Bonnie and Clyde of American Politics Marc Lamont Hill Not My Brand of Hope Liliana Segura Obama and Torture: the Sounds of Silence and Equivocation Peter Morici Challenges for the New President Christopher Brauchli A Drug Rant from a Former Taker Website of the Day Annie vs. the Blue Angels   February 8 / 10, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Does the GOP Have Aces Up Its Sleeves? Patrick Cockburn Will Moqtada al-Sadr's Truce Hold? Mike Whitney The Great Bust of '08 Anthony DiMaggio How the Press Covers Waterboarding Andy Worthington The Guántanamo Trials: Where are the Terrorists? Linn Cohen-Cole Hillary, Will You Renounce Your Ties to Monsanto? Firmin DeBrabander Notes from the Foreclosure Front: Suing Your Way to Solvency Cpt. Paul Watson The Other Whaling Industry: How Greenpeace Cashes In on the Suffering and Deaths of the Great Whales Kenneth S. Pope Why I Resigned from the American Psychological Association Jacob G. Hornberger American Soldiers Will Pay the Price for Bush's Torture Policy Robert Bryce Beyond Group Think on Climate Change: If More CO2 is Bad ... Then What? P. Sainath The Last of the Buccaneer Editors Allan Nairn Give Me Back My Land Fred Gardner / Pebbles Trippet "The District Attorney of Shasta County Doesn't Know the Law!" Andrew Wimmer Growing Up Catholic: Ignorance is Death Robert Fantina America's Disgrace: the Case of Omar Khadr David Michael Green Partycide in Six Easy Steps: Watch the Democrats Destroy Themselves Kevin Zeese Is Dennis Kucinich Being McKinney'd? Peter Morici Wall Street Gives Bernacke a Vote of No Confidence Chris Driscoll Could Nader be the Come-Back Kid of 2008? Prairie Miller Black August: Bringing George Jackson's Life to the Screen Poets Basement Davies and Buknatski   February 7, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Why Baghdad Will Explode Again Bill Christison Potholes Bigger Than Ever for Palestinians David Anderson NBC's "To Entrap" a Predator: Perverting Justice for the Sake of Ratings Ron Jacobs Innocent Flesh: Recruiting Kids to Kill Nikolas Kozloff Hugo Chávez's Coca: It's the Real Thing Jane Rockefeller The Moral Economy of an Anti-Poverty Foundation Andy Worthington On Waterboarding: Two Questions for Michael Hayden Dave Zirin Instep Intifada Saul Landau The "Honestest" Candidate Since Lincoln Susie Day Our Blob in the White House Website of the Day George Carlin on Voting   February 6, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Super Tuesday's Vote for Chaos Ben Rosenfeld Informant Games: The Disturbing GreenScare Case of Briana Waters Vijay Prashad An Intellectual Hustler Lays It All Out Joe Bageant Nine Billion Little Feet on the Highway of the Damned Michael Donnelly What White Women Do In Private Voting Booths Allan Nairn Does the US Need a Civilizing Mayan Invasion? Kathryn Gray Wilderness on Edge: The Fate of Donner Summit Ray McGovern Powell's UN Fiasco Sheldon Richman The Whining Empire Paul Cantor / Roger Sparks A Presidential Aptitude Examination John Chuckman Political Bits and Pieces Website of the Day Save the Albatross February 5, 2008 Winslow T. Wheeler The Chaos in America's Vast Security Budget Tariq Ali Why I Will Not Participate in the Turin Book Fair Stephen Soldz The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq: Did Rumsfeld Authorize War Crimes? Chris Floyd Strange Fruit: America's Gulag and the Good War William S. Lind Saddam's Secret War Strategy: Die and Win Martha Rosenberg Live From the Killing Floor Heather Gray Conversations with Georgia Voters Ayesha Ijaz Khan Obama, Bhagwandas and the Battle for a Secular Politics David Macaray Unions Need to Stop Being So Nice Eliza Ernshire Making Music and Laughing Till the Tears Run Brenda Norrell Hated Nation Website of the Day The Things I Used to Do     February 4, 2008 Marc Levy Winter in America Patrick Cockburn The Bird Market Bombings Saree Makdisi Strangling Gaza Uri Avnery From Stalingrad to Winograd Alan Farago Let's Get Bambi! Someone is Slaughtering Florida's Key Deer Ben Tripp Spare Change: the Whine of the Progressive Voter Paul Wolf Civil Wars North and South Paul Craig Roberts Why Were the 9/11 Tapes Destroyed? Joshua Frank MoveOn's Obama Endorsement: Why There's No Hope for Change John Halle Whither Progressive Democrats? Website of the Day How to Cheat in School   February 2 / 3, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Hot Democratic Properties Pam Martens Bankers Gone Bonkers: Global Finance and the Insanity Defense Ralph Nader The Great Clinton-Obama Debate: Questions They Weren't Asked John Ross Hilaria vs. "El Moreno" Wajahat Ali Hillary, Obama and the Clash of Civilizations: an Interview with Imam Zaid Shakir Robert Fantina A Colony by Any Other Name: Iraq as Stepchild of the American Empire B. R. Gowani Not All Veils and Guns James L. Secor China in Winter: On the Western Edge of the Great Snow John V. Walsh The Invisible Green Primary Niranjan Ramakrishnan Barack's Bubble, Bubba's Trouble Dave Zirin Who Stole the Super Bowl's Soul? Jeremy Scahill Blackwater and Blood Fidel Castro Reflections on Lula Joe Allen Tet Reconsidered: the Turning Point in the Vietnam War Stephen Lendman Life in Occupied Gaza Patrick Irelan What Happened to the Streetcars? Andrej Grubacic Ziga Vodovnik Caligula's Horse: the USA, New Europe and Kosovo Josh Karpoff Dead Soldiers and the Antiwar Movement Ron Jacobs Carl Oglesby's War Paul Krassner Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel Website of the Weekend Company Woman: Hillary and Wal-Mart   February 1, 2008 Ray McGovern The Iniquities and Inequalities of War Diane Farsetta The Wild Career of James "Dow 36,000" Glassman Patrick Cockburn The Most Dangerous Country in the World for Journalists Tariq Ali Et Tu, New York Times? Allan Nairn Eating Dirt for Lunch in Haiti Rannie Amiri Collective Punishment in Beirut Ramzy Baroud People Power in Gaza: They Simply Did It Kenneth Couesbouc The Mother of All Snowballs Peter Morici Recession Looms Mumia Abu-Jamal Witha "Brutha" Like This: Bill Clinton as White Negro Rosemary Jackowski 27 Reasons Nader Should Run for President Scott Campbell Direct Action to Stop the War Re-emerges Website of the Day Betes et Hommes   January 31, 2008 Saul Landau Return to Afghanistan Andy Worthington Horror at Guantánamo Mike Whitney Rate Cut as Dagger: America's Teetering Banking System Jeff Ballinger Sustainability for Dictators Initiative? Clinton Praises the "Suharto of the Steppe" Tiffany Ten Eyck The Saga of the Freightliner Five William Loren Katz Waterboarding: Torure or Mystery? Alan Farago Why the Republicans are in Deep Trouble Col. Dan Smith Oh Say Can You See the 2009 Budget? China Hand Slouching Toward Islamabad Dave Lindorff The Usual Suspects Once Again Wadner Pierre Fake Democracy in Haiti Website of the Day One Big Union   January 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair McCain vs. Clinton? Christopher Ketcham The Genius of the Development Industrial-Complex Robert Weissman America By the Numbers: The Shameful State of the Union Neve Gordon An Experiment in Famine Paul Craig Roberts Regulation or Deregulation, Which is Worse? Joanne Mariner How Anti-Terror Laws Threaten Free Speech David Macaray Labor's Only Real Weapon Liaquat Ali Khan Is NATO Committing Genocide in Afghanistan? Raymond J. Lawrence Prankster-in-Chief: Bush's Troubling Non-Verbal Communication Dan Bacher The Collapse of the Central Valley Salmon Website of the Day Onward Through the Fog   January 29, 2008 Franklin C. Spinney Bush's New War Budget: the $70 Billion Hand-Off Mike Whitney The Great Credit Unwind of 2008 Alan Farago Buyer Beware: Florida, the Candidates and the Latin Builders Association Patrick Cockburn "The Americans Bring Us Only Destruction" Gary Leupp "We Can't Afford to Let Them Spill the Beans:" a Sibel Edmonds Timeline R. F. Blader A World Without Abortion: USA v. Romania Ahmad Faruqui Musharraf's Post-Electoral Prospect Fran Shor Obama, the Kennedys and "Change We Can Believe In" Jeremy Scahill Secret Trials and Criminal Convictions: the Ordeal of the Blackwater Protesters Allan Nairn Bush's SOTU: Entitlement, Justice and the War of All Against All Website of the Day The Ghost of Rambo   January 28, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Return to Fallujah Paul Craig Roberts The End of American Liberty Allan Nairn The Breaking of the Gaza Wall Eyad al-Sarraj / Sara Roy Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza Martha Rosenberg Obit for the "Front Page" City Corporate Crime Reporter How They Rip Us Off David Michael Green Kristolizing Iraq: What a Great Freakin' War Jennifer Van Bergen What's Left? Nancy Oden Survival Tips for Hard Times Divya Karnad Saving India's Sea Turtles James L. Secor Pissed About Pistorious: Why the Olympics Needs a Gimp Website of the Day Yellow Journalism?   January 26 / 27, 2008 Uri Avnery Worse Than a Crime JoAnn Wypijewski How the Clintons Lost It, Whatever the Outcome in S. Carolina Ralph Nader Ambition, Power and the Clintons Paul Craig Roberts How Bush Destroyed the Dollar Paul Watson I'm Proud to be a Pirate! John Ross Murder and Cover-Up in Mexico Fred Gardner Ross v. Raging Wire: Employer's Right to Fire Workers Held Sacred by California Supreme Court Allan Nairn Little Hands with Fever: Some Consequences of Poverty Death Joshua Frank Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey Binoy Kampmark Société Générale and the Economic Meltdown James T. Phillips America's Sick Comedy: Bringing the War Home Stan Cox The Depressing Truth About Anti-Depressants Eamonn McCann Hillary's Lie: "I Brought Peace to Northern Ireland" Ron Jacobs The Horizons of History: What's at Stake in Bolivia Seth Sandronsky California's Health Care Crisis Ben Terrall The Future is Unwritten Poets' Basement Tripp, Gardner, Gibbons and Davies Website of the Weekend City of Immigrants     January 25, 2008 Douglas Valentine Operation Two-Fold: How the CIA Infiltrated the DEA Patrick Cockburn US Troops Will Be In Iraq for 10 More Years: an Interview with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari JoAnn Wypijewski Down to the Wire in South Carolina Heather Gray Are We Seeing a Racial Shift in the South? Conversations with South Carolina Voters Marjorie Cohn Senate Democrats Poised to Fold to Cheney on FISA Erica Rosenberg Environmentalists Out on a Limb: the Perils of Collaboration Alan Farago Jeb Bush Goes Nuclear Robert Weissman Reclaiming Economic Freedom Laura Carlsen Wild Cards: Mining the Hispanic Vote in Nevada Stephen Lendman Israeli Repression in the Hebron Website of the Day The FIX is In   January 24, 2008 JoAnn Wypijewski Obama as Anthologist of Uplift Paul Craig Roberts President Hillary Alexander Cockburn Hillary Wants to Talk About Dirty Legal Dealings? Remember Her Nursing Home Scam? Kathleen Christison One and Two State Solutions and the Myth of International Consensus Jeff Halper Power to the (Palestinian) People! Stanley Heller The Siege of Gaza is Broken George Wuerthner The Moronic Sport: ORVs on the Public Lands Patrick Cockburn Desperate Iraqi Farmers Turn to Opium Jeff Sher Just How "Good" is Your Health Insurance? Patrick Irelan Musharraf, the Steadfast Ally? Charles Modiano Restoring the Anti-War King Website of the Day An Illustrated History of Trepanation   January 23, 2008 David Rosen The Great Disappearing Act: the Presidential Candidates and the Politics of Sex David Isenberg Is It Really So Hard to Believe That Iran Stopped Its Nuclear Weapons Program? Farzana Versey Hillary's Harem Paul Craig Roberts The Empire That Must Be Obeyed Alan Farago Where Did All the Good Times Go? Allan Nairn Indonesian Intelligence Service Threatens to Kill Human Rights Activist Kenneth Couesbouc Another Turn of the Screw Niranjan Ramakrishnan How the West was Re-Sold Michael Donnelly Obama Strikes Back Norman Solomon The Power of Love Website of the Day Rafah Today   January 22, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Farewell to Old Economic Nostrums JoAnn Wypijewski King Day in Columbia, South Carolina Al Giordano Divide and Conquer Politics: How the Clinton Campaign Armed a Black-Latino Time Bomb in Nevada Felice Pace Power Politics in the Klamath: Water, Dams and Salmon Paul Wolf Bolívar's Sword Robert Weissman Deregulation and the Financial Crisis Dave Lindorff The Bush Dollar Trap Marjorie Cohn Cheney Impeachment Gains Traction Richard Neville Keeping Shakespeare in a Box Don Fitz / Zaki Baruti St. Louis Mayor Booed Off MLK Platform Ben Terrall Cindy Sheehan and the Virtues of Divisiveness Sam Husseini Stoning Martin Luther King, Jr. Website of the Day Defend the Mapuche!     January 21, 2008 Kevin Alexander Gray Playing the Race Card Linn Washington, Jr. Deferring Dreams, Delusions of Democracy Pam Martens How Wall Street Blew Itself Up David Macaray Labor's Grim Dilemma: Do We Need a Labor Party? Uri Avnery Look Who's Talking Omar Barghouti Europe's Collusion in Israel's Slow Genocide Joe DeRaymond Protest and Trial in D.C. B.R. Gowani Why Islam Should Tolerate Images Shepherd Bliss The False U.S. Economy Jean-Guy Allard Philip Agee Versus the CIA Dan Bacher Leaping Steelhead! Website of the Day Destroyed By a Rising Flood January 19 / 20, 2008 Alexander Cockburn The Campaign in Black and White Saul Landau Good Time Charlie's War China Hand Endgame for Pakistan? Conn Hallinan Desert Mirage: What Was the Bombing of Syria Really About? Ron Jacobs No Retreat Dave Lindorff A Tax Rebate Won't Fix This Mess Andy Worthington Canada's Humiliating Double Standard on Torture Paul Armentano What's the Going Price for a Joint? More Than You Might Think Seth Sandronsky High Crimes and Economics Michael Donnelly Dodging Ecocide Patrick Irelan The Ordeal of Dr. Safdar Sarki Martha Rosenberg The Drug Industry Takes Another Hit Sherwood Ross Making the World Safe for Despots: Bush's Global Arms Trade David Michael Green So You Want to be My President, Eh? James Rothenberg Unimpeachable: Under House Protection Daniel Gross Starbucks Shortchanges Dr. King Peter N. Carroll In Memory of Milton Wolff Susie Day Croakin' on Hudson Paul Krassner Woody Allen Meets Tongue Fu Poets' Basement Wolff, Buknatski and Orloski Website of the Day Rocky Mountain Blues   January 18, 2008 Allan Nairn Killing Civilians, Carefully Ralph Nader When the Big Boys Get in Trouble, Who Pays the Ultimate Bill? Joanne Mariner Terrorism and Preventative Detention Alan Farago The Stimulus and the Meltdown P. Sainath Pity the Brahmins R.F. Blader Beyond Steinem's Feminism Andy Worthington A Letter from Guantánamo John Jonik Private Insurance is Bad for Your Health Brian McKenna Where Even Sharing is Prohibited: Notes from Inside a Michigan Women's Prison Daoud Kuttab This Time Next Year? Website of the Day Those South Carolina Voting Machines   January 17, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Leader and Vassal Christopher Brauchli The FBI's Bills Come Due Robert Fantina Leadership, Bush and the New York Times Patrick Irelan Eternal War Paul A. Moore When the Rich Pay No Taxes Stephen Lendman Institutionalized Spying on Americans Beena Sarwar Bhutto and the "State Within a State" Walter Brasch Buzzwords in the Echo Chamber: Change and the Establishment Brenda Norrell Bush Legacy in Texas Sours Adam Federman End of the Left? Website of the Day Democrats for Romney   January 16, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Return of the Native Franklin Lamb The Bombing at Qarantina Julian Sanchez David Weigel Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? Sharon Smith Ron Paul and the Left: a Slippery Slope? Allan Nairn Economic Indicator: No Free Lunch, No Free Market Ayesha Ijaz Khan How the American Media Enables Bush's Iran Fixation Andy Worthington A Strategic Call to Close Guantánamo Richard Behan Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach! Website of the Day Obama the New JFK? He's Not That Bad!   January 15, 2008 Andrea Peacock Breach of Trust in America's Most Toxic Town: How the EPA is Rubbing Poison Into Libby's Wounds Wajahat Ali An Interview with Seymour Hersh on Iraq, Bush Foreign Policy and the Prospects of War with Iran Joe Bageant Getting Out the Bling Vote Ralph Nader The Candidate Taboos John Ross Zero Hour: NAFTA and Mexico's Agrarian Apocalypse Elaine Cassel Jose Padilla vs. John Yoo: Can a National Disgrace be Rectified? Peter Morici The Fed Needs More Than a New Communications Strategy Beena Sarwar Pakistan's Dirty Tricks Brigade Robert Weissman Big Business is Even More Unpopular Than You Thought Binoy Kampmark Going Tata in India Dave Zirin Dennis Brutus Smacks Down the Hall of Fame Website of the Day David Lynch on the iPhone   January 14, 2008 Ishmael Reed Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man Roger Morris Burials in the Sind Uri Avnery The Hands of Esau Mike Whitney Bush's Voodoo Stimulus Package Allan Nairn General Suharto of Indonesia: One Small Man Leaves a Million Corpses William Blum Oh, By the Way, the Iraqis Don't Really Want Us Alan Farago A Subprime Wake Up Call David Macaray Are Labor Unions Ready for Prime Time? Eva Liddell Getting Drunk with Obama Zoe Blunt Road Kill: New Highway Blocked by Protesting Raccoons Website of the Day Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies   January 12 / 13, 2008 Andrew Cockburn How the New England Journal of Medicine Undercounted Iraqi Civilian Deaths Saul Landau 60 Years of Empire Corey D. B. Walker Barack Obama and the Crisis of the White Intellectual Col. Dan Smith Bush, Iran and the Magician of the Tarot Eric Toussaint The US Subprime Crisis Goes Global Ron Jacobs Television, Murder and Vietnam Fred Gardner The People vs. Christopher James Chakos Stan Cox Don't Take That Pill! Jacob G. Hornberger The Warfare State Ramzy Baroud The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Joseph Grosso The Anglosphere: a Special Relationship of Elites David Díaz-Arias Imagining An/Other Latin American Left Stacey Warde Before We Move On ... Dan Bacher Pumped to Extinction: the Decline of the Delta Smelt Michael Dickinson Georgie in Jesusland Website of Weekend CounterPunchers Protest Outside NYT Offices   January 11, 2008 Dave Lindorff Did Hillary Really Win New Hampshire? More Questions About Diebold Voting Machines Paul Craig Roberts No Escape from War and Unemployment Andy Worthington Six Years of Guantánamo Kenneth Couesbouc Banking on Thin Ice Jeff Ballinger Inside the Vienna Consensus Christopher Brauchli Lethal Injection, the Supremes and China Manuel Garcia, Jr. Paying No Attention to the Presidential Campaigns Andrew Silverstein Bush's Weepy Visit to Jerasulem Marwan Bishara Bush in the Middle East Robert Weissman The First Amendment Gone Wild Patrick Irelan Damn the Small Boats! Website of the Day Hillary and the Superdelegates: Or Why She Wins Even When She Loses     January 10, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Now Nader Claims He Didn't Endorse Edwards Bob Wing Marqueece Harris-Dawson Race Within the Race: Obama, the NH Vote and the Specter of Tom Bradley Michael Donnelly White Women Gone Wild? David Macaray Three Big Reasons for the Decline of Labor Unions China Hand Bush's Delusional Policy Pushes Pakistan to Brink of Catastrophe Ayesha Ijaz Khan Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: Brotherly, Friendly Countries? Rannie Amiri Obama, Man of Kansas or Kenya? Website of the Day Iranian Video of the Hormuz Incident   January 9, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair The Empire Strikes Back Dave Lindorff The Bad News from New Hampshire: Death By Triangulation John Chuckman Pardon My Laughter: Watching the US Primaries from Canada James Bovard Stomping Freedom: Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006 Alan Farago As Florida Sinks: the View from the Titanic Russell Mokhiber Why Picket the New York Times in DC on Friday? William S. Lind Kicking the Can Down the Road in Iraq Peter Morici Beyond the Sophistry: Why the Trade Deficit Matters Josh Reubner Sudan vs. Israel: Double Standard on Divestment Mike Roselle The Pursuit of Happiness Website of the Day Bottles of Tears on the Wall: Steve Perry on NH       Subscribe Online

February 15, 2008 Ground-Truthing the Surge Is the US Really Bringing Stability to Baghdad? By PATRICK COCKBURN To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story. People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to check with their commander. "I believe," Bassim said afterwards, "that if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish one] they would have killed us all immediately." In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves. What happened to Bassim was also to happen to millions of Iraqis who saw their lives ruined by successive calamities. As their world collapsed around them they were forced to take desperate measures to survive, obtain a job and make enough money to feed and educate their families. In the US and Europe, the main measure of whether the war in Iraq is "going well" or "going badly" is the casualty figures. The number of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed went down to 39 US soldiers and 599 Iraqi civilians in January. The White House is promoting the idea that the United States is finally on the road to success, if not victory, in Iraq. On the back of this renewed optimism about the war, Senator John McCain, the premier hawk among the Republican candidates for the presidency, has been able to revive his foundering campaign and is set to be his party's nominee. Despite the skepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington have largely bought into the idea that "the surge"--the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006--has succeeded. But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back. At the time we had our encounter with the Mehdi Army in Kufa, Bassim was living in a house in the mixed Sunni-Shia area of Jihad in south-west Baghdad. He loved the house, which had a sitting room and two bedrooms, because he had built it himself in 2001. "I didn't complete it because I didn't have enough money," he said. "But we were so happy to have our own home." He was living there in the summer of 2006 with his wife Maha, 38, and his children Sarah, 13, Noor, eight, and Sama, three, when Shia militiamen took over Jihad. The struggle for the capital had begun on February 22 when Sunni insurgents blew up a revered Shia shrine in Samarra. Bassim fled to Syria with his family and, when he returned to Jihad three months later, he found pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric who heads the Mehdi Army, pasted to the gate of his house. Neighbors told Bassim to get out as fast as he could before the Mehdi Army militiamen came back and killed him. He drove with his family to his father-in-law's house in the tough Sunni district of al-Khadra, where he and his wife and three children were to live in future in a single small room. He did not dare go back to his old home, but he heard about it in the summer of 2007 from a friendly Shia neighbour who said it had been taken over by militiamen. "They accused me," says Bassim, "of being a high-rank officer in the former intelligence service and because of that they got a permit [from al-Sadr's office] to take it over." Two Shia families moved in for a couple of months and, when they left, they took all his remaining belongings. They left the house unlocked, and soon the wooden doors and other fittings were gone. The permanent loss of his home, his only possession of any value apart from his car, was a terrible blow to Bassim and his wife. "I have nothing else to lose aside from my house," he wrote to me in a sad letter in the autumn of 2007, "and because of what happened I had a heart attack. I worked as a taxi driver for a few days, but I couldn't do it any longer because of the dangerous situation and I had no other way of earning a living. Finally, I sold my car and my wife's few gold things and I will try to go to Sweden even if I have to go illegally." I thought his plan to travel to Sweden was a terrible one, as Bassim spoke only Arabic and had not travelled outside Iraq, apart from a few trips to Syria and Jordan. But there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. I did not see or hear from him for six months, though I heard from his friends that his bid to reach Sweden had failed and that he was stuck in Kuala Lumpur. Then, on February 1, he appeared at the door of my hotel room in Baghdad, looking shrunken and miserable, and told me of his strange and disastrous odyssey. I had originally hoped that his plan to travel illegally to Sweden was a fantasy he would never try to realize, but everything he had said in his letter turned out to be true. He had sold his car, his wife's gold jewellery and some furniture for $6,500 (about £3,300) and borrowed $1,500 from his sister and the same amount from friends. Of this, $6,900 was paid to Abu Mohammed, an Iraqi in Sweden, who provided Bassim and a friend called Ibrahim with Lithuanian passports (these turned out to be genuine, but one of Bassim's many fears over the next three months was that his passport was a fake and he would be thrown in jail). The two men went first to Damascus and then, instructed over the phone by Abu Mohammed in Sweden, they flew to Malaysia. This would seem to be the wrong direction, but Malaysia has the great advantage of being one of the few countries to give Iraqis entry visas at the airport. Bassim and Ibrahim took rooms at the cheapest hotel they could find in Kuala Lumpur. They were then told by Abu Mohammed to get a plane to Cambodia and take a bus to Vietnam. Though their money was fast dwindling, they did so. Somehow, still speaking only Arabic, they made their way from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. The plan was to get a ticket to Sweden by way of France (Bassim now thinks that this was a mistake and it would have been better to travel first to Lithuania, posing as citizens returning home, but this would have left the two Iraqis with the problem of explaining to officials there why they did not speak Lithuanian). In the check-in queue at the airport in Vietnam on January 5 this year, Bassim was desperately worried he would be detected. He had staked all his remaining money and his family's future on getting to Sweden. In fact, he and Ibrahim had little chance of being allowed on to the plane. Too many Iraqis, claiming to be citizens of small East European states, had tried this route before. Suspicious Vietnamese immigration officials took them to an investigation room where Bassim felt ill and asked for a glass of water, which was refused. He and Ibrahim continued to protest that they were Lithuanian citizens and demanded to be taken to the Lithuanian embassy, knowing full well that Lithuania is unrepresented in Vietnam. It was all in vain. The officials guessed that they were Iraqis. They sent Bassim and Ibrahim back to Cambodia. Half-starved because he did not like the local food--"I was used to Iraqi bread," he recalled later--and with his money almost gone, Bassim made his way back to Kuala Lumpur by the end of January. He last saw his friend Ibrahim heading for Indonesia in a small boat. Abu Mohammed in Sweden became elusive and, when finally contacted by phone after six days, admitted that "for Iraqis, all the ways from Asia to Sweden are shut". He did not offer to return Bassim's $6,900. Demoralized, and hearing that many Iraqi refugees trying to get to Europe through Indonesia simply disappeared, Bassim used his last few dollars to fly to Damascus and took a shared taxi across the desert to Baghdad. "The journey took three months but it felt like 10 years," he said. "I have lost everything." Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago. "The problem," complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, "is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets--'War Rages' and 'Peace Dawns'--and not a lot in between." Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against "the new Iraq". When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down. In contrast to the spurious turning-points of the past, the most recent political changes in Iraq, which had led to the fall in American and Iraqi casualties, are quite real. But they differ significantly from the way in which they are portrayed in the outside world, and have less to do with al-Qa'ida and the US than the continuing struggle for power between Sunni and Shia in Iraq. From the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 to the summer of 2006, the five million-strong Sunni community had battled the US and the Shia-Kurdish Iraqi government. Then, quite suddenly, last year many of the Sunni rebel groups switched sides and allied themselves with the Americans, formed the "al-Sahwa" or "Awakening" movement and declared war on al-Qa'ida. Dramatic changes of side when enemies embrace each other are not unknown in Iraqi politics and may stem from its traditions of tribal warfare. I was in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996 when the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, many of whose family and tribe had been murdered by Saddam Hussein, called in Saddam's tanks to capture the city of Arbil and to repulse an offensive by the rival Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, now president of Iraq. The US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the US ambassador, Ryan Crocker, are cautious about claiming too much success. But the White House and the Republicans have been quick to suggest that a turning point had been reached in the war. As in 2003, after the American overthrow of Saddam, both the Democrats and much of the American media could be easily intimidated by the fear that they were being unpatriotic or defeatist when military victory was in sight. "The problem in Iraq is that the agenda is driven not by what is really happening, but by the perception in America of what is happening," Ahmad Chalabi, veteran of the opposition to Saddam and one of the most astute observers of the Iraqi scene, told me. A problem is that US politicians and commentators assume far greater American control of events in Iraq than is the case. The US is the most powerful player there, but it is by no means the only one. The dramatic change of sides of Sunni guerrilla organizations such as the "1920 Revolution Brigades" and the "Islamic Army" came about for many reasons. In Anbar province west of Baghdad (perhaps one-third of Iraq by area), the Sunni tribes had become enraged by al-Qa'ida's attempt to establish total dominance, and to replace or murder traditional leaders and set up a Taliban-type state. But the Sunni community could also see that, although its guerrilla war was effective against the US, it was being defeated by the Shia who controlled the Iraqi government and armed forces after the elections of 2005. The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs--four million, if those on a pension are included--are with the government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. "The Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was to be allied to the Americans," said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. "Otherwise we were in a hopeless situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government] in Baghdad." The "surge"--the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad--has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit. Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce. "People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible." Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop. For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60. "People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in the main roads as they were 12 months ago," says one Shia leader with a network of contacts throughout Baghdad. "About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits." This figure is still well below what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous level as long as al-Qa'ida does not resume its suicide bombing campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on February 1, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni. The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government. At the end of January, I visited Abu Marouf, one of the leaders of the Awakening, in his headquarters near Khan Dari, halfway between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Asked about his attitude to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Abu Marouf, until recently a commander of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, said: "Maliki has got 13 divisions [in the army] most of whom are Shia, and half are from militias controlled by Iran." In his State of the Union address, President Bush spoke of the 80,000 Awakening Council members--also labelled "concerned local citizens", as if they were respectable householders who have taken up arms against "terrorists". The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the "terrorists" of yesterday. Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present post in December 2006 he was "fighting the Americans". Abu Marouf is threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa'ida return unless his 13,000 men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein's regime to once again hold real power in the state. Bizarrely, the US is still holding hundreds of men suspected of contacts with al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while in Iraq many of the Awakening members are past and, in many cases, probably current members of al-Qa'ida being paid by the US Army. "I knew a young man, aged 17 or 18," says Kassim Ahmed Salman, "who was a friend of my brother and used to carry a PKC [a Russian light machine-gun] and fight for al-Qa'ida. I was astonished to see him a few days ago in al-Khadra where he is a lieutenant in al-Sahwa, standing together with Iraqi army officers." The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time. All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa'ida is wounded but by no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his movements, al-Qa'ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his house and injure four of his guards. Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members, declaring enthusiastically to the camera: "You see, together we will defeat al-Qa'ida." Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: "I don't have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers." Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth". In the coming weeks, we will see the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces on March 19, and the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9. There will be much rancorous debate in the Western media about the success or failure of the "surge" and the US war effort here. But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq. Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006. His forthcoming book 'Muqtada! Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq' is published by Scribner in April.

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