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Cost of the War in Iraq
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The following articles are transcripts or articles written by Robert Fisk. He has spent a most of the last 10 years in the middle east, and knows whats really going on over there.

Iraq

We need to go back and recall how this whole disaster happened. We are talking about a disaster in Iraq. We are talking about a country we claimed we were coming to liberate and now we're occupying it. We're re-besieging their cities. I mean, Samarra was supposed to have been liberated by us in 2003. Now we're going to re-liberate it, and apparently Fallujah is next on the list. What on earth are we doing there? Remember this all started at a critical moment after September 11, 2001, after the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. When Osama bin Laden was suddenly deleted off the screen, off the radar screen and Saddam Hussein was put up there. The Americans were bombarded with the idea, which many Americans, sadly, still believe, that Saddam Hussein had had something to do with September 11 when in fact the agenda for attacking Iraq was first thought up by the neoconservatives in Washington during the Clinton administration. We're now apparently fighting for democracy in Iraq. Originally, we were going to liberate Iraq so they could have democracy. Most of Iraq is outside of the control of the United States forces or British forces and certainly not government forces. The Iraqi government itself now has less power than the mayor of Baghdad and doesn't even control all of Baghdad. The situation - the disastrous situation in Iraq is now so grave that I don't think it could ever be turned around, not while western troops are there. And yet, Kerry and Bush talk about it, as if it is a reversible situation or actually getting better. And again and again, the concentration on America's soldiers. Well, fine, Americans should be interested in their soldiers and their welfare, but the principal victims in Iraq are not Americans, they’re Iraqis, and they're dying at an ever greater number. When I go to the mortuaries and see shrieking people holding the corpses of children, old men as well as young men. Trying to stuff them into coffins. The stench is overpowering. That's the reality on the ground in Iraq. What Kerry and Bush had to say last night bore no relation to the reality which I see inside Iraq.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan is not a success. Human rights organizations are already pointing out that the polls are hopelessly flawed, that the candidates in some cases are working for the warlords. Not since before the Taliban, when the same warlords were back in power killing each other has there been such opium and drug production in Afghanistan. Most of the country is out of bounds to foreigners because the Taliban have re-established themselves, especially in the villages around Pastia coast, and the Pakistani border. In many cases, U.S. forces cannot move freely except in large numbers in parts of Afghanistan. There has been some reconstruction work. Some people have gone along to put their names down for a vote, but given the warlordism, the vote is likely to prove meaningless, if it does take place. I don't think, by the way, that the elections are going to take place in January or any time soon afterwards in Iraq. Afghanistan is being left to sink again back into the same chaos and the same poverty that it was in before. Both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, we have profoundly failed because we have not done our work as we should have done internationally through the United Nations. And that, unfortunately, is why the bin Ladens of this world can continue to flourish and can continue to stage their war. I think there's one other thing that you need to remember. It's very easy to say, we're at war. It's very easy to go off and start a war. Okay, you can say that the war started on September 11, 2001, but you could also say that the war started in 1948 between the Palestinians and Israelis. The war started in Iraq when the British invaded in 1917 and again in 1941. But once you embark on a major military campaign it's very difficult to switch it off. What we have got in Iraq now is not a war on terror. Most of the people - the vast majority of the men fighting the Americans are Iraqi, and they will go on fighting. You know one of the things that's very interesting at moment. Again, we need to look at history. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, we supported him with guns, chemicals for gas, with export credits from the United States. And we urged him on. We wanted the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran after Khomeini’s revolution. We backed Saddam. He sent a whole generation of Iraqis to learn to fight and die. Now, in that war, the Iraqis went through immense suffering. They fought most of them without any initiatives, because no one could take initiative, only Saddam was the man who was allowed to make decisions. They dug their tanks into the ground, stuck the gun barrels over the top and just fought on, like the battle of Asam against Iranians. But those young men, those men who were captains and lieutenants are now grown up with an enormous experience of fighting power. And they are no longer hobbled by dictatorship. They can take their own initiatives. That, I suspect, that, I suspect is why this insurgency is so successful.

Future generations will struggle to escape the legacy of the disaster in Iraq

I am writing a book about our need to escape from history--or rather about our inability to escape the effects of the decisions taken by our fathers and grandfathers. My father was a soldier in the First World War or, as it says on the back of his campaign medal, "The Great War for Civilisation''--which is the title I've chosen for my book. In the space of just 17 months after my father's war ended, the victors had drawn the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent all my professional life watching the people inside those borders burn. I once sat down with old Malcolm Macdonald, Britain's former colonial secretary, to discuss his handover of the Irish treaty ports to De Valera before the Second World War, thus depriving Britain of three great harbours during the Battle of the Atlantic. It was a step which earned Macdonald the undying contempt of Winston Churchill. Inevitably, though, we ended up talking about his vain attempts to solve the "Palestine problem" in the 1930s. In the Commons, Churchill angrily condemned Macdonald for restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine. I still have my notes of what Macdonald said to me. "We have a terrific argument in House of Commons, and when we met in the division lobby afterwards, Churchill accused me of being pro-Arab. He said that Arabs were savages and that they ate nothing but camel dung. I could see that it was no good trying to persuade him to change his views. So I suddenly told him that I wished I had a son. He asked me why, and I said I was reading a book called My Early Life by Winston Churchill, and that I would want any son of mine to live that life. At this point, tears appeared in Churchill's eyes and he put his arms round me, saying, 'Malcolm, Malcolm.' The next day a package arrived for me from Churchill containing a signed copy of his latest volume of the life of Marlborough.'' My father worshipped Churchill, and pleaded with a friend to ask Churchill to sign a book for him; which is why I have in my library today Marlborough: His Life and Times, with the words "Inscribed by Winston S Churchill 1948" in the great man's own hand. I still take the book out from time to time to look at that handwriting and to reflect that this was a man who sent our armies to Gallipoli, who shook hands with Michael Collins, who stood alone against Adolf Hitler, who campaigned for Zionism in Palestine and sent King Faisal to Iraq as a consolation prize for losing Syria to the French. "The situation that confronted HM Government in Iraq at the beginning of 1921 was a most unsatisfactory one,'' Churchill would write in his The World Crisis: The Aftermath, of the insurgency against British rule. His friend Gertrude Bell--and here I am indebted to HVF Winstone's splendid and revised biography of Britain's "oriental secretary" in Baghdad--was that same year trying to set up an "Arab government with British advisors'' in Baghdad so that Britain's army of occupation could leave Iraq. "I don't know what hanky panky the Allies are up to about the mandates,'' she wrote, "but I am all on the side of the League of Nations in protesting that they must be made public ... everyone from the Euphrates provinces says the people there won't accept Sunni officials and the (provisional) Council goes on blandly appointing them ... a Shia of Karbala (sic) has at last accepted the Ministry of Education ...'' Bell attended Churchill's famous--or infamous--Cairo conference where the British decided the future of most of the Middle East. TE Lawrence was there, of course, along with just about every Brit who thought he or she understood the region. "I'll tell you about our conference,'' Bell wrote to a friend in her jolly hockey-sticks way. "It has been wonderful. We covered more work in a fortnight than has been got through in a year. Mr Churchill was admirable ...'' It quite takes the breath away; the British thought they could fix the Middle East in 14 days. And so we laid the borders of Iraq and laid out the future for what Churchill would, much later, refer to as the "hell disaster'' of Palestine. I'll always remember the way that Macdonald, talking to me in his Sevenoaks home 26 years ago, turned to me during our conversation. "In Palestine, I failed,'' he said. "And that is why you are in Beirut today.'' And he was right, of course. Had we really "fixed" the Middle East, I wouldn't have spent the last 29 years of my life travelling from one bloody war to another amid the lies and deceit of our leaders and the surrogates they appointed to rule over the Arabs. Had we really "fixed" the Middle East, Ken Bigley would not have been murdered in Iraq last week. Can we escape? Can we one day say--both the West and the peoples of the Middle East--"Enough! Let us start again!'' I fear we cannot. Our betrayals and our broken promises--to Jews as well as Arabs--have created a kind of irreversible disease, something that will not go away and cannot and will not be forgiven for generations. Look, for example, how we egged on Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, how we patronised him for eight terrible years with export credits and guns and aircraft and chemicals for gas. Looking back now, we were doing something else. By supporting Saddam's war, we were helping an entire generation of Iraqis to learn to fight--and die. I called up my old friend Tony Clifton in Australia this week. He and I reported the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war from both sides. "Just think,'' he said. "All these millions of Iraqis were taught about how to fight a big army. They used to use their tanks as static positions with just their gun barrels pointing over the earth to stop the Iranians. But they weren't allowed to use their initiative. But now Saddam has gone and all those lieutenants and captains are older and can use their initiative and their fighting abilities against the Americans. I think that's why the resistance in Iraq is so successful.'' I suspect that Clifton is right, and that the eight-year war with Iran which we were so keen on is intimately connected to the current insurgency and the savagery with which it is being conducted by the Iraqi gunmen and suicide killers. And what of the Americans themselves? I've been re-reading Seymour Hersh's stunning 1970 account of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. And there's something about the casual attitude to death and cruelty in the way that Medina and Calley did their killings there that I find chillingly familiar. The Americans have a professional army in Iraq, but it is becoming frighteningly casual about the way it kills women and children in Fallujah, simply denying that its air strikes are killing the innocent, and insists that all 120 dead in their Samarra operation are all insurgents when this cannot possibly be true. What about the latest wedding party carnage, another American "success" against terrorism? Because journalists can scarcely travel in Iraq any more, there is no longer any independent witness to this awful war. What is going on in Ramadi and Hilla and all the other cities where US forces carry out their brutal raids? Tony Blair still thinks his hideous invasion was not a mistake. He still seems to believe in his own version of The Great War for Civilisation, just as my father once believed in it. And now I wonder what terrors this disaster holds in store for our future generations, who will also ask themselves if they can escape from history.


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