[Peace-discuss] Bob Fisk on Iraq

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

1. ROBERT FISK   War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
2. Srdja Trifkovic  WHY IS THE WEST LOSING THE WAR ON TERROR?


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War Lords to Their Critics: "Just Shut Up"
Bush's War and the Lapdog Press Corps
By ROBERT FISK         Counterpunch         April 10,2004

Just shut up. That's the new foreign policy line of our masters. When
Senator Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam", US Secretary of
State Colin Powell told him to be "a little more restrained and careful" in
his comments. I recall that when the US commenced its bombing of
Afghanistan, the White House spokesman claimed that some journalists were
"asking questions that the American people wouldn't want asked". Back in the
early 1980s, when I reported on the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to
Tehran who were coughing Saddam's mustard gas out of their lungs in blood
and mucus, a Foreign Office official told my then editor on The Times that
my dispatch was "not helpful". In other words, stop criticising our ally,
Saddam.
So maybe the policy has been around for quite a while. When the occupation
authorities deliberately concealed the attacks against US troops after the
start of the Iraq occupation last year, journalists who investigated this
violence were told that they weren't covering the big picture, that only
small areas of Iraq were restive. And there was a lot of clucking of tongues
when a few of us decided to take a close look at US proconsul Paul Bremer's
press laws last year. A whole team of "Coalition Provisional Authority"
lawyers was set up to see how they could legalise the closure and censorship
of Iraqi newspapers that "incited violence". And whenever we raised
questions about it, the CPA spokesman--and its current attendant lord, Dan
Senor, used the same phrase last week--would announce that "we will not
tolerate incitement to violence".
So when Bremer's own closure last week of Muqtada Sadr's silly little
weekly--circulation about a quarter that of the Kent Messenger--incited the
very violence he supposedly wanted to avoid, what did the American High
Commissioner announce? "This will not be tolerated." One of the paper's
major sins was to have condemned Paul Bremer for taking Iraq down "Saddam's
path", an article which Bremer condemned in painstaking detail in his signed
letter--in execrable Arabic--to the editor of the miscreant paper.
Now I'm all against incitement to violence. Just like I'm against incitement
to war by the use of fraudulent claims of weapons of mass destruction and
secret links to al-Qa'ida. Just like I'm against the use of Saddam's army
against Iraqi cities and the use of America's army against Iraqi cities. For
let's remember that some of Muqtada Sadr's dangerous militiamen fought
Saddam in the 1991 insurgency--the one we supported and then betrayed.
Saddam, of course, knew how to deal with resistance. "We will not
tolerate...," he told his commanders. And we all know what that meant. No,
the Americans are not Saddam's army. But the siege of Fallujah is likely to
give that city the heroic status among future generations of Iraqi Sunnis as
Basra--surrounded by Saddam's hordes in 1991--holds among Iraqi Shias today.
But still, we must shut up. I remember how last autumn the cabal of
right-wing neo-conservatives who urged the Bush administration into this war
suddenly went to ground. What was this so-called neo-conservative lobby
behind Bush and Cheney, a New York Times columnist demanded to know, these
so-called former Likudist supporters of Israel? When one of them, Richard
Perle, turned up on a radio show with me a few weeks ago, he insisted that
things were getting better in Iraq, that we were all en route to a cracking
little democracy in Mesopotamia.
The moment I suggested that this was a massive case of self-delusion, Perle
replied that Fisk had "always been for the maintenance of the Baathist
regime". I got the message. Anyone who condemned this bloody mess was a
secret Baathist, a lover of the dictator and his torturers. Thus far have
the falcons of Washington fallen.
Of course, the "shut-up" principle works both ways. Back on 16 March 2003,
when the world was obsessed with the war that would break out in Iraq three
days later, a tragedy occurred on another battlefield 500 miles west of
Baghdad. On that day, an Israeli soldier and his commander drove a nine-ton
Caterpillar bulldozer over a young American peace activist called Rachel
Corrie who was unarmed, clearly visible in a fluorescent jacket and trying
to protect a Palestinian home that the Israelis intended to destroy. The
Caterpillar was part of the regular US aid to Israel. Israel acquitted its
own army of responsibility for Rachel's death--which was taped on video by
her appalled friends--and the Bush administration remained gutlessly silent.
Rachel's grieving mother Cindi has been a picture of dignity. US citizens,
she wrote, "should ask themselves how it is that an unarmed US citizen can
be killed with impunity by a soldier from an allied nation receiving massive
US aid... When three Americans were killed, presumably by Palestinians, in
an explosion on October 15th, 2003 ... the FBI came within 24 hours to
investigate the deaths. After one year, neither the FBI nor any other US-led
team has done anything to investigate the death of an American killed by an
Israeli."
Well, the answer is that Bush and his administration know how to shut
themselves up when it pays them to do so. That's what Condoleezza Rice
initially tried to do when summoned before the 11 September hearings. And,
thanks to the subservience of many members of the White House and Pentagon
press corps, the administration has an easy time. Why, for example, no press
conference questions about Rachel Corrie?
It seems that as long as you say "war on terror", you are safe from all
criticism. For not a single American journalist has investigated the links
between the Israeli army's "rules of engagement"--so blithely handed over to
US forces on Sharon's orders--and the behaviour of the US military in Iraq.
The destruction of houses of "suspects", the wholesale detention of
thousands of Iraqis without trial, the cordoning off of "hostile" villages
with razor wire, the bombardment of civilian areas by Apache helicopter
gunships and tanks on the hunt for "terrorists" are all part of the Israeli
military lexicon.
In besieging cities--when they were taking casualties or the number of
civilians killed was becoming too shameful to sustain--the Israeli army
would call a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations". They did this
11 times after they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And yesterday, the American
army declared a "unilateral suspension of offensive operations" around
Fallujah.
Not a word on this mysterious parallel by America's reporters, no questions
about the even more mysterious use of identical language. And in the coming
days, we shall--perhaps--find out how many of the estimated 300 dead of
Fallujah were Sunni gunmen and how many were women and children. Following
Israel's rules is going to lead the Americans into the same disaster those
rules have led the Israelis. But I guess we'll shut up about it.
In the end, I suspect, the Iraqis will probably have a greater say in the US
presidential elections than American voters. They will decide if President
Bush loses or wins. The same may apply to Mr Blair. Funny thing, that a far
away people, just 26 million, can change our political history. As for us, I
guess we'll be expected to shut up.
Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation.
He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of
Anti-Semitism.