Semi-Daily Journal

"I've been reading the Iraq War reports of Robert Fisk. There's a certain loonyness there"

Oh well, better late than never. Many of us have long ago realized that Fisk is an anti-West loony. How many people do you know who think that they deserved to be mugged? Shucks, there is a very good reason why the term "fisking" will likely be officially included in future dictionaries. The man has definitely earned this dubious honor.

PS: I have just taught my word processing program to recognize “fisking.” Let us hope that more folks will do likewise.

I don't particularly like the phrase Fisking, because it sounds too much like a kinky sexual... well, never mind.

I never thought it would happen - David T says something I agree with! Yep, Fisk is a nutter - and this time he's truly gone off th deep end.

Another way to look at the Fisk reporting is that he is in Baghdad. He sees only what the Iraqis want him to see. Therefore, he can write about the Iraqi POV of this war.

There is also a weird reality about this war. The US controls the countryside, but not the cities. The US strategy has been to bypass the cities and control the transportation routes between them and then to isolate Baghdad.

Will the cities surrender once Saddam has gone? We do not know the answer to that question yet. It seems that the "coaltion has walled off the Iraqi forces in their enclaves so they can control the roads. The enclaves fight on keeping the coalition from entering these cities. Is this really a war of liberation? Is Fisk closer to the truth? Or is the truth somewhere in between. Will Iraq turn into another Palestine? That would be the worst possible scenario for the US. Bush believes that the Iraqis without Saddam will readily submit to US rule. Will it be that easy?

I got a chance to hear Fisk speak during one of his visits to the US. He knows a lot about the Middle East. He was one of the first western journalists to enter the refugee camps in Lebanon and observe the massacre of Palestinians. Fisk was also in Lebanon when the marines were bombed. He knows what can happen. He has seen it first hand. As generals fight the last war, maybe reporters report the last war? I had thought that going into Iraq and getting Saddam out would be easier than it has been. However, I also thought going in that Iraq would never be totally passified, that the US would be a sitting duck target once we tried to win the peace. It is foolish to underestimate the power of an enemy to defeat an unpopular foreign occupation.

The British won almost every battle but lost the war in the 1770s. The US won almost all the battles in Nam but still lost the war. The Soviets won most of the battles in Afghanistan, but still left licking their wounds. The Israelis have no military opposition in the West Bank and Gaza, but still have no peace. The Chechens hold out against the Russians. Is Northern Ireland settled? I could go on and on. The US has been lucky in not having to fight partisans for long periods of our history. I view FIsk as not a tally of what has or will go wrong, but it is certainly a warning about what can go wrong.

fisk has been described as "gone native" to me, and that makes some sense, seeing this. that said, i don't see either side of this conflict as motivated to give objective facts out at let the public draw their own conclusions. i tend to think the truth of the situation is most likely somewhere between the fisk report and a white house press conference.

bakho makes an interesting point, our superior force and tech have failed us before, and failed others. there is a quality of home court advantage that is hard to account for in war, but we never seem to know how much it counted or didn't until after the fact. it's nobody's intension to give away how it's going at the time, or perhaps it's simply impossible to know.

my curiousity about fisk is whether his detractors (i see myself as neither detractor or supporter) believe that he is telling lies, and why he would be motivated to, or mentally ill, as brad suggests, though what mental illness would it be? or perhaps overconsumed with the propoganda of one side? whatever it is, i suspect the same can be said of many of the enthusiatically pro-war crowd.

Why no link here? I'd like to judge all loonyness from the source, if you please.

Just cottoning on to the fact that Mr. Fisk doesn't live on the same planet as the rest of us? The man is quite simply obssessed with his vision of America as the root of all the world's evils, and Israel as it's agent of oppression in the middle east. I'd put Robert Fisk in the same category as John Pilger and George Galloway - there's a certain breed of Englishman that combines an uncritical Arabophilia with a visceral hatred of Israel and America.

Arjay, it's only an ad hominem attack when used as a step in a logical deduction. Saying as a factual matter that Robert Fisk is wierd, creepy, and outright loony is simply stating the truth, however unpleasant you might find it. What is more, you're hardly above ad hominem yourself - "go easy on the Freedom Fries?" You do realize that Brad DeLong is no raving right-wing Bush-worshipper, don't you?

There are some things that reasonable and decent people can be expected to agree on, even when their political views are on different sides of the aisle. That suicide bombings, and terrorism in general, are loathsome ways of seeking one's ends, is one such matter, and that Robert Fisk seems to endorse such behavior when directed against the "Zionist Entity" is another.

I agree that this post was rather one-sided. Robert Fisk is not insane.

And Abiola, if you can say this post is ok because BDL is 'no raving right-wing Bush-worshipper', I will just note that in the most right-wing British magazine, its media pundit Stephen Glover called Robert Fisk 'brilliant'. Which he is.

Hey, I'm against this war, and I think the coverage of it by the US media has been ridiculously jingoistic, highly selective and plain dishonest. But having reports that are selective and dishonest in the other direction is not the way to find out what's going on. The point is Fisk is now saying things which are demonstrably untrue.

Even though I'm sympathetic to some of his opinions, he's always been the sort of journalist who lets those opinions colour his reporting and whose 'facts' need checking (there are plenty of those on both right and left). Unlike, for instance, Peter Arnett who is simply a fine and scrupulous reporter with a very long record of accuracy and penetration.

bahko writes:

"...The US has been lucky in not having to fight partisans for long periods of our history....."

I take it you mean LATELY. We "fought" NATIVE "partisan(s)" of the North American continent from "day one" right up until the turn of the previous century.

This essentially genocidal, largely unacknowleged, "parallel" history goes hand in hand with other enduring AND disturbing aspects of the American story: Its occasionally irrational, hysterical and paranoid character as well as its penchant for euphemism and other forms of passive and not so passive self-delusion, to name just two...

Which brings me, in a roundabout way to today's subject:

"...weirdness...true loonyness and creepyness...[the] wearing [of]masks, and...those [creepy moments] when the mask seems to slip...."

Remember the "Peace Dividend"?

If you're one of the few people in the world who STILL wonders whatever happened to THAT, you weren't paying attention ten years ago or so, when some key decisions were quietly taken at the highest political levels--and, perhaps more importantly, somewhere within ITS inner sanctum: the "National Secutity Establishment"--by a hand-full of essentially unaccountable, supposedly sober-minded, so-called public servants like, for instance, the Honorable Mr. R. James Woolsey...

The Pentagon's (CIA) Man in Iraq
by David Corn
04/04/2003 @ 2:50pm

"Toward the start of the second Persian Gulf War, I found myself in a room with R. James Woolsey, CIA chief during the first two years of the Clinton administration. A television was turned on, and we both watched a news report on the latest development in the North Korea nuclear drama. How much longer, I asked him, could this administration wait before dealing with North Korea and its efforts to develop nuclear-weapons material? A little while, but not too long, he said. Until after the Iraq war? Yes, Woolsey said, we can take care of things then. (That was when the prevailing assumption was the war in Iraq would take about as long as a Donald Rumsfeld press conference.) And, I wondered, is this a challenge that can be taken care of with, say, a well-planned and contained bombing raid, one that strikes the nuclear facilities in question? "Oh, no, " he said. "This is going to be war." War, full-out war, with a nation that might already have a few nuclear weapons and that does have 600,000 North Korean soldiers stationed 25 miles from Seoul, with 37,000 US troops in between? "Yes, war." He didn't flinch, didn't bat an eye.

Woolsey is something of a prophet of war. And the Pentagon wants him to be part of its team running postwar Iraq.

On April 2, Woolsey made headlines by telling students at UCLA that the Iraq war was part of "World War IV." Speaking at a teach-in sponsored by campus Republicans and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, a pro-war-in-Iraq group founded by William Bennett, Woolsey remarked, "This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us....

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=546

The question under debate here is not really "is Fisk loony?" but is "is Fisk worth reading"?

To that, my answer is definitely yes. Like any other source, you have to read him critically, but there is more chance of finding out something new in a Robert Fisk article than in 100 hours of CNN or other network reporting.

Sure, you have to be careful to distinguish what Fisk reports from his interpretation of it, but at least he sees something a little different. If you are really worried about propaganda, Fisk is the last place to start. Instead, start with those sources of information that refuse to use the word "kill" when talking about the deaths of Iraqi soldiers ("degraded"? "softened up"? Give me a break) and spend more hours on Jessica whats-her-name than they do seconds on Iraqi dead.

I don't recognise Fisk as making things up -- sure he gets things wrong sometimes, and as Tom says you have to read him critically, but he is a very good source of information and sometimes his reporting gives you insights you just don't get elsewhere.

I wonder whether the problem is not just Fisk, but British journalism, and Fisk gets singled out because he is known to Americans. British journalism has always been much more opinionated than US journalism -- any British newspaper shows you that.

>>I don't recognise Fisk as making things up<<

Not even when he claims that last weekend's U.S. raid-march through the Baghdad suburbs never happened?

Robert Fisk: The Allied grip tightens on Baghdad: On the streets, grim evidence of a bloody battle

07 April 2003

...But what really happened here? The hole in the tank's armour was clearly caused by a small missile. But the tank's right track had been virtually torn off by a massive explosion below the vehicle that had gouged a 5ft crater in the road. At first I thought the tank's ammunition had exploded. But that would have torn the Abrams apart. So here's a battlefield guess. During the "probing mission" into the Baghdad suburbs, a mission that didn't actually reach the suburbs before it got ambushed by the Iraqis, "Cojone" was hit and its crew was rescued by another vehicle.

Unwilling to leave their crippled but perhaps repairable tank to the Iraqis, the Americans ordered a US air strike to destroy it. This would account for the crater and the massive hunks of asphalt thrown up around the vehicle. Maybe the crew were not saved. Maybe they were captured, though surely the Iraqis would have told us. But there were two tactical lessons to be learnt from all this. First, the American mission, whatever its original intention, was a failure. Their tank column did not "break into" the city as the Anglo-American headquarters originally stated. Iraqi resistance turned it back. The US response ? air assaults on individual Iraqi vehicles ? was presumably committed by Apache helicopters, because each smouldering wreck had been hit by a small rocket at close range...

So in military terms ? and despite all the waffle from the Americans about the "success" of the aborted US incursion ? the Iraqis have so far held their ground in the Battle of Baghdad.

Hmm. I always thought that the word "fisking" had more to do with Fiskers scissors, and with the practice of cutting what someone wrote apart, line-by-line and responding to it in an out-of-context sort of way. It would make sense as a verbed noun that way, at least... ;-)

Who knows Brad?

He's talking about one incursion which he has seen with his own eyes, not the entire US assault. The BBC said exactly the same thing about the tank apparently being blown up by US air attacks, presumably (they put it) to take it out of action.

The US has often claimed things in this war that have subsequently proven false, such as being in the 'heart' of Baghdad when they were only in the suburbs, or their denial of the friendly-fire action that killed many US special forces yesterday. I'm not picking on the Americans, as the British if anything have been less accurate, e.g. the non-event of the uprising in Basra, the 100% over estimate of the number of prisoners, the dialogue with Iraqi leaders that never happened, etc.

Of course Fisk may be mistaken about the scale of the US incursions, and extrapolating too much from his limited viewpoint in Baghdad. But differences in view over what is happening on the ground, when he is on the ground, and we aren't, I don't think we can take as a sign of his insanity.

I don't have any particular brief for Fisk, but after reading his comparison of Saddam to Stalin I then saw about half a dozen more just like it. I don't know where it came from originally (although since Saddam has a library of Stalin books it might just be common knowledge), but that particular comparison seems pretty reasonable.

This piece led me to review Robert Fisk's stuff. He's not crazy, but he definitely doesn't like the U.S....G.W. Bush, in particular.

One hilarious thing he says is that he likes the detail provided by the Iraqi Information Ministry, telling exactly who the divisions are in the various battles, even down to the Iraqi officers serving.

It's pretty hilarious, given the fact that the Iraqi Information Ministry gives out "facts" that are completely contradicted by every reliable account (e.g., embedded reporters).

While there is essentially simultaneous footage of U.S. troops walking through the terminal at the airport formerly known as Saddam's Place, the Iraqi Information Ministry is telling...in excrutiating detail...how Saddam's troops have scored another victory, pushing the "criminals" back.

This piece led me to review Robert Fisk's stuff. He's not crazy, but he definitely doesn't like the U.S....G.W. Bush, in particular.

One hilarious thing he says is that he likes the detail provided by the Iraqi Information Ministry, telling exactly who the divisions are in the various battles, even down to the Iraqi officers serving.

It's pretty hilarious, given the fact that the Iraqi Information Ministry gives out "facts" that are completely contradicted by every reliable account (e.g., embedded reporters).

While there is essentially simultaneous footage of U.S. troops walking through the terminal at the airport formerly known as Saddam's Place, the Iraqi Information Ministry is telling...in excrutiating detail...how Saddam's troops have scored another victory, pushing the "criminals" back.

I find it difficult to see how the Fisk perspective is not important even as it may sometimes be flawed. He is there. He is an experienced reporter with significant knowlege about the region and the people. Yes, he recognizes the propaganda of "coalition forces", "coalition of the willing", "war of liberation", etc. to disguise what is an American initiated and dominated invasion of a another country even as he also recognizes the blatant lies of the Iraqi functionaries.

What get from Fisk that I don't find anywhere else is some general concept of what damage is being done to the Iraqi people by our efforts. How much carnage have we percipitated?

There has never been any doubt about the success of the US initiated and led invasion of Iraq. A few facts about the “formidable enemy” are in order. Iraq has a population of some 24 million people. Of these, 41% are under the age of 15. All told it has 3.5 million people who make up its “military manpower”, defined as males age 15-49 by the 2002 CIA Fact Book from which these statistics came. According to the same source, Iraq spends $1.3 billion on its military and has a GDP of roughly $60 billion.

Contrast these numbers with comparable U.S. statistics. Our military expenditures were about $277 billion for the comparable period, roughly 200 times those of Iraq and indeed, almost five times the GDP of Iraq. We have 74 million people classified as “military manpower”, roughly 20 times the Iraqi number not counting the fact that many women serve in our military and the Iraq numbers include Kurds, many of whom are armed but only to defend themselves from the Iraqi government.

Iraq has no Navy. It has almost no air force and I do not recall mention of a single Iraqi air attack. It apparently has no missiles with any accuracy or firepower. It has been under sanctions for over a decade, subject to weapons inspectors and inhibited by US and UK air power that periodically bombed some suspicious target. Its air defenses might have been helpful in WW II, but highflying planes with high tech missiles can attack it virtually undisturbed. Once these precision guided missiles have wiped out the WW II type radar, Iraq has no defenses against air bombardment. On the ground, Iraqi tanks are old and decrepit and along with what artillery they have are quickly nullified by precision air strikes. The US bombs anywhere and anytime at will.

To dignify the current hostilities as a “war” is ludicrous. Iraqi deaths will be in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands as the mightiest military apparatus the world has ever known slaughters Iraqi soldiers and the inevitable “collateral damage” kills hundreds if not thousands of bystanders. Casualties of the so-called “coalition” will probably be in the low hundreds.

All this for a country that has never attacked us (there were no Iraqis involved in 9/11), could not conceivably pose a current threat, has no nuclear capability and probably has little in the way of chemical and biological weapons that would be of any real use. (Finding an atropine syringe like the one that was standard issue when I was a raw recruit in 1958 is hardly a smoking gun.)

Even given the intellectual cover of the neo-con long term strategy, what we are actually doing seems reminiscent of an earlier day we don’t like to remember: We destroy the village to save it.

Any way you chose to look at this picture, there will be a lot of blood on American hands. Let us hope that we are more effective at saving this village than we have been so far in Afghanistan so some one, some day may conclude that the blood was worth it.

Fisk is reminding us of the blood. I'm glad he does, because outside the Guardian, Independent and Mirror, hardly anyone else is. Carping about the "British Press" seems a little misplaced, since this is about the only source that reminds us of the immediate consequences of our national policy.

Well, let's see...Bringing up R. James Woolsey's "vision" for spreading American Values at gunpoint wasn't sufficient to bring the squid to the surface.

Maybe this will work....

Remember JFK?

A guy who impressed people all over the world with his idealism and his professed committment to economic development and social justice at home and abroad. (He invented the Peace Corps, just for instance. His portrait could be found hanging in "places of honor" in hovels, shanties and shacks on several continents--even years after his death--They say.)

If he even HAD a budget for "public dipolmacy", I'm sure it paled in comparison to whatever they were giving Charolette Beers. Not much of a head for big business, though. A pity. Anyway, he's dead.

Remember Jimmy Carter?

The first AND last guy who actually improved the "facts on the ground" in and around Israel by facilitating "The Camp David Accord" between Israel and Egypt? He incurred the enmity of authoritarians and tyrants around the world too--by resolving to regard "human rights" as an essential element of U.S. foreign policy.

"Real politickers", "corporate titans" and image mongers here at home were NOT impressed. HE was "retired" after one term.

Clinton?

Think "globalization". Think WTO. Think job security. Think Social Security. Think about your (probably "forced", early) retirement...

Now, here's my question for the perfessor (-:

Would you please compare and contrast YOUR opinion of Woolsey's "dream" http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=546 , with YOUR opinion of Fisk's "journalism"?

And please Brad, color both of them according to their relative homeland security threat level too--while you're at it...

It is interesting to notice how a critical or dissenting journalist raises eyebrows among Americans, even liberal Americans like Brad.

Thanks Mr. Fisk, keep up reporting...

Brad,

>>I don't recognise Fisk as making things upNot even when he claims that last weekend's U.S. >raid-march through the Baghdad suburbs never
>happened?

I'm not sure you're being fair in your reading. Fisk (in your quote) describes what he sees, and then gives what he himself describes as a "battlefield guess" as to what might have caused what he sees - his guess being that this particular probing attack was turned back. He also (in the same article) points out reasons why the Iraqi's heroic version of events cannot be true.

He said he was making a guess: you think his guess was wrong. How is that him "making things up"?

Sean

"It is interesting to notice how a critical or dissenting journalist raises eyebrows among Americans, even liberal Americans like Brad.

Thanks Mr. Fisk, keep up reporting..."

Dissent by itself is not a virtue. One also has to be rational and sane. We should, for instance, laugh at somebody who dissents from the theory of gravity. So far, Robert Fisk has been making a fool of himself. He definitely has not been writing Pulitzer award winning articles.

Fisk's column today is a brilliant piece of even handed journalism -- which is why most Americans don't like it or even understand it.

He noted yesterday that the British government used to accuse him of aiding the enemy when he wrote about Saddam's torture and babarity (when Saddam was our friend). Now they do the same again.

Serendipitiously (or not ;-) Matthew, John Pilger, of the same newspaper (The Independent) , recently reminded anyone who cares to remember of another piece of inconvenient history--The Nuremberg Tribunal:

John Pilger: We see too much. We know too much. That's our best defence

06 April 2003

"We now glimpse the forbidden truths of the invasion of Iraq. A man cuddles the body of his infant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in a uniform. "I'm sorry,'' he says, "but the chick got in the way.''

Covering this in a shroud of respectability has not been easy for George Bush and Tony Blair. Millions now know too much; the crime is all too evident. Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, a Labour MP for 41 years, says the Prime Minister is a war criminal and should be sent to The Hague. He is serious, because the prima facie case against Blair and Bush is beyond doubt.

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected German arguments of the "necessity'' for pre-emptive attacks against its neighbours. "To initiate a war of aggression," said the tribunal's judgment, "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole...."

http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=394406

Don't look for THAT argument to get a lot of play on Fox or MSNBC any time soon.....

Speaking of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, TRUE history buffs will appreciate this:

9-26-02: News Abroad

George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq
By Albert Eisele
Mr. Eisele is the editor of The Hill.

George F. Kennan, the chief architect of the containment and deterrence policies that shaped America foreign policy during the Cold War, said Sunday that Congress, and not President Bush, must decide whether the United States should take military action against Iraq.

In a wide-ranging interview at a Georgetown senior citizens home where he spent the past month, the 98-year-old historian and former top U.S. diplomat repeatedly warned of the unforeseen consequences of waging war.

Speaking out even as the Bush administration unveiled a new national security strategy calling for preemptive strikes against hostile states and terrorist groups suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, Kennan said, “This decision should really rest with Congress.”

He added, “Congress is there for the exercise of that responsibility. I think our Constitution and our tradition are quite sufficient here. [Bush] should not do what he’s planning to do without a clear congressional mandate. This is against all American tradition.

“Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before,” he said. "In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”

Kennan is the author of the history-making 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs, which he signed as “X” and enunciated the policy of containment that helped define American foreign policy after World War II. In the interview, he also:

• Characterized the new national security document issued by the Bush administration last week as “a great mistake in principle”;

• Voicing the same view that Vice President Albert Gore would take a day later, he warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that “bears no relation to the first war against terrorism”;

• Declared that efforts by the White House and Republicans in Congress to link al Qaeda terrorists with Saddam Hussein “have been pathetically unsupportive and unreliable”;

• Said Bush “shouldn’t speak contemptuously” of the inspection teams that previously worked in Iraq, “because they succeeded in destroying and removing from Iraq very, very sizeable quantities of dangerous arms”;

• Called the failure of Democratic congressional leaders and the party’s would-be presidential candidates to question Bush’s war plans as “a shabby and shameful reaction”;

• Insisted that there is no evidence that Iraq has succeeded in developing nuclear weaponry, and even if they had, it would be targeted on Israel and not the United States;

• Said the Israelis almost certainly possess nuclear weapons, and would be “quite capable of mounting a devastating retaliatory strike” if Iraq ever uses weapons of mass destruction against Israel;

• Praised the diplomatic skills of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom he called a “man of strong loyalties in a difficult position [who] has been much more powerful in his statements than” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and

• Cautioned that the United States, even as the world’s sole superpower, cannot “confront all the painful and dangerous situations that exist in this world. … That’s beyond our capabilities...”

http://hnn.us/articles/997.html

...the OTHER kind (of 'history buffs'), doubtlessly, won't appreciate it one little bit...