Siah
03-10-04, 09:12
AMY GOODMAN : As we turn now to Robert Fisk. He is the long-time middle East correspondent for the London Independent. Today he joins us from his home in Ireland. He has spent much of the past year, though, in Iraq. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Robert Fisk.
ROBERT FISK : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : It's great to have you with us. Well, you have been listening to the debate.
ROBERT FISK : Oh, I have, indeed, yes.
AMY GOODMAN : If you want to call it that, when it comes to the issue of Iraq. Why don't you share some of your thoughts today.
ROBERT FISK : Well, I thought they were both – I have actually heard it before, and I have heard almost all of the so-called debate. I think it's miserable stuff. Both Kerry and Bush have completely missed the point. I think if they're not willfully doing so, they are certainly misleading American people, who listened to what they had to say. We need to go back and recall how this whole disaster happened. We are talking about a disaster in Iraq. We are talking about a country we claimed we were coming to liberate and now we're occupying it. We're re-besieging their cities. I mean, Samarra was supposed to have been liberated by us in 2003. Now we're going to re-liberate it, and apparently Fallujah is next on the list. What on earth are we doing there? Remember this all started at a critical moment after September 11, 2001, after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. When Osama bin Laden was suddenly deleted off the screen, off the radar screen and Saddam Hussein was put up there. The Americans were bombarded with the idea, which many Americans, sadly, still believe, that Saddam Hussein had had something to do with September 11 when in fact the agenda for attacking Iraq was first thought up by the neoconservatives in Washington during the Clinton administration. We're now apparently fighting for democracy in Iraq. Originally, we were going to liberate Iraq so they could have democracy. Most of Iraq is outside of the control of the United States forces or British forces and certainly not government forces. The Iraqi government itself now has less power than the mayor of Baghdad and doesn't even control all of Baghdad. The situation – the disastrous situation in Iraq is now so grave that I don't think it could ever be turned around, not while western troops are there. And yet, Kerry and Bush talk about it, as if it is a reversible situation or actually getting better. And again and again, the concentration on America's soldiers. Well, fine, Americans should be interested in their soldiers and their welfare, but the principal victims in Iraq are not Americans, they’re Iraqis, and they're dying at an ever greater number. When I go to the mortuaries and see shrieking people holding the corpses of children, old men as well as young men. Trying to stuff them into coffins. The stench is overpowering. That's the reality on the ground in Iraq. What Kerry and Bush had to say last night bore no relation to the reality which I see inside Iraq.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Robert Fisk, it seemed almost as if the basic thrust of Kerry's arguments was, I will present a smarter imperialism, a smarter defensive empire than the kind of defense that the President has so far been responsible for. For instance, he – as you mentioned, the thrust of the Bush administration, he kept calling it a colossal mistake, rather than dealing with even what some former people in government as Richard Clarke said in his book, the night of September 11, President Bush began to say, let's find a connection to Saddam Hussein in the attacks. Rather than reiterate that enormous indictment of Richard Clarke against the President, he kept referring to it as a colossal mistake. And he also, as Amy mentioned before, didn't deal with one of the driving forces of much of the Islamic terrorism around the world is the continuing situation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Your thoughts about how that would be possible.
ROBERT FISK : You have to start off on the basis that nobody who wants to be the United States President is going to try and head into the Palestine-Israel conflict because it would be essential at some point to criticize the Israelis, and that's not going to get you President of the United States of America. So, I'm not surprised that they ducked that one. That's par for the course. Clinton did the same. George Bush Sr. This is not going to be a subject for debate.
AMY GOODMAN : But neither did the journalists dare to ask them about it, either.
ROBERT FISK : No, of course, not, because American journalism is, I think, I'm sorry to say, is becoming increasingly neutered. You only have to look the at cozy relationships now between journalists and power in Washington. The relationship is very evident. If you go to a press conference it's, “Yes, John.” It’s “Mr. President, can I ask you…” It's first name terms for the journalists and Mr. President. The journalists in many ways have become mouthpieces. I remember pointing out in lectures in the United States before the invasion of Iraq that “The New York Times,” every time it had a major story, the first paragraph always ended with the words, “according to American officials” or “American officials say” – often by Judith Miller at “The New York Times.” Over and over again, we have seen a failure of American journalism, who should – I mean the fourth estate should be out there for the people to ask the serious questions and challenge power. I go back to Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist, who once defined journalism to me as monitoring the centers of power. I think by and large, with the exception of a few newspapers and small television and radio programs, yours for example, by and large, major American news organizations are neutered. They have neutered themselves. They will not monitor the centers of power. They will not challenge authority , and that leads to a situation in which the major issues which should be discussed, and which American people are quite capable of discussing, and would like to discuss, do not get mentioned. You have got to go back and realize what lies behind the whole issue of Iraq for the two contenders last night. There is an equation which they wouldn't mention and can’t mention, but it's very clear. The Americans have got to leave Iraq. And they will leave Iraq, but they can’t leave Iraq. That is why we have this bloody mess at the moment. Everybody in America would like the American soldiers home. Everyone in America knows why the President cannot admit it was all folly. And why Kerry can’t admit it was all folly. So, we end up in essentially a false debate. The issue is that the Iraqi invasion is a disaster. We have got rid of dictatorship and replaced it with total anarchy. You know, I hate to once again go back to the poor Iraqi, but over and over again when I go to funerals in Iraq, of men who have been cruelly murdered, women, children, people say to me, look. I don't care if you got rid of Saddam Hussein. No, we didn't like him, but at least with Saddam Hussein, we had security. Our children went to school in the morning. Although we didn't have free speech, we knew that if we obeyed the rules, we would be alive. Now, that is not praise of Saddam Hussein. He was a cruel dictator. We helped to prop him up. We started him off in the first place. But if the alternative is carnage on the scale we're now seeing, what do you think that the Iraqis want? I mean, history shows that what Bush did, and what Kerry thinks he might be able to do, cannot work, especially in Iraq. I'm writing a new book about history and the folly of history and the inability to escape from it. I have gone back through the British and Iraqi records and what happened when the British occupied Iraq in 1917. Well, we set up an occupation authority. We appointed our own Iraqi rulers, like Mr. Allawi. Eventually we brought in a King. We found that the Iraqis started a major insurrection against us. One of our senior officers was killed near Fallujah. So we besieged Fallujah with artillery and killed many of the citizens living there. Then we besieged Najaf because we wanted the surrender of a Shia muslim cleric called Badr, not Muqtada al-Sadr, but the name is kind of similar. And then our intelligence operatives in Baghdad, this is British intelligence in 1920, told London they thought the terrorists were coming in from Syria. It’s an absolute fingerprint of what was to happen in 2003 and 2004. Anyone who goes back to the history of the British occupation, and believe me, we knew about empire and occupation, can see every step of the way the path to disaster. Everything we did there went wrong.
AMY GOODMAN : Robert Fisk, we want it turn for a minute it another excerpt of the debate, this on Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN : John Kerry, George Bush, and their first so-called debate last night. It took place in Coral Gables, Florida. Certainly, a swing state. On the line us with, Robert Fisk, long-time middle-East correspondent for The Independent newspaper of Britain. he speaks to us from his home in Ireland on Afghanistan. Robert Fisk, you were beaten badly when you were covering the conflict in Afghanistan, but your response to Kerry and Bush?
ROBERT FISK : Afghanistan is not a success. Human rights organizations are already pointing out that the polls are hopelessly flawed, that the candidates in some cases are working for the warlords. Not since before the Taliban, when the same warlords were back in power killing each other has there been such opium and drug production in Afghanistan. Most of the country is out of bounds to foreigners because the Taliban have re-established themselves, especially in the villages around Pastia coast, and the Pakistani border. In many cases, U.S. forces cannot move freely except in large numbers in parts of Afghanistan. There has been some reconstruction work. Some people have gone along to put their names down for a vote, but given the warlordism, the vote is likely to prove meaningless, if it does take place. I don't think, by the way, that the elections are going to take place in January or any time soon afterwards in Iraq. Afghanistan is being left to sink again back into the same chaos and the same poverty that it was in before. Both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, we have profoundly failed because we have not done our work as we should have done internationally through the United Nations. And that, unfortunately, is why the bin Ladens of this world can continue to flourish and can continue to stage their war. I think there's one other thing that you need to remember. It's very easy to say, we're at war. It's very easy to go off and start a war. Okay, you can say that the war started on September 11, 2001, but you could also say that the war started in 1948 between the Palestinians and Israelis. The war started in Iraq when the British invaded in 1917 and again in 1941. But once you embark on a major military campaign it's very difficult to switch it off. What we have got in Iraq now is not a war on terror. Most of the people – the vast majority of the men fighting the Americans are Iraqi, and they will go on fighting. You know one of the things that's very interesting at moment. Again, we need to look at history. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, we supported him with guns, chemicals for gas, with export credits from the United States. And we urged him on. We wanted the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran after Khomeini’s revolution. We backed Saddam. He sent a whole generation of Iraqis to learn to fight and die. Now, in that war, the Iraqis went through immense suffering. They fought most of them without any initiatives, because no one could take initiative, only Saddam was the man who was allowed to make decisions. They dug their tanks into the ground, stuck the gun barrels over the top and just fought on, like the battle of Asam against Iranians. But those young men, those men who were captains and lieutenants are now grown up with an enormous experience of fighting power. And they are no longer hobbled by dictatorship. They can take their own initiatives. That, I suspect, that, I suspect is why this insurgency is so successful.
AMY GOODMAN : Robert Fisk, before we end, I wanted to go to the issue of the international criminal court. During the face-off last night, moderator, Jim Lehrer asked the two candidates starting with John Kerry his position on the whole concept of pre-emptive war. Kerry responded by saying, quote “The President always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike,” but it was Bush's response to Kerry that was most compelling. This is what President Bush had to say.
GEORGE W. BUSH : My attitude is you take pre-emptive action in order to protect the American people. That you act in order to make this country secure. My opponent talks about me not signing certain treaties. Let me tell you one thing I didn't sign and I think show as difference of our opinion, the difference of opinions. That is: I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. This is a body based in the Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops and diplomats up for trial. I wouldn't join it. I understand that in certain capitals around the world it – that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move. Not to join a foreign court that could – where our people could be prosecuted. My opponent is for joining the International Criminal Court. I just think that trying to be popular in the global sense, if it's not in our best interests makes no sense. I'm interested with working with other nations and do a lot of it. But I'm not going to make decisions that I think are wrong for America.
ROBERT FISK : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : It's great to have you with us. Well, you have been listening to the debate.
ROBERT FISK : Oh, I have, indeed, yes.
AMY GOODMAN : If you want to call it that, when it comes to the issue of Iraq. Why don't you share some of your thoughts today.
ROBERT FISK : Well, I thought they were both – I have actually heard it before, and I have heard almost all of the so-called debate. I think it's miserable stuff. Both Kerry and Bush have completely missed the point. I think if they're not willfully doing so, they are certainly misleading American people, who listened to what they had to say. We need to go back and recall how this whole disaster happened. We are talking about a disaster in Iraq. We are talking about a country we claimed we were coming to liberate and now we're occupying it. We're re-besieging their cities. I mean, Samarra was supposed to have been liberated by us in 2003. Now we're going to re-liberate it, and apparently Fallujah is next on the list. What on earth are we doing there? Remember this all started at a critical moment after September 11, 2001, after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. When Osama bin Laden was suddenly deleted off the screen, off the radar screen and Saddam Hussein was put up there. The Americans were bombarded with the idea, which many Americans, sadly, still believe, that Saddam Hussein had had something to do with September 11 when in fact the agenda for attacking Iraq was first thought up by the neoconservatives in Washington during the Clinton administration. We're now apparently fighting for democracy in Iraq. Originally, we were going to liberate Iraq so they could have democracy. Most of Iraq is outside of the control of the United States forces or British forces and certainly not government forces. The Iraqi government itself now has less power than the mayor of Baghdad and doesn't even control all of Baghdad. The situation – the disastrous situation in Iraq is now so grave that I don't think it could ever be turned around, not while western troops are there. And yet, Kerry and Bush talk about it, as if it is a reversible situation or actually getting better. And again and again, the concentration on America's soldiers. Well, fine, Americans should be interested in their soldiers and their welfare, but the principal victims in Iraq are not Americans, they’re Iraqis, and they're dying at an ever greater number. When I go to the mortuaries and see shrieking people holding the corpses of children, old men as well as young men. Trying to stuff them into coffins. The stench is overpowering. That's the reality on the ground in Iraq. What Kerry and Bush had to say last night bore no relation to the reality which I see inside Iraq.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Robert Fisk, it seemed almost as if the basic thrust of Kerry's arguments was, I will present a smarter imperialism, a smarter defensive empire than the kind of defense that the President has so far been responsible for. For instance, he – as you mentioned, the thrust of the Bush administration, he kept calling it a colossal mistake, rather than dealing with even what some former people in government as Richard Clarke said in his book, the night of September 11, President Bush began to say, let's find a connection to Saddam Hussein in the attacks. Rather than reiterate that enormous indictment of Richard Clarke against the President, he kept referring to it as a colossal mistake. And he also, as Amy mentioned before, didn't deal with one of the driving forces of much of the Islamic terrorism around the world is the continuing situation of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Your thoughts about how that would be possible.
ROBERT FISK : You have to start off on the basis that nobody who wants to be the United States President is going to try and head into the Palestine-Israel conflict because it would be essential at some point to criticize the Israelis, and that's not going to get you President of the United States of America. So, I'm not surprised that they ducked that one. That's par for the course. Clinton did the same. George Bush Sr. This is not going to be a subject for debate.
AMY GOODMAN : But neither did the journalists dare to ask them about it, either.
ROBERT FISK : No, of course, not, because American journalism is, I think, I'm sorry to say, is becoming increasingly neutered. You only have to look the at cozy relationships now between journalists and power in Washington. The relationship is very evident. If you go to a press conference it's, “Yes, John.” It’s “Mr. President, can I ask you…” It's first name terms for the journalists and Mr. President. The journalists in many ways have become mouthpieces. I remember pointing out in lectures in the United States before the invasion of Iraq that “The New York Times,” every time it had a major story, the first paragraph always ended with the words, “according to American officials” or “American officials say” – often by Judith Miller at “The New York Times.” Over and over again, we have seen a failure of American journalism, who should – I mean the fourth estate should be out there for the people to ask the serious questions and challenge power. I go back to Amira Hass, the brilliant Israeli journalist, who once defined journalism to me as monitoring the centers of power. I think by and large, with the exception of a few newspapers and small television and radio programs, yours for example, by and large, major American news organizations are neutered. They have neutered themselves. They will not monitor the centers of power. They will not challenge authority , and that leads to a situation in which the major issues which should be discussed, and which American people are quite capable of discussing, and would like to discuss, do not get mentioned. You have got to go back and realize what lies behind the whole issue of Iraq for the two contenders last night. There is an equation which they wouldn't mention and can’t mention, but it's very clear. The Americans have got to leave Iraq. And they will leave Iraq, but they can’t leave Iraq. That is why we have this bloody mess at the moment. Everybody in America would like the American soldiers home. Everyone in America knows why the President cannot admit it was all folly. And why Kerry can’t admit it was all folly. So, we end up in essentially a false debate. The issue is that the Iraqi invasion is a disaster. We have got rid of dictatorship and replaced it with total anarchy. You know, I hate to once again go back to the poor Iraqi, but over and over again when I go to funerals in Iraq, of men who have been cruelly murdered, women, children, people say to me, look. I don't care if you got rid of Saddam Hussein. No, we didn't like him, but at least with Saddam Hussein, we had security. Our children went to school in the morning. Although we didn't have free speech, we knew that if we obeyed the rules, we would be alive. Now, that is not praise of Saddam Hussein. He was a cruel dictator. We helped to prop him up. We started him off in the first place. But if the alternative is carnage on the scale we're now seeing, what do you think that the Iraqis want? I mean, history shows that what Bush did, and what Kerry thinks he might be able to do, cannot work, especially in Iraq. I'm writing a new book about history and the folly of history and the inability to escape from it. I have gone back through the British and Iraqi records and what happened when the British occupied Iraq in 1917. Well, we set up an occupation authority. We appointed our own Iraqi rulers, like Mr. Allawi. Eventually we brought in a King. We found that the Iraqis started a major insurrection against us. One of our senior officers was killed near Fallujah. So we besieged Fallujah with artillery and killed many of the citizens living there. Then we besieged Najaf because we wanted the surrender of a Shia muslim cleric called Badr, not Muqtada al-Sadr, but the name is kind of similar. And then our intelligence operatives in Baghdad, this is British intelligence in 1920, told London they thought the terrorists were coming in from Syria. It’s an absolute fingerprint of what was to happen in 2003 and 2004. Anyone who goes back to the history of the British occupation, and believe me, we knew about empire and occupation, can see every step of the way the path to disaster. Everything we did there went wrong.
AMY GOODMAN : Robert Fisk, we want it turn for a minute it another excerpt of the debate, this on Afghanistan.
AMY GOODMAN : John Kerry, George Bush, and their first so-called debate last night. It took place in Coral Gables, Florida. Certainly, a swing state. On the line us with, Robert Fisk, long-time middle-East correspondent for The Independent newspaper of Britain. he speaks to us from his home in Ireland on Afghanistan. Robert Fisk, you were beaten badly when you were covering the conflict in Afghanistan, but your response to Kerry and Bush?
ROBERT FISK : Afghanistan is not a success. Human rights organizations are already pointing out that the polls are hopelessly flawed, that the candidates in some cases are working for the warlords. Not since before the Taliban, when the same warlords were back in power killing each other has there been such opium and drug production in Afghanistan. Most of the country is out of bounds to foreigners because the Taliban have re-established themselves, especially in the villages around Pastia coast, and the Pakistani border. In many cases, U.S. forces cannot move freely except in large numbers in parts of Afghanistan. There has been some reconstruction work. Some people have gone along to put their names down for a vote, but given the warlordism, the vote is likely to prove meaningless, if it does take place. I don't think, by the way, that the elections are going to take place in January or any time soon afterwards in Iraq. Afghanistan is being left to sink again back into the same chaos and the same poverty that it was in before. Both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, we have profoundly failed because we have not done our work as we should have done internationally through the United Nations. And that, unfortunately, is why the bin Ladens of this world can continue to flourish and can continue to stage their war. I think there's one other thing that you need to remember. It's very easy to say, we're at war. It's very easy to go off and start a war. Okay, you can say that the war started on September 11, 2001, but you could also say that the war started in 1948 between the Palestinians and Israelis. The war started in Iraq when the British invaded in 1917 and again in 1941. But once you embark on a major military campaign it's very difficult to switch it off. What we have got in Iraq now is not a war on terror. Most of the people – the vast majority of the men fighting the Americans are Iraqi, and they will go on fighting. You know one of the things that's very interesting at moment. Again, we need to look at history. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, we supported him with guns, chemicals for gas, with export credits from the United States. And we urged him on. We wanted the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran after Khomeini’s revolution. We backed Saddam. He sent a whole generation of Iraqis to learn to fight and die. Now, in that war, the Iraqis went through immense suffering. They fought most of them without any initiatives, because no one could take initiative, only Saddam was the man who was allowed to make decisions. They dug their tanks into the ground, stuck the gun barrels over the top and just fought on, like the battle of Asam against Iranians. But those young men, those men who were captains and lieutenants are now grown up with an enormous experience of fighting power. And they are no longer hobbled by dictatorship. They can take their own initiatives. That, I suspect, that, I suspect is why this insurgency is so successful.
AMY GOODMAN : Robert Fisk, before we end, I wanted to go to the issue of the international criminal court. During the face-off last night, moderator, Jim Lehrer asked the two candidates starting with John Kerry his position on the whole concept of pre-emptive war. Kerry responded by saying, quote “The President always has the right and always has had the right for pre-emptive strike,” but it was Bush's response to Kerry that was most compelling. This is what President Bush had to say.
GEORGE W. BUSH : My attitude is you take pre-emptive action in order to protect the American people. That you act in order to make this country secure. My opponent talks about me not signing certain treaties. Let me tell you one thing I didn't sign and I think show as difference of our opinion, the difference of opinions. That is: I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. This is a body based in the Hague where unaccountable judges and prosecutors can pull our troops and diplomats up for trial. I wouldn't join it. I understand that in certain capitals around the world it – that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move. Not to join a foreign court that could – where our people could be prosecuted. My opponent is for joining the International Criminal Court. I just think that trying to be popular in the global sense, if it's not in our best interests makes no sense. I'm interested with working with other nations and do a lot of it. But I'm not going to make decisions that I think are wrong for America.