Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest tonight is Patrick Coburn. He has been Middle East correspondent

for the Independent for over 30 years, during which time he has extensively reported

on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. He is the author of a number

of books, including the occupation about the US occupation of Iraq,

The Age of Jihad, a compilation of his Middle East reporting from 9-11 to around 2015,

the broken boy, a memoir of his Irish childhood and his experience with polio as well as the quark polio epidemic.

And most recently war in the age of Trump, the defeat of ISIS, the fall of the cards, the conflict with Iran available from war books.

Patrick Coburn has been said of him by Tom Englehart of Tom Dispatch

that he has the caniest, clearest-eyed view of developments in the regions. If you want to know

what's actually going on in the Middle East, instead of what U.S. officials think or say is going on,

you turn to the reporting of Patrick Coburn.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you.

Okay, so I live in the United States.

Most of our readers and listeners are in the United States.

And our media, as you note in your books,

pay less and less attention to the Middle East over time. There's less and less good reporting.

And I think there are so many things that from reading your book, the ordinary American does not know about the region and does not know about their country's involvement of the region.

So I want to start by asking you broadly speaking, and I know this is going to be impossible to answer because it's so broad, what do you think are the biggest misconceptions or delusions that Americans hold, what they don't understand about the Middle East, that actual firsthand knowledge of these countries has brought you over the course of your reporting?

I think let's start with governments. I think that, you know, if you look for the common link

in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Lebanon, in the past, is they think that these are sort of normal

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