Posted on 27-3-2003
Amy
Goodman Talks To Robert Fisk In Baghdad
Independent reporting from Baghdad. Amy Goodman interviews Fisk,
who spends a lot of time talking about how he goes about his
work, how he retains independence, the way an ethical journalist
chooses to remain that way.
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Host, AG: Set the scene for us in
Baghdad right now.
RF: Well, it’s been a relatively quiet night, there’s
been quite a lot of explosions about an hour ago. There have
obviously been an awful lot of missiles arriving on some target,
but I would say it was about 4 or 5 miles away. You can hear
the change in air pressure and you can hear this long, low rumble
like drums or like someone banging on a drum deep beneath the
ground, but quite a ways away. There have only been 2 or 3 explosions
near the center of the city, which is where I am, in the last
12 hours. So, I suppose you could say that, comparatively, to
anyone living in central Baghdad, it’s been a quiet night.
The strange thing is that the intensity of the attacks on Baghdad
changes quite extraordinarily; you’ll get one evening when you
can actually sleep through it all, and the next evening when
you see the explosions red hot around you.
As if no one really planning the things, it’s like someone wakes
up in the morning and says, “Let’s target this on the map today”,
and it’s something which sort of characterizes the whole adventure
because if you actually look at what’s happening on the ground,
you’ll see that the American and British armies started off
in the border. They started off at Um Qasr and got stuck, carried
on up the road through the desert, took another right turn and
tried to get into Basra, got stuck, took another right at Nasiriya,
got stuckit’s almost as if they keep on saying, “Well let’s
try the next road on the right”, and it has kind of a lack of
planning to it. There will be those who say that, “No it’s been
meticulously planned,” but it doesn’t feel like it to be here.
AG: Can you talk about the POWs and television- the charge that
they’re violating the Geneva Convention by showing them on television?
RF: Well, you know, the Geneva Convention is meant to protect
children, and hospitals are full of civilians, including many
children who’ve been badly wounded.
It seems to me that this concentration on whether television
should show prisoners or not is a kind of mischief: it’s not
the point. The issue, of course, is that both sides are taking
prisoners, and that both sides want the other side to know of
the prisoners they’ve taken. I watched CNN showing a British
soldier forcing a man to kneel on the ground and put his hands
up and produce his identity card and I’ve seen other film on
British television of prisoners near Um Qasr and Basra being
forced to march past a British soldier with their hands in the
air. Well, they (the American soldiers) weren’t interviewed,
it’s true, although you heard at one point a man asking questions,
clearly to put any prisoner on air answering questions is against
the Geneva Convention. But for many, many years now, in the
Middle East television has been showing both sides in various
wars appearing on television and being asked what their names
are and what their home countries are. And the real issue
is that these prisoners should not be maltreated, tortured,
or hurt after capture. When you realize that 19 men have tried
to commit suicide at Guantanamo, that we now know that 2 prisoners
at the US base Bagram were beaten to death during interrogation.
To accuse the Iraqis of breaking the Geneva Convention by putting
American POWs on television in which you hear them being asked
what state they’re from in the states, it seems a very hypocritical
thing to do. But one would have to say, technically, putting
a prisoner of war on television and asking them questions on
television is against the Geneva Convention. It is quite specifically
so. And thus, clearly Iraq broke that convention when it put
those men on television- I watched them on Iraqi TV here. But,
as I’ve said, it’s a pretty hypocritical thing when you realize,
this equates to the way America treats prisoners from Afghanistan-
Mr. Bush is not the person to be teaching anyone about the Geneva
Convention.
Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! Correspondent: Robert Fisk, you
wrote in one of your most recent articles, actually, the title
of it was “Iraq Will Become a Quagmire for the Americans” and
I think many people within the US administration were surprised
to find the kinds of resistance they have in places like Nasiriya.
We have the two Apache helicopters that have apparently been
shot down and many US casualties so far. Do you think the Americans
were caught by surprise, particularly by the resistance in the
south where everyone was saying that the people are against
Saddam Hussein?
RF: Well, they shouldn’t have been caught by surprise; there
were plenty of us writing that this was going to be a disaster
and a catastrophe and that they were going to take casualties.
You know, one thing I think the Bush administration has shown
as a characteristic, is that it dreams up moral ideas and then
believes that they’re all true, and characterizes this policy
by assuming that everyone else will then play their roles. In
their attempt to dream up an excuse to invade Iraq, they’ve
started out, remember, by saying first of all that there are
weapons of mass destruction. We were then told that al Qaeda
had links to Iraq, which, there certainly isn’t an al Qaeda
link. Then we were told that there were links to September 11th,
which was rubbish. And in the end, the best the Bush administration
could do was to say, “Well, we’re going to liberate the people
of Iraq”. And because it provided this excuse, it obviously
then had to believe that these people wanted to be liberated
by the Americans. And, as the Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz
said a few hours ago, I was listening to him in person, the
Americans expected to be greeted with roses and music- and they
were greeted with bullets. I think you see what has happened
is that- and as he pointed out- the American administration
and the US press lectured everybody about how the country would
break apart where Shiites hated Sunnis and Sunnis hated Turkmen
and Turkmen hated Kurds, and so on. And yet, most of the soldiers
fighting in southern Iraq are actually Shiite. They’re
not Sunnis, they’re not Tikritis, they’re not from Saddam’s
home city. Saddam did not get knocked off his perch straight
away, and I think that, to a considerable degree, the American
administration allowed that little cabal of advisors around
Bush- I’m talking about Perle, Wolfowitz, and these other peoplepeople
who have never been to war, never served their country, never
put on a uniform- nor, indeed, has Mr. Bush ever served his
country- they persuaded themselves of this Hollywood scenario
of GIs driving through the streets of Iraqi cities being showered
with roses by a relieved populace who desperately want this
offer of democracy that Mr. Bush has put on offer-as reality.
And the truth of the matter is that Iraq has a very, very strong
political tradition of strong anti-colonial struggle. It doesn’t
matter whether that’s carried out under the guise of kings or
under the guise of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath party, or under
the guise of a total dictator. There are many people in
this country who would love to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I’m
sure, but they don’t want to live under American occupation.
The nearest I can describe it- and again, things can change-
maybe the pack of cards will all collapse tomorrow- but if I
can describe it, it would be a bit like the situation in 1941-
and I hate these World War II parallels because I think it’s
disgusting to constantly dig up the second world war- Hitler
is dead and he died in 1945 and we shouldn’t use it, but if
you want the same parallel, you’ll look at Operation: Barbarosa,
where the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 believing that the
Russians would collapse because Stalin was so hated and Communism
was so hated. And at the end of the day, the Russians preferred
to fight the Germans to free their country from Germany, from
Nazi rule, rather than to use the German invasion to turn against
Stalin. And at the end of the day, a population many of whom
had suffered greatly under Communism fought for their motherland
under the leadership of Marshal Stalin against the German invader.
A similar situation occurred in 1980 when Saddam himself invaded
Iran. There had just been, 12 months earlier, a revolution in
Iran and the Islamic Republic had come into being. It was believed
here in Baghdad that if an invasion force crossed the border
from Iraq- supported again in this case by the Americans- that
the Islamic Republic would fall to pieces; that it would collapse
under its own volition; that is couldn’t withstand a foreign
invasion. I actually crossed the border with the Iraqi forces
in 1980, I was reporting on both sides, and I remember reaching
the first Iranian city called Horam Shar and we came under tremendous
fire; mortar fire, sniper fire, and artillery fire, and I remember
suddenly thinking as I hid in this villa with a number of Iraqi
commandos, “My goodness, the Iranians are fighting for their
country”. And I think the same thing is happening now,
and, obviously, we know that with the firepower they have the
Americans can batter their way into these cities and they can
take over Baghdad, but the moral ethos behind this war is that
you Americans are supposed to be coming to liberate this place.
And, if you’re going to have to smash your way into city after
city using armor and helicopters and aircraft, then the whole
underpinning and purpose of this war just disappears, and, the
world- which has not been convinced thus far, who thinks this
is a wrong war and an unjust war- are going to say, “Then what
is this for? They don’t want to be liberated by us.” And that’s
when we’re going to come down to the old word: Oil. What’s quite
significant is in the next few hours the Oil Minister in Iraq
is supposed to be addressing the press, and that might turn
out to be one of the more interesting press conferences that
we’ve had, maybe even more interesting, perhaps, than the various
briefings from military officials about the course of the war.
Amy Goodman: We’re speaking to Robert Fisk in Baghdad, Iraq.
Robert, we also have word that the Turks have also crossed over
the border- thousands of Turkish soldiers- into northern Iraq.
RF: I wouldn’t be surprised, I really don’t know. You’ve got
to realize that, although electricity and communications continue
n Baghdad, I only know what I hear on the radio and television,
and, as in all wars, covering it is an immensely exhausting
experience. I simply haven’t been able to keep up with what’s
happening in the north. I rely on people like you, Amy, to tell
me. I have a pretty good idea of what’s happening in the rest
of Iraq, but not in the north.
AG: Well can you tell us what is happening and what it’s like
to report there? How are you getting around and do you agree
with the Iraqi General Hazim Al-Rawi that you quoted that Iraq
will become a quagmire for the Americans?
RF: Well, it’s not just Rawi, we’ve had Vice President Ramadan,
[and] the Minister of Defense just over 24 hours ago giving
the most detailed briefings. One of the interesting things is
whether or not you believe these various briefings are correct,
the detail is quite extraordinary, and certainly we’re being
given more information about what’s been going on at the front-
accurate or not- than most of the Western correspondents have
been getting in Qatar. I mean, you’ll see pictures of journalists
saying, “Well, I’m with the US Marines near a town I can’t name,
but we’re having some problems, here’s Nasiriya and here’s a
bridge”. If you go to the Iraqi briefing, they’ll tell you it’s
the third corp, 45th
Battalion, they’re actually giving the names of the officers
who are in charge of various units and what position they’re
in, and where the battles are taking place. There is actually
more detail being given out by the Iraqis than by the Americans
or the British, which is quite remarkable, it’s the first time
I’ve ever known this. Now, again, it may be plausible to think
that all this information is accurate- when the Iraqis first
said they had taken American prisoners, we said, “Oh, more propaganda”-
then up comes the film of the prisoners. Then they said they’d
shot down a helicopter, and the journalists here in the briefing
sort of looked at each other and said, “There’s another story”,
and suddenly we’re seeing film of a shot down helicopter- then
another film of a shot down helicopter. Then they said they
had attacked and destroyed armored personnel carriers belonging
to the US armed forces, and we all looked at each other and
said, “Here we go again, more propaganda”, and then we see film
on CNN of burning APCs. So, there’s a good deal of credibility
being given to the Iraqi version of events, although I’d have
to say that their total version of how many aircraft have been
shot down appears to be an exaggeration. So, we do have a moderately
good idea, in that sense, of what’s actually happening. There
are Iraqis moving around inside Iraq and arriving in Baghdad
and giving us accounts of events that appear to be the same
as accounts being given by various authorities. And no journalist
can leave Baghdad to go to the south to check this out, but
I do suspect that will happen in due course, I do think they
will get journalists to move around inside Iraq providing they
can produce a scenario that is favorable to Iraq. But frankly,
any scene that a journalist sees that is opposition to the United
States would be favorable to Iraq. But, it may well be that,
with the Americans only about 50 miles away from where I am,
if they’re going to try to enter Baghdad or if a siege of Baghdad
begins, of course the Iraqis have boasted for a long time that
this would be a kind of Stalingrad- here come the World War
II references again- we won’t have to go very far to see the
Americans fighting the Iraqis, we’ll see them with our own eyes.
The Americans won’t be arriving close to Baghdad; they already
are close. When we’ll be moving around- you asked me about reporting-
it’s not nearly as claustrophobic as you might imagine. I can
walk out from my hotel in the evening, and, if I can find a
restaurant open, I can get in a cab and go to dinner, no one
stops me. When I’m traveling around during the day, if I want
to go and carry out any interviews, if I want to do anything
journalistic, I have a driver and I have what is called a minder;
a person provided by the ministry to travel with me. This means
that nobody I speak to is able to speak freely. I’ve gone up
to people in the streets-shopkeepers- and talked to them, but
it’s quite clear that there’s a representative of the authority
with me, and I, in fact, don’t do any interviews like that any
more, I think it’s ridiculous. Many of my colleagues continue
to point microphones at these poor people and ask them questions
which they cannot possibly respond to freely. So I simply do
not do interview stories, I think it’s too intimidating to the
person one is talking to, it is unprofessional and it is unethical
to travel with anyone else on an interview of that kind. But,
you know, as I say, I can get into a car without a minder and
go to a grocery shop and pick up groceries, bottles of water,
biscuits, vegetables- I don’t need to travel around with a minder
in that case and nobody minds. In other words, it’s not as though
you’re under a great oppressive watch. Television reports now,
by and large, when reporters are making television interviews,
or when they’re being interviewed by the head offices, now require
a ministry minder to sit and listen. It doesn’t mean they are
being censored, but it means that they bite their lip occasionally.
I will not do any television interviews with minders present
so I don’t appear on television here. The odd thing is
that there is no control at all attempted over written journalism
or radio journalism. While I’m talking to you now, I’m sure
this phone is being listened to, but whether they have the ability
to listen to every phone call in Baghdad, but I doubt very much.
I can say anything I want, and I do. And when I write, I’m not
worried at all about being critical of the regime here and I
am. So, it’s really a television thing here that I think the
authorities are more fixated with and the actual presence of
the minder, who, in my case is a pleasant guy who does not have
a political upbringing particularly. It’s more of a concern,
which I suppose one could understand if you saw it through Iraqi
eyes or the eyes of the regime, that the reporter is not doing
some kind of dual purpose. Obviously, there is a tradition that
journalists sometimes, unfortunately, turned out to work for
governments as well as for newspapers or television, and I think
the concern of the Iraqis is that some vital piece of information
doesn’t get out to what is referred to by them as the enemy,
and, secondly, that reporters are what they say they are. But,
you know, this happened in Yugoslavia when I was covering the
Serbian war. I was in there from the beginning of the war and
most journalists were thrown out but I managed to hang on. And
at the beginning, one couldn’t travel anywhere in Serbia or
Yugoslavia at all without a government official. And, after
days and weeks went by, and you turned out to be who you said
you were, and you were not at all interested in working for
anyone but your editor and your newspaper, a form of trust build
up where they know that you disapprove of their regime, but
they vaguely know you’re going to tell the truth, even if it’s
critical towards Britain or America or whoever. And they leave
you alone, by and large. I have been to Iraq many times and
I know a lot of people here, both in authority and civilians.
I think people generally realize that The Independent really
is an independent newspaper. So, there’s no great attempt to
influence me or force me to praise the regime, for example,
which is kind of a Hollywood version of what happens in these
places. I’ve written very critically, with condemnation of Saddam
and the regime and of all the human rights abuses here and the
use of gas in Halabja and so on. And I think there’s a sort
of understanding that as long as you’re a real journalist you
will have to say these things, and indeed one has to, one should,
but that doesn’t mean that we are laboring under the cruel heelto
use Churchill’s phraseof some kind of Gestapo. Again, this is
not a free country, this is a dictatorship, this is a regime
that does not believe in the free speech that you and I believe
in. One has to do ones best to get the story out.
AG: Do you think Saddam Hussein is in control?
RF: Oh yes, absolutely. There have been a few incidents, I mean
there was a little bit of shooting last night and there were
the rumors that people had come from Saddam City and there were
clashes with security forces or security agents, and rumors
of a railway line being blown up, which was denied by the authorities,
but there is no doubt Saddam is in control. It’s very funny
sitting here, in a strange way, I suppose, if you could listen
to some of the things that were said about the United States
here, you’d laugh in America, but I’ve been listening to this
uproariously funny argument about whether Saddam’s speech was
recorded before the war and whether they have look-alikes. So,
that in fact, the speech that Saddam made 24 hours ago, less
than 24 hours ago, a speech that was very important if you read
the text carefully and understand what he was trying to do,
it has been totally warped in the United States by a concentration
not on what he was saying, but whether it was actually him that
was saying it. The American correspondent was saying to me yesterday
morning, “This is ridiculous, we simply can’t report the story,
because every time we have to deal with something Saddam says,
the Pentagon claims it’s not him or it’s his double or it was
recorded 2 weeks ago”. So, the story ceases to be about what
the man says, the story starts to be this totally mythical,
fictional idea that it really isn’t Saddam or it’s his double,
etcetera. I watched this recording on television, all his television
broadcasts are recordings because he’s not so stupid as to do
a live broadcast and get bombed by the Americans while he’s
doing it. The one thing you learn if you’re a target is not
to do live television broadcasts, or radio for that matter,
or, indeed telephone. But if you listen and read the text of
what Saddam said, it has clearly been recorded in the previous
few hours, and I can tell you, having once actually met the
man, it absolutely was Saddam Hussein. But that’s the strange
thing, you see, that in the US, the Pentagon only has to say
it’s not Saddam, that it’s a fake, it was recorded years ago,
or that it’s a double, and the Hollywood side of the story,
which is quite rubbish, it’s not true- it is him, then takes
over from the real story, which is ‘What the hell is this guy
actually saying?’.
AG: What is he saying?
RF: There were several themes. The first one; 14 times he told
the Iraqis, “Be patient”. Oddly enough, that’s what Joseph Stalin
told the Russian people in 1941 and 1942; be patient. He made
a point of specifically naming the army officers in charge of
Um Qasr, Basra, and Nasiriya and the various other cities in
which are holding out against the Americans. It was important
that he kept saying, ‘the army, the army, the Ba’ath party militia’.
He was constantly reiterating that these things were happening;
they were opposing the Americans and the Americans were taking
casualties. In some ways, his speech was not unlike that of
George W. Bush, he talked about fighting evil, of fighting the
devil. And, although there’s no connection, that’s something
that bin Laden used to say a lot. The idea of good versus evil
has become part of kind of a patoire for every warring leader
whether it be Bush or Saddam or anyone else. But there was also
this constant reference to the anti-colonial history of Iraq,
the need to remember this was a battle against an invader; that
these people were invading from another country. This was not
Iraq invading the US- this was the US invading Iraq. It was
not a speech that was delivered with a great deal of passion,
and Saddam is capable of emotion. He read from a text, it wasn’t
Churchillian- here we go again, World War II grasping at me
like a ghost. But it was an interesting text because of its
constant repetition; wait, we will win eventually. And it was
quite clear what came over from it; Saddam believes Iraq’s salvation-
at least the salvation of the regime, shall we say- is just
keeping on fighting and fighting and fighting until the moral
foundations and underpinnings which America has attached to
this invasion have collapsed. In other words, if you can keep
holding out week after week, if you can suck the Americans into
the quagmire of Baghdad and make them fight, and use artillery
against them in civilian areas, that will undermine the whole
moral purpose they’ve strapped onto this war. Frankly, having
listened to the various meretricious reasons put forward for
this war, I think he’s understood one of the main reasons why
it’s taking place and thus has decided he’s going to go on fighting.
And, of course, once you apply unconditional surrender- World
War II- isn’t that what Roosevelt did at Casablanca, there is
no way out. It was an interesting moment last night when Tariq
Aziz was asked by a journalist, “Can you see a way out?” Is
it possible to have another peace?” Tariq Aziz looked at the
journalist as if he’d seen a ghost and he said, “What are you
talking about? There is a war”. I asked Tariq Aziz, I said,
“You’ve given us a very dramatic description of the last 7 days
of the war, can you give us a dramatic description of the next
7 days?” ”Just stay on here in Baghdad and you’ll find out”,
he said.
JS: Robert Fisk, what are you seeing in terms of the preparations
for the defense of Baghdad? The people that we’ve been interviewing
inside of Iraq- both ordinary Iraqis as well as journalists
and others, are saying that there aren’t really visible signs
that there are any overt preparations underway. What’s your
sense?
RF: Well, it doesn’t look like Stalingrad to me, but I guess
in Stalingrad there probably weren’t a lot of preparations.
I’ve been more than 20 miles outside of Baghdad, and you can
certainly see troops building big artillery vetments around
the city. I mean, positions for heavy artillery and mortars,
army vehicles hidden under overpasses, the big barracks of long
ago-as in Serbia before the NATO bombardment have long been
abandoned. Most of these cruise missiles that we hear exploding
at night are bursting into government buildings, ministries,
offices and barracks that have long ago been abandoned. There’s
nobody inside them; they are empty. I’ve watched ministries
take all their computers out, trays- even the pictures from
the walls. That is the degree to which these buildings are empty;
they are shells. Inside the city, there have been a lot of trenches
dug beside roads, sandbag positions set up. In some cases, holes
dug with sandbags around them to make positions on road intersections
to make positions for snipers and machine gunners. This is pretty
primitive stuff. It might be WW2 in fabrication, but it doesn’t
look like the kind of defenses that are going to stop a modern,
mechanized army like that of the United States or Britain- I
think the US is a little more modern than we are. I don’t think
it needs to be, because America’s power is in its firepower,
its mechanized state, its sophistication of its technology.
Iraqi military power is insane; these people are invading us
and we continue to resist them- active resistance is a principle
element of Iraq’s military defense. It’s in the act of resistance,
not whether you can stop this tank or that tank. And, the fact
of the matter is, and it’s become obvious in the Middle East
over the last few years; the West doesn’t want to take casualties.
They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die, but some people
out here realize a new form of warfare has set in where, the
United States, if they want to invade a country, they will bombard
it. They will use other people’s soldiers to do it. Look at
the way the Israelis used Lebanese mercenaries of the South
Lebanon army in Lebanon. Look at the way the Americans
used the KLA in Kosovo or the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
But here in Iraq there isn’t anyone they can use; the Iraqi
opposition appears to be hopeless. The Iraqis have not risen
up against their oppressors as they did in 1991 when they were
betrayed by the Americans and the British after being urged
to fight Saddam- they’re staying at home. They’re letting the
Americans do the liberating. If the Americans want to liberate
them, fine, let the Americans do it- but the Americans aren’t
doing very well at the moment. You see, we’ve already
got a situation down in Basra where the British army have admitted
firing artillery into the city of Basra, and then winging on
afterward talking about ‘We’re being fired at by soldiers hiding
among civilians’. Well, I’m sorry; all soldiers defending cities
are among civilians. But now the British are firing artillery
shells into the heavily populated city of Basra. When the British
were fired upon with mortars or with snipers from the cragg
on the state or the bogside in Delhi and in Northern Ireland,
they did not use artillery, but here, apparently, it is ok to
use artillery on a crowded city. What on Earth is the British
army doing in Iraq firing artillery into a city after invading
the country? Is this really about weapons of mass destruction?
Is this about al Qaeda? It’s interesting that in the last few
days, not a single reporter has mentioned September 11th.
This is supposed to be about September 11th.
This is supposed to be about the war on terror, but nobody calls
it that anymore because deep down, nobody believes it is. So,
what is it about? It’s interesting that there are very few stories
being written about oil. We’re told about the oil fields being
mined and booby-trapped, some oil wells set on fire- but oil
is really not quite the point. Strange enough, in Baghdad, you
don’t forget it, because in an attempt to mislead the guidance
system of heat seeking missiles and cruise missiles, Iraqis
are setting fire to large berms of oil around the city. All
day, all you see is this sinister black canopy of oil smoke
over Baghdad. It blocks out the sun, it makes the wind rise
and it gets quite cold; here, you can’t forget the word oil.
But I don’t hear it too much in news reports.
AG: We’re talking to Robert Fisk in Baghdad, Iraq. I wanted
to get you comment on Richard Perle’s piece in The Guardian
where he said “Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to
end. He will go quickly, but not alone. In a parting irony,
he will take the UN down with him”.
RF: Well, poor old UN. Very soon, the Americans are going to
need the United Nations as desperately as they wanted to get
rid of them. Because if this turns into the tragedy that it
is turning into at the moment, if the Americans end up, by besieging
Baghdad day after day after day, they’ll be looking for a way
out, and the only way out is going to be the United Nations
at which point, believe me, the French and the Russians are
going to make sure that George Bush passes through some element
of humiliation to do that. But that’s some way away. Remember
what I said early on to you. The Americans can do it- they have
the firepower. They may need more than 250,000 troops, but if
they’re willing to sacrifice lives of their own men, as well
as lives of the Iraqis, they can take Baghdad; they can come
in. But, you know, I look down from my balcony here next to
the Tigris River- does that mean we’re going to have an American
tank on every intersection in Baghdad? What are they there for-
to occupy? To repress? To run an occupation force against the
wishes of Iraqis? Or are they liberators? It’s very interesting
how the reporting has swung from one side to another. Are these
liberating forces or occupying forces? Every time I hear a journalist
say ‘liberation’, I know he means ‘occupation’. We come back
to the same point again which Mr. Perle will not acknowledge;
because this war does not have a UN sanction behind itI mean
not in the sense of sanctions but that it doesn’t have permission
behind it, it is a war without international legitimacy, and
the longer it goes on, the more it hurts Bush and the less it
hurts Saddam. And we’re now into one week, and there isn’t even
a single American soldier who has even approached the city of
Baghdad yet. And the strange thing, looking at it from here
in Baghdad, is the ad hoc way in which this war appears to be
carried out. We heard about the air campaign. There is no air
campaign; there was not a single Iraqi airplane in the sky.
This isn’t Luftwaffe faces the Battle of Britain or the Royal
Air Force or the USAF- this is aerial bombardment. The fighting
is going on on the ground. There wasn’t meant to be any fighting,
but there is. It’s the way in which during the first night there
was some distant rumbling, and we were told that the war had
begun, but it wasn’t really the bombing of Baghdad, but a one
off attempt to kill Saddam. I guess someone walked into the
White House and said, “Mr. President, we’re not planning to
start until tomorrow, but we’ve got this opportunity to kill
Saddam”. “OK, let’s have a go, let’s try it, let’s try it”.
Then we have this big blitz the following night, and a much
bigger one the next night, where I was literally standing in
the middle of Baghdad literally watching buildings blow up all
over Baghdad around me- a whole presidential palace went into
flames right in front of me, it was extraordinary. An anarchical
sight of red and gold colors and tremendous explosions and leaves
dropping off the trees like autumn in the spring. And then the
next night was quite quiet, and then last night, for example,
most of the attacks by the cruise missiles were in the suburbs,
and it was possible- until you rang, of course, to sleep. It’s
as if someone down there in Qatar or in CentCom in Tampa, Florida,
or somewhere is saying, “Ok, let’s send another 20 tonight,
let’s send 300 tonight, where should we send them, let’s send
them here”. It’s as if the whole idea of the war was not planned
militarily, it was planned politically, it was planned ideologically,
as if there’s an ideological plan behind the war. It started
with al Qaeda, it moved on to weapons of mass destruction, then
we’re going to liberate the people- and it’s all going wrong.
Whatever kind of ideological plan there was has fallen to bits.
Now, of course, maybe Saddam falls in the next few days, maybe
Baghdad collapses. I actually believed and wrote in the paper
a few days ago that it’s possible that one day we’ll all get
up and all the militias and the Iraqi soldiers will be gone
and we’ll see American soldiers walking through the streets.
But I don’t believe that now.
AG: Last question- have you been to the hospitals of Baghdad?
RF: Yes; quite a few of them. The main visit I made was to one
of the main government hospitals on Saturday morning after a
pretty long night of explosions around the city in which of
course quite a lot of these cruise missiles exploded right on
their targets. Others missed them and crashed into civilian
areas. I went to one hospital where-the doctors here are not
Ba’ath party members- the chief doctor I spoke to was trained
in Edinborough where he got his FRCF. He went very coldly down
his list of patients and he had 101, whom he estimated 16 were
soldiers 85 were civilians, and of the 85 civilians, 20 were
women, 6 were children. One child and one man had died in the
operating theater during surgery. Most of the children were
pretty badly hurt, one little girl had shrapnel from an American
bomb in her spine and her left leg was paralyzed. Her mother
was, rather pathetically, trying to straighten out her right
leg against it as if both the legs, if pointed in the same direction,
she’d somehow regain movement in the left side of her body,
which, of course, she did not. Other children were on drip feeds
and had very serious leg injuries. One little girl had shrapnel
in her abdomen, which had not yet been removed. They were clearly
in pain, there was a lot of tears and crying from the children,
less so from the young women who had been hit- one woman was
actually 17, they weren’t all young. In one case a woman and
her daughter were there. The woman said to me that she had gone
to see a relative and she had gotten out of a taxi, her daughter,
whom I also spoke to, was standing in front of her and there
was a tremendous explosion, noise, and white light, as the woman
said. The girl was hit in the legs and the woman was hit
in the chest and legs by shrapnel. They were lying next to each
other in hospital beds. This is not the worst kind of injuries
I have ever seen, and I’ve seen just about every injury in the
world including people who’ve virtually got no heads left and
are still alive, and I didn’t see that. But, if you’re going
to bomb a country, you will wound and kill civilians; that is
in the nature of warfare. We bomb, they suffer, and nothing
I saw in that hospital surprised me.
AG: Well, Robert Fisk, we’re going to let you go to sleep. General
Colin Powell said that foreign journalists should leave as the
campaign of so-called ‘shock and awe’ is initiated- and it has
started. Why have you chosen to remain in Baghdad?
RF: Because I don’t work for Colin Powell, I work for a British
newspaper called The Independent; if you read it, you’ll find
that we are. It’s not the job of a journalist to snap to the
attention of generals. I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago
in my newspaper saying that before the war began in Yugoslavia,
the British Foreign Office urged journalists to leave and then
said the British intelligence had uncovered a secret plot to
take all the foreign reporters hostage in Belgrade. I decided
this was a lie and stayedand it was a lie. In Afghanistan, just
before the fall of Khandahar, as I was entering Afghanistan,
the British Foreign Office urged all journalists to stay out
of Taliban areas and then said the British intelligence had
uncovered a plot to take all the foreign reporters hostage.
Aware of Yugoslavia, I pressed on to Khandahar and it proved
to be a lie. Just before the bombardment here, the British Foreign
Office said that all journalists should leave because British
intelligence had uncovered a plot by Saddam to take all journalists
hostages, at which moment I knew I’d be safe to stay because
it was, of course, the usual lie. What is sad is how many journalists
did leave. There were a very large number of reporters who left
here voluntarily before the war believing this meretricious
nonsense. I should say that the Iraqis have thrown quite a large
number of journalists out as well. But I don’t think it’s the
job of a journalist to run away when war comes just because
it happens to be his own side doing the bombing. I’ve been bombed
by the British and Americans so many times that it’s not ‘shock
and awe’ anymore, it’s ‘shock and bore’, frankly.
AG: Thank you, Robert. Good night, be safe.
RF: Good night, Amy, I’m going to bed.
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