I protest.

"You can't look everywhere at once."

Robert Fisk has another article in The Independent: For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial oppression.

Whatever you may say about his agenda (or lack of one), I don't for a second believe that he is lying about the events he describes. We know that there is no order in Baghdad, no matter what the arrogant Rumsfeld says, and we know that American soldiers are guarding the oil ministry but are paying no attention to the looting of other places.

Whatever you may think of his politics, Fisk asks some very good questions. Why are the documents in the compounds of former torturers and intelligence bureaus sitting there unviewed, why haven't they been collected for analysis? Why hasn't the bomb crater that was supposedly aimed at Hussein himself not been examined? Why have the soldiers apparently been ordered to turn a blind eye to the looting and arson that is going on around them, in some cases literally in front of them?

Fisk asks, "In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, destroyed?" If Notes on the Atrocities is right, it is in the American interest. (Direct linking is still broken at Blogspot; look for the "Pax (Latin) Americana" entry.) As she says at the end of the entry:

And so the US fiddles while Iraqis loot. Even the most nonpolitical Americans have a gut sense that this probably isn’t so hot for a healthy democracy in the long run. They wonder why the US didn't foresee or try to prevent it. We’re left to conclude that a healthy democracy isn’t what the President's after. He’s after an unhealthy one. And for that, looting and revenge are just what the free-market colonialist ordered.

Makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it?