War-battered Iraq is now a "corpse" of a country and the United States isn't feeling so well itself, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in Regina Wednesday.

The icon of American journalism provided a harsh assessment of his country's war in Iraq during a visit to the University of Regina.

Seymour Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his reporting on Vietnam.
(John Weidlich/CBC)

Hersh is known for decades of ground-breaking coverage from the war in Vietnam to the current conflict in Iraq. In 1969, he was the first to report on the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai. 

Hersh said he came to conclude that the Vietnam War was a horrible misadventure and he has a similarly harsh assessment of the current war Iraq started with a U.S.-led invasion ostensibly in search of weapons of mass destruction.  

"Iraq right now is a corpse. It's just a dead body," he told reporters in Regina.

In a series of articles for the New Yorker, Hersh exposed the treatment of Iraqi prisoners held by U.S. forces in Baghdad's now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

Hersh said the current U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is "in a terrible position of having to basically pimp for a war that's not winnable. But he will. He'll come to congress and say how wonderful it is."

In a later speech to about 300 people at the university, Hersh also had caustic words for U.S. President George W. Bush's administration, which he suggested was "the single worst government we've ever had."

He discounted the notion that Bush is a lame-duck president who won't involve the U.S. in any more adventures in the Middle East. "I think he's going to be very dangerous," he said.

Despite the grim content of much of his speech, Hersh sprinkled his talk with some humorous observations drawn from his decades writing for publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker Magazine.

For example, Hersh said the contrast in personalities between the two reporters who broke the Watergate story — the "wild" Carl Bernstein and the more reserved Bob Woodward — was something to see.

"When you finish lunch with Bob Woodward, you do a Snoopy dance," he said.

When someone in the audience asked what has changed in the United States from the early decades of the 20th century when it had an isolationist foreign policy, he quipped: "Fluoridation?… I don't have the foggiest."

More often, he maintained a sober tone as he lamented over the fate of his country.

"What we have in America is not democracy and I don't know how to fix it," he said.