Amy Goodman Interviews Robert Fisk on Iraq/Palestine

hydrarchist submits:

Robert Fisk Interviewed by Amy Goodman


On June 11, 2003, Amy Goodman interviewed Robert Fisk. He recently

left Iraq

where he was chronicling the rising resistance to the U.S.

occupation. Ten

American soldiers have been killed in ambushes across Iraq in the

past 15

days including one yesterday in Baghdad who was attacked with

rocket

propelled grenades. Fallujah has been a hotbed of Iraqi resistance

since

April when U.S. troops fired into large crowds of civilians twice

killing at

least 18 people.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, can you talk more about what you found

there?

ROBERT FISK: I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of an

army that

thought it was an army of liberation and has become an army of

occupation.

It's important perhaps to say -- I did mention it in [a recent]

article that

a number of those soldiers who were attached to the 3rd infantry

division

who were military policeman, American ordinary cops like one from

Rhode

Island, for example--they had a pretty shrewd idea of what was

going on. You

got different kinds of behavior from the Americans. You got this

very nice

guy, Phil Cummings, who was a Rhode Island cop, very sensitive

towards

people, didn't worry if people shouted at him. He remained smiling.

He just

said that if people throw rocks at me or stones at me, I give them

candies.

There was another soldier who went up to a middle aged man sitting

on a seat

and he said, "If you get out of that seat, I'll break your neck,"

and there

was quite a lot of language like that as well. There were good guys

as well

as bad guys among the Americans as there always are in armies, but

the

people who I talked to, the sergeants and captains and so on--most

of them

acknowledge that something had gone wrong, that this was not going

to be

good.

One guy said to me, every time we go down to the river here--he was

talking

about the river area in Fallujah--it's a tributary of the

Tigris--it's like

Somalia down there. You always get shot at and you always get

stoned, I

mean, have stones thrown at them. Some of the soldiers spoke very

frankly

about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me--I heard twice

before in

Baghdad itself, once from a British Commonwealth diplomat and once

from a

fairly senior officer in what we now have to call the coalition,

C.P.A., the

Coalition-- for the moment forces or whatever it's

called--Authority, the

authority that's hanging on there until they can create some kind

of Iraqi

government--they all say that Baghdad airport now comes under

nightly sniper

fire from the perimeter of the runways from Iraqis. Two of them

told me that

every time a military aircraft comes in at night, it's fired at. In

fact

some of the American pilots are now going back to the old

Vietnamese tactic

of cork screwing down tightly on to the runways from above rather

than

making the normal level flight approach across open countryside

because

they're shot at so much. It's a coalition provisional authority I'm

thinking

of, the C.P.A., previously an even more long fangled name. There is

a very

serious problem of security.

The Americans still officially call them the remnants of Saddam or

terrorists.

But in fact, it is obviously an increase in the organized

resistance and not

just people who were in Saddam's forces, who were in the Ba'ath

Party or the

Saddam Fedayeen.

There was also increasing anger among the Shiite community, those

who were

of course most opposed to Saddam, and I think what we're actually

seeing,

you can get clues in Iraq, is a cross fertilization. Shiites who

are

disillusioned, who don't believe they have been liberated, who

spent so long

in Iran, they don't like the Americans anyway. Sunni Muslims who

feel like

they're threatened by the Shiites, former Sadaam acolytes who've

lost their

jobs and found that their money has stopped. Kurds who are

disaffected and

are beginning to have contacts, and that of course is the beginning

of a

real resistance movement and that's the great danger for the

Americans now.

GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, who is just come out of

Iraq. There's

a front page piece in The New York Times today, "GI's In Iraqi City

Are

Stalked By Faceless Enemies At Night, and Michael Gordon writes

about how

organized the resistance is, how it seems to come alive at night

and that

what's clear, he says , is some attacks are premeditated, involve

cooperation among small groups of fighters including a system of

signaling

the presence of American forces: talking about the use of red,

white and

blue flares when forces come and then the attacks begin.

FISK: Yes, I've heard this. I also know that in Fallujah, for

example,

there's a system of honking the horns of cars: when the vehicles

approach,

the American convoy approaches, there's one honk on the horn. When

the last

vehicle goes by the same spot, there's two honks on the horn, and

the

purpose is to work out the time element between the first hooter

and the

second because by that, they know how big is the convoy and whether

it's

small enough to be attacked. That comes from a sergeant in the

military

police in Fallujah taking part in this actual operation which I

described to

you just now, which you read out from my report.

One of the problems with the Americans I think is that the top

people in the

Pentagon always knew that this wasn't going to be human rights

abuses ended,

flowers and music for the soldiers, and everyone lives happily

every after

and loves America. You may remember when Rumsfeld first came to

Baghdad,

something your president didn't dare to do in the end, he wanted to

fly over

in an airplane.

He made a speech which I thought was very interesting, rather

sinister in

the big hanger at Baghdad airport. He said we still have to fight

the

remnants of Saddam and the terrorists in Iraq, and I thought, hang

on a

minute, who are these people? And it took me a few minutes to

realize I

think what he was doing, he was laying the future narrative of the

opposition to the Americans. I.E when the Americans get attacked,

it could

be first of all laid down to remnants of Saddam, as in remnants of

the

Taliban who seem to be moving around in Afghanistan now in

battalion

strength, but never mind. It could be blamed on Al Qaeda, so

America was

back fighting its old enemies again. This was familiar territory.

If you were to suggest that it was a resistance movement, harakat

muqawama,

resistance party in Arabic, that would suggest the people didn't

believe

they had been liberated, and of course, all good-natured peace

loving people

have to believe they were liberated by the Americans, not occupied

by them.

What you're finding for example is a whole series of blunders by

Paul

Bremer, the American head of the so-called coalition forces, at

least

coalition authority in Baghdad.

First of all, he dissolved the Iraqi Army. Well, I can't imagine an

Army

that better deserves to be dissolved. But that means that more than

quarter

of a million armed men overnight are deprived of their welfare and

money.

Now if you have quarter of a million armed Iraqis who suddenly

don't get

paid any more, and they all know each other, what are they going to

do? They

are going to form some kind of force which is secret, which is

covered; then

they will be called terrorists, but I guess they know that, and

then of

course they will be saying to people, why don't you come and join

us.

It was very interesting that in Fallujah, a young man came out to

see me from a shop just after the American searches there had ended and

said some

people came from the resistance a few nights ago and asked him to

join. I

said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now,

he said, I

might think differently. I met a Shiite Muslim family in Baghdad

who moved

into the former home of a Saddam intelligence officer. This family

had been

visited three nights previously by armed men who said, you better

move out

of this house. It doesn't belong to you unless you want to join us.

The guy

in Fallujah said that the men, the armed men who came to invite him

to join

the resistance had weapons, showed their mukhabarat intelligence

identity

card and said, we're still being paid and we are proud to hold our

I.D.

cards for the Ba'ath Party. So, now you have to realize that

Fallujah and

other towns like it are very unlike Tikrit, are very much

pro-Saddam.

Fallujah is the site of a great munitions factory, it gave people

massive

employment. They all loved Saddam in the way Arabs are encouraged

to love

dictators or go to prison otherwise. But nonetheless, there is an

embryo of a serious resistance movement now.

On top of this, you can see the measure of what I think is

basically

desperation. I've been writing about this in The Independent this

morning in

London, well, last night for this morning's paper, and Paul Bremer

now asked

the legal side of the coalition provisional authority to set up the

machinery of Iraqi press censorship. In other words, Iraqi

newspapers are

going to be censored. Controlled I think is the official word they

use, but

that means censorship.

That is the kind of language that Saddam used. Iraqis are used to a

censored

press; after all, they lived with it for more than 20 years under

Saddam

Hussein.

Now when you question the Americans about it, first of all they

deny it.

Then the British half accept it; then other people involved in the

coalition

say well it's probably true, yes, it is true.

But the problem is the wild stories appearing in the Iraqi press.

Now, of

course there's no tradition of western style journalism in Iraq.

There are

those that say it's a good idea, no tradition for example of

letting the

other side have a say, checking the story out, going back on the

ground and

asking the other side for their version of events. It doesn't

exist. It's a

little bit, but not much. What you get after saying that Americans

are going

with Iraqi prostitutes, American troops are chasing Iraqi women,

that Muslim

women are being invited to marry Christian foreigners, that this is

worse

than it was under Saddam. I'm actually quoting from one particular

newspaper

called The Witness, which is a Shiite Muslim paper, basically that

had its

first issue the other day. Other newspapers carry reports of

American

beatings; they also carry reports of "I was Saddam's double" , and

the

opening of mass graves. They're not totally one sided against the

Americans.

But you can see how the occupation forces, let's call them by their

real

name, are troubled by this kind of publication because it seems to

them to

provoke or incite animosity towards the liberators of Iraq, which

it is not

meant to do. But of course the problem is that the Imams in the

mosques are

saying the same thing about the Americans. Now, the last quote I

read from

American official said that it may be necessary to control what the

Imams

were saying in the mosques; well, this is preposterous. I sat on

Rashid

Street in Baghdad a few days ago and listened to the loud speaker

carrying

the sermon of the imam from within the mosque.

I think he was saying the Americans must leave immediately, now.

Well, under

the new rule presumably he's inciting the people to violence. What

are we

going to do? Arrest all the Imams in the mosques, arrest all the

journalists

who won't obey, close down the newspapers? I mean what Iraqi

journalists

need are courses in journalism from reporters who work in real

democracies.

You can come along and say, look, by all means criticize the

Americans and

put the boot in if you want to, but make sure you get it right. And

if you

also do that you have to look at your own society and what is wrong

in it

and how Saddam ever came about. He didn't just come about because

America

supported Saddam which my goodness they did. But Bremer is not

interested in

this. What Bremer wants to do is control, control the press,

control the

Imams, and it doesn't work. A lot of the incidents taking place

now, the

violent incidents are not being divulged.

GOODMAN: Robert, you were just talking about a lot of the attacks

we're

hearing about--what seems like a good number, a lot of the

attacks--on U.S.

forces are not being reported.

FISK: I have a colleague, for example, who went down to Fallujah

before the

incident I was describing to you earlier, after two gunmen, one

American had

been killed in the fire fight, he reported, I spoke to both sides.

On his

way back he was traveling past the town of Abu Garab a rather

sinister place

where the huge prison is where Saddam executed so many prisoners,

including

an Observer journalist back in the late 1980's.

As we were, as the colleague was passing by the town, he saw a

young man

come up and throw a hand grenade at American troops in the Humvee.

The grenade missed them and exploded in the canal and wounded six

Iraqi

children, a very clear account of what happened. I rang the

coalition

forces, the telephone didn't answer as it very often doesn't do.

And no

report ever emerged except in my paper that this incident had

occurred.

Now, over and over again we keep seeing things, seeing small

incidents

occur, soldiers threatening people outside petrol lines because

people are

trying to jump the line and steal. And it just doesn't make it back

into the

coalition record of what's actually happening in Iraq. The danger

here is

not so much that we're not being told about it because we can see

and find

out for ourselves. The danger is that the United States leadership

in

Baghdad, and of course, especially back in the White House and

Pentagon is

also not being told about it. Or if it is, information is only

going to

certain people who can deal with that information.

It's very easy to say, well Iraq's been a great success we've got

rid of a

dictatorship, the weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist

have now

been destroyed or whatever interpretation you want to put on that.

Human

rights abuses have ended, certainly the Saddam kind. But if you try

and if

this information goes up the ladder every bit of it to people like

Bremer,

I'm not sure it all is--I think it should be--then you can see how

the

coalition doesn't represent the reality.

One of the big problems at the moment is the Americans and, to some

extent

the British, particularly the Americans in Baghdad. They're all

ensconced in

this chic gleaming marble palace, largest, most expensive palace.

There they

sit with their laptops trying to work out with Washington how

they're going

to bring about this new democracy in Iraq. They rely upon for the

most part

former Iraqi exiles who never endured Saddam Hussein, who are

hovering

around making sure that they get the biggest part of the pie

possible. When

they leave the palace, when they go into the streets of Baghdad,

the

dangerous streets of Baghdad, they leave in these armored black

Mercedes

with gunmen in the front and back, soldiers, plain clothes guys

with weapons

and sunglasses.

One Iraqi said to me the other day "who did you think was the last

person we

saw driving through town like [this]?" I said, Saddam Hussein?

They all

burst out laughing, of course, they said, exactly the same.

We are used to this just like they're used to press censorship. I

think it's

difficult--you need to be in Baghdad to understand the degree to

which

there's been this slippage of ambition and slippage in the

ideological war.

I was in small hotel called the Al Hama the other day--it has a

swimming

pool, 24-hour generators. Just going down to have a meal in the

evening, I

came across two westerners, one with a pump action shotgun, the

other with a

submachine gun passing me in the hallway.

I said, "Who are you?"

He said, "Well, who are you?"

"I'm a guest in the hotel. You have guns. Who are you?"

He said, "We work for D.O.D"

"Department of Defense, right?" (But he was obviously English--he

had a

British accent.) "Hang on a second you're not American."

"No, we're a British company that is hired to look after D.O.D.

employees in

Baghdad. That's why we're armed."

I said, "Who gives you permission to have weapons?"

He said, "The coalition forces, we're here protecting them."

Now, how often have Iraqis seen armed plain clothes men moving in

and out of

hotels, they have for more than 20 years, now seeing them again.

Well these

guys are not going to string them up by their fingernails and

electrocute

them in torture cells. But again, the image, the picture is the

same. The

armored escort, limousines in the street, soldiers kicking down the

doors

searching for, "terrorists." The press censorship plans. Plain

clothes

armed men going into a hotel asking who you are immediately by

asking them

who they are, same system as before. It has this kind of ghastly

ghostly

veneer of the old regime about it. The Americans are not Saddam,

they're not

murdering people - they're not lining up people at mass graves, of

course

they're not. But if you see through the eyes of the Iraqis, it

doesn't look

quite that simple.

GOODMAN: We are talking to Robert Fisk, just came out of Iraq but

you've

also written about the so-called road map to peace. I just wanted

to get

your response to what happened yesterday in Gaza, with the Israeli

helicopter gun ships attempting to assassinate the political leader

for

Hamas, Abdel Azziz Rantizzi. And also Bush strongly criticizing the

attempted assassination on the part of the Israel.

FISK: First of all he didn't strongly criticize them, he mildly,

rather

pathetically and rather cowardly criticized the Israelis. This was

an attack

which was meant to kill the political head of Hamas. And in the

ghastly role

which the Palestinians and Israelis play in their bloody and

useless

conflict, I can understand why the attack was made in that context.

But that attack did not kill Rantizzi, it killed a little child of

five and

a young woman. Now your president said that that was "troubling".

That isn't

troubling that's a shameful act, that's a despicable thing to do.

But there

was no strong condemnation from Mr. Bush, he just said it was

troubling. If

a Palestinian had attacked Israeli forces or Israeli political

leader

involved in encouraging violence, had killed a little Israeli girl,

and a

young innocent Israeli woman Mr. Bush would not have called it

troubling. He

would have said it was a shameful, terrorist act, which it would

have been.

How can it work when the most powerful president of the most

powerful state

in the world, United States of America, can be so gutless and

cowardly in

condemning the killing of two innocent people.

It is not troubling. It is an outrage that those two innocent

people died.

Just as it would be if the Palestinians had done it. Just as it is

when the

Palestinians do do it. [For Bush]It is not an outrage. Not a

tragedy. Not

shameful. It is merely troubling. Like a flood is troubling or a

heavy

rainfall that kills people or a storm is troubling. In that context

how can

this new peace possibly work.

It's called a road map, who invented the phrase road map? I suppose

the poor

old State Department and all the journalists dutifully used the

word road

map.

They can't use peace process because that's associated with Oslo

and that

failed. You remember the cliche for the peace process, always had

to be put

back on track. I suppose peace process was a railway line or a

railway train

so it presumably always has to be put back on the main road or back

on the

highway that is the cliche.

What has Sharon done? he's closed down a few empty caravans on

hilltops.

At large and continuing to expand Jewish settlements, the Jews and

Jews only

in occupied Arab land. What have the Palestinians done? Mahmoud

Abbas says

I'm going to finish terrorism, there's going to be no more violence

by the

Palestinians and, bang, there immediately is. We have the three

main violent

groups, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa immediately carrying out

the

suicide bombing.

And then praised by Rantizzi, I remember thinking, he's praising

them,

that's against the road map so Israelis have got a green light to

knock him

off and they tried and failed. I remember interviewing Rantizzi

along

similar lines about six months ago in Gaza, as I was talking to him

I saw an

Israeli helicopter emerge in the window and his body guard looked

around

very nervously and I thought, oh, no, please go away and so I

finished the

interview.

But I always thought he was a target, he always had two gunmen with

him all

the time. That's not the point. Rantizzi is a very tough Hamas man,

a very

ruthless man. He was one of the Palestinians who was illegally

deported from

Israeli prisons into Lebanon in 1992. I actually met him there in

the

southern Lebanon in the hills, when he was living rough, months

after months

in a tent.

This is a very rough character, very tough guy--grew up the hard

way in

guerrilla warfare as well as politics.

But when you're going to have a situation where you have an Israeli

prime

minister who doesn't want to end the settlements, who is indeed the

creator

of the settlements, and a Palestinian prime minister who can't stop

the

intifada and a U.S. president who is so gutless he can only call a

killing

of a woman and a child troubling, what chance is there for a road

map or

peace process or any other kind of agreement in the Middle East?

GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert Fisk, who is just come out of Iraq

and who

has reported extensively on the Middle East for more than 30 years.

I wanted to end, back in Iraq. CNN is reporting today that Ahmed

Chalabi who

has addressed the Council on Foreign Relations is saying that

Saddam Hussein

is moving in an arc around the Tigris River starting northeast of

Baghdad.He

said finding Saddam would just be a matter of knowing whom to talk

to.He

says based on information from credible sources, he believes the

former

Iraqi president wants revenge and has obtained two suicide bombing

vests for

attacks on U.S. forces. Chalabi says Saddam is paying bounty for

every U.S.

soldier killed. Your response?

FISK: I long ago gave up putting any credit in anything that Ahmed

Chalabi

says.The real issue is not where is Saddam Hussein, he could be

sitting in

Minsk or Belarus or he could be sitting in Tikrit or in the Iraqi

countryside somewhere.Obviously there were plans to hide him in

advance. You

know this goes back to another issue of the degree of real effort

to find

him. Just look back, the Americans wanted to arrest Valadich and

put him in

the Hague. We were going to capture Osama bin laden, he's still on

the

loose. We were going to capture Mullah Omar, he's only got one eye,

not

difficult to identify. But he's still on the loose. We can't get

vice

president Ramadan in Iraq or Uday Hussein, the sons of Saddam. We

can't get

Saddam himself. Can't get Naji Sabri the foreign minister.

I was sitting in a restaurant in Baghdad a week and a half ago, at

the next

table next to me was Saddam's personal translator. I sort of did a

double

take, I said, hi, how are you? I knew the guy. I'd known him for

years and

years. I said, are you okay? Fine, fine no problem, he was having a

beer

with friends. And he walked out. This is the same restaurant that

later on I

saw Paul Bremer walk into with several special forces men to

protect him and

his guests for dinner. I have to ask myself sometimes what's going

on. Ahmed

Chalabi says that Saddam is moving in an arc, he maybe moving in a

circle or

square for all I know but it's clear he's still alive. That's the

point.

GOODMAN: Well, Robert Fisk, thank you very much for being with

us.Robert

Fisk of the Independent of London just out of Iraq.