Democracy Now! interviews Robert Fisk in Baghdad

NOTE: THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT



DEMOCRACY NOW! MARCH 25, 2003



Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Host: Set the scene for us in Baghdad right now.

Robert Fisk, The Independent: Well, it’s been a relatively—relatively being the word—quiet night, there’s been quite a lot of explosions about an hour ago. There have obviously been an awful lot of missiles arriving on some target, but I would say it was about 4 or 5 miles away. You can hear the change in air pressure and you can hear this long, low rumble like drums or like someone banging on a drum deep beneath the ground, but quite a ways away. There have only been 2 or 3 explosions near the center of the city, which is where I am, in the last 12 hours. So, I suppose you could say that, comparatively, to anyone living in central Baghdad, it’s been a quiet night.

The strange thing is that the intensity of the attacks on Baghdad changes quite extraordinarily; you’ll get one evening when you can actually sleep through it all, and the next evening when you see the explosions red hot around you.

As if no one really planning the things, it’s like someone wakes up in the morning and says, “Let’s target this on the map today”, and it’s something which sort of characterizes the whole adventure because if you actually look at what’s happening on the ground, you’ll see that the American and British armies started off in the border. They started off at Um Qasr and got stuck, carried on up the road through the desert, took another right turn and tried to get into Basra, got stuck, took another right at Nasiriya, got stuck—it’s almost as if they keep on saying, “Well let’s try the next road on the right”, and it has kind of a lack of planning to it. There will be those who say that, “No it’s been meticulously planned,” but it doesn’t feel like it to be here.


\AG: Can you talk about the POWs and television- the charge that they’re violating the Geneva Convention by showing them on television?


RF: Well, you know, the Geneva Convention is meant to protect children, and hospitals are full of civilians, including many children who’ve been badly wounded.

It seems to me that this concentration on whether television should show prisoners or not is a kind of mischief: it’s not the point. The issue, of course, is that both sides are taking prisoners, and that both sides want the other side to know of the prisoners they’ve taken.

I watched CNN showing a British soldier forcing a man to kneel on the ground and put his hands up and produce his identity card and I’ve seen other film on British television of prisoners near Um Qasr and Basra being forced to march past a British soldier with their hands in the air. Well, they (the American soldiers) weren’t interviewed, it’s true, although you heard at one point a man asking questions, clearly to put any prisoner on air answering questions is against the Geneva Convention. But for many, many years now, in the Middle East television has been showing both sides in various wars appearing on television and being asked what their names are and what their home countries are.

And the real issue is that these prisoners should not be maltreated, tortured, or hurt after capture. When you realize that 19 men have tried to commit suicide at Guantanamo, that we now know that 2 prisoners at the US base Bagram were beaten to death during interrogation. To accuse the Iraqis of breaking the Geneva Convention by putting American POWs on television in which you hear them being asked what state they’re from in the states, it seems a very hypocritical thing to do. But one would have to say, technically, putting a prisoner of war on television and asking them questions on television is against the Geneva Convention. It is quite specifically so. And thus, clearly Iraq broke that convention when it put those men on television- I watched them on Iraqi TV here.

But, as I’ve said, it’s a pretty hypocritical thing when you realize, this equates to the way America treats prisoners from Afghanistan- Mr. Bush is not the person to be teaching anyone about the Geneva Convention.


Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! Correspondent: Robert Fisk, you wrote in one of your most recent articles, actually, the title of it was "Iraq Will Become a Quagmire for the Americans" and I think many people within the US administration were surprised to find the kinds of resistance they have in places like Nasiriya. We have the two Apache helicopters that have apparently been shot down and many US casualties so far. Do you think the Americans were caught by surprise, particularly by the resistance in the south where everyone was saying that the people are against Saddam Hussein?

RF: Well, they shouldn’t have been caught by surprise; there were plenty of us writing that this was going to be a disaster and a catastrophe and that they were going to take casualties. You know, one thing I think the Bush administration has shown as a characteristic, is that it dreams up moral ideas and then believes that they’re all true, and characterizes this policy by assuming that everyone else will then play their roles. In their attempt to dream up an excuse to invade Iraq, they’ve started out, remember, by saying first of all that there are weapons of mass destruction. We were then told that al Qaeda had links to Iraq, which, there certainly isn’t an al Qaeda link. Then we were told that there were links to September 11th, which was rubbish. And in the end, the best the Bush administration could do was to say, “Well, we’re going to liberate the people of Iraq”. And because it provided this excuse, it obviously then had to believe that these people wanted to be liberated by the Americans. And, as the Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said a few hours ago, I was listening to him in person, the Americans expected to be greeted with roses and music- and they were greeted with bullets. I think you see what has happened is that- and as he pointed out- the American administration and the US press lectured everybody about how the country would break apart where Shiites hated Sunnis and Sunnis hated Turkmen and Turkmen hated Kurds, and so on. And yet, most of the soldiers fighting in southern Iraq are actually Shiite. They’re not Sunnis, they’re not Tikritis, they’re not from Saddam’s home city. Saddam did not get knocked off his perch straight away, and I think that, to a considerable degree, the American administration allowed that little cabal of advisors around Bush- I’m talking about Perle, Wolfowitz, and these other people—people who have never been to war, never served their country, never put on a uniform- nor, indeed, has Mr. Bush ever served his country- they persuaded themselves of this Hollywood scenario of GIs driving through the streets of Iraqi cities being showered with roses by a relieved populace who desperately want this offer of democracy that Mr. Bush has put on offer-as reality. And the truth of the matter is that Iraq has a very, very strong political tradition of strong anti-colonial struggle. It doesn’t matter whether that’s carried out under the guise of kings or under the guise of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath party, or under the guise of a total dictator. There are many people in this country who would love to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I’m sure, but they don’t want to live under American occupation. The nearest I can describe it- and again, things can change- maybe the pack of cards will all collapse tomorrow- but if I can describe it, it would be a bit like the situation in 1941- and I hate these World War II parallels because I think it’s disgusting to constantly dig up the second world war- Hitler is dead and he died in 1945 and we shouldn’t use it, but if you want the same parallel, you’ll look at Operation: Barbarosa, where the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 believing that the Russians would collapse because Stalin was so hated and Communism was so hated. And at the end of the day, the Russians preferred to fight the Germans to free their country from Germany, from Nazi rule, rather than to use the German invasion to turn against Stalin. And at the end of the day, a population many of whom had suffered greatly under Communism fought for their motherland under the leadership of Marshal Stalin against the German invader. A similar situation occurred in 1980 when Saddam himself invaded Iran. There had just been, 12 months earlier, a revolution in Iran and the Islamic Republic had come into being. It was believed here in Baghdad that if an invasion force crossed the border from Iraq- supported again in this case by the Americans- that the Islamic Republic would fall to pieces; that it would collapse under its own volition; that is couldn’t withstand a foreign invasion. I actually crossed the border with the Iraqi forces in 1980, I was reporting on both sides, and I remember reaching the first Iranian city called Horam Shar and we came under tremendous fire; mortar fire, sniper fire, and artillery fire, and I remember suddenly thinking as I hid in this villa with a number of Iraqi commandos, “My goodness, the Iranians are fighting for their country”. And I think the same thing is happening now, and, obviously, we know that with the firepower they have the Americans can batter their way into these cities and they can take over Baghdad, but the moral ethos behind this war is that you Americans are supposed to be coming to liberate this place. And, if you’re going to have to smash your way into city after city using armor and helicopters and aircraft, then the whole underpinning and purpose of this war just disappears, and, the world- which has not been convinced thus far, who thinks this is a wrong war and an unjust war- are going to say, “Then what is this for? They don’t want to be liberated by us.” And that’s when we’re going to come down to the old word: Oil. What’s quite significant is in the next few hours the Oil Minister in Iraq is supposed to be addressing the press, and that might turn out to be one of the more interesting press conferences that we’ve had, maybe even more interesting, perhaps, than the various briefings from military officials about the course of the war... cont'd

Read the rest of the transcript & listen to the interview: http://www.democracynow.org/fisk.htm