Reading Robert Fisk & Reversal of Field (The "loony" and "creepy" Fisk eviscerated by Brad Delong)

I've been reading the Iraq War reports of Robert Fisk. There's a certain loonyness there:

"So it's a "truly remarkable achievement"... General Tommy Franks says so... the British still have not "liberated" Basra... the Iraqis... launch a scud missile from the Fao peninsula... the Americans... lose an Apache helicopter to the gun of an Iraqi peasant farmer... spend four days trying to cross the river... confronted by their first suicide bomber.... Even the "siege of Baghdad" -- a city which is 30 miles wide and might need a quarter of a million men to surround it -- is fading from the diary.... Any kind of mendacity could be used to fuel this ideological project... this is now a nationalist war against the most obvious kind of imperial power..."

"Vice President... Ramadan... talking like a Palestinian or Hizballah leader... "The US administration is going to turn the whole world into people who are prepared to die for their nations" he said. "... All they can do now is turn themselves into bombs. If the B-52 bombs can now kill 500 or more in our war, then I'm sure that some operations by our freedom fighters will be able to kill 5,000"..."

"Suicide bombers--whether they be the Shia Muslim Lebanese successfully evicting Israel's army of occupation or the Palestinians destroying Israel's sense of security--are the ultimate weapon of the Arabs. The United States first understood its power when suicide bombers struck the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, then the Marine Barracks in Beirut on October 23 the same year where 241 American servicemen died. Only when Arabs bent on a far more devastating suicide mission carried out their attacks on September 11, 2001, did Washington finally realise that there was no effective defence against such tactics..."

"The Iraqi Minister of Defence, General Sultan Hashim, gave a remarkable briefing on the war, naming... units... the 3rd Battalion of the... 27th Brigade... holding out at Suq ash-Shuyukh south of Nasariyah, the 3rd Battalion of the Third Iraqi Army... holding Basra... destroying US tanks and armour and helicopters. This was easy to dismiss until videotape of two burning US armoured personnel carriers popped up on the television screen..."

"[Y]ou couldn't help remembering... the way... Joseph Stalin encouraged his Soviet troops to fight their Nazi invaders behind the banner of the church as well as communism. For the Americans... there is no... comfort. From now onwards, every civilian, every car, every taxi, every truck driver, every newly "liberated" Iraqi becomes a potential killer..."

"The road to the front... a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For kilometre after kilometre they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets... Like the Serb Army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment... palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns... Saddam Fedayeen... kitted out with ammunition pouches and rocket-propelled grenades... not... a "degraded" Army on the verge of surrender... prepared to fight for their leadership, just as they have at Umm Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh. Or was it something else they might be fighting for? An Iraq, however dictatorial in its leadership, that simply rejects the idea of foreign conquerors?... The open road the long highway to Baghdad lined with adoring Iraqis throwing roses... is proving to be an illusion.... [T]he Americans... outside Baghdad... in military terms they might as well be in Kuwait... how badly the Americans and British have miscalculated... how long President Saddam and his army and Baath party militias can endure... Saddam?s tactics are clearly those of Stalin. Every day that passes is a day of further pain for Washington and London..."

"So where are the Americans?... Only three hours earlier, the BBC had reported claims that forward units of an American mechanised infantry division were less than 16km west of Baghdad -- and that some US troops had taken up positions on the very edge of the international airport. But I was 27km west of the city.... Alas for the Anglo-American spokesmen in Doha and the US officer quoted on the BBC, the Iraqi minister was right and the Americans were wrong... Sure, the Americans had been caught lying again..."

"Was their some kind of trap about to be sprung? Were the Americans being lured into the gentle, palm-fringed highway into town because, unknown to all of us, there was in fact some real armour hidden away in the great fields on the western banks of the Tigris?... Had the Americans found themselves miles away on the edge of the old RAF airbase at Habbaniyeh, one wondered, and confused it with the airport outside Baghdad? Had they sent a patrol up to the far side of the Saddam airport for a few minutes, just to say they'd been there? Back in 1941, a German patrol briefly captured the last tram-stop on the line west of Moscow, collecting the discarded passenger tickets as souvenirs - and then got no farther...."

"I guess it's the same old question. The Russians could hold Stalingrad because they loved Russia as much as they feared Marshal Stalin..."

[Brad Delong] Part of the weirdness is the fact that the phrase "'Marshal' Stalin" is used in an... unusual way. The Marshal Stalin to whom Fisk refers appears to be not the historical figure but the cruel-but-brilliant nationalist dictator and defender of Mother Russia whom those of us west of the Iron Curtain last saw in World War II propaganda movies. Part of it is the implicit violation of Godwin's Law: after all, if Saddam Hussein is like "Marshal" Stalin, then George W. Bush is like... fill-in-the-blank. (Hence I cannot agree with Esteemed Citizen Kevin Drum that Fisk's comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Stalin are just an insightful analogy: there's something creepy down there.) And part of it is Fisk's eagerness to transport himself to some parallel universe in which the war is going much better for Saddam Hussein than is in fact the case--in which the entire Iraqi people, in a nationalistic levee en masse, have risen to fight and repel the invader at "Umm Qasr and in Basra and Nasiriyah and Suq al-Shuyukh" and Baghdad.

But there is more. It goes beyond weirdness to true loonyness and creepyness. I think the best way to describe it is to say that Fisk appears to be wearing a mask, and that the moments that are creepyest are those when the mask seems to slip. Fisk describes an Iraqi Vice President boasting that his suicide bombers will kill Americans by the thousands as talking "like a Palestinian leader," and you realize that Fisk seems to think "Palestinian leaders"--or perhaps it is authentic Palestinian leaders--are people who call for suicide bombers to kill people by the thousands. Fisk turns into a pure propagandist for Saddam Hussein, boasting of the strength of Saddamist conventional military defenses ("For kilometre after kilometre they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets," "how, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences?") in ways that would make even an Iraqi Minister of Information blush. Fisk writes about how the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division is "outside Baghdad" but "in military terms... might as well be in Kuwait," and this falsehood makes you realize how keenly Fisk wishes that the Anglo-American military campaign so far had had no effect on the stability of the Iraqi regime. Fisk writes about "suicide bombers... Palestinians destroying Israel's sense of security... the ultimate weapon of the Arabs.... [T]here [is] no effective defence against such tactics," and you realize that Fisk seems to think that Arafat's Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign was not a hideous political blunder but somehow (perhaps because it hurt "Israel" by killing a lot of unarmed Jews?) a substantial military success.

But we all know--at least those of us who are sane know--that Palestinian victory depends not on destroying but on creating Israel's sense of security. We all know--at least those of us who are sane know--that two U.S. divisions at the gates of Baghdad are a very different thing than two U.S. divisions in Kuwait. We all know--at least those of us who are sane know--that Saddam Hussein's conventional military defenses are not that strong when compared to the Anglo-American forces they are matched against. And we all know--at least those of us who are sane know--that Palestine needs real leaders in the next generation, leaders who do not boast about how their suicide bombers will kill people by the thousands.

An extraordinarily rapid reversal-of-field in his reporting on the Iraq War from Mr. Robert Fisk. As of April 4, U.S. CentCom claims that Saddamist forces defending the approaches to Baghdad were on the point of breaking were dismissed as false propaganda--belied by the evidence of Mr. Fisk's own eyes as he drove the roads south and west of Baghdad. As of April 7, U.S. claims to have conducted a battalion-sized armored raid through the inner suburbs of Baghdad were dismissed as simply lies--proved false by Mr. Fisk's inspection of the battlefield.

As of April 8... as of April 8 the U.S. move into Baghdad has "neither humility nor honour" because General Wallace did not enter Baghdad on foot in respect for the memory of Haroun Al-Rashid.

Surely those who trusted Mr. Fisk, and who relied on his reporting to support their dismissal of the reports from CentCom in Qatar and of the embedded reporters with the 3rd Infantry Division deserve better than this. I mean, "Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia" is a catchy slogan, but is unsatisfactory as a matter of analysis. Surely Mr. Fisk's loyal readers deserve an explanation of why it is that the world we live in is much closer to the world as reported by CentCom than the world as reported yesterday and before by Mr. Fisk...

href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3350715&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue"

"...The road to the front in central Iraq is a place of fast-moving vehicles, blazing Iraqi anti-aircraft guns, tanks and trucks hidden in palm groves, a train of armoured vehicles bombed from the air and hundreds of artillery positions dug into revetments. Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad."

"How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defences? For kilometre after kilometre they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truckloads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets."

"That a Western journalist could see more of Iraq's military preparedness than many of the reporters supposedly "embedded" with British and American forces says as much for the Iraqi Government's self-confidence as it does for the need of Saddam's Government to make propaganda against its enemies... there are literally hundreds of military vehicles untouched for 100km south of the capital, carefully camouflaged to avoid air attack. Like the Serb Army in Kosovo, the Iraqis have proved masters of concealment. An innocent wheatfield fringed by tall palm trees turned out, on closer scrutiny, to be traversed with bunkers and hidden anti-aircraft guns..."

"...Then there was the American tank. It had a neat hole in its armour, almost certainly made by a 106mm gun.... There was just the name on the barrel. "Cojone EH," it said.... But what really happened here? The hole in the tank's armour was clearly caused by a small missile. But the tank's right track had been virtually torn off by a massive explosion below the vehicle that had gouged a 5ft crater in the road.... During the "probing mission" into the Baghdad suburbs, a mission that didn't actually reach the suburbs before it got ambushed by the Iraqis, "Cojone" was hit and its crew was rescued by another vehicle."

"Unwilling to leave their crippled but perhaps repairable tank to the Iraqis, the Americans ordered a US air strike to destroy it. This would account for the crater and the massive hunks of asphalt thrown up around the vehicle. Maybe the crew were not saved. Maybe they were captured, though surely the Iraqis would have told us. But there were two tactical lessons to be learnt from all this. First, the American mission, whatever its original intention, was a failure. Their tank column did not "break into" the city as the Anglo-American headquarters originally stated. Iraqi resistance turned it back. The US response -- air assaults on individual Iraqi vehicles -- was presumably committed by Apache helicopters, because each smouldering wreck had been hit by a small rocket at close range.... So in military terms -- and despite all the waffle from the Americans about the "success" of the aborted US incursion -- the Iraqis have so far held their ground in the Battle of Baghdad..."

href="http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3351376&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue"

April 8: Robert Fisk: American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour:

"...Amid the crack of gunfire and the tracer streaking across the river and the huge oil fires which the Iraqis lit to give them cover to retreat, one had to look away -- to the great river bridges further north, into the pale green waters of that most ancient of rivers -- to realise that a western army on a moral crusade had broken through to the heart of an Arab city for the first time since General Allenby marched into Jerusalem in 1918. But Allenby walked into Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ's birthplace; yesterday's American thrust into Baghdad had neither humility nor honour about it..."

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"John Malkovich once stated that Robert Fisk (along with George Galloway) ought to be shot. It becomes ever more clear why."

Yeah, and in reply, the self-pitying, self-centered, self-serving, egomaniacal Fisk wrote an article, "Why does John Malkovich want to kill me?".

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=294787

A little "opposition research" on the varmint:

The Anti-Israel Rants of Robert Fisk
June 2, 1994 by Andrea Levin. The Anti-Israel Rant
of Robert Fisk. Usual fare on cable ...

Robert Fisk's Orwellian Newspeak
... Robert Fisk's Orwellian Newspeak For more than two decades, journalist Robert Fisk
has used his correspondent card to proudly become a crusader for Arab and ...

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Press&publishing | BBC man hits back ...
... 3, 2001 BBC world affairs editor John Simpson has hit back at the Independent's Robert
Fisk over his claim that the BBC kow-towed to the Israeli government in ...

Iraq Under Siege Authors
... Robert Fisk. Robert Fisk is an award-winning reporter for The Independent newspaper
in London. As the Independent’s Middle east correspondent since 1976, he ...

Special report on the US and terrorism.
... For three days in a row the London Independent allowed its Middle East correspondent
Robert Fisk to give vent to his anger at the Americans, on its news pages ...

This is a herky-jerky put-down of Fisk's bigoted "reporting." The easiest attack on Fisk's dishonesty and incompetence comes in the final line. General Allenby did not "walk into Jerusalem on foot, in reverence for Christ's birthplace..." for the simple fact that Christ was born in Bethlehem -- as any sentient being in the West is well aware.
The trust of this article is correct. Fisk is a bigot who writes lies, and his publishers share in that dishonesty and contempt for their readers.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, now up on UPI, and FR, "I Believe" (1957-2003)

Latest book(let), "to Restore Trust in America."

But Allenby walked into Jerusalem on foot etc.

Errors such as this is are forever being mouthed & written by the liberal media. That great human encyclopedia, Chris Matthews, is forever dividing Iraq into three religions: Shi'ite, Suni and Kurds. It appears that he hasn't yet discovered that the Kurds are Suni Moslems.

"But Allenby walked into Jerusalem on foot etc."

The following sounds possible though, although I even doubt this:

"when Viscount Allenby entered Jerusalem towards the end of World War I hegot off his horse a mile away and walked in, to make it clear he did notenter the city as a king or ruler or conquerer of any kind."

http://www.pipechat.org/archives/2002/January/digest2632.html

No I don't want to see that done to even a detestable leftist crud like Fisk. A more fitting punishment for the real Baghdad Bob would for him be the guy who sits on the chair at the dunk tank...a fixture of many American carnivals. When a person throws a baseball and hit's a small round metal triggering device next to the chair, the person sitting in the chair is dropped into the water-filled tank. I'm sure the throwing style of cricket bowlers would work just as well as the style use by baseball players. But instead of a tank filled with water, I would have it filled with...well I'll leave it to your imagination.

That great human encyclopedia, Chris Matthews, is forever dividing Iraq into three religions: Shi'ite, Suni and Kurds. It appears that he hasn't yet discovered that the Kurds are Suni Moslems.

I thought the regions were Hi-test, Regular, and Nolead.

--from Jay Leno, I think.

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