Robert Fisk: Interview About Iraq
Fisk: Well, that's a State Department phrase. The Americans don't understand what's happening here. These were not demonstrations for democracy. This was an insurrection against the corruption of government here and the lack of freedom of speech in parliament, which is weighted down with pro-Syrian MPs. It has been misinterpreted in the West as part of this great domino effect of democracy, which is allegedly bursting out all over the place. But it's not. There isn't such an effect at all. This is how the legend, the narrative, is being written. By misreading what's happening in Lebanon, the Americans will make more mistakes here. They're using what is happening in Lebanon for their own purposes, and possibly for Israel's. And that's the real tragedy, because people here deserve better than that.
Opposition leaders are asking themselves whether the Americans really want a working democracy or whether Washington's support hinges on a neoconservative project which culminates in the United States ambassador visiting the president of Lebanon and saying, "Well, how about a peace treaty with Israel?" Is that what this is really about? The senior members of the opposition are very worried that America is much less interested in democracy than in shoring up another bulwark for Israel.
American foreign policy in the Middle East has never been so skewed towards Israel and against the Arabs as it is now. That's bad for the Arabs, it's actually bad for the Israelis, and it's very bad for the U.S. But the policy is being ruthlessly pursued by Bush and his friends.
Q: Israel invaded first in 1978, and again in 1982. It remained in the country until 2000. Hezbollah is given credit for forcing Israel out of Lebanon.
Fisk: The Israeli military officers believe that is basically accurate. Hezbollah believes it's accurate. I'm not going to disagree with both the Israelis and Hezbollah.
When Israel came here, the ferocity of the invasion in 1982 drove people who were not deeply religious into seeing Islam as the only way of leading their lives if they were going to seriously oppose Israel's military force. Hezbollah was the only real resistance movement against the Israelis. So Hezbollah in a sense won its spurs, to use an old cliché. Most Lebanese are not interested in disarming Hezbollah, despite its ties with Syria, which has been here for more than a quarter of a century. If Hezbollah is disarmed, which is part of the U.N. Resolution 1559, there will be no active force capable of resisting other interference in Lebanon's internal affairs. But the disarming of Hezbollah is something the Israelis want, and that, I suspect, is why the Americans are pushing it.
The Americans say Hezbollah is the most powerful terrorist movement in the world. It's certainly the most disciplined guerrilla movement in the world - much more disciplined, for example, than the insurgency in Iraq, although that, of course, is on a much bigger scale.
Needless to say, Hezbollah is watching the insurgency in Iraq and the American response with great interest. 'When they were fighting the Israelis, they had a longer-term objective, which was to play a role in Lebanese politics later: "We freed the country, we have a right." So now they realize that the insurgents in the Sunni areas of Iraq also have a longer-term aim than just getting rid of the Americans. It is to be able to say afterwards: "We got rid of the Americans, so the Sunnis do have a right to power in Iraq." The Shias did not fight the Americans, and Hezbollah sees this. The Americans don't. They won't look at the day after tomorrow, only today and tonight. Short-term, short-term, short-term. That's why they're in this mess in Iraq in the first place.
Q: Why else is the U.S. in Iraq?
Fisk: That's the question I ask myself more and more. We didn't invade for weapons of mass destruction, because there weren't any. We didn't want to help the Shiites, because we had asked them to rise up in 1991 and sat back while they were all massacred. Clearly, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq if its chief export was cauliflower or carrots. So the oil dimension has to be there.
But I think there is something else, too. I was down that horrible Highway 18 in Iraq. I was interviewing some people after a Red Cross man had been murdered. I was standing by the roadside, and the road started to move. I thought, "My God, it's an earthquake." Around the corner and coming up the highway was an American infantry division. Thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers. Abrams tanks, Bradley armored vehicles, truck after truck with the infantry, all wearing shades, rifles pointing out the side like porcupines, transporters, mobile-tracked armored vehicles, anti-aircraft guns, heavy artillery. It took almost an hour to pass, and all the time the ground shook.
And I remember thinking that 2,000 years ago a little bit to the west of where I was standing we would have been feeling the vibration of centurions' feet, tromp, tromp, tromp. I began to wonder, then, when I saw this massive armored centipede, whether it didn't also represent the visceral need to project power, which is a characteristic of a superpower. We can go to Baghdad, so we will go to Baghdad. We can go to Tehran. We can go to Damascus. We will, because we can.
That is part of the way in which a neoconservative thinks. You know, it's very easy to sneer at the Cheneys and the Wolfowitzes and the Feiths and the Perles. But we should spend a lot more time examining what their motives are and what makes them tick, because this projection of power is much more important than we realize. Possibly, it's almost as important as oil.
You have to be on this side of the world to realize that the Americans have a steel line right across the region. They're in Britain, they're in Germany, they're in Italy, they're in Greece, they're in Turkey. They won't get to Syria yet, but they're in Iraq, they're in Saudi Arabia on a lesser scale, they're in Qatar on a big scale, they're in Bahrain, they're in Kuwait, Special Forces are operating in Yemen. A whole steel line runs from the Arctic right down below the equator. Lily pads are what Donald Rumsfeld calls them, these zones where the Americans live. But in fact they are not lily pads; they are armed fortresses.
It reminds me of the Crusader castles. They are quite lovely on the outside. But when you're inside, it's cold and damp and you can't see out; you just have to peer through these arrow slits. That's all the Crusaders saw of the land they were occupying. And that's now happening to the Americans in Iraq. They sit in this little Green Zone, which is where the Republican Palace was, where the American and British embassies are, and where all their American-appointed Iraqis are, surrounded by palisades of prestressed concrete. It's the nearest we've got to the Crusader castle. And they peer out through the machine gun openings, and they see a street outside. That is Baghdad. That is their contact with the land they occupy. And all these positions-Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, the huge American base outside Fallujah, the Green Zone inside Baghdad-are massive Crusader compounds.
Q: The U.S. is building permanent military bases in Iraq. Their intention is to stay for many years.
Fisk: I think so. The great equation, which causes so much bloodshed in Iraq, is this: The Americans must leave, and the Americans will leave, and the Americans can't leave. They can't leave for a whole series of reasons, which we know. Because if they leave behind them chaos, what did they achieve by invading Iraq?
Q: 'What are the historical parallels here?
Fisk: If you go back to the British invasion of Iraq in 1917, I have a document that was put up on the wall by General Stanley Maude when he arrived in Baghdad. "To the people of Baghdad: We come here not as conquerors but as liberators, to free you from generations of tyranny." We were saying the same things then. What happened when the insurgency started against the British? It started in Fallujah, and we shelled Fallujah and half destroyed the town. We surrounded Najaf and claimed we wanted a Shiite prelate who was an insurrectionist to be handed over to us. In the House of Commons, Lloyd George stood up and said, "If the British Army leaves Iraq, there will be civil war." For some reason, the Americans didn't read the history books.