A great piece from the inimitable Mr Fisk.

A

Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 5:36 AM
Subject: Robert Fisk

Defeat is victory. Death is life

By Robert Fisk

02/26/06 "The Independent" -- -- Everyone in the Middle East rewrites
history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully,
dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as
victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant
American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British
and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about
military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands
of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and
Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of
thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.

Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's
bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the
cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the
burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the
bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt
and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in
her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she
denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in
the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of
the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".

As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very
bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the
kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East
states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As
Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the
boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in
self-determination only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies
are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other
cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd
might have added.

Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the
"shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans
in the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North
Africa to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them
President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest
secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the
best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to
hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until
they have almost drowned.

The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the
Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a
few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The
Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their
nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their
naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work,
they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap
until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special
department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld
wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before
being dispatched by an execution squad.

All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the
Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the
United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves
political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation.
And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in
counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to
learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example,
which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than
America's thugs.

Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the
Pentagon's system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes
- "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his
fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of
the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the
Abu Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column
inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at
Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation
associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves,
which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."

Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime,
especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to
Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu
Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad,
grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and
mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of
Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.

With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems,
witness George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington
in his Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about
defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ...
Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if
the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors
will be equal to the tasks ahead."

And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental
catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war".
Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as
an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has
nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each
other's mosques? They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a
non-sectarian government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the
get-out line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.

Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against
British rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's
just sit back and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle
East. People are enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only
the future. And the future for the people of the Middle East is
becoming darker and bloodier by the day. I guess it just depends
whether "Jove" is up to his job when all that bright sunlight streams
in and lights his face.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited








------ End of Forwarded Message