Patrick Oliver Cockburn (/ˈkoʊbɜːrn/ KOH-burn; born 5 March 1950) is a journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times since 1979 and, from 1990, The Independent.

[clarification needed] He worked for the Financial Times as its Middle East correspondent until 1990, when he left and joined The Independent to cover the Gulf War.

The first, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, was written with his brother Andrew prior to the war in Iraq.

[8] He has also published a collection of essays on the Soviet Union, titled Getting Russia Wrong: The End of Kremlinology (1989).

[10] Cockburn is critical of embedded journalism, writing in the Independent in 2010 "...There is a more subtle disadvantage to "embedding": it leads reporters to see the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts primarily in military terms, while the most important developments are political or, if they are military, may have little to do with foreign forces".

The best reporting in any single publication during the height of the sectarian slaughter in Iraq in 2006–07 was in The New York Times, which got round this dilemma by simply hiring experienced and highly regarded correspondents from other newspapers.

I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well.

"[12] Cockburn was criticised by Idrees Ahmad for an apparent claim made in his 2015 book The Rise of Islamic State about the Adra massacre of Alawites and Christians during the Syrian Civil War.

The publisher criticised Ahmad for using a "minor" mistake "made evident by text that surrounds and contradicts it" to "impugn the integrity" of Cockburn.