Patrick Cockburn
The Independent (London)

At a certain point, in 2003, I remember the exact moment the British had moved inside the Green Zone, and I remember going to see a senior diplomat who I actually knew quite well and who was actually quite intelligent. But because they were inside the Green Zone, they knew less and less about what was happening in Iraq, and what they did know was all second-hand. Now on this day, I was rather late to see this diplomat because there were enormous traffic jams all over Baghdad because there was a shortage of fuel, of gasoline.

So I was talking to him and I mentioned this to him and he said, “But I just looked at figures showing there’s plenty of gasoline.” Now everybody in the rest of Baghdad knew that there was a shortage of gasoline. The only people that didn’t were inside the Green Zone.

Jon Lee Anderson
The New Yorker
I returned before the end of June 2003 and stayed for the summer. Of course, this is when the insurgency really did pick up, when Paul Bremer, the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] administrator, was getting a grip on his job [the CPA served as a transitional government from April 2003 until June 2004]. And I wrote a long piece in The New Yorker, which appeared in August — I think the title was “Iraq’s Bloody Summer.” I did have an interview with Paul Bremer on my last night in the country, though I’d already filed my piece. And I came away pretty disheartened by what I saw as a very kind of imperious, closed-off Green Zone under the CPA.

I remember receiving e-mails that I think we all received, announcing civic action — little civic action jobs like...

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