Patrick Cockburn: Iraq: The Greatest Ever Failure in US Foreign Policy

"An Iraqi friend who feared for his life because he was close to the Americans used to live inside the Green Zone, the heavily protected area in central Baghdad where the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has its headquarters.
One day he fell into conversation with an American soldier guarding one of the gates. The soldier said he was of Iraqi origin and could speak Arabic. He added that security was not quite as tight as it looked since prostitutes were regular visitors to the zone.
My friend, a little alarmed about this, decided to investigate. He went to a house being used as a brothel.
He says: “In the toilet I found that the women were writing pro-Baath party, anti-American and patriotic slogans with their lipstick on the mirrors.” Their clients could not tell what they had written because it was in Arabic.
The story illustrates the way in which the CPA officials became wholly isolated from the real opinions of Iraqis. Arriving in the wake of the war last year they cut themselves off inside Saddam Hussein’s old palace complex. They were as remote from the lives of ordinary Iraqis as if they lived in a Martian spaceship that had temporarily touched down in the center of Baghdad."