MIDDLE EAST MYTHOLOGY DEBUNKED By Robert Fisk! Forget CNN & Christiane Amanpour: It's Not That She Is Incompetent; It's That There Are Multitude Of Truths She Dare Not Speak! - RI10

MIDDLE EAST

MYTHOLOGY

DEBUNKED By

Robert Fisk! Forget

CNN & Christiane

Amanpour: It’s Not

That She Is

Incompetent; It’s

That There Are

Multitude Of Truths

She Dare Not Speak!

- RI10

 http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/2/the_age_of_the_warrior_robert

October 02, 2008

“The Age of the Warrior”: Robert Fisk on the US Elections, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine

Robert Fisk is Britain’s most celebrated foreign correspondent and has borne witness to countless tragedies in the Middle East for over three decades. With the publication of a new collection of essays, Fisk joins us to talk about the US elections and their bearing on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel-Palestine. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Robert Fisk, bestselling author and journalist. He has reported from the Middle East for more than three decades and covered eleven major wars. He is one of the world’s most celebrated foreign correspondents and has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon and The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays from The Independent called The Age of the Warrior.

Rush Transcript
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JUAN GONZALEZ: The US strategy in Afghanistan is back in the news, just ahead of the vice-presidential debate tonight. The British ambassador to Afghanistan has been quoted in a French newspaper as saying that the American military strategy in that country is “destined to fail”. Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles’ critical comments about the NATO operation in Afghanistan were part of a leaked memo from a French diplomat. He also said, “The coalition presence—particularly the military presence—is part of the problem, not the solution”.

The British ambassador’s leaked statements were published just as the top US commander in Afghanistan called for three additional combat brigades—that is, over 10,000 soldiers—to be immediately deployed to Kabul. General David McKiernan told reporters in Washington, D.C. Wednesday that Americans were facing a “tough fight” in Afghanistan that “might get worse before it gets better”.

AMY GOODMAN: As the US-led wars in the Middle East show no sign of abating, we turn now to a man who has chronicled eleven major wars in this part of the world and shows no sign of abating, himself. Robert Fisk is Britain’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, has borne witness to countless tragedies in the Middle East for over three decades.

Robert Fisk has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon and The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays and articles from The Independent; it’s called The Age of the Warrior. Robert Fisk joins us here in New York in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT FISK: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’re traveling through this country in the midst of a major crisis and a war abroad. Talk about your observations.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I suppose the first thing is how similar the two things are. I mean, first of all, the Europeans were constantly advising more banking regulation, in case they got infected by any economic crisis. The United States, this had to be a free market, deregulation totally. In other words, once more, the United States did not listen to its foreign partners and allies, on economic issues this time.

Number two is, rushed into a quick fix for a rescue bailout without any really serious planning, like crossing the Tigris River without a plan for post-war Iraq.

And three, it’s the little people who get hit: the little Iraqis, in the hundreds of thousands, who’ve died; and, of course, poor Americans, for the most part, who join the Marines or the Reservists because they want to have a university education, they end up in Iraq, and they get killed. The little people, once more, are the people who are getting hit. They’re very parallel things, in my view. I can see it all the time.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, here, in this country, as the number of US casualties has declined, so has the attention in the media or in the public to the situation in Iraq, and everyone has now bought into the thought that things are getting better.

ROBERT FISK: Ha ha ha, yes. Look, the degree of ethnic cleansing that actually took place—genocidal, in some ways—and the fact that the Americans have now built walls through every community in every major city in Iraq, which has divided between the communities, means that there isn’t, in fact, any free flow of movement. There isn’t a country operating anymore.

But now, I mean, if you stand back a little bit and look at it like this, first of all, we went to Afghanistan, we won the war. Then we rushed off to Iraq and won the war. Then we lost the war in Iraq, or maybe we won it again. And then we’re going back to Afghanistan, where we seem to have lost the war, to win it all over again. And in due course, perhaps we’ll have to go back to Iraq. I mean, in my reports, I’m calling this Iraqistan. And now, we’ve actually got soldiers on foot turning up in Pakistan. I mean, has nobody actually stood back and said, “What on earth are we doing out there?” I mean, I calculated for our Sunday magazine that we now have twenty-two times as many military personnel per head of population as the Crusaders had in the twelfth century. You know, what are we doing?
Tabacco: How about calling it “Ping-Pong” as Tabacco refers to the ridiculous process of switching back and forth with your vote between the Democrats and the Republicans, then back again!

It was a baker in Baghdad who asked me this very obvious question. He said, “Why are you”—“you” meaning Western military—“Why are you in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, French air base at Dushanbe running close as support for the British in Helmand province in Afghanistan? Why are your people going into Pakistan? Why are you in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why are you in Turkey? Why are you in Jordan and Egypt and Algeria? US Special Forces have a base outside Tamanrasset in the southern Sahara. Why are you in Bahrain? Why are you in Oman? Why are you in Yemen? Why are you in Qatar? Biggest US air base”. I didn’t have a reply.
Tabacco: I do! Occupation & Destabilization of Oil-Rich Middle East is the Main Directive of what passes for US FOREIGN POLICY! In such circumstances, the Neocons can steal all the Oil they don’t buy without any competition. Then they can also spend Taxpayer Dollar$ continually buying Armaments from the Military-Industrial Complex, which certainly pleases those War Profiteers! If you are NOT at war, your purchasing of Armaments slows down drastically as do the Profits for those War Profiteers.

But I was struck when I was having lunch on the West Coast a few days ago, by a very educated lady sitting next to me, saying, “But the Muslims wanted to take over the world, and they had already taken over France”. I mean, how does this happen? I mean, she might have told me that Martians had landed in New Mexico, only thing you could do to counter that kind of argument. It looks like somehow we’re on a brainwashing trip. And we’ve all bought the narrative. You know, we even have Mrs. Palin talking about victory in Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you go to Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you live there.

AMY GOODMAN: She also has talked about Iraq as being God’s war.
Tabacco: And John McCain sings, “Bomb, Bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys’ song “Barbara Ann”! Isn’t it revealing that former POW McCain finds humor in the Genocide of innocent people? Bombs don’t distinguish between Combatants and Innocents!

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, we’ve had some generals who’ve talked about that, too—haven’t we?—and kept their uniform on in church when they said it. You know, more and more, I look back on the early statements by bin Laden, statements we never actually read. The narrative is always “Is this bin Laden?” when he appears. “Is he ill? When did he make the statement? And have the CIA confirmed it’s his voice?” What his voice actually says is never of any interest to us.
Tabacco: Political DISTRACTION!

But if you remember, he went on and on about crusaders, and he actually made a very important statement before we invaded Iraq, in which he called upon Muslims in Iraq to collaborate with Baath Party officials against the crusaders, on the grounds that Salahadin had collaborated with the non-Muslim Persians against the crusaders in the twelfth century. We missed all this. And this was the detonation that set off the insurgency.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, at the debate, the presidential debate last Friday, we had the situation where the so-called candidate of peace—

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —Barack Obama, is talking about, well, we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, as if this is a game here that’s being played and we made a mistake in the game. And so, now we must go back to Afghanistan and possibly even into Pakistan.

ROBERT FISK: Look, I think you have to realize—and the Arabs do not, and I’ve been trying on Al Jazeera Arabic service to say this—it’s not going to make any difference who is the next president of the United States, as far as Southwest Asia and the Muslim world is concerned. I was in Qatar, actually, in the Al Jazeera Arabic studios when Obama made his famous Middle East trip. You know, he gave forty-five minutes to the Palestinians, twenty-four hours to the Israelis. And the Arabic anchorman turned to me. He said, “So, Robert, do you think Obama will win the election?” I said, “He’ll win the election for the Israeli Knesset. I don’t know if he’s going to get the presidency of the United States.” You know, we’ve got here a one-track policy into the Middle East by the United States, and it’s not going to change.

AMY GOODMAN: But, Robert, is that true? On the one hand, you have, yes, they don’t sound that different when it comes to, for example, Afghanistan. They agree that’s the main site of the war, the main candidates. But I guess it’s the question of what could happen next and what approach McCain or Obama would take.

ROBERT FISK: Look, the Taliban now control half of Afghanistan, not just at night, but in the day—during the day, too. There’s no doubt that Petraeus has got it right when he talks about things are going to get worse.

AMY GOODMAN: Petraeus?

ROBERT FISK: Petraeus. And there’s no doubt, too, that the famous British ambassador, Mr. Cowper-Coles—by the way, he’s in my book, and he’s the guy who persuaded the British, when he was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, not to continue with the bribes inquiry by the British fraud squad into arms sold to Saudi Arabia. He’s the guy who actually advised the fraud squad people to drop it.

AMY GOODMAN: And this involved Bandar Bush. This involved the former Saudi ambassador to the United States.

ROBERT FISK: Absolutely, it’s the same guy. I should add—I should just add that more than twenty years ago, a young diplomat in the Egyptian embassy—in the British embassy in Cairo advised me to drop one of our stringers in the region and take on another stringer who was rather favorable to the foreign office. I didn’t do as I was told. But that man was also Cowper-Coles. What a strange career he has!

However, let’s go back to your Obama thing. Look, at the end of the day, we cannot win in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not crossing porous borders. They don’t even acknowledge the border, because, for them, it’s Pashtunistan. The border was drawn by a British civil servant called Sir Mortimer Durand in the Victorian age, and no one there, apart from us, accepts that it’s there—and, I suppose, the Pakistani army.

And the fact of the matter is that we have no policy there. The Karzai government is totally discredited. Karzai himself only rules his palace, with the help of American mercenaries to protect him. His government is full of drug barons, warlords and criminals. And that includes the people down in Kandahar, which is virtually a lost city. The troops cannot enter Kandahar anymore. It’s gone, effectively, especially at night. You can’t go there. No Westerner can walk through the streets of Kandahar. And you don’t see any women, except in Kabul, who are not wearing burqas. You remember the famous liberation of women, equality, gender equality was coming? It’s all turned out to be totally false. And we’re going to win there? We’re going to win there?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and, of course, the issue of Pakistan, to me, is the most frightening one of all, because—

ROBERT FISK: Absolutely.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —you’re talking about a country that is really almost a failed state at this point.

ROBERT FISK: We’ve been told that—the narrative is that the mad mullahs with black turbans and the crackpot Ahmadinejad of Iran—and he is a crackpot—are going to destroy Israel, and then, of course, they’re going to destroy the Palestinians, and they’ll get destroyed with all these nuclear weapons.
Tabacco: Just to repeat these lies, the US denies Israeli Nuclear Weapons. If they admitted Israel has Nukes, they couldn’t say these lies because Ahmadinejad and Iran are not CRAZY enough to attack Nuclear Israel – anybody could see that, if they knew. So the US (Republicans & Democrats) deny the Israeli Nuclear Weapons program exists!

Even Neocons admit that Israel was established, not to give Jews a homeland, but to create a “Buffer” in the volatile Middle East. Tabacco calls Israel the PITBULL among the Cats.

I’ve been saying for more than two years there is one nation in Southwest Asia, which is packed with Taliban supporters and al-Qaeda supporters, and it’s got a bomb, and it’s totally corrupted, from the shoeshine boy to the president, via its intelligence services and army, and it’s called Pakistan. And only now are we beginning to see Pakistan pop up. I bet you if you run a computer check in the next few months, Iran will go right down to the bottom of the page, unless Israel chooses to bomb it, and up will go Pakistan.
Tabacco: Bush continues to invoke “democracy”. Of course that is the Excuse. The Truth is the USA supports our “FRIENDS”, regardless of their politics, and denigrates our “ENEMIES”, regardless of theirs. Remember that both China and Cuba are Communist. But we cannot survive without China; and we act as if we cannot survive with Cuba!

Tabacco reminds you Readers that the UK was OUR ORIGINAL ENEMY!

In WWII our “Enemies” were Japan, Italy and Germany. And France was our “Friend”. As a “Friend, France falls in and out of favor regularly. Our “Friends” included the USSR.

After the War, we had 50 years of “Cold War” with the Russians. Now they are our “Friends” again – or are they?

I realize how unlikely it is, but it is possible that one day the Israelis will make the “Enemies’ List”. Who knows! One day the Israelis and the Muslim countries may become ALLIES! You know the adage: The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend!

Wouldn’t that be an ASS-KICKER! And we taught the Israelis everything they know about Nuclear Weapons, they don’t ascribe to the Anti-Nuclear Proliferation initiative or admit they even have Nukes, and we supply them with the Lion’s share of their weaponry (all the latest and best).

The fact that Israel is NOT a major oil-producing country, among all those major oil-producing Muslim countries, must NOT be lost on you Readers. This was undoubtedly planned by the West when we created Israel. Jealousy is a marvelous hedge against true friendship! Israelis were satisfied just to have Jerusalem. How clever we Westerners be!

And suddenly, how do we deal with this country? It will be a whole crazed mixture, which is already symbolized by the fact that, first of all, we put troops in on the ground in Pakistan and infringed its sovereignty. Then, when the Marriott Hotel blows up, the FBI offers its help in finding out the criminals. I mean, are we friends, or are we enemies of Pakistan? We don’t even know that.

And we start talking, using phrases like “victory” (which the Neocons don’t even want!). We should be talking about phrases like "justice for the people of the Middle East” (Is Fisk serious!). If you have justice, you can build democracy (Oh! Fisk thinks Bush & the Klan are serious about “democracy” – SILLY BOY! Sometimes it’s hard to figure out whether good guys like Fisk are naïve or just afraid to tell the whole truth?) on it, and then we can withdraw all these soldiers. We’re always going—promising people in the Middle East democracy and packages of human rights off our supermarket shelves, and we’re always arriving with our horses and our Humvees and our swords and our Apache helicopters and our M1A1 tanks. The only future in the Middle East is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.
(Tell that to the Neocons!)

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, just before we went on air, this came over AP: suicide bombers targeted Shia worshippers as they left morning prayers at two Baghdad mosques, killing nineteen people, injuring fifty others. In a separate attack, gunmen fatally shot six people as they traveled in a minibus at Wajihiyah, a town sixty miles north of Baghdad.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, and we won, and the surge was successful, and everything’s going back to ordinary life, and people—I mean, that map which we saw, the two maps coming up—it’s preposterous. I mean, I get phone calls from Iraqis in Damascus, when I’m in Beirut, saying, you know, “Can you help us stay in Syria? Can we come to Lebanon? We cannot go back to Baghdad.” And they’re still getting calls saying, you know, “If you come back to your house, you’ll be murdered.” This is not a success; it’s a hell disaster for all the peoples of the Middle East. I mean, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank—I mean, is no one waking up to say that there is no hope there at the moment? You know, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel out in the Middle East.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, you mentioned the West Bank, obviously, the original center of this entire conflict. The—

ROBERT FISK: I’m not sure it is the center anymore, by the way, but, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Right. But the comments recently by Ehud Olmert, saying that—

ROBERT FISK: Look, Ehud Olmert is a has-been. He’s gone.

AMY GOODMAN: But he is prime minister.

ROBERT FISK: Just!

AMY GOODMAN: And he said you should give back the West Bank.

ROBERT FISK: Yes, but he’s going, Amy. He’s going. This is the same as all your generals who go out to fight in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and when they’re asked to comment to the press, they say, “Everything is going fine; it may be a tough battle”, and they salute and click their heels to Rumsfeld, or they did. And the moment they retire, they demand Rumsfeld’s resignation and say it’s all gone wrong. I mean, if only just one of them, just one, would say it in a press conference when they still had their uniform on, we might see a few changes coming about, but they don’t. They keep their—they go heel.
(Few are brave enough to abdicate a great career, except on their own terms!)

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, we’ll end it there, but we’re going to do part two. Robert Fisk, bestselling author, journalist, writes for The Independent, currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest collection of essays and articles is called The Age of the Warrior.


http://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/5/robert_fisk_on_osama_bin_laden

March 05, 2007

Robert Fisk on Osama bin Laden at 50, Iraqi Death Squads and Why the Middle East is More Dangerous Now Than in Past 30 Years

Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent and one of the world’s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years. His latest book is “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”. He joins us in our Firehouse studio. [includes rush transcript]

In Iraq, at least 26 people died today when a suicide bomber struck a busy commercial district in Baghdad. Over 50 people were injured. In other reported violence, gunmen killed five people when they opened fire on Shia pilgrims in two separate incidents around the capital. Elsewhere in Baghdad, police said that since Saturday, they had found 20 bodies of men who were believed to be victims of Shiite death squads

The latest news comes as more than one thousand US and Iraqi troops have moved into the Shiite stronghold of Sadr city to conduct house-to-house searches and street patrols. It marked the largest operation into the area in more than three years.

Meanwhile in southern Iraq, British-led troops have uncovered an Iraqi government facility in Basra where Shiite forces were torturing prisoners and producing bomb-making equipment. The torture was going on inside the local headquarters of the Iraqi interior ministry’s domestic intelligence agency.

The news comes amid the backdrop of a planned security conference on the tenth of March in Iraq. The United States says it will attend the talks that include both Syria and Iran.

Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent and one of the world’s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years. He was in Iraq in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, in the early 1990s during the Persian Gulf War and most recently during the U.S. invasion and occupation. He has also reported on the civil wars in Algeria and Lebanon, the Iranian revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Robert Fisk joins me in our firehouse studio.

    * Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. He is the author of several books, his latest is “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”.

Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
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AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent, one of the world’s most experienced journalists in the Middle East. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years. He was in Iraq in the ‘80s during the Iran-Iraq War, in the early ’90s during the Persian Gulf War, and most recently during the US invasion and occupation. He has also reported on civil wars in Algeria and Lebanon, the Iranian revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Robert Fisk joins me here in our firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ROBERT FISK: You’re making me feel old, Amy. All these talks of all the civil wars I’ve covered, I’m beginning to think it’s time I packed it all in.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, congratulations also on your 2006 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom.

ROBERT FISK: Thanks very much, indeed. Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You said last night at a large event at Town Hall in New York, where you were honored and you spoke, that you consider the award important as a flak jacket. Explain.

ROBERT FISK: Well, if you report the Middle East and you do it fairly and honorably and you criticize everyone, and that includes Israel, you’re going to get the sticks and stones, sometimes literally. You get a lot of flak. And when a journalist gets an honor like the Lannan Award or a journalistic award in Britain, OK, it’s flattering, it’s nice. All journalists like that. But particularly in the Middle East, it’s a way of showing that there are other people in the West who say, “You’re doing the right job. Keep it up”.

And it’s also a lesson to those critics, particularly the particularly venomous ones, and you and I could think of them straightaway, who try to destroy your career by lying about you, by accusing you of being anti-Semitic, anti-Arab, you name it. It’s a way of saying, “Well, hold on a second. Look at this list of awards. Do you think these people are all the same? Do you not realize that this was for some reason?” So, it is a flak jacket. It’s a protection for journalists when we get awards for reporting in the Middle East, particularly in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, your last piece is about bin Laden hitting fifty.

ROBERT FISK: Yes. Well, I must say I did sort of mention in the same piece that I think bin Laden is pretty irrelevant now. You know, his creation is al-Qaeda, and it exists. It’s in being. The monster is born. Chasing bin Laden now, if indeed we are chasing bin Laden now, is a bit like chasing nuclear scientists and arresting them all after the invention of the atom bomb. The atom bomb exists. You can’t deconstruct it. So arresting the nuclear scientists won’t do any good.

And in a sense, you see, the same applies with bin Laden. His “achievement”—I put that in quotation marks—in his eyes, is the creation of al-Qaeda. Never before have we had a violent institution of this kind. And the only way to overcome it is to produce some justice, which, of course, we don’t want to do. We want more and more violence against al-Qaeda, which, of course, helps al-Qaeda. But the fact of the matter is that I think bin Laden has achieved, in his mind, what he wants. And now, if he dies of kidney failure, which I don’t think he’s going to do—I don’t believe these stories—or whether he falls off a cliff or gets bombed or arrested, I think it’s irrelevant, totally irrelevant.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your interviews with Osama bin Laden. How many did you do?

ROBERT FISK: I did three.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the first one.

ROBERT FISK: Well, the first one was in Sudan. A Saudi friend of his, who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan, who, mind you—he was now a journalist—he met me at an Islamic conference in Khartoum, and one Sunday morning, he said, “Robert, I want you to come and meet someone”. And for him, it was a bit of a joke. He knew bin Laden was out in the desert, where bin Laden’s construction teams—he was, of course, in the construction business, as most his family were—had been building a new road from a little village to the main highway between Port Sudan and Khartoum to link up so that the villagers could take part in the national economy.

AMY GOODMAN: Bin Laden’s father was a great Yemeni construction magnate in Saudi Arabia?

ROBERT FISK: A billionaire so, yes. And, indeed, most of bin Laden’s—or some of bin Laden’s money came from the construction business. He built the roads upon which the Afghan guerrillas took tanks to fight the Russians. I mean, I actually went in an air raid shelter twenty-five feet high, built into the living rock of a mountain in Afghanistan, built by bin Laden during the Russian war, next to a camp built by the CIA, of course.

But, no, I went out with this guy. We went across the desert past pyramids you’ve never seen before. I mean, they’re not even in guidebooks. And we ended up in this desert village, and there was this man in this long white robe with all these kids dancing in front of him and people slaughtering chickens and goats and sheep. And my journalist friend, who knew bin Laden well, went up and spoke to him in his ear. And I saw bin Laden’s eyes flick towards me with palpable concern. He had never met a Western journalist before. And I was invited to meet him. I shook hands with him, and he thought I was going to ask him about terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, because he was already being implicated. There were comments by State Department officials that bin Laden was plotting world terror.

AMY GOODMAN: This is 1993.

ROBERT FISK: Yes. Pretty accurate, actually, if you think about it. But, anyway, that’s what was happening. So anyway, I wasn’t really interested in this. You know, my colleagues had written all this terror, terror, terror stuff. I wanted to know what created bin Laden during the war with the Russians, what happened to him, because, you know, the Saudis wanted to send a Saudi prince to lead an Arab legion against the Soviet infidels. Unfortunately, the Saudi princes were keener on living in Monte Carlo than going to Afghanistan, and bin Laden was the man who led the Arab legion.

So I said to him, “What was it like fighting the Russians? Tell me about fighting the Russians”. And he talked for some time about the large number of his supporters—there wasn’t al-Qaeda in existence then—a large number of Arab fighters who died. There’s a mass grave near Jalalabad—he told me exactly where it was—with hundreds of his own fighters buried in it. And then he recalled an attack on a Russian firebase, a Russian artillery position in Nangarhar province—capital is Jalalabad. And he said, “As we were advancing, a mortar shell fell at my feet.” And he waited for it to explode and kill him. And he said, “I felt sakina, a calmness”—it’s a religious idea that you are not worried about death, you are outside this world, you are linked in with God and the idea of another world, another life. And the mortar shell didn’t explode. There must be many people who wish that it had, but it didn’t.

And, obviously, it was quite clear talking to him that this was a very important moment in his life. He had conquered fear and the fear of death. And once you do that, you start discovering perhaps that you love death, but it’s not the same. You remember the famous phrase we always hear from suicide bombers, “You love life; we love death”, which is the most frightening thing you can hear. And I think at that moment, that during that attack on the Russians—I mean, it was a Soviet base, a Soviet army base—I think that must have changed him in some way. But, you know, as I saw him each time, he changed, too. I mean, he was growing older.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re older than him?

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I’m about ten years older than him. Yes, that’s right. I don’t think—I mean, he always—we never discussed age, but, I mean, he must have guessed I was slightly older than him. He was always very courteous towards me. And when he stopped to eat, I would sit on the ground with the al-Qaeda fighters and eat yoghurt and drink tea with him. He broke off occasionally to pray, as well, which I, of course, didn’t do with him.

But certainly, the next time I met him in Afghanistan, he was a much more angry man. He was filled with fury at the corruption of the Saudi royal family. He went into great detail on how many millions of dollars they stole on this occasion, how many princes have taken these dollars, and so on. And it looked at that stage as if what he really wanted to do was to overthrow the Saudi royal family and become caliph of Arabia. He didn’t say that, but I suspect. I mean, Arabia is what he’s interested in. At the end of the day, it’s Arabia, not because of oil, but because of the holy places of Mecca and Medina and his own religious Salafi beliefs.

But he was already beginning to talk about people having dreams. You know, in the Wahhabi sect, people believe in what I call “dreamology”. They think that when they have a dream, it’s a message coming from somewhere outside the world. Obviously, you know, you can interpret the Prophet Muhammad’s receiving the message of God as being in a kind of trance or a dream. Remember, the first message he received, he talked about how he was wrapped in, and it was felt tight—that an angel wrapped him and squeezed him tight. And I think that bin Laden believes in dreams. I think a lot of al-Qaeda people do. They have ideas that come to them. We don’t. We believe that this is an inactive but still living brain taking over, just things come through like stars pass through the heavens, but I think they interpret them or want to interpret them, which is a very—something we basically gave up in the Middle Ages in Europe.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but when we come back, tell us what he told you on that mountaintop in Afghanistan. We’re talking to Robert Fisk, the veteran war correspondent. His latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, has just come out in paperback. His earlier book, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, is coming out in French, and he is traveling to Paris today for the launch of the book there. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We continue with Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London, voted best foreign correspondent for years by British reporters and editors. His latest book is called The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert, you’re talking about mountaintop in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden.

ROBERT FISK: Well, the last time I saw him, which was ‘97—he did want to see me after 9/11, but I couldn’t reach him. An American air raid was on the road in front of me on my way to see him. But the last time I saw him, he had moved from his hatred of the Saudis, which was still there, into a quite clear fury at the United States. He was starting to talk about them as being crusaders.

And, in fact, the last words he said to me, as we sat in a very freezing mountaintop—I spent the night with his al-Qaeda people in a tent sleeping. I woke up with ice in my hair. And the last words he said to me, and I have my notebooks, which, of course, I will research for this book, and his words were, “Mr. Robert, from this mountain upon which we are sitting, we destroyed the Soviet army and helped to destroy the Soviet Union”, which was an element of truth, though obviously a usual bin Laden exaggeration. And then he said, “and I pray to God that He permits us to turn America into a shadow of itself”. (Fait Accompli!) Those were his words. And in my notebook, which I actually took these words down in, I put two lines on each side of the quote. At the time, I wrote, “Rhetoric?” It wasn’t, of course.

And I remember that, you know, on 9/11, I said before, I think, to you, that I was crossing the Atlantic that day. The plane turned around, and I got back to Europe and saw, you know, the biblical crashing of the Twin Towers. I remember thinking, well, New York is now a shadow of itself, all that dust and fog going across the city. I was pretty convinced, from the start, that bin Laden was involved. I still am, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: You have chosen a section of your book—

ROBERT FISK: Highly subversive, highly subversive section.

AMY GOODMAN:—The Great War for Civilisation, to read, deleting any curses or anything like that, if you could read a piece.

ROBERT FISK: I’ve chosen a piece that has no bad language, which is permitted on British television, but not on American television. Yes, it fits in rather well with the news today and what you’ve just been talking about. It’s about the issue of our rationale of how we behave in Iraq.

[reading] "The Americans and British benefited from these accounts of terror under Saddam. Would you rather he was still here in Iraq torturing and gassing his own people? they would ask. Don’t you think we did a good thing by getting rid of him? All this, of course, because the original reasons for the invasion—Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, his links with the outrages of September 11th, Mr. Blair’s 45-minute warning—turned out to be lies. But it was a dark comparison that Bush and Blair were making. If Saddam’s immorality and wickedness had to be the yardstick against which all of our own iniquities were judged, what did that say about us? If Saddam’s regime was to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad—how iniquitous—did that allow us to be? Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects in Bagram in Afghanistan and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantánamo. Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam’s shame—the prison at Abu Ghraib—subsequently became the symbol of our shame, too.

"What was interesting was the vastly different reaction in East and West to our abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. We ‘civilised’ Westerners were shocked at the dog-biting and humiliations and torture ‘our’ men and women administered to the inmates. Iraqis were outraged, but not shocked. Their friends and relatives—some of whom have been locked up by the Americans—had long ago told them of the revolting behaviour of the American guards. They weren’t surprised by those iconic photographs. They already knew.

"By early 2004, an army of thousands of mercenaries had appeared on the streets of Iraq’s major cities, many of them former British and American soldiers hired by the occupying Anglo-American authorities and by dozens of companies who feared for the lives of their employees in Baghdad The heavily armed Britons working for well over 300 security firms in Iraq now outnumbered Britain’s 8,000-strong army in the south of the country. Although major US and British security companies were operating in Iraq, dozens of small firms also set up shop with little vetting of their employees and few rules of engagement. Many of the Britons were former SAS soldiers—hundreds of former American Special Forces men were also in the country—while armed South Africans were also working for the occupation authorities.

“The presence in Iraq of so many thousands of Western mercenaries—or ‘security contractors,’ as the American press coyly referred to them—said as much about America’s fear of taking military casualties as it did about the multi-million-pound security industry now milking the coffers of the US and British governments. Security firms were escorting convoys on the highways of Iraq. Armed plain-clothes men from an American company were guarding US troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer had his headquarters. In other words, security companies were now guarding the occupation troops. When a US helicopter crashed near Fallujah in 2003, it was an American security company that took control of the area and began rescue operations. Needless to say, casualties among the mercenaries were not included in the regular body count put out by the occupation authorities.”

The latest figure that I have as a journalist now is that we now have in Iraq 120,000 Westerner mercenaries. That’s almost equal to the total number of American troops.

AMY GOODMAN: And in your experience in Iraq,—

ROBERT FISK: Ouch.

AMY GOODMAN:—having been there, how much did you run into these mercenaries?

ROBERT FISK: Oh, they would turn up and stay in the same hotel I was in. They turned up during checkpoints on roads, sometimes wearing hoods or masks. Why? Why hoods? Why masks? What were they doing? I would come across them driving vehicles through the streets of Baghdad, guns pointing out the window. “Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch, in the air. Very similar to the same gangs that Saddam used to use for security purposes to get people out of the way in vehicles. In fact, the way in which the occupation authorities have sealed off vast areas of Baghdad with walls is classic. It wasn’t as bad under Saddam. There weren’t so many walls, but it’s very similar to the same practice that Saddam’s regime used. In fact, in many ways, what we do has become a kind of pale mirror of the regime we got rid of. You know, hanging people and their heads come off when you hang them, this is incredible.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressman John Murtha, the former Marine who basically channeled the Pentagon and came out early on—he was first for the war, came out against and called for withdrawal—said yesterday that Abu Ghraib—that the US military should destroy Abu Ghraib, should pull the troops out of Saddam’s palaces and should close Guantánamo.

ROBERT FISK: Look, we’ve been through Abu Ghraib so often. First of all, it was liberated, and we all went in and saw the hangman’s noose and where Saddam’s people were executed. Then they announced they would have to use it briefly as a prison. I said—immediately I went to prison. I said, “They’ll use it as a prison again”, because they always do, and they did. And then, one Iraqi historian said it should be turned into a museum of Saddam’s horror. This is Kanan Makiya, of course. And then, after the abuses were made photographically evident at Abu Ghraib, it was announced by the then-Iraqi government that it was going to be bulldozed to the ground. And then it was announced that, after all, it was still needed as a prison, so it would stay as a prison for more abuses, perhaps. And now, again, we have this suggestion it should be razed to the ground. Later on, it will be stated that it will be still needed as a prison. Then we’ll hear yet again that it has to be razed to the ground. You don’t realize, unless you go to Iraq, that this is a circular track. All the stories we report, we reported last year, and we’re going to report them again next year, believe me.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about Dick Cheney. The so-called coalition of the willing in Iraq continues to shrink. Two members recently announced they’re withdrawing troops. Denmark says its battalion will pull out of Iraq by August and increase its troop presence in Afghanistan. This followed British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s announcement of a pending withdrawal of 1,600 British troops from Iraq. After Blair made the announcement, Vice President Dick Cheney issued what some called a tacit criticism of Britain’s withdrawal.

    VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat. We want to complete the mission. We want to get it done right. And then we want to return home with honor.

AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Dick Cheney.

ROBERT FISK: Well, you’ve got to remember that at one point it looked as if the Brits might pull out of the original invasion, and Rumsfeld made a statement rather similar to Cheney’s, saying, well, we can do it without them. You know, I mean, I’m still wondering what on earth Britain is doing in Iraq and how we ever got into it. You know, one of the extraordinary things at the moment about both Iraq and Afghanistan is that our leaderships, British just as much as Americans’, have lied continually. They’ve lied about weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, 45-minute warnings, as I said.

I mean, it’s one thing to lie to the people, and then you have your own policy of how to pursue a war, but to pursue the war on the basis of the lies you’re telling the people, this is an entirely new concept in war and strategy in foreign policy. I’ve never seen it before.

You know, you have Blair standing up now in the British parliament—well, less and less, thank goodness; I mean, soon he’s going, because of Iraq, of course, and because of his relationship with Bush-–and he keeps saying the same thing over and over again: “I absolutely and completely believe I was right”. And that’s not good enough. You know, we can all believe we’re right. We can jump off the Empire State Building believing we can fly, but we won’t fly, will we? And Blair actually thinks that his conviction, his own self-regard, is sufficient to make up for the factual mistakes that he makes. It’s OK, because he really believed it. That’s not the way you go to war.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think Tony Blair is pulling these troops out, although at the same time increasing troops in Afghanistan, and what do you think of that?

ROBERT FISK: I’ll tell you why I think he’s doing it. I think that the British military is having serious morale problems. I think that the British military commanders are getting to a point where they’re going to say, “We can’t do this anymore. We’re going to resign”. When the Chief of Staff, Dannatt, made his statement at the Ministry of Defense about four months ago, in which he said, “Look, the longer we stay there, the more we’re exacerbating the situation”, it was a great shock for Blair. This was not a retired officer like Mike Jackson, who I think very cowardly did not say those things when he was in office. This was a serving—this was the guy at the top of the British army, giving a clear warning: watch out.

And, you know, in Afghanistan, the British are in a very serious position. They’ve got units of only twelve or fifteen men in little villages, and they’re being attacked in company strength by the Taliban, very serious. I mean, I met a British soldier in London. I was giving a talk at the Dorchester about a week and a half ago. I was in London. A British officer was talking to me. He said, “You don’t realize how we are being overwhelmed in Afghanistan”.

There was a very interesting comment from the British Ministry of Defense about a month ago—or five or six weeks ago. They said British troops are now in the most violent combat they’ve experienced since the Korean War. And British defense correspondents sort of put this up as a great sign: our chaps are fighting just like in Korea. And I thought, hang on a minute, that’s not the point. What happened in Korea? The Gloucestershire Regiment were overwhelmed by millions of Chinese troops crossing the Yalu River. We couldn’t stand up to the vast numbers of soldiers that were coming in from the north in Korea. They were just overrunning us, totally. And what was happening, I realized immediately, in Afghanistan is that soldiers were being so totally outnumbered, they were having to retreat out of villages. In one case, I understand, twelve British troops in a school in a village were facing 300 Taliban and had to call in US air strikes to destroy the rest of the village to save themselves.

You know, one story, which has not really come out in the American press—I know it’s a fact, because I’ve investigated it fully in Iraq—is that in the first battle of Fallujah—remember, when there was a ceasefire and then the Iraqis came back, then they had the second battle and they took the city and managed to destroy much of it—in the first battle of Fallujah, there were twelve US Marines guarding the mayor’s office at Ramadi, the neighboring city to the west, and they were attacked by hundreds of Iraqi insurgents, and that twelve-man US Marine unit was liquidated. They were totally eliminated. They were killed, all of them. They were wiped out. And that is not a story that’s gotten the front page, as far as I know, of the New York Times, but that’s what happened. So the dangers you see that we’re now facing, very much—I don’t mean to make too facile a comparison—very much the same dangers that the crusaders faced with overwhelming force from the Muslim armies of the 12th century, is that the local populations are now so full of fury and anger against us that they are attacking us in their hundreds, overwhelming force.

AMY GOODMAN: This latest news in Basra, British-led troops have uncovered an Iraqi government facility where Shia forces were torturing prisoners and producing bomb-making equipment?

ROBERT FISK: Look, everything’s getting better in Basra. That’s why we’re leaving, right? I mean, here we go again. You know, my colleague Patrick Cockburn wrote a very good piece in Iraq not long ago. He said the problem with British statements, or particularly Blair, who’s saying everything is getting better, is that to prove them wrong, you have to go to places where you will have your throat cut. So you can’t prove him wrong, so it’s OK, he’ll get away with it.

Look, there’s no doubt that the Iraqi interior ministry is totally—I mean, it’s impregnated with the insurgency, Shiite insurgency, Sunni and other parts. You know, from the very beginning, we used to have these reports: men in police uniform have kidnapped Margaret Hassan, men in army uniform besieged a police station, you know? And I used to say, hang on, there’s not a Wal-Mart factory in Fallujah with made-to-measure police uniforms. Bring in 300 more men, we’ve got the—no, these are policemen. These are Iraqi soldiers. The Iraqi security forces have been totally infiltrated by the insurgents of both sides. That includes interior ministry, prisons, police stations. This idea, oh, we’re going to build up the Iraqi forces until they can take over—you know, I love that line from Blair: from now onwards Iraqis in Basra will write their own history. Yeah, they sure will, when we go. It’s incredible the way they get away with it, these people.

AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news out of Afghanistan, thousands of angry demonstrators taking to the streets after US forces were involved in a panicked shooting, which left sixteen civilians dead and twenty-three injured—at least that’s how it was described—panic shooting in The Independent.

ROBERT FISK: No photos, please. That’s what you were talking about also. We will delete you if you take pictures. Look, this is happening over and over again in Baghdad. A car blows up, a suicide bomber attacks, so everyone in the area is shot at. You know, at the very beginning of the invasion, when the Americans reached Baghdad, there was a frightening circumstance of Highway 11, I think it was. I went there afterwards, and a US tank column was moving down the road. They were ambushed, and the tank commander believed that every car on the road was a potential suicide car, and he ordered his men to fire at every civilian car. So when I got to the scene, there were smoking cars. There were women, their clothes blasted off them, naked in the backs of vehicles, children lying with rugs over them, dead beside the road. It was a massacre. Now, there was an ambush by the Iraqis. The Americans were attacked there, but their response was to kill everything in sight. And I actually talked to the US tank commander—he’s quoted in my book by name—who said, “Look, I have to defend my men. I have a duty to defend my men. I’m sorry if innocent people get killed”.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest book is The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk is our guest, chief Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. Robert, you head to Paris today for the French edition of Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, then Cairo and Egypt for the Arabic edition coming out of The Great War for Civilisation?

ROBERT FISK: Yes. It goes onto the crack of doom. We also have, by the way, a Bosnian edition next year coming out in Sarajevo. There’s sixteen foreign language editions now.

AMY GOODMAN: But then, you pack up everything and you start your Middle East reporting again.

ROBERT FISK: Well, I’m still doing Middle East reporting. I mean, I was in Lebanon for the violence in the streets, of course, in January. Yeah, from about July onwards, I will be full-time back Afghanistan and Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, etc.

AMY GOODMAN: You mention Lebanon. Let’s talk about the situation there today. This is where you have been based for the last thirty years.

ROBERT FISK: Thirty-one, almost, now, yeah. Yes, I mean, I was, you know, like I suppose most Lebanese, I felt, up until July the 12th, the beginning of the war between Hezbollah and the Israelis last summer, that maybe Lebanon had a chance. You know, it was being rebuilt. There wasn’t enough money trickling down from the top to the bottom; it was still a lopsided society with the Shiites being the poor and the oppressed as usual. But I thought until we came across—you know, even when the Shiites pulled out of the government, which was a very serious matter because it meant that once again we were emphasizing the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics, that there might be some form of compromise.

But once we had that strike, which turned so violent—you know, I turned up on Corniche Mazraa in the western part of Beirut, and there must have been 7,000 people, Muslims, Shiites and Sunnis, chucking rocks and stones at each other. There were seven Lebanese soldiers trying to get between them. I went with them taking pictures. I mean, the stones were bouncing off the soldiers. People were chucking rocks from the top of sixteen-story buildings. It was very dangerous. I thought, civil war was going to restart that day.

And one of the dangerous things at that point was that the young people who were involved were too young to remember the civil war, which of course actually ended in 1990. They might have a faint memory. They would have heard their parents talking about it. And they didn’t realize how quickly it would escalate, how quickly you could deteriorate. Even Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah—well, the Hezbollah is a very disciplined organization, of course—was shocked at the speed with which his strike, his civil disobedience strike, descended into total street violence. Then, of course, two days later, guns came on the streets.

Very dangerous situation, because it keeps going back into a sort of semi-denial of the political crisis. We think, OK, well, Lebanon is out of the news, it’s OK again. But the reality is that Lebanon is in great danger of splintering apart again. And I went out, a short time, a short while ago, before I came to America, for dinner in a Sunni area of Beirut. It’s a mixed area, but mostly Sunni, and I remember saying, well, how are you getting on with your Shiite neighbors these days? And the woman at the table said, well, actually, most of them have gone on holiday. They’ve left their keys with their neighbors. They have gone to stay with relatives elsewhere.

Now, that’s how it begins. That’s how it happened in Baghdad, people moving out of Sunni areas, people moving out of Shiite areas, if they’re a different religion. One of the frightening things that happened during those January days of violence, including the area where there was shooting used, is that the scenes of street combat were on the same green line of the civil war. In other words, the old fracture between east and west, Beirut and parts of West Beirut, reopened at the exact—Hazmieh—exactly the same point. I spent parts of the civil war at Hazmieh watching the fighting, and there, on the same piece of road, it broke apart again. It’s like, you know, you keep stitching it up, and it comes undone.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Seymour Hersh’s report, where he says that the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia are pumping money for covert operations in many areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria and Iran, in an effort to strengthen Saudi-supported Sunni Islam groups and weaken Iranian-backed Shiites. Some of the covert money has been given to jihadist groups in Lebanon with ties to al-Qaeda.

ROBERT FISK: Look, Seymour Hersh said that we were going to invade Iraq, and I thought we wouldn’t, and he was right and I was wrong. So when Seymour Hersh says we’re going to bombard Iran, I remain silent. When Seymour Hersh tells me—he was in Beirut, of course; he met Nasrallah there—that we’re pumping money into Sunni extremist groups, I think, well, hang on a second, he got it right and I got it wrong on Iraq.

Look, the truth of the matter is that these various organizations—and there are some al-Qaeda-type groups, groupuscules, tiny ones in Lebanon, and I’ve met them—they don’t need money from outside. They’ve got money. Everyone in Lebanon who’s got weapons has money. It’s like the same nonsense: we talk about how the Iranians are teaching the Iraqi Shiite insurgents to make bombs. Iraqi insurgents know how to make bombs. They don’t need the Iranians to come and teach them. I don’t think a lot of money is reaching these people. What I do think is that these various extreme groups are quite possibly being mobilized or encouraged by elements within the—what we now call the American-supported Lebanese government—what a kiss of death that is for the Siniora government—encouraged to remain where they are and to be available in certain circumstances.

You know, a large number of the killings that have taken place in Beirut are not necessarily carried out by the Syrians. Hariri, I think, was a Syrian-engineered plot, yes. But, for example, Pierre Gemayel’s murder, a lot of Lebanese say, well, maybe it was another Christian group behind that. One of the things you find in Lebanon is that there are various groups, some of them Palestinian—we call them extremists or terrorists, whatever you like—who are available to help anyone. They can make temporary alliances. They don’t need to be given $5 million on the quiet by someone with American money.

The real danger now, you see, is that with an ideological government like you have and like we, I suppose, think we have, we constantly want to assist people who will join us in our campaign. You can go back to Afghanistan. We wanted the warlords on our side against bin Laden. Now we’re saddled with the warlords, which is why we can’t stamp out the opium trade or the drugs trade. In Iraq, we started—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that, for people who may not understand the significance of drugs in Afghanistan.

ROBERT FISK: We basically used the Northern Alliance, Mujahideen, the non-Taliban, anti-Taliban alliance of guerrillas, who had fought a terrible, terrifying civil war of rape and murder in Kabul earlier, to combat on the ground the Talibans, so that we didn’t lose so many soldiers. The principle of war at the moment is that they die and we live, not the other way around or not both. And because then, in order to continue the control of Afghanistan, which we’re now losing in the south, we wanted to continue that control without casualties, we continued to employ with millions and millions of dollars the same warlords who had been running the poppy trade, as well as fighting Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

You know, we forget that the UN in the beginning of 2001 said that the drugs exports of Afghanistan had fallen by 94% because the Taliban had banned drugs. The Tony Blair version is that Taliban were in the drugs trade and it was flourishing, and now it’s flourishing again. Once again, the narrative of history is simply wrong. That’s not what happened.

But in all these various—Iraq, again, who is funding the interior ministry militiamen who are murdering people? The interior ministry is funded by us. We use local gunmen and murderers to do our job for us and save our soldiers’ lives, not very successfully, but that’s what we do. And, of course, we’ll do the same if necessary in Lebanon with all these unsavory groups, all of whom have got blood on their hands. I mean, there’s one Lebanese politician—he’s a friend of mine, I know him very well—who ran a militia during the civil war, which brutally tortured its opponents, committed war crimes, and he met Condoleezza Rice a few days ago. I mean, you know, we will make friends with those who want to help us and whom we think are worthy of our support on the short term. And if—I mean, who did bin Laden used to work for when he was fighting the Russians? Us, you know? I mean, we use these unsavory—who was Saddam working for for most of his rule? Us. Who gave him the gas? The components came from the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Lebanon and to Palestine and Israel and to go to the issue of—

AMY GOODMAN: Why not?

ROBERT FISK: Unless the Palestinians can have a cohesive state without Jewish settlements dotted through it and have East Jerusalem as a capital, I cannot see there ever being a Palestinian state, in reality. I mean, you can print stamps or bank notes, and have Ramallah as your temporary capital. But unless we see UN Security Council Resolution 242 abided by by all sides—

AMY GOODMAN: Which says?

ROBERT FISK: Retreat of Israeli forces from territories occupied in the ‘67 War, in return for security of all states in the area, including, of course, Israel, and the absolute fact that you cannot legally acquire land through war. It is illegal to acquire land through war, which means the settlements or colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are internationally illegal. Bush has already said there are facts on the grounds that won’t be changed. He’s thus said that these illegal settlements can remain. He’s effectively torn up 242 a couple of years ago. Well, I suppose we can still, you know, have another 242 Resolution. It will be 17- or 18-something-or-other. But 242 remains. It was supposed to be the basis of the Oslo Agreement, which failed. It failed because we didn’t abide by 242.

Unless Israel goes back to its international frontiers, or at least the ‘67 frontiers, I don’t think there’s going to be peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and I don’t think there’s going to be a Palestine. And most Palestinians realize this. It’s only we, who sit in our beautiful homes in New York or London or wherever in the West—or mine’s in Beirut, but that’s a different matter—who can talk about, oh, a one-state solution, a two-state solution, putting the peace process—was the cliché—back on track. Now, it’s a road map. You can’t put a road back on track, so I’m sure we’ll invent a new cliché for that. But this is woeful. It’s more self-delusion by us. It’s like Bush saying that the Israelis won the war against the Hezbollah. I’m not sure the Hezbollah did, but the Israelis certainly didn’t. Here again, we’re living on our own lies.

AMY GOODMAN: CBS reported just in the last few weeks, the UN estimates Israel dropped as many as four million bomblets in southern Lebanon during last year’s war with Hezbollah, with as many as 40% failing to explode on impact.

ROBERT FISK: Which is why thirty-four Lebanese have been killed, let alone wounded, since the war ended, by those bomblets. Most of them of course are civilians, or all are civilians, except for one soldier who was trying to defuse one. And many of those civilians, of course, are children, because they think they are toys. They pick them up. I’ve actually walked across a field and seen them lying there. Yes, and those bomblets were dropped after the ceasefire hour was stated, when the Israelis knew the war was going to end, and they soaked the ground with those bombs, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: In The Great War for Civilisation, you talk about the weapons manufacturers. What about the cluster bomb manufacturers?

ROBERT FISK: Well, you know, last night when I was speaking at Town Hall in New York, and I don’t like to cheerlead these things, because I’m a journalist, but I ask in my book and I ask people in Lebanon, as a newspaper reporter, why don’t the victims of these weapons, not just cluster bombs, but the Lockheed Martin, Boeing, AGM-114C air-to-ground missile—it hits an ambulance, it kills people, it did in 1996—why don’t the victims or survivors sue the arms companies? I actually took—and I recall the story here—I actually took parts of, in fact, literally the whole US missile in bits that hit an ambulance, was fired on an ambulance by an Israeli helicopter, Apache, American-made, in ’96, killed three children, two women. And with the UN, I got all the bits of the missile, including bits from the corpses. And we found the computer plate, and it was made in Duluth, Georgia. We found the date on it.

I went to Duluth. I managed to get the missile parts out of Beirut to Paris with the help of airport security. In Paris, we got Amnesty International to send it to Washington as a DHL package. I didn’t want to turn up at JFK, you know, reporter found with explosive traces. Imagine Tom Friedman’s comment on that. And I got these parts of the missile down to Duluth in Georgia to confront the Boeing executives there, including the developer of the missile. They thought I was coming to write a piece about this wonderful missile that could be fired five miles away and go through a baseball loop, you know. And there was a sort of explosion in the boardroom as I laid out the pieces of the missile along with the photographs of the dead and wounded civilians hit by their missile, which was made there, the building next door to where we were talking.

AMY GOODMAN: And where did it kill people, that you had the example of?

ROBERT FISK: Southern Lebanon. Southern Lebanon. It was on a road—I was in front of the vehicle when it was hit. I was driving on the same road. That’s why I knew exactly—I saw the helicopter.

And the amazing thing was that when I got back to Beirut having run this story on the front page of the paper—it’s called “Return to Sender”—they didn’t want the pieces of the missile; actually, they kept them, but they didn’t put them in the Boeing museum—I was rung up by a NATO arms expert in Paris. He was a Frenchman. And he said, “That missile was not sold to Israel, it was sold to the US Marine Corps.” And I said, how—“come to Paris.” We met at the Lutetia Hotel—great secrecy—and he pulled out all the secret lists with NATO codes showing—if you read the computer codes on the missile side, which I can do, you can tell who it was sold to. And he showed me the “O1,” US forces, and then “M” for Marines.

So I went back to Washington immediately, called up the Commandant of the Marine Corps, got taken by guys to a Marine base outside Washington, where men in civilian clothes, officers, sat around and went through it, said, “Well, look, we can tell you the story. These missiles were a batch of 360 sent with US Marines to Saudi Arabia in 1990, and we used half of them against the Iraqi army in the liberation of Kuwait in ’91. Those half that remained, we were instructed to drop off at the Haifa munitions pier in Israel as part of a quid pro quo weapons for the Israelis in return for their non-participation in the 1990 war against Iraq”. So this missile started off, was sold to the Marines, taken to Saudi Arabia for use against the Iraqis, dumped on the Israelis and fired into an ambulance in southern Lebanon, and then taken by me back to its base in—

Now, when I did that, I said, “Hang on, why don’t these people sue Boeing? Is there no responsibility on behalf of the arms makers?” They say, “Oh, we’ve given it to the Marines. We’re selling it to Israel”. Don’t they have a responsibility to follow through? We, in our jobs, have responsibilities. You know, if you misreport something, at some point you’re going to go on the screen and say, “I got it wrong”. And so am I, if I make mistakes. But these guys are completely—they’re completely protected.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, we have thirty seconds. What would happen if the US attacked Iran?

ROBERT FISK: Hell disaster again. You try to get out of one war by starting another. I think the Iranians would find some way of hitting back, and it would not be the same kind of war, you see. We’re not talking about a land war. We’re talking about bombarding it. And the Iranians, both as a people, as well as all the mullahs, they would want to hit back again. It would be a war. It wouldn’t stop there. You can’t say, “OK, we’re going to stop bombarding. It will carry on.” That’s a problem.
Tabacco: Somewhere in the White House I hear John McCain singing!

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Robert Fisk is the author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, his earlier book, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, longtime Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. Thanks for joining us.


http://www.democracynow.org/2006/12/20/robert_fisk_criticizes_experts_cited_in

December 20, 2006

Robert Fisk Criticizes ‘Experts’ Cited in Iraq Study Group Report

Robert Fisk, Chief Middle East Correspondent for the London Independent, recently participated in a roundtable discussion on the Iraq Study Group report held at the sixth annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. We play his comments. [includes rush transcript]

Robert Fisk is the Chief Middle East Correspondent for the London Independent and author of the book “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years. He was in Iraq in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, in the early 1990s during the Persian Gulf War and most recently during the U.S. invasion and occupation.

This past weekend Robert Fisk was invited to deliver the keynote address before hundreds of Muslim Americans gathered in Long Beach, California for the sixth annual convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. At the convention, Fisk–who was the keynote speaker–participated in a roundtable discussion on the Iraq Study Group’s implications. He took to the podium with a copy of the report in his hand.

    * Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. He is the author of several books, his latest is “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”.

Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Robert Fisk. Robert Fisk is the chief Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London. He has been reporting from the Middle East for the last 30 years, whether in Afghanistan or Iran, Lebanon, the Occupied Territories, Israel or in Iraq, year after year. Well, he came to California, to Long Beach this weekend to address the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a group of more than 1,000 Muslims who gathered for their sixth annual conference. He gave the keynote address at night, which we will play. But first, we go to the speech he gave late in the afternoon at a roundtable discussion on the Baker-Hamilton report. He came to the podium with a copy of the report in his hand.

    ROBERT FISK: Ladies and gentlemen, how many of you have actually read the Iraq report by Baker and Hamilton? A sea of no hands, virtually, yes. It reads, oddly enough—it has this odd journalistic flavor. It keeps talking about “time is running out”, “porous borders”. It reminds me of the kind of stuff we get from the Brookings Institution or my favorite journalist, Tom Friedman of the New York Times. So, I do suggest before you read it—I managed to get through this on United Flight 979 yesterday. Before you actually read it, I do suggest you start at the back, because you will find that Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Baker have been kind enough to list all the experts who helped them. They’re actually called former officials and experts.

    Let me read through a few things here for you: Strobe Talbott, the Brookings Institution; George Will, the Washington Post; Kenneth Pollack, the man who brought you The Threatening Storm, the book that told you there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the Brookings Institution; Carlos Pascual, the Brookings Institution; Michael O’Hanlon, the Brookings Institution; American Enterprise Institute; Martin Indyk, the Brookings Institution. You get the idea that perhaps these proposals are not really going to work, don’t you? And then, here we are, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times. So, I do strongly advise you to read this document.

    Maybe Mr. Bush is right. You know, I think we don’t want democracy, we Westerners. We don’t want democracy in the Middle East. We have no intention. (Amen!) I think the people of the Middle East—well, actually, I agree entirely—would like some of our democracy. I think they’d like some packets of human rights off our Western supermarket shelves. But they also, I think, want a different kind of freedom. They want freedom from us. And this we do not intend to give them.

    It’s also about something else, though. It’s about the visceral need of imperial powers to project themselves—military—and expand. I mean, the Romans did it, the British did it. I had a very strange conversation a couple of years ago when the Spanish were withdrawing after the Madrid bombings. And I went down to the Spanish headquarters at Kufa, just outside Najaf. And while I was talking to some Spanish officers, all of whom couldn’t wait to get home to Spain, out walks a guy, an American military man, pistol, rifle, civilian clothes, obviously CIA. And he says, “They’re saying that there are men, 60 or 70, with weapons, moving around the roads here at night”. And I said, “There probably are”.

    He said, “How will we do? What will we do? Where did we go wrong?” And I said, “Look, when the Romans conquered another country—and they did so with great brutality; they crucified anyone who opposed them—they made everyone a citizen of Rome. Everybody had the equivalent of a Roman passport. Just imagine”, I said, “what would have happened if, when the first American troops crossed the Tigris River in April of 2003, the United States had said every citizen of Iraq who wishes to be can join our democracy and become an American citizen”. I can’t tell you how long the queue would be around the first American embassy to open. That doesn’t mean all the people of Iraq would go and live in America, or vice versa. But I don’t think there would have been an insurgency if generosity had been shown to Iraqis.

    When I watched Baghdad burn—its institutions, its museums, its art galleries, its heritage—the United States military should have been setting up a massive tent medical city around Baghdad. Free medical aid for everyone, the sick, the wounded, those in pain, to show you that we are your fellow human beings. But that, of course, was not part of the plan. What a terrible, terrible mistake, much worse than disbanding the Iraqi army or disbanding their police force. Even worse than stealing the oil.
Tabacco: Uh, hello, READERS! Did you read that last sentence? Fisk minimizes “stealing the oil”, but I do not. I’ve been saying that same thing for 3 years now in print!

    You know, we face today in the media the same constant problem of weakness, laziness and fear. In trying to report the realities, what newspaper have you read in your country, mainstream newspaper recently, where an ordinary mainstream reporter can say the things that I’ve said to you tonight? Which is probably why I’m here and Tom Friedman is not, isn’t it? Well, Tom Friedman could say it up to a point, but I think we can read him in this report.

    The problem, I’m afraid, is that we have grown used to a kind of mild, temperate reporting out of the Middle East in the US media, which is incomprehensible unless you happen to know the region. The “wall” becomes a “security barrier”, like the Berlin security barrier, which some of you may remember. “Occupied territory” is “disputed territory”. A “colony” becomes a “neighborhood”. And thus, of course, the Palestinians, generically violent for opposing this by throwing stones, or worse.

    I think, you know, you see the same thing happen with Mearsheimer-Walt report. I interviewed poor old Walt up in Harvard just after he produced his famous report on the Israeli lobby and the power of the Israel lobby, and he was in a state of near catatonic shock. And I said, “Calm down, you know. Join the club. We’ve been through this before”. Anybody who has a reasonable decent criticism of Israel, including Israelis, will be called anti-Semitic. And we respond to this very clearly. In Britain, we threaten to sue when anyone calls us that, because it’s a lie. John Malkovich, the actor, who said at the Cambridge Union he wanted to shoot me, followed this up in the Observer by saying he hated me because of my, quote, “vicious anti-Semitism”. Our lawyers went into action immediately. The Observer withdrew the story and apologized. You’ve got to stand up. And journalists have got to stand up when they are falsely accused of racism.

    I agree entirely with my friend when he talks about the shamefulness of denying the Jewish Holocaust. It happened. Six million Jews were murdered in Europe. I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve been to Birkenau. I’ve been to Treblinka. It’s all true. Read Martin Gilbert’s magisterial book, The Holocaust. But why doesn’t President Ahmadinejad and those many Arab figures who say the same things, but not so loudly, why doesn’t he say, “Yes, yes, six million Jews were foully murdered, and it’s true, but we didn’t do it”? There’s the mistake.

    Over and over again, the Arabs are blamed now for the Holocaust. Do you remember Menachem Begin, when he was sending his troops towards Beirut in 1982, he wrote this rambling, crazed letter to Reagan saying he felt he was the Red Army advancing on Berlin where Hitler was—Hitler being the poor old Yasser Arafat, who was claiming at the time, by the way, that he was defending Beirut like Stalingrad.

    Everyone is obsessed with the Second World War. Everyone. Bush, even our own dear Mr. Blair, think they’re Winston Churchill. And all our enemies, every one of them, believe me, is a Hitler of the Tigris. Antony Eden actually referred to Nasser as the Mussolini of the Nile. We’re all putting on our World War II cloaks. It’s incredible. And if anyone, anyone, suggests the war is wrong, then we are Neville Chamberlain, we’re in the house of appeasement, and look what happened in 1939.

    And journalists go along with this. Pollack, one of these people, went along with that line. We’re contently trying to repeat the bits of history that we remember inaccurately and wrongly. And we do not remember the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, when the British commander issued a document on the walls of Baghdad, saying, “We come here”—to the people of the Mohafazat, the governorate of Baghdad—“We come here, not as conquerors, but as liberators to free you from generations of tyranny”. And in 1920, when the insurgency, the Iraqi insurgency against British rule in Iraq, began, we shelled Fallujah, and we shelled Najaf. The British army, in 1920. I’ve seen the telegram written by British intelligence in Baghdad to the War Department in London saying that terrorists were crossing the border, from…?

    AUDIENCE MEMBER: Syria.

    ROBERT FISK: Yes, quite. You read that telegram. You knew about that telegram. And then Lloyd George, the British prime minister, stood up in the House of Commons and said, “If British troops leave Iraq now, there will be…”?

    AUDIENCE MEMBER: Civil war.

    ROBERT FISK: Spot on. You read the Times parliamentary report in 1920, didn’t you? We don’t read history. Our journalists don’t read history. My goodness, me, nor do our leaders.

    You know, I think that this—one of these problems of journalism is that we don’t carry history books in our back pocket. And I think the other problem is that our leaders don’t. And there’s one major problem, above all others, which we don’t look at. Many of us, many of you here, many of us have witnessed wars. But there isn’t a single member of any Western government anywhere in the world that has ever experienced or been in a war. Mr. Bush could have been, of course. Mr. Cheney could have been. Colin Powell was, and he’s gone; he had experience. When I grew up, Churchill, Eden, we had lots of prime ministers in Britain who had been in the war. They knew that you don’t go to war on false and meretricious reasons. But that’s gone now. Our leaders’ experience of war is now Hollywood.

    I think that, you know, the project to remake the Middle East is a project of a child. It’s been forgotten already. The neoconservative planners have already said, “Not us mate. Not us, no, no. We’re going. His fault. And look at those Iraqis”. The latest line we’re getting, by the way—read David Brooks in the New York Times—is that the Iraqis have proved unworthy of the fruits of civilization which we wish to give them. Greedy. Sectarian. They only know the tribe. Until, of course, we find some other nation suitable to be invaded and offered the fruits of our civilization. Be sure, there’s quite a selection around. It won’t be North Korea, because they’ve got the bomb.

    Look at the way we bought the whole line on Iran. Iran, whose nuclear facilities were begun with our encouragement, and Washington’s encouragement under the Shah. There is actually a Muslim country in Southwest Asia, which has many Taliban supporters there, many al-Qaeda people, and it has a bomb. It’s called Pakistan. But we don’t talk about that. That’s not part of the narrative set down by our leaders. It is Iran, Iran, Iran. As if everyone, for thousands, millions of years to come, who has a turban, will not be allowed to have nuclear power stations. This is preposterous. This is the language of children and the policies of children. And it is us, the most powerful superpower presence in the West, that is permitting this and actually organizing it.

    Ladies and gentleman, we are not going to reshape the Middle East. We may help to destroy it, but we are not going to reshape it. If you want to know what is deciding American politics now and what is deciding British politics, it is not Mr. Blair, and it is not Mr. Bush, it is the Iraqis. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

AMY GOODMAN: Veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk, writes for the Independent of London, speaking at a panel discussion of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, their annual gathering this weekend. The convention was called “Reform, Relevance and Renewal: Understanding Islam for the Future”.



Tabacco: I consider myself both a funnel and a filter. I funnel information, not readily available on the Mass Media, which is ignored and/or suppressed. I filter out the irrelevancies and trivialities to save both the time and effort of my Readers and bring consternation to the enemies of Truth & Fairness! When you read Tabacco, if you don’t learn something NEW, I’ve wasted your time.


In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".

 

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