Robert Fisk: "Journalist" of the

Robert Fisk: "Journalist" of the "Liberation" - Robert Fisk, ultraliberal toady, wrote this about the liberation of Baghdad today:

The Americans "liberated" Baghdad yesterday,

Note the sneer quotes.

I should quit right here, because Fisk has already given his entire game away. Liberation is "liberation", in Robert Fisk's world. He and I inhabit very different places. Freedom - er, "freedom", to the likes of Robert Fisk, is something that pertains to journalists, not brown people who speak funny languages.

...but brought behind them an army of looters who unleashed upon the ancient city a reign of pillage and anarchy.

Most accounts say that it was pretty much the government buildings and Saddam's palaces that got looted.

It was a day that began with shellfire and air strikes and blood-bloated hospitals and ended with the ritual destruction of the dictator's statues. The mobs shrieked their delight. Men who, for 25 years, had grovellingly obeyed Saddam's most humble secret policeman turned into giants, bellowing their hatred of the Iraqi leader as his vast and monstrous statues thundered to the ground.

Note the implied ridicule; "they were big men, tackling statues...

"It is the beginning of our new freedom," an Iraqi shopkeeper shouted at me. Then he paused, and asked: "What do the Americans want from us now?' The great Lebanese poet Kalil Gibran once wrote that he pitied the nation that welcomed its tyrants with trumpetings and dismissed them with hootings of derision. And the people of Baghdad performed this same deadly ritual yesterday, forgetting that they – or their parents – had behaved in identical fashion when the Arab Socialist Baath Party destroyed the previous dictatorship of Iraq's generals and princes. Forgetting, too, that the "liberators" were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq.

Just like in Japan.

Oh, wait - that would trash Mr. Fisks's preconceptions, woudn't it?

In Al-Fardus (Paradise) Square, US Marines helped a crowd of youths pull down the gaunt and massive statue of Saddam by roping it to an armoured personnel carrier. It toppled menacingly forward from its plinth to hang lengthways above the ground, right arm still raised in fraternal greetings to the Iraqi people.

It was a symbolic moment in more ways than one. I stood behind the first man to seize a hatchet and smash at the imposing grey marble plinth. But within seconds, the marble had fallen away to reveal a foundation of cheap bricks and badly cracked cement. That's what the Americans always guessed Saddam's regime was made of, although they did their best – in the late Seventies and early Eighties – to arm him and service his economy and offer him political support, to turn him into the very dictator he became.

It took Fisk about four minutes to exhume that strawman.

Mr. Fisk; we also supported Stalin, when he was our enemy's enemy. For that matter, many American and English leaders, including John F. Kennedy's father Joseph, and Henry Ford, supported Hitler. How complicit do you all feel?

In one sense, therefore, America – occupying the capital of an Arab nation for the first time in its history – was helping to destroy what it had spent so much time and money creating. Saddam was "our" man and yesterday, metaphorically at least, we annihilated him.

Let's do try to be honest here; France, Germany and Russia sent a thousand dollars to Hussein for every dollar we did. He was "our man" for a very brief window, twenty years ago, before Hussein developed into quite the criminal he has been for the last 15 years. Hussein was an old fling from long ago; France, Russia and Germany are still in bed with him.

Hence the importance of all those statue- bashing mobs, of all that looting and theft.

But of the real and somewhat less imposing Saddam, there was no trace.

Neither he nor his sons, Uday and Qusay, could be found. Had they fled north to their homeland fortress of Tikrit? Or has he – the most popular rumour this – taken refuge in the Russian embassy in Baghdad. Were they hiding out in the cobweb of underground tunnels and bunkers beneath the presidential palaces? True, their rule was effectively over. The torture chambers and the prisons should now be turned into memorials, the true story of Iraq's use of gas warfare revealed at last. But history suggests otherwise. Prisons usually pass over to new management, torture cells too, and who would want the world to know how easy it is to make weapons of mass destruction.

There will be mass graves that will have to be opened – though in the Middle East, these disinterments are usually performed in order to allow more blood to be poured onto the graves.

This is, of course, the same Fisk that was predicting world-class slaughter in Afghanistan. He just can't let that thread go.

Not that the nightmare is entirely over. For though the Americans will mark yesterday as their first day of occupation – they, of course, will call it liberation – vast areas of Baghdad remained outside the control of the United States last night.

Three days ago, all of it was outside our control.

Here, it gets interesting:

And at dusk, just before darkness curled over the land, I crossed through the American lines, back to the little bit of Saddam's regime that remained intact within the vast, flat city of Baghdad. Down grey, carless streets, I drove to the great bridges over the Tigris which the Americans had still not crossed from the west. And there, on the corner of Bab al-Moazzam Street, were a small group of mujahedin fighters, firing Kalashnikov rifles at the American tanks on the other side of the waterway. It was brave and utterly pathetic and painfully instructive.

For the men turned out to be Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, Palestine. Not an Iraqi was among them. The Baathist militiamen, the Republican Guard, the greasy Iraqi intelligence men, the so-called Saddam Fedayeen had all left their posts and crept home. Only the foreign Arabs, like the Frenchmen of the Nazi Charlemagne Division in 1945 Berlin, fought on.

There's a great parallel here. Only the deluded from outside Iraq - the foreign zealots, the Robert Fisks, the matron from Highland Park with her "At Least Saddam Was Elected" sign at the "Peace" rally - attributes Hussein to be anything but a thug, a glorified gang-banger who has held power for thirty years because his thugs were bigger and badder than the opposition's thugs.

...tanks come in two forms: the dangerous, deadly kind and the "liberating" kind from which smart young soldiers with tanned faces look down with smiles at Iraqis who are obliging enough to wave at them, tanks with cute names stencilled on their gun barrels, names like "Kitten Rescue" and "Nightmare Witness" (this with a human skull painted underneath) and "Pearl". And there has to be a first soldier – of the occupying or liberating kind – who stands at the very front of the first column of every vast and powerful army.

So I walked up to Corporal David Breeze of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from Michigan. He hadn't spoken to his parents for two months so I called his mother on my satellite phone and from the other side of the world, Mrs Breeze came on the line and I handed the phone to her son.

And so this is what the very first soldier to enter the centre of Baghdad told his family yesterday evening. "Hi you guys. I'm in Baghdad.

"I'm ringing to say 'Hi! I love you. I'm doing fine. I love you guys. The war will be over in a few days. I'll see you all soon.''

Yes, they all say the war will be over soon. There will be a homecoming no doubt for Corporal Breeze and I suppose I admired his innocence despite the deadly realities that await America in this dangerous, cruel land. For even as the marine tanks thrashed and ground down the highway, there were men and women who saw them and stood, the women scarved, the men observing the soldiers with the most acute attention, who spoke of their fear for the future, who talked of how Iraq could never be ruled by foreigners.

Just the way you were saying Afghanistan could never be liberated by Americans, not so very long ago, Robert Fisk.

It goes on from there. Read it, if you have the stomach.

Er..."stomach".

Posted by Mitch at April 10, 2003 07:07 AM