Self Par-Uday - The Hussein

Self Par-Uday - The Hussein Boys have bought the farm.

Everyone knows it.

Except, of course, Robert "Fisk Fodder" Fisk. Watch him jerk the chains:

Of course, they might be dead. The two men are said to bear an impressive resemblance to the brothers.

Reasonable Doubt!

A 14-year-old child killed by the Americans - one of the four dead - might be one of Saddam's grandsons.

A child! Dead!

Qusay was a leader of the Special Republican Guard, a special target of the Americans. The two men obviously fought fiercely against the 200 American troops who surrounded the house.

Those Plucky Underdogs!

The Americans used their so-called Task Force 20 to storm the pseudo-Palladian villa on a main highway through Mosul.

Task Force 20 combines both special forces and CIA agents. But this is the same Task Force 20 that blasted to death the occupants of a convoy heading for the Syrian border earlier this month, a convoy whose travellers were meant to include Saddam himself and even the two sons supposedly killed yesterday. The victims turned out to be only smugglers.

Therefore - and never mind what they may have been smuggling in this WMD-crazy time - everything TF20, and by extension the rest of the military does, is not only suspect, but guilty until proven innocent!

And American intelligence - the organisation that failed to predict events of 11 September, 2001 - was also responsible for the air raid on a Saddam villa on 20 March, which was supposed to kill Saddam. And the far crueller air raid on the Mansour district of Baghdad at the end of the air bombardment in April which was supposed to kill Saddam and his sons but only succeeded in slaughtering 16 innocent civilians. All proved to be miserable failures.

All Failures! Like the war itself! Why, except for that whole "liberated country" thingie, this war has been an unmitigated balls-up!

But it's in the closing that Fisk proves himself not only supremely, invincibly illogical, but quite stark raving mad:

If he and his sons are dead, the chances are that the opposition to the American-led occupation will grow rather than diminish - on the grounds that with Saddam gone, Iraqis will have nothing to lose by fighting the Americans

Got that? When the regime in whose interest everyone is fighting is eradicated, only then will Iraqis find it safe to fight us!

When the Fedayeen (who drove troops, NKVD-style, toward the American guns in Nasiriyah) are gone - then fighting us will be a matter of freewill!

Fisk may not have the toxic sheen of a Robert Scheer; he's too doddering and logically incontinent to meet that standard - but the fact that he earns a living at all is telling, and more than a bit depressing.

Posted by Mitch at July 24, 2003 04:40 PM