Fisk: Can’t Bush and Blair See Iraq Is About to Explode? ?

[G_j]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0802-01.htm

Published on Monday, August 2, 2004 by the Arab News

Can’t Bush and Blair See Iraq Is About to Explode?

by Robert Fisk

BAGHDAD - The war is a fraud. I’m not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda which didn’t exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I’m talking about the new lies.

For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist. Much of Iraq has fallen outside the control of America’s puppet government in Baghdad but we are not told. Hundreds of attacks are made against US troops every month. But unless an American dies, we are not told. This month’s death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 — the worst month since the invasion ended. But we are not told.

The stage management of this catastrophe in Iraq was all too evident at Saddam Hussein’s “trial”. Not only did the US military censor the tapes of the event. Not only did they effectively delete all sound of the 11 other defendants. But the Americans led Saddam Hussein to believe — until he reached the courtroom — that he was on his way to his execution. Indeed, when he entered the room he believed that the judge was there to condemn him to death. This, after all, was the way Saddam ran his own state security courts. No wonder he initially looked “disorientated” — CNN’s helpful description — because, of course, he was meant to look that way. We had made sure of that. Which is why Saddam asked Judge Juhi: “Are you a lawyer? ... Is this a trial?” And swiftly, as he realized that this really was an initial court hearing — not a preliminary to his own hanging — he quickly adopted an attitude of belligerence. But don’t think we’re going to learn much more about Saddam’s future court appearances. Salem Chalabi, the brother of convicted fraudster Ahmad and the man entrusted by the Americans with the tribunal, told the Iraqi press two weeks ago that all media would be excluded from future court hearings. And I can see why. Because if Saddam does a Milosevic, he’ll want to talk about the real intelligence and military connections of his regime — which were primarily with the United States.

Living in Iraq these past few weeks is a weird as well as dangerous experience. I drive down to Najaf. Highway 8 is one of the worst in Iraq. Westerners are murdered there. It is littered with burnt-out police vehicles and American trucks. Every police post for 70 miles has been abandoned. Yet a few hours later, I am sitting in my room in Baghdad watching British Prime Minister Tony Blair, grinning in the House of Commons as if he is the hero of a school debating competition; so much for the Butler report.


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[whistle]

1. Yes they can, which is a strong case for LIHOP and MIHOP...

...body bags and flag drapped coffins may be the October surprise. I pray that it is not:cry:

[Doctor_J]

2. I don't think * gives a shit about iraq at this point

he hasn't been to a single funeral, still couldn't find it on a map, and his entire job now consists of campaigning - there is no policy work at all (if there ever was). He forgot about iraq as soon as it was no longer propping up his poll numbers.

Blair may have a conscience, but Smirk? Don't make me laugh.

[Cha]

8. And I wonder about tony....

"As foreign workers pour out of Iraq for fear of their lives, US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells a press conference that hostage-taking is having an “effect” on reconstruction. Effect! Oil pipeline explosions are now as regular as power cuts. In parts of Baghdad now, they have only four hours of electricity a day; the streets swarm with foreign mercenaries, guns poking from windows, shouting abusively at Iraqis who don’t clear the way for them. This is the “safer” Iraq which Blair was boasting of the other day. What world does the British government exist in?

[G_j]

3. led Saddam to believe that he was on his way to his execution

that is against the Geneva Convention.

[G_j]

4. delete

[G_j]

6. delete

[G_j]

5. it is too dangerous for reporters to leave Baghdad

we will probably never know most of what has really been happening.

[Cha]

7. As someone said..."nobody gets Iraq like Robert Fisk"..

I feel like I'm practically there when I read him.

I can only imagine the Hell that is Iraq and from what I saw in F9/11..

Will we ever get to a place where the big corporate mainstream media has to answer for not telling us the truth?

[CaTeacher]

9. If it really explodes over there--

we will sky rocket in the polls!

[bread_and_roses]

11. More suffering for the Iraqi people is too high a price

even for good polls.

[buycitgo]

10. that's exactly what I was gonna say

he and the bloggers like Riverbend are the ones who tell you what's really going on

for once Wolfowitz was right about the majority of reporters: they're afraid to go out into the streets; not that I blame them

The smell of the dead pours into the street through the air-conditioning ducts. Hot, sweet, overwhelming. Inside the Baghdad morgue, there are so many corpses that the fridges are overflowing. The dead are on the floor. Dozens of them. Outside, in the 46C (114F) heat, Qadum Ganawi tells me how his brother Hassan was murdered.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles423.htm#FullStory


from his own site, the one to read if you're tired of not hearing what's really happening; it's SO much worse
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles423.htm

[G_j]

12. Fisk on Iraq: history

this should be required reading,

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/2004/0617iraq1917.htm

Iraq, 1917
By Robert Fisk
Independent
June 17, 2004

They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...

On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.

Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq. That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.

Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/071304F.shtml

A History Lesson in Iraq
By Robert Fisk
The Independent UK

Monday 12 July 2004

Baghdad - The Americans could learn a lot from Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi Al-Khalasi. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with eloquence and humor, he has the same forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather - the man who led the Shiite Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920.

He brings out a portrait of the grand old revolutionary, who has a fluffy but carefully combed white beard. One of the most eminent scholars of his day, he ended his life in exile, negotiating with Lenin's Bolshevik government and dying mysteriously - poisoned, his supporters believed, by British intelligence. Sheikh Jouwad's shoulders shake with laughter when I suggest that there are more than a few parallels between the Iraqi insurrections of 1920 and 2004. "Exactly", he says.

"In 1920, the British tried to introduce an Iraqi government in name only - it looks like a copy of UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Sheikh Mehdi Al-Khalasi had become the grand 'marja' (the leading Shiite scholar) after the death of Mohamed Al-Shiazi and he issued a fatwa telling his followers and all Shiites in Iraq not to participate in elections, not to give legitimacy to a government established by occupation forces.

"Not only the Shiites responded to it but the Sunnis and the Jewish, Christian and other minorities as well. The elections failed and so the British forced my grandfather to leave Iraq. They arrested him at his home on the other side of this religious school where we are today - a home which many years later Saddam Hussein deliberately destroyed." It was a familiar colonial pattern, of course. The Brits were exiling troublesome clerics - Archbishop Makarios comes to mind - throughout the 20th century, but Sheikh Mehdi turned out to be as dangerous to the British abroad as he had been at home. He was transported to Bombay, but so great was the crowd of angry Indian Muslims who arrived at the port that British troops kept him aboard ship and then transported him to the hot, volcanic port of Aden.

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[G_j]

13. kick

[buycitgo]

14. thank you

Fisk should be in everybody's bookmarks

for him not to be on the news all the time bespeaks the supinity of the the corporate media

[greekspeak]

15. Unless the roiling cauldron gets too close to the oil....

We will only hear sunshine and lollypops, moonbeams and teddy bears about Iraq. Shrub has his sights set on Iran now, and has bigger fish to fry. He and BushCo are expending all their energies on simply trying to keep poll numbers as high as Kerry's. Iraq is Shrub's discarded plaything now, an old toy that is not fun anymore now that he has broken it.

[G_j]

16. kick

[G_j]

17. kick

:bounce: