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GUEST: Jonathan Steele senior foreign correspondent for the Guardian, author of Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq

Many expected that last week’s Congressional hearings on Iraq at which General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified, would revive the debate on the war. But the testimonies and questions from legislators focused mostly on supposed “gains” made in Iraq and painted an optimistic, if fragile picture of what is to come. But no matter how many troops are deployed, and or how many Iraqi fighters are paid off, according to my guest for the hour, Jonathan Steele, it’s the occupation itself that is the problem. And, ending the occupation can be the only solution to the devastating war in Iraq.

Jonathan Steele is based in London as the Senior Foreign Correspondent and main International Affairs Columnist for the Guardian newspaper. He has covered various recent wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Darfur, and Iraq. He has twice won the International Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards, and the James Cameron award “for work as a journalist that combined moral vision and professional integrity.”

His new book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq is based on the premise that no matter how well the occupation of Iraq was planned and executed, it was doomed to fail. According to Noam Chomsky, Steele writes “with penetrating intelligence and deep knowledge.” I spent the hour with Jonathan Steele in studio last week while he was on tour through Los Angeles.