Kerry.... on the wrong side of history --
madtimes.com
Robert Fisk: An unflinching account of Iraq by a firsthand observer
By Rob Hunter
Robert Fisk, a controversial reporter on the Middle East and a correspondent for the London paper The Independent, spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at the Orpheum Theater Nov. 20. Fisk did not offer a title for his remarks, but a fitting one can be found in the name of one of his recent articles in The Independent: “We are paying the price of an infantile attempt to reshape the Middle East.” An equally good title would be Fisk’s remark that “by our hubris and by our lies and by our fantasies we are descending into … a new colonial humiliation … which could end the careers” of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.
Fisk spoke about recent events in the Middle East, including the invasion of Iraq and the current occupation, as he himself experienced them. He also spoke about his personal encounters with Middle Eastern history, including the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Iran-Iraq war, and the Persian Gulf wars. For nearly two hours, sometimes sardonic, at others impassioned, he made the case for his claim that the West, especially the United States, is sowing the seeds for future conflict in the current situation in Iraq.
“This country of Iraq is living a tragedy of epic proportions and now, after its descent into hell under Saddam, we are doomed … to suffer [a repeat of history],” he said.
Fisk has spent 28 years covering the Middle East and has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1996. He has made numerous documentaries, notably on the wars in Lebanon and Bosnia, as well as a film attacking Holocaust deniers. He is also the author of the book “Pity the Nation,” an account of the Lebanese civil war, and is working on a book on events in Iraq since the first Gulf War.
Fisk is no stranger to controversy. He is well-known for his belief that journalistic standards of objectivity make for ineffective reporting that too often becomes a mouthpiece for official viewpoints, an attitude that has attracted a great deal of criticism from many of his colleagues in journalism. Fisk has also been criticized for being a correspondent for The Independent, a newspaper known for its critical stance on Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians.
Fisk brought his no-holds-barred style of journalism to Madison, adopting a tone in his speech that was at once solemn, hard-edged, and opinionated. He doled out equal measures of criticism for the ousted government of Saddam Hussein; the interim U.S. occupational government, Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA); the collusion (as he saw it) of mainstream journalists in the campaign to justify the war; and the way the war itself was conducted. “None of what I'm going to show negates the evidence of Saddam's killing fields, his butchery against the Kurds and Shiites, his torture chambers … [but] wars are not the clean and bloodless sandpits that our colleagues like to pretend [they are],” he said.
Fisk attacked Bremer and the provisional government for critical failures in the administrative oversight of Iraq. He pointed out that the CPA has now taken steps to control and censor information in Iraq, banning the independent, foreign-based al Jazeera and al Arabiya networks and replacing them with U.S.-controlled ones, as well as only allowing cell phone companies owned by U.S. or British firms to bid on reconstruction contracts. A company called Apt Associates has been called in to provide assistance in reconstructing hospitals and medical care in Iraq; however, the company has decreed that all equipment must conform to U.S. standards, meaning that Iraq will be forced to purchase all medical supplies and equipment from the United States. Additionally, Iraqi universities are up and running now only because Bremer has rehired Ba’athist professors he originally fired, and the 400,000-strong Iraqi army, originally disbanded, has now been put back on rations to prevent ex-soldiers from joining resistance groups.
“Bremer has a habit of reversing his own solemn decisions,” Fisk said. He also accused Bremer and the occupational authorities of providing misleading, inaccurate, or sometimes nonexistent information on the current state of affairs. For example, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, U.S. commander in Iraq, recently claimed that Iraq was producing nearly 1 million barrels of oil per day, when in fact the number has dropped by 25 percent or more due to smuggling and sabotage.
Most damningly, Fisk accused the CPA of doing little to track, record, or publicize violence in Iraq, whether committed by civilians against civilians, civilians against troops, or troops against civilians. Incidents in which civilian demonstrators have been killed by U.S. troops —14 in Faluja, 11 in Mosul, eight in Mansur, and more in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Tikrit, Basra, and other cities, receive little attention. By Fisk’s estimates, there have been weeks in which up to 1,000 Iraqis have died in the violent lawlessness that grips the country, yet the authorities do little to investigate, publicize, or prevent it. The victims of rape, kidnapping, assault, or murder crowd Iraq’s hospitals and mortuaries — up to 70 bodies come to Baghdad’s public mortuaries in a “nightly cull of civilians” — receive little assistance from the occupying powers. Only major attacks, such as those on U.N. or Red Cross headquarters, receive official attention, he said.
Fisk also criticized the conduct of the war, displaying photographs he took of civilian victims of U.S. raids and strikes in Iraq. He accused the U.S. commanders of ordering a strike against the Baghdad offices of al Jazeera after the network had willingly given the coalition the map coordinates of its building. He displayed photographs he took of U.S. troops entering Baghdad, describing them as conquerors rather than liberators.
Indeed, Fisk was adamant that the war could not be justified in terms of liberation, since Iraq had enjoyed U.S. support — politically and monetarily — up until the first Gulf War. He referred to the now famous visit by Donald Rumsfeld to Hussein’s palace in Baghdad in the early 1980s and pointed out that Washington had seen Hussein as “our man against Iran” during the Iran-Iraq War. If the current invasion and occupation of Iraq was meant to rescue Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein, Fisk said, it came “20 years too late.”
The most emotional and harrowing point of the evening came when Fisk displayed footage taken by the Iraqi Muhabarat intelligence service of a torture chamber in which Shiite rebels — whom Bush Sr. had encouraged to revolt during the first Gulf War — were being held captive. The coalition failed to come to their assistance, and they faced a brutal crackdown by the Iraqi army. The footage showed emaciated and nearly naked prisoners being beaten; whipped with cattle prods, batons, and electric cords; and hurled against the walls and floor, eliciting gasps from the audience and prompting one member to yell, “If we had listened to Robert Fisk, these guys would still be in power.”
Fisk closed by saying that just as in Lebanon, Israel, and other flashpoints in the Middle East, the projection of U.S. strength into Iraq would provoke a new wave of terrorism. “Through our alliances, through our military involvement in the Middle East, through our failure to act in the face of decades of brutality, [we] have created real enemies in the Middle East. In Iraq … the suicide bomber has joined America’s enemies, just as he did in Lebanon.”
Although not everyone in the capacity-sized crowd was sympathetic to Fisk’s views, he was not heckled or harassed and was able to answer questions from the audience — first at the microphone and then with a small knot of audience members who gathered around him afterward. Fisk was, as always, unapologetically opinionated. The onus falls to the reader, as it did to his audience, to decide which account — his or the official word of Paul Bremer and the CPA — comes closer to the truth. |
