Ordinarily I'd ignore the generally anti-American rantings of Robert Fisk, but given that one of the sites I regularly read actually uses an article of his (from the Arab News, no less) as a demonstration of "incredible hypocrisy" in "the current 'Damn You, Saddam!' culture."

Since this is a pretty long one, I'm going to drop into the Extended Entry mode ...

Fisk starts off ...

Each day now, someone says something even more incredible ‚ even more unimaginable — about President Bush’s obsession with war.

Yes. Usually its someone like Fisk.

On Tuesday, George Bush was himself telling an audience in Cincinnati about "nuclear holy warriors". Forget for a moment that we still can’t prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons.

Due to Iraqi shell games and intransigence.

Besides, nobody is claiming that Iraq actually has nuclear weapons. The claim is that they are seeking to have them. The evidence seems quite clear of that.

Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a re-hash of all the "ifs" and "mays" and "coulds" in Tony Blair’s flimsy 16 pages of allegations in his historically dishonest "dossier".

The proof of Iraq's obtaining of a nuclear weapon will be its detonation. That's what's heralded every other entry into the Nuclear Club.

Does Fisk really want to wait for that? Does he have a serious suggestion of how we make certain that doesn't happen, short of sending troops, linked arm in arm, to walk across Iraq from one end to the other?

Forget that if Osama Bin Laden ever acquired a nuclear weapon, he’d probably use it first on Saddam. No. We’ve got to fight "nuclear holy warriors". That’s what we have to do to justify the whole charade through which we are being taken now by the White House, by Downing Street, by all the decaying "experts" on terrorism and, alas, far too many journalists.

Because ad hominem attacks are always the best way to prove your point.

Does Fisk count himself as an expert on terrorism? Or as a journalist? If both professions are suspect, why should we pay any attention to him.

Forget the 14 Palestinians, including the 12-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Bush spoke, forget that when his aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon — a "man of peace" in Bush’s words — described the slaughter as "a great success". Israel is on our side.

Aside from the gratuitous Israel-bashing, what's the point? How many twelve year old children have been blown up by Palestinian suicide bombers, whose families are then given five-figure "life insurance" payments by Baghdad? Oh, sorry -- something else we should be forgetting.

Remember to use the word "terror". Use it about Saddam Hussein, use it about Osama Bin Laden, use it about Yasser Arafat, use it about anyone who opposes Israel or America. Bush used it in his speech yesterday, 30 times in half an hour — that’s one "terrorism" a minute.

Perhaps it's to make up for the "journalists" who refuse to use the word, even in the context of 9/11, suicide bombers, and the like. And, after all, certainly nobody would ever dream of using such a word on men of peace such as Hussein, bin Laden, or Arafat. Perish the thought.

By the way, France and Germany and China and Russia seem to be opposing US efforts at the moment, and are all historically hostile to Israel. Haven't heard the Bushies calling them terrorists.

But now let’s list exactly what we really must forget if we are to support this madness. Most important of all, we absolutely must forget that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It’s essential to forget this for three reasons. Firstly, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians — which is one of the reasons we are now supposed to go to war with him.
Secondly, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the US Embassy — in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad. Thirdly, because the envoy was — wait for it — Donald Rumsfeld. Now you might think it strange that Rumsfeld, in the course of one of his folksy press conferences, hasn’t chatted to us about this interesting tit-bit. You might think he would have wished to enlighten us about the evil nature of the criminal with whom he so warmly shook hands. But no.

I've heard this argument -- that we supported Iraq in the 80s -- many times , and it still doesn't quite make sense to me. Of course, we did so with the blessing of other neighboring Arab states, and as a regional counter-balance to Iran, itself no bastion of human rights (or friend to the US). Nor were we alone in doing so. Fisk, who would argue US saber-rattling against Iraq is immoral because of its unilateral nature, would also thus argue that the multilateral nature of support for support of Iraq in the 80s was also immoral.

Fisk forgets something else important. Iraq, in his eyes, and the eyes of many in the whole "Evil Empire of the US" school, is utterly passive in this equation. The US acts. The rest of the world only reacts. That why, for example, he's willing to blame the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, not on Iraq, but on the US for not telling Iraq not to do it. Why, as another example, he has no problems placing the blame on 9/11, not on homicidal terrorists, but on US actions that provoked them. Similarly, he's already on record blaming the bombing of the night club in Bali, not on the folks who actually did it, but on Australia's support of US actions provoking people into doing it.

So, for example, the US acted, in his view, in a vacuum during the 80s in its support of Hussein. Nobody, especially Fisk, ever considers that Saddam might well have played the US Administrations of the time for chumps, promising whatever he thought they wanted to hear, feeding whatever intel he thought would convince them, in exchange for support against Iran. Given the state of US/Iran relations at the time, it wouldn't have taken much persuasion, especially if he sweetened the pot by promising to move out of the Soviet orbit.

We never hear about that idea because -- well, who's going to advance it? Saddam? Surely not. Those Administrations? Of course not. Fisk? Definitely not. In his eyes, the US is the only player -- the other nations just lie back and take it.

Strangely, Rumsfeld is silent about this. As he is about his subsequent and equally friendly meeting with Tareq Aziz — which just happened to take place on the day in March, 1984, that the UN released its damning report on Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran. The American media are silent about this too, of course. Because we must forget.

Odd. I've heard about it. Maybe for "silent" Fisk means "not as loud about it as I'd like them to be."

We must forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds — when he "used gas against his own people" in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al — President Bush Sr. provided him with $500 million in US government subsidies to buy American farm products. We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, President Bush Sr. doubled this subsidy to $1 billion, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious "dual-use" material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.

Fisk seems to think that because the US provided support to Iraq then, that prevents us from make moral (or pragmatic) judgments about Iraq now. By labeling it hypocrisy, he surely expects the US to collectively hang its head in shame and slink back to its own hemisphere.

The US provided subsidies to Iraq to buy US farm goods. This is treated by Fisk as some sort of horrific crime, proof of our criminal intent. Of course, Fisk has been just as swift to quote statistics about how the US embargo since then has also been a horrific crime. It seems the US can't do anything right.

Besides, the US provided subsidies and commercial assistance to sell wheat to the Soviets. Does that mean that the Cold War was a great hypocrisy, that the US was complicit in the Soviet depredations of Afghanistan in the 80s?

Finally -- and to me, this is the compelling point -- if the US was responsible for knowingly (implied but not proved) supporting Saddam's crimes then, what is the right thing for us to do now? Be silent? Let him do whatever he wants, since we once enabled him to do so in the past?

Do we not have all the greater a responsibility to act, to clean up the mess that we had a role in?

And when President Bush Jr. promises the Iraqi people "an era of new hope" and democracy after the destruction of Saddam — as he did on Tuesday night — we must forget how the Americans promised Pakistan and Afghanistan a new era of hope after the defeat of the Soviet Army in 1980 — and did nothing.
We must forget how President Bush Sr. urged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam in 1991 and — when they obeyed — did nothing. We must forget how America promised a new era of hope to Somalia in 1993 and then, after "Black Hawk Down", abandoned the country.

Fisk fails to mention (since it would weaken his eliding of Bush Sr. with Bush Jr.) that it was Clinton who bailed out of Somalia.

One wonders whether Fisk would have preferred a massive US invasion of Somalia, since that's the only thing that would have rooted out the warlords.

We did let Afghanistan down after the Soviets withdrew -- though Fisk is one to always point out how what efforts there were by the US to work with Afghanistan were a hypocritical supporting of the Taliban, who quickly rose to dominance after the Soviets fled.

But, then, what would Fisk have us do? Given that we did not fulfill all our promises of the past, should we make no more promises, commit ourselves no more to assisting regimes with democracy? Surely the US is called to provide plenty of assistance on other fronts -- economic, environmental, techological -- and is called to task for failing to commit. Which way would Fisk like it?

We must forget how President Bush Jr. promised to "stand by" Afghanistan before he began his bombings last year — and has left it now an economic shambles of drug barons, warlords, anarchy and fear.

Because Afghanistan wasn't an economic shambles in the first have of 2001, there were no drug barons or warlords present, and certainly fear had no place there.

And it's shocking, shocking how the US as "left" Afghanistan -- except for all those troops we still have there, helping to clear minefields and transport supplies and keep something resembling a non-anarchic government in place. Nope, all we just did was bomb, then leave.

He boasted yesterday that the people of Afghanistan have been "liberated" — this after he has failed to catch Bin Laden, failed to catch Mulla Omar, and while his troops are coming under daily attack.

How many gays have had walls bulldozed onto them since the fall of the Taliban? How many folks have been shot for blasphemy in the soccer fields of Kabul since Mullah Omar and Bin Laden fled (or were killed)? How many women have been beaten with steel rods for not wearing burqhas?

Nobody will claim that life in Afghanistan is skittles and beer, or that it's somehow been magically transformed into the wonderland that Fisk thinks it should be (whatever that is). But the people by and large seem to be a hell of a lot better off -- and, yes, more "liberated" -- than they were a year ago.

And what's this about troops coming under daily attack? It makes it sound like we still have a presence there, and haven't simply "left" Afghanistan. How dare we?

We must forget, as we listen to the need to reinsert arms inspectors, that the CIA covertly used UN weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq.

Maybe because we were trying to -- let's see, how did Fisk describe it earlier? -- "prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons." Let's remember that a big part of that CIA activity was feeding to the weapons inspectors suspected locations of WMD development, which led to the destruction of much (?) of what had been stockpiled at the time.

And of course, we must forget about oil. Indeed, oil is the one commodity — and one of the few things which George Bush Jr. knows something about, along with his ex-oil cronies Cheney and Rice and countless others in the administration — which is never mentioned.
In all of Bush’s 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk on Tuesday — pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how "I hope this will not require military action" — there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multibillionaires on the spoils of this war. We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.

Never mind that US oil interests could make a killing by have the US take a friendly approach to Iraq, dropping the embargo. Or, if they want to keep the price of oil up, the US could simply keep the embargo in place. Either strategy could help Bush make a case that we have to develop more domestic reserves, such as in ANWR -- an activity that would clearly provide lots of profit to US oil interests.

No, that makes too much sense. We know Bush is just in it for the money. Fisk just told us so.

And never mind (or, as Fisk would put it, we must forget) that much of the "principled opposition" to US unilateralism comes from nations such as France and Russia and Germany that have large contracts for oil field (and industrial) development in Iraq, too.

But that's not hypocrisy. That's just good, multilateral business acumen.

Fisk's main point, though, remains hypocrisy. The US supported Iraq in the past, therefore it is disqualified from acting against it now. The US stands (perhaps) to economically gain from a war on Iraq, therefore it is disqualified from acting against it, regardless of whatever other reasons there may be. The US has not always kept its promises, therefore it should not (in this instance at least) be making promises about democracy in Iraq, since that would be hypocritical in the extreme.

(Unlike the nature of democracy in Iraq today. Did Saddam manage to pull 100% of the vote this time?)

US support of Iraq in the 80s was, in retrospect, stupid. It was even shameful. Depending on what you choose to believe, it even bordered on criminal. US failures to follow up on commitments it made (wisely or not) during the Cold War are also shameful.

And, yes, to be fair, it makes me angry. And sad. And even ashamed.

So what? What does that have to do with the current situation?

Iraq -- by which I mean Saddam Hussein's regime -- has developed WMDs in the past, and used them both on enemy combatants and on his own citizenry. Iraq has brutally invaded its neighbors. Iraq has attempted to develop nuclear weapons, and there's every indication that it will continue to do so.

Will Fisk be happier when Iraq becomes a nuclear power? How does he think Saddam will act once that happens?

Or will that simply be a reaction to US aggression, too, and so not anything anyone should plan on holding Baghdad responsible for?

Filed under :: Geopolitical Brouhaha
Link · Print · Edit · TR/G

Now, now -- you're using common sense and reason. That can't be allowed.

Wow, this is one of the best Fiskings I've ever read. Terrific job!

A proper Fisk-fisking. I have to agree with Andrea, no use of common sense allowed <grin>.

It sounds like without meaning to that Fisk made a good case for why we should peruse regime change in Iraq. After 10 years of off again on again inspections "we still can’t prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons," "in March, 1984, that the UN released its damning report on Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran" and "in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds — when he "used gas against his own people.""

How much more information do we need than what Fisk himself has graciously provided?

Well done.

Thankee, all.

Well done, Dave. Didn't know you had it in you. (And linked from Instapundit, too. Yow.)

Excellent Fisking there, Brother Dave. However, you did let one interesting little tidbit sneak past you:

"ex-oil cronies Cheney and Rice"

Condi Rice is an oilman? Condi is a regular Renaissance woman: political scientist, concert pianist, and (now, according to Fiskie) a wildcatter to boot. Whod'a thunk it?

Top-notch Fisk-fisking. And you even got in a mention of Skittlebrau!

What makes you think that your arguments aren't as single-minded and simplistic as Fisks'? While I don't agree with him in the slightest, your barrage of under-developed, one sided counter points are just as easily slighted. Your personal distaste for this man clouds your response and detracts from the impact of your rebuttal.

Right on dave. You fisked the whiskers off of him. Hypocritical thinking is all in a days work to Fisk. See his article on the very first fisking administered by a pakistani mob. Note that it was only when he began to fight back was the attack stopped. Parallels to the current political situation? Not for Mister Fisker.

Stay safe and don't let the terrorists bite.

How's the Instalanch going? ;-) David -- Mass. USA

The thing about the Fisk article that finally bugged me enough to write this comment was the agricultural-subsidies thing. This charge is virtually akin to asserting that we're allies of Robert Mughabe because we're sending food to Zimbabwe.

The likes of Fisk construct things so they can attack America no matter what: we're responsible for the suffering of Iraq's people because of sanctions, or we're responsible for the sufferings Saddam's regime causes because we help prop it up with agricultural support. Heads, Fisk wins, tails, the U.S. loses.

Notice how the worst that Fisk and his ilk can ever say is "American envoys met with" Saddam and sent agricultural aid. They can't claim we armed him in any meaningful sense, as their ideological buddies did (because the evidence stands in the way: one can look at row after row after row of T-72s, T-60s, and BMPs and see who supplied Iraq), nor can they charge us with providing him with the gas, again as those countries the "anti-war" side looks to as enlightened beakons did (Germany, France, and the rest, all knee-deep in equiping Saddam's death machine, all now oppose action against Saddam).

Fisks lense is distorted, in the typical propagandistic method of the left, by what is omitted (by misdirection Fisk's tirade is filled with admonishments about what we're asked to forget. But Fisk's half-truths leave out the vast majority of information).

I remember the time when we were "cozying up" to Saddam, and no one at the time thought we were sincere allies of Saddam (who, after all, was still closer to the Soviet Union) - just, as you point out, a convenient tool against Iran. Whether the policy was wise or misguided at the time is a quite different matter from what Fisk is trying to claim (that Saddam is somehow a monster purely of Amerikkka's creation). I also remember the stories - at the time - of Iraq's use of poison gas, and, no, it neither was covered up by nor condoned by the American government.

Perhaps Fisk's point is that we should have done something about it then, beyond condemning it with words, and have no excuse to do so now since we didn't then (that is a charitable reading of Fisk). But, then, he again is asking us to slip the context of that time down the memory hole: had we gone to war to remove Saddam in the mid-80s, his real patrons, to whom he had made Iraq a client-state, would have intervened. That patron was the Soviet Union, and we would have been risking global thermonuclear war over it. And Fisk would have been cheering on the Soviets for "protecting a small, weak, third-world nation against Western brutality. After all, wasn't it Britain who first used poison gas in Mesopotamia, huh? Isn't this all the West's fault? Who are we to get on our moral high-horse", etc, etc, ad nausium.

" US support of Iraq in the 80s was, in retrospect, stupid."

I disagree. The US "supported" Iraq only as a counter balance to the more dangerous Iran just as we supported Stalin's Soviet Union against the immediate danger of Hitler's Third Reich. We judged, rightly I believe, that Iran's revolutionary expansionism posed a greater immediate danger than Iraq. Saddam blundered badly when he attack Iran and it nearly caused the collapse of Iraq. The US faced a simple choice, "support" Iraq enough to keep it in the fight or let Iran win and expand.

Today, we think of Iran today as a marginal threat only because the nine year long war with Iraq exhausted it. What would the world look like now if the Ayatollahs had defeated Iraq and pushed on into the Gulf States or Jordan? We might now be debating how to handle a nuclear-armed Iranian empire that controlled half the worlds oil and sprawled from the western boarder of China to Jordan, down into Saudi Arabia and up into the Islamic former-Soviet republics.

The US supported Iraq solely because the likely consequences of not doing so seemed much worse. There was not the least iota of moral approval implied. As Henry Kissinger famously said of the Iran-Iraq war, "Pity they can't both lose."

Shannon: Hmmmm. I understand the realpolitik of supporting Iraq against Iran. I'm enough of a liberal (regardless of my feelings about Fisk) to think that there must have been some other way, particularly since Iraq started the conflict -- but that is, perhaps, wishful thinking on my part (something that can afflict any part of the political spectrum).

Porphyrogenitus: Unless the argument is that Bush and his rice industry cronies are going to become multi-billionaires (Iraq was, at one point, the number one market of US rice exports), the whole agricultural subsidies thing doesn't make any sense as an indictment.

And, after all, should we not engage economically with countries whose governments and actions we disapprove of? Certainly that's the argument asserted about both Cuba and China.

Brian: I'll confess that my reactions to his previous writings (and the reactions of others whose opinions I respect) do indeed color my thinking about Mr. Fisk. I'll even concede that there's probably room for debating some of the points I've asserted (though I'd rather hear the debate specifically than simply the accusation that my arguments are "under-developed, one sided").

On the other hand, my blog is for both my thoughts and my feelings, as each colors the other; I'm not presenting myself before the world as a professional journalist, a dispassionate communicator and analyst of facts and the truth. If I let my biases creep into my tone, well, I'm not writing for the front page of the NY Times or the Independent or something -- no journalistic canons or presumption of objectivity have been injured.

If I let my biases creep into my facts or reasoning, though, I welcome correction.

Fisking Fisk is simply redundant. The man is a bufoon.

Fair enough. It is all too easy for me to make un-backed accusations from the safety of my desk. You are, of course totally right, this page is for your thoughts and feelings as much as anything else. To be honest, I agree with everything you said, I've just never commented before and was interested in what response I might get. Thank you.

Brian, do you also poke sticks in bee's nests?

An excellent Fisking. Seeing logic and common sense applied to Mr. Fisk's blather is like watching salt poured on a slug. It shrivels and dissolves. Tho it is unkind to compare Fisk and his ilk to slugs; slugs may be slimy, brainless invertebrates but they are honest ones.

"The proof of Iraq's obtaining of a nuclear weapon will be its detonation. That's what's heralded every other entry into the Nuclear Club.

"Does Fisk really want to wait for that? . . .

"Will Fisk be happier when Iraq becomes a nuclear power?"

The answers are, respectively, YES, YES, & YES. Fisk wants Saddam to have the nuclear weapons. That's why he's opposed to the coming war -- it will prevent Saddam from getting atomic bombs.

"Does he have a serious suggestion of how we make certain that doesn't happen, short of sending troops, linked arm in arm, to walk across Iraq from one end to the other?"

No, but as I said, FISK WANTS SADDAM TO HAVE THE BOMB.

"How does he think Saddam will act once that happens?

"Or will that simply be a reaction to US aggression, too, and so not anything anyone should plan on holding Baghdad responsible for?"

What you mean 'or', blog man? Yes, he thinks Saddam will use nuclear weapons to increase his power, perhaps provide them to terrorists. Fisk thinks that's a good thing.

And yes, if Saddam does that, Fisk will blame it on the United States.

Which gets us down to the core:

FISK IS AS MUCH AN ENEMY OF THE UNITED STATES AS OSAMA BIN LADEN WAS. HE'S JUST LESS POWERFUL, AND THEREFORE LESS DANGEROUS.

But when you read him, think of Goebbels. Fisk, Chomsky, and the rest of that crowd are just spouting enemy propoganda.

What would Fisk have us do? Be destroyed. I'm always surprised I have to point these things out.