I protest.

Another good Robert Fisk interview.

Since the Independent has made its articles by Fisk pay-only, I haven't been reading them. So it's nice to see this interview with Robert Fisk by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! As usual, he has a good and quite independent perspective on the never-ending conflict in Iraq. Apparently he has been in Iraq recently, chronicling the rise of resistance to American occupation. I seem to recall that I said something about remembering Viet Nam not so long ago. Well, it's happening. As I said then, Iraq really can't truly be a Viet Nam, since there's no true freedom fighter there, but it can still be a nasty little guerilla war that eats young American men and excretes body bags. Fisk relates the reports of some of those American soldiers:

Some of the soldiers spoke very frankly about the situation in Baghdad. One man told me [ … ] — 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.

If I were a pilot about to land at that airport, I would certainly try to make my approach over as much safe territory as possible. A couple of bullets in the wrong place can really ruin your whole day.

Of course, there is the occasional soldier who actually knows what he's doing.

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.

Didn't I say something in my last article about hiring out-of-work police to do the work in places like Baghdad? That's too simple a solution, I guess. So instead we get

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.

Yeah, that's going to win friends.

Fisk casts a Rumsfeld pronouncement (to which I didn't pay much attention at the time) in a new light:

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.

This makes too much sense to dismiss, unfortunately. Rumsfeld expected these attacks and the rise of resistance, so he laid the groundwork to "spin" (that is, lie about) it. Is there a resistance? Well, Rumsfeld's "spin" and pronouncements from the Pentagon notwithstanding, I don't for a second believe that all of these attacks are carried out by "Ba'athist elements" or "Saddamists." Even if they are, though, with atrocities such as those in Fallujah, people who weren't disaffected earlier will become so.

It was very interesting that in Fallujah, the young men 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 me to join. I said, what did you say, and he said, I wouldn't do that. But now, he said, I might think differently. [ … ] 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 the young men become disaffected and then realize that they can actually get paid by the resistance. The real irony here is that with only a little effective effort, Bremer or his precedessor could have avoided this situation easily. But instead, Bremer is becoming the same kind of tyrant our military toppled:

[ … ] 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.

Fisk talks quite a bit about the new Iraqi press, that it is publishing "wild stories" and actually making things worse.

But you can see how the occupation forces [ … ] 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.

He suggests actually teaching the members of the new Iraqi press to pay attention to the problems in their own society while they criticize the Americans.

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.

Fisk points out that so many of the relatively small incidents don't make it to the record, the press often doesn't report it (if they see it at all) and of course it isn't making it back those who most need to know. I would assert, though, that this really doesn't matter, since those in control, those with the authority to make a difference, don't care about these incidents. They have accomplished their goal, whatever that might have been, and they really don't care that six Iraqi children were hurt by a grenade, or that an elderly Iraqi man was held in cruel conditions for hours, for no obvious reason, before being released.

I do think that Fisk's point that Bremer is interested only in control, not in being an effective leader (or even an effective administrator), is a good one. I suspect, too, that this is not limited to Bremer.

Read the interview. As usual, Fisk has probably the most clear view of what is really going on in Iraq. I just wish our own media had such reporters.