[On Monday January 29, 2006 I spoke at a forum of the US Congress' "Out of Iraq" Caucus in the Ways and Means Committee room of the Longwoth House Office Buiding. The forum was officiated by Congresswomen Maxine Waters of Los Angeles and Lynn Woolsey of Northern California. Below is a transcript of my opening remarks.]

Congresswoman Waters, and fellow members, a year ago I published a book called How America Lost Iraq. The book, based on my experiences as an unembedded journalist, documented how the US military went from being seen as liberators to the situation we have now - where the vast majority of ordinary Iraqis support attacks on American soldiers in an effort to get them to leave their country.

There are four main reasons for this:

** NUMBER ONE: All the things that were broken during the initial invasion are still broken. There is no security, no ability to send children to school without fear of kidnapping. There is almost no clean water, and almost no electricity. Imagine trying to sleep without a fan during when its 120 degrees in the Summer in Baghdad. Imagine four years without reliable refrigeration. You would get grouchy.

**NUMBER TWO: The Abu Ghraib prison scandal, but not the one you saw on TV. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq is that so many people imprisoned in Abu Ghraib prison. When the scandal broke two years ago, there were more than 10,000 "security detainees" in Iraq. These are people who were not charged with any crime and had no access to a lawyer or to visits from their family. In 2004, the International Committee for the Red Cross, which has access to the prisons, estimated up to 90 percent of inmates were arrested by mistake. Even now, the US military holds an estimated 13,000 people without trial in Iraq. This is not a good way to make friends.

**NUMBER THREE: The attack on the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr. Many here may not like his anti-American rhetoric and fundamentalist ideology, but he is a man with a lot of street credibility in Iraq - his followers provide food and security to the poor. His father and uncle were both killed by Saddam Hussien. When the US military attacks a major social movement with millions of members, it inflicts many civilian casualties - causing many people who had never picked up arms before to start to fight against our soldiers. It also causes Iraqis of all political stripes to believe the United States has no commitment to democracy - that we only want to control their country.

**NUMBER FOUR The attack on Fallujah. The first siege in the Spring of 2004, which came after four military contractors were killed and their burning corpses hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River in the center of town. The US military didn't just take revenge on the killers, but against all the people of Fallujah. So many people were killed in the US bombardment of Fallujah that the municipal stadium had to be turned into a graveyard for the dead. And I've been to that stadium and I've seen the mourners and the headstones and I can tell you that many of the people buried there are innocent women, children, and the elderly.

Imagine if so many Americans were killed in Washington that RFK Stadium had to be turned into a graveyard. People here would get angry. Some would get violent.
Four things, the lack of basic services, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the attack on Muqtada al-Sadr and the attack on Fallujah.

By the middle of 2004, almost every Iraq I talked to wanted the United States military to leave their country. Since then, the situation on the ground in Iraq has steadily gotten worse - with Iraqis killing each other in larger numbers every year the occupation drags on.

Earlier this year, the respected British medical journal, The Lancet reported that more than 650,000 Iraqis have been killed during the US occupation. These are not just numbers but human lives.

On June 28, Alaa Hassan, a friend and colleague from Inter Press News Service, was on his way to work when masked men ambushed him on a bridge and machine-gunned his car. He is dead now simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- one of so many people killed seemingly for no reason in Iraq each day.
The US military could not save Alaa's life and it will not be able to secure Baghdad or anywhere else, because it is the US military occupation that is destabilizing the country.

I want to leave you with this story about a car mechanic I met in Baghdad in 2004. He was a member of the insurgency. I asked him: "Mr Car Mechanic, you're a member of the insurgency, what do you do?"

He told me: "Me and my friends we get together every night at a caf?. We drink tea and smoke cigarettes and when the American troops come through we hit them. And if no American troops come through we bomb the police station because they're collaborators."

If you take the US soldiers out of this situation, this guy is just a car mechanic and slowly, slowly peace will come to Baghdad. Thank you very much.