Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt.

On this ninth anniversary of that dreadful day, Robert Fisk notes the irony of Palin and Gingrich objecting to the building of a mosque in lower Manhattan. They are arguing, "as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West."

He is right, of course. It is our secularism which they abhor, rather than our religiosity.

But both sides have been quick to bring God into the equation, arguing that they are fighting on His side.

And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow of itself", as he told me in 1997 – and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed – and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror") pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that, and God the other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'." And that was just the First World War...

Just five years ago – on the fourth anniversary of the twin towers/Pentagon/Pennsylvania attacks – a schoolgirl asked me at a lecture in a Belfast church whether the Middle East would benefit from more religion. No – less religion! – I howled back. God is good for contemplation, not for war.

Bin Laden sits in his cave 100% sure that he is carrying out the work of God, just as Palin is convinced that she is doing the same. And Pastor Terry Jones awaits His signal on whether or not he should burn the Qur'an.

What did God ever do to deserve so many idiots to be the interpreters of His wishes?

How, nine years after 9-11, do we end up listening to Palin and Gingrich bloviating about a mosque in lower Manhattan, yet ignore what all of this is actually about?

And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America". But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: "The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians."

The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine". We may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims supposedly "hate us for what we are" or "hate our democracy" (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) – but this great conflict lies at the heart of the "war on terror".

To point that out, of course, is almost heresy. It is the link which one is not allowed to make.

Nine years after 9-11, nine years in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and maimed, it is still considered bad form to point out any link between the events of that day and Israel's colonial mission to steal Palestinian land.

It is ironic in the extreme that the United States, the country which recognised Britain's colonialism as the evil which it was, now finds itself the world's greatest supporter of this planet's last colonial project.

And it's not as if bin Laden has hidden his motivations:

"The reason for our dispute with you is your support for your ally Israel, occupying our land in Palestine."

And yet, as Obama seeks to bring a final reconciliation between both Israel and Palestine - the one thing which even Tony Blair admitted might do more than anything else to bring this madness to an end - we see American politicians lining up to insist that Obama is being "counter productive" and insisting that he must seek peace, but seek peace only "on Israel's terms."

Nine years on, we have learnt nothing.

Click here for Fisk's article.

Tags: Robert Fisk, 9-11, Israel, Palestine

Robert Fisk: A historic day for Iraq – but not in the way the British want to believe.

I really like Robert Fisk. I don't always agree with him, but I love the fact that he writes from his heart and isn't frightened to demand that we see the present through the prism of the past. "Those who ignore history are destined to repeat it" and all that stuff.

So, as the British finally leave Iraq, it's well worth looking at what Fisk has to say on this day of all days.

One hundred and seventy-nine dead soldiers. For what? 179,000 dead Iraqis? Or is the real figure closer to a million? We don't know. And we don't care. We never cared about the Iraqis. That's why we don't know the figure. That's why we left Basra yesterday.

I remember going to the famous Basra air base to ask how a poor Iraqi boy, a hotel receptionist called Bahr Moussa, had died. He was kicked to death in British military custody. His father was an Iraqi policeman. I talked to him in the company of a young Muslim woman. The British public relations man at the airport was laughing. "I don't believe this," my Muslim companion said. "He doesn't care." She did. So did I. I had reported from Northern Ireland. I had heard this laughter before. Which is why yesterday's departure should have been called the Day of Bahr Moussa. Yesterday, his country was set free from his murderer. At last.

History is a hard taskmaster. In my library, I have an original copy of General Angus Maude's statement to the people of Baghdad – $2,000, it cost me, at a telephone auction a few days before we invaded Iraq in 2003, but it is worth every cent. "Our military operations have as their object," Maude announced, "the defeat of the enemy... our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." And so it goes on. Maude, I should add, expired shortly afterwards because he declined to boil his milk in Baghdad and died of cholera.

One of the things which used to gall me the most in the days after the invasion was the right wing claim that we were "liberators" and the pretence that they gave a shit about the Iraqi people.

In truth these people were not the ones who complained about the sanctions which killed over half a million Iraqi babies, that was us old lefties; so it was hard to listen to right wing blowhards pretending that they had the best wishes of the Iraqi people in their hearts, especially as they adamantly refused to count how many of them they had to kill in order to bring about this "liberation".

And one only had to look at how much effort George W Bush was putting in to passing the Iraq Oil laws to suspect that this was, perhaps, much more important to the Bush administration than any "liberation" of the Iraqi people. He failed, of course, in his endeavor to guarantee US oil companies a 25 year contract to develop Iraqi oil, which only makes the entire invasion more pointless than ever. They didn't even manage to steal the bloody oil and yet still millions are displaced, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead, as are 179 of our own troops.

But all of this could have been foreseen. Fisk reminds us of another invasion of Iraq in another time:

There followed a familiar story. The British occupation force was opposed by an Iraqi resistance – "terrorists", of course – and the British destroyed a town called Fallujah and demanded the surrender of a Shiite cleric and British intelligence in Baghdad claimed that "terrorists" were crossing the border from Syria, and Lloyd George – the Blair-Brown of his age – then stood up in the House of Commons and said that there would be "anarchy" in Iraq if British troops left. Oh dear.

So let us turn at last to T E Lawrence. Yes, Lawrence of Arabia. In The Sunday Times on 22 August 1920, he wrote of Iraq that the people of England "had been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information... Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows."

We were lied into this war for no greater reason than Tony Blair feared allowing the Tories to form as close a relationship to Bush as he had enjoyed with Clinton. To prevent this he glued himself to Bush's side, leaving no room for the Tories and identifying himself - and our country - as the Yin to Bush's Yang.

As we finally take leave of this place perhaps now we can, at last, have the inquiry into the rational behind this conflict and we can finally put people under oath and ask them what they were thinking of.

Blair and others have always insisted that they acted "in good faith", with Blair insisting that, if we saw what was passing across his desk, we would all reach a similar conclusion.

I have to admit that I have always had great difficulty with that claim. I never believed that Blair saw evidence and then decided to go to war. I have always thought the opposite; that Blair decided to go to war and then set out to find the evidence which would justify that war.

That was what led to the dodgy dossier, and that was what led him to ignore every piece of evidence which did not back his assertion that war was necessary.

Only an inquiry - in which witnesses are required to speak under oath - will ever give us the answers to the myriad of questions which we have.

Did the Attorney General change his mind on the legality of the war? When did Blair give his word to Bush that we would be by his side no matter what? Was the evidence justifying the war "cherry-picked" as many of us believe?

And, of course, we will hear cries that, "it was all a long time ago" and that people, "were panicked in the wake of 9-11" and all other kinds of justifications, but we are not to blame for the fact that it is six years after the invasion before any investigation can take place. We must never forget that this situation exists because two Labour PM's insisted that this must be the case.

Blair and the others must now be held to account for what they did. It is time for answers.

Click title for Fisk's article.

Tags: Blair, Bush, Brown, Iraq war, Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk: They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf

Fisk touches on the same things that I thought of when I heard Bush's comments about Bhutto's assassination: How quickly he was trying to steer the agenda. It's well worth reading.

By Robert Fisk.

Weird, isn't it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People's Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were "extremists" and "terrorists".

Well, you can't dispute that. But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa'ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy – and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr – it's not surprising that the "good-versus-evil" donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight – which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.

Only a few days ago – in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year – Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: "Daughter of the West".

In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi. Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister – and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir's appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir's murder, the report continues: "The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated – a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister's brother had been taken at a very high level."

When Murtaza's 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested – rather than her father's killers – she says Benazir told her: "Look, you're very young. You don't understand things."

Or so Tariq Ali's exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan's ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence. This vast institution – corrupt, venal and brutal – works for Musharraf.

But it also worked – and still works – for the Taliban.

It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America's enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the " extremists" and "terrorists" who so oppress George Bush.

And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander's office. Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI's web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.

But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was "looking forward" to talking to his old friend Musharraf.

Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance – a certain Mr Khan – who supplied all Pakistan's nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let's not bring that bit of the "axis of evil" into this.

So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those " extremists" and "terrorists", not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir's assassination. It doesn't, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.

So let's run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman's notebook before he became the top cop in London.

Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan?

Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir's supporters this month?

Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month?

Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who declared martial law this month?

Answer General Musharraf.

Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?

Er. Yes. Well quite.

You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a "murderer" were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

Click title for source.

Tags: Robert Fisk, Benazir Bhutto, George W Bush, Musharraf, assassination, Pakistan

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq

Nice to see Fisk return to blazing form.

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour..."

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, the Turks "would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available."

Now who does that remind you of? The "fortified post every four square miles" is the ghostly future echo of George W Bush's absurd "surge". The Americans need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill will of the Iraqi people, and they have only 150,000 available. Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of "war lite" is responsible for that. Yet still these rascals get away with it.

Hands up those readers who know that Canada's Defence Minister, Gordon O'Connor, actually sent a letter to Rumsfeld two days before his departure in disgrace from the Pentagon, praising this disreputable man's "leadership". Yes, O'Connor wanted "to take this opportunity to congratulate you on your many achievements (sic) as Secretary of Defence, and to recognise the significant contribution you have made in the fight against terrorism". The world, gushed the ridiculous O'Connor, had benefited from Rumsfeld's "leadership in addressing the complex issues in play".

O'Connor tried to shrug off this grovelling note, acquired through the Canadian Access to Information Act, by claiming he merely wanted to thank Rumsfeld for the use of US medical facilities in Germany to ferry wounded Canadian soldiers home from Afghanistan. But he made no mention of this in his preposterous letter. O'Connor, it seems, is just another of the world's illusionists who believe they can ignore the facts - and laud fools - by stating the opposite of the truth. Bush, of course, is among the worst of these meretricious creatures. So is the late Tony Blair.

Oh, how we miss Lawrence. "The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern (guerrilla) commander," he wrote 78 years ago, accurately predicting al-Qa'ida's modern-day use of the internet. For insurgents, "battles were a mistake ... Napoleon had spoken in angry reaction against the excessive finesse of the 18th century, when men almost forgot that war gave licence to murder".

True, the First World War Arab Revolt was not identical to today's Iraqi insurgency. In 1917, the Turks had manpower but insufficient weapons. Today the Americans have the weapons but insufficient men. But listen to Lawrence again.

"Rebellion must have an unassailable base ...

In the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.

"It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic ... Granted mobility, security ... time, and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

Has the US General David Petraeus read this? Has Bush? Have any of the tired American columnists whose anti-Arab bias is wobbling close to racism, bothered to study this wisdom? I remember how Daniel Pipes - one of the great illusionists of modern American journalism - announced in the summer of 2003 that what the Iraqis needed was (no smirking here, please), a "democratically minded strongman".

They had already had one, of course, our old chum Saddam Hussein, whom we did indeed call a "strongman" when he was our friend and when he was busy using our gas against Iran. And I do wonder whether Bush - defeated, as he is, in Iraq - may not soon sanction an Iraqi military coup d'état to overthrow the ridiculous Maliki "Green Zone" government in Baghdad. Well, as one of my favourite expressions goes, we'll see.

But wait, Pipes is at it again. The director of the "Middle East Forum" has been writing in Canada's National Post about "Palestine". His piece is filled with the usual bile. Palestinian anarchy had "spewed forth" warlords. Arafat was an "evil" figure. Israeli withdrawal from Gaza had deprived Palestinians of the one "stabilising element" in the region. Phew! "Palestinianism" (whatever that is) is "superficial". Palestinian "victimisation" is a "supreme myth of modern politics". Gaza is now an "[Islamist] beachhead at the heart of the Middle East from which to infiltrate Egypt, Israel and the West Bank".

One of these days, Pipes concludes, "maybe the idiot savant 'peace processors' will note the trail of disasters their handiwork has achieved". He notes with approval that "Ehud Barak, Israel's brand new Defence Minister, reportedly plans to attack Hamas within weeks" and condemns the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, for buoying Mahmoud Abbas' "corrupt and irredentist Fatah".

So we are going to have yet another war in the Middle East, this time against Hamas - democratically elected, of course, but only as a result of what Pipes calls "the Bush administration's heedless rush to Palestinian elections"? It's good to see that the late Tony Blair is already being dubbed a "savant". But shouldn't Pipes, too, read Lawrence? For insurgency is a more powerful "vapour" than that which comes from the mouths of illusionists.

People like Pipes only emphasise what I have always believed. There are many pro-Israelis who have no interest in peace and only pretend to do so to in order to pacify their American sponsors. What these buggers want is land, nothing else.

Click title for source.

Tags: Robert Fisk, Iraq war, TE Lawrence, warnings, insurgency

Robert Fisk: Caught in the deadly web of the internet

This is beyond belief. It reminds me of the latest twist in the story of the politicisation of the American Justice Department, when applicants were said to be refused interviews on the grounds of "inappropriate information about them on the internet."

By Robert Fisk:

Could it possibly be that the security men who guard the frontiers of North America are supporting Holocaust denial? Alas, it's true. Here's the story.

Taner Akcam is the distinguished Turkish scholar at the University of Minnesota who, with immense courage, proved the facts of the Armenian genocide - the deliberate mass murder of up to a million and a half Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish authorities in 1915 - from Turkish documents and archives. His book A Shameful Act was published to great critical acclaim in Britain and the United States.

He is now, needless to say, being threatened with legal action in Turkey under the infamous Law 301 - which makes a crime of insulting "Turkishness" - but it's probably par for the course for a man who was granted political asylum in Germany after receiving an eight-year prison sentence in his own country for articles he had written in a student journal; Amnesty International had already named him a prisoner of conscience.

But Mr Akcam has now become a different kind of prisoner: an inmate of the internet hate machine, the circle of hell in which any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent without any recourse to the law, to libel lawyers or to common decency. The Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was misquoted on the internet for allegedly claiming that Turkish blood was "poisonous"; this total lie - Dink never said such a thing - prompted a young man to murder him in an Istanbul street.

But Taner Akcam's experience is potentially far more serious for all of us. As he wrote in a letter to me this month, "Additional to the criminal investigation (law 301) in Turkey, there is a hate campaign going on here in the USA, as a result of which I cannot travel internationally any more... My recent detention at the Montreal airport - apparently on the basis of anonymous insertions in my Wikipedia biography - signals a disturbing new phase in a Turkish campaign of intimidation that has intensified since the November 2006 publication of my book."

Akcam was travelling to lecture in Montreal and took the Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis on 16 February this year. The Canadian immigration officer, Akcam says, was "courteous" - but promptly detained him at Montreal's Trudeau airport. Even odder, the Canadian immigration officer asked him why he needed to be detained. Akcam tells me he gave the man a brief history of the genocide and of the campaign of hatred against him in the US by Turkish groups "controlled by ... Turkish diplomats" who "spread propaganda stating that I am a member of a terrorist organisation".

All this went on for four hours while the immigration officer took notes and made phone calls to his bosses. Akcam was given a one-week visa and the Canadian officer showed him - at Akcam's insistence - a piece of paper which was the obvious reason for his temporary detention.

"I recognised the page at once," Akcam says. "The photo was a still from a 2005 documentary on the Armenian genocide... The still photo and the text beneath it comprised my biography in the English language edition of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anyone in the world can modify at any time. For the last year ... my Wikipedia biography has been persistently vandalised by anonymous 'contributors' intent on labelling me as a terrorist. The same allegations has been repeatedly scrawled, like gangland graffiti, as 'customer reviews' of my books at Amazon."

Akcam was released, but his reflections on this very disturbing incident are worth recording. "It was unlikely, to say the least, that a Canadian immigration officer found out that I was coming to Montreal, took the sole initiative to research my identity on the internet, discovered the archived version of my Wikipedia biography, printed it out on 16 February, and showed it to me - voilà! - as a result."

But this was not the end. Prior to his Canadian visit, two Turkish-American websites had been hinting that Akcam's "terrorist activities" should be of interest to American immigration authorities. And sure enough, Akcam was detained yet again - for another hour - by US Homeland Security officers at Montreal airport before boarding his flight at Montreal for Minnesota two days later.

On this occasion, he says that the American officer - US Homeland Security operates at the Canadian airport - gave him a warning: "Mr Akcam, if you don't retain an attorney and correct this issue, every entry and exit from the country is going to be problematic. We recommend that you do not travel in the meantime and that you try to get this information removed from your customs dossier."

So let's get this clear. US and Canadian officials now appear to be detaining the innocent on the grounds of hate postings on the internet. And it is the innocent - guilty until proved otherwise, I suppose - who must now pay lawyers to protect them from Homeland Security and the internet. But as Akcam says, there is nothing he can do.

"Allegations against me, posted by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Turkish Forum and 'Tall Armenia Tale' (a Holocaust denial website) have been copy-pasted and recycled through innumerable websites and e-groups ever since I arrived in America. By now, my name in close proximity to the English word 'terrorist' turns up in well over 10,000 web pages."

I'm not surprised. There is no end to the internet's circle of hate. What does shock me, however, is that the men and women chosen to guard their nations against Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida are reading this dirt and are prepared to detain an honourable scholar such as Taner Akcam on the basis of it.

I don't think the immigration lads are to blame. I once remember listening to a Canadian official at Toronto airport carefully explaining to a Palestinian visitor that he was not required to tell any police officer about his religion or personal beliefs, that he should feel safe in Canada.

No, it's their bosses in Ottawa and Washington I wonder about. Put very simply, how much smut are the US and Canadian immigration authorities taking off the internet? And how much of it is now going to be flung at us when we queue at airports to go about our lawful business?

Click title for source.

Tags: Robert Fisk, Taner Akcam, Turkey, Armenian Holocaust, immigration, border control

Fear and loathing on an American campus

By Robert Fisk:

On the night of 11 September 2001, Al Dershowitz of Harvard law school exploded in anger. Robert Fisk, he roared over Irish radio, was a dangerous man. I was "pro-terrorist". I was "anti-American" and that, Dershowitz announced to the people of County Mayo, "is the same as anti-Semitic".

Of course I had dared to ask the "Why" question; Why had 19 Arabs flown aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania? Take any crime on the streets of London and the first thing Scotland Yard does is look for a motive. But when we had international crimes against humanity on the scale of New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the first thing we were not allowed to do was look for a motive. How very odd. The 19 murderers came from a place called the Middle East. Was there a problem out there?

But Al would have none of this. And I got the message. To ask the "Why" question made me a Nazi. Which is why I subsequently received a flood of mail, much of it from Denver - what has Denver got against me? - telling me that my mother was Adolf Eichmann's daughter. Thanks, Al. I'm sure you didn't dream of the hate mail your silly diatribe will inspire. I guess Irish radio host Eamon Dunphy did. He pulled the plug on Al.

I'm recalling all this nonsense because Al has been back at work attacking his old nemesis, Norm Finkelstein, who has just applied for tenure at DePaul University in the US where he is an assistant professor of politics. Norm's department has supported him but Al has bombarded faculty members with a blistering attack on Norm and all his works.

So let me just explain what these works are. Finkelstein, who is Jewish and the son of Holocaust survivors, has published a number of works highly critical of Israel's occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and the use Israeli supporters make of the Holocaust of six million Jews to suppress criticism of Israel's policies. He has accused Dershowitz of plagiarising portions of his 2003 book The Case for Israel. Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry, earned Dershowitz's continued fury.

Now, I've known Norm for years and he is a tough, no-holds-barred polemicist, angry against all the traditional supporters of Israel, especially those who turn a blind eye to torture. Personally, I find Norm's arguments sometimes a little overwrought. In radio discussions, his voice will take on a slightly whingeing tone that must infuriate his antagonists.

But Al is clearly trying to destroy Norm's career, adding that the "dossier" he sent to DePaul academics - we remember that word "dossier" rather too well in Britain and, I should add, Al has absolutely no connection to DePaul University - contains details of "Norman Finkelstein's ... outright lies, misquotations and distortion".

It will be a disgrace, says Al, for DePaul to give tenure to Norm. "His scholarship is no more than ad hominem attacks on his ideological enemies." As if this is not enough, Al - who is also Jewish - takes a crack at philosopher and linguistic academic Noam Chomsky who has supported Norm and whom Al refers to as "the high priest of the radical anti-Israeli left".

Enough, I hear readers shout. I agree. But Norm's politics department give him top marks for scholarship and says he "offers a detailed argument that suggests that Dershowitz plagiarised or inappropriately appropriated large sections of others work in The Case for Israel". Norm has a "substantial and serious record of scholarly production and achievement" and has lectured at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Georgetown and Northwestern Universities.

So far so good. But now up pops "Chuck" Suchar, the dean of DePaul's College of Liberal (sic) Arts and Sciences, with an extraordinary recommendation that Norm should not be granted tenure. While acknowledging that "he is a skilled teacher" with "consistently high course evaluations," Chuck has decided "that a considerable amount of [his work] is inconsistent with DePaul's Vincentian values, most particularly our institutional commitment to respect the dignity of the individual and to respect the rights of others to hold an express different intellectual positions". Norm's books, according to Chuck, "border on character assassination and ... embody a strategy clearly aimed at destroying the reputation of many who oppose his views".

Now I have to say that scholars who read this column will be interested to know of Chuck's own work. I gather it has absolutely nothing to do with the Middle East, though I'm sure his study of Gentrification and Urban Change: Research in Urban Society (1992) had American readers queuing round the block of their major bookstores in search of first editions. All I do ask is how a college dean could involve himself in the same kind of ad hominem attacks against one of his own colleagues that he has accused that same colleague of being guilty of.

I loved too, that bit about "Vincentian values". That really does warrant a chortle or two. St Vincent de Paul - the real de Paul who lived from 1581 to 1660, not the de Paul of Chuck's soft imagination - was a no nonsense theologian who was captured by Muslim Turkish pirates and taken to Tunis as a slave. Here, however, he argued his religious values so well that he converted his owner to Christianity and earned his freedom. His charitable organisations - he also created a home for foundlings in Paris - became a legend which Chuck Suchar simply dishonours.

All over the United States, however, Norm's academic chums have been condemning Suchar's tomfoolery; even in Beirut, where Norm has lectured, academics of the American University have insisted that he be granted tenure in his department, Arabs supporting a Jewish professor and son of Holocaust survivors.

Of course, I grant that all this is a little heavy for the real world and I do have a secret desire to take Norm, Chuck and Al and bang their bloody heads together. But what is happening at DePaul University is a very serious matter in the anodyne, frightened academic world that now exists in the US. Norm's moment of truth comes up in May. As they say watch this space.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that I support Finkelstein in this. Please consider visiting the Norman G. Finkelstein Solidarity Campaign and adding your name to the letter of support. Click here to be taken there.

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Tags: Robert Fisk, Norman Finkelstein, Dershowitz, DePaul University, The Case for Israel, The Holocaust Industry

Robert Fisk: The war of humiliation

Fisk points out one thing very well. Most of us in Britain have almost completely forgotten our country's past regarding Iran, which means we see this incident in isolation. You can bet that the Iranians have not forgotten our past interventions, which is why the more we fulminate, they more they enjoy seeing little Satan powerless.

And how much truth is there to Iranian claims that we are trying to incite the Arabs of Iran's Khuzestan province to rise up against the regime? One gets the distinct feeling that there is a lot going on just beneath the surface of all this that we are not being told about.

By Robert Fisk:

Our Marines are hostages. Two more were shown on Iranian TV. Petrol bombs burst behind the walls of the British embassy in Tehran. But it's definitely not the war on terror. It's the war of humiliation. The humiliation of Britain, the humiliation of Tony Blair, of the British military, of George Bush and the whole Iraqi shooting match. And the master of humiliation - even if Tony Blair doesn't realise it - is Iran, a nation which feels itself forever humiliated by the West.

Oh how pleased the Iranians must have been to hear Messers Blair and Bush shout for the "immediate" release of the luckless 15 - this Blair-Bush insistence has assuredly locked them up for weeks - because it is a demand that can be so easily ignored. And will be.

"Inexcusable behaviour," roared Bush on Saturday - and the Iranians loved it. The Iranian Minister meanwhile waited for a change in Britain's "behaviour".

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-denying President from hell, calls Blair "arrogant and selfish" - and so say all of us, by the way - after refusing to play to the crowd at the United Nations. They'll release "serviceperson" Faye Turney. Then they won't release her.

Veiled Faye with her cigarette and her backcloth of cheaply flowered curtains, producing those preposterous letters of cloying friendship towards the "Iranian people" while abjectly apologising for the British snoop into Iranian waters - written, I strongly suspect, by the lads from the Ministry of Islamic Guidance - is the star of the Iranian show.

Back in 1980, when Tehran staged its much more ambitious takeover of the US embassy, the star was a blubbering marine - a certain Sergeant Ladell Maples - who was induced to express his appreciation for Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution just before America's prime-time television news.

The Iranians, you see, understand the West. And they understand it much better than we understand - or bother to understand - Iran.

We have forgotten the years of Allied occupation in the Second World War, the deposition of the pro-German Shah and then, humiliation of humiliations, the overthrow of the democratic Prime Minister, Mohamed Mossadeq, engineered by the CIA's Allen Dulles and an eccentric British scholar of Greek, an ex-Special Operations Executive operative - "Monty" Woodhouse by name - with a few guns and a pile of dollars. And the Iranians remember well, how back came the Shah of Iran, our "policeman" in the Gulf, the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, descendant of Cyrus the Great, to stretch out the young Iranian men and women of the resistance on the toasting racks of their Savak torturers.

Nor have the Iranians any real intention of putting Faye and her chums in front of any court. They'd far rather have the Brits chomping through their "nan" bread on Sky TV, courtesy, of course, of Tehran's Arabic "Al-Alam" channel. And did you notice that little "exclusive" label in the top left-hand corner of the screen when Rifleman Nathan Summers decided to go public?

How the Iranians love mimicking their oppressors. When the gold braid of the Ministry of Defence produce a complexity of maps to prove our boys were in Iraqi waters, the Iranians produce a humble coastguard with a Minotaur map to show that they were in the Iranian briney.

The Union Jack still flies on their rubber boat - but the Iranian banner floats above it. No one has yet explained, I notice, why our boys and girls in blue carry rifles on their sailing adventures if their duty is to hand them over when attacked. Are we actually trying to supply the Revolutionary Guards with more weapons?

But behind all this lie some dark questions - with, I fear, some still unknown but dark answers. The Iranian security services are convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the Arabs of Iran's Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5. Outrageous, they said. Inexcusable.

The Brits made no comment, even when the Iranians hanged a man accused of the killings from a crane; he had, they said, been working for London.

Are the SAS in south-western Iran, just as the British claim the Iranians are in south-eastern Iraq, harassing the boys in Basra with new-fangled bombs? Will the Americans release the five Iranians issuing visas to Kurds in Arbil whom they locked up a couple of months ago. No, says Bush. Well, we shall see.

There is a lot we do not know - or care to know - about all this. In the meantime, however, it will be left to Blair, Bush and the merchants of the SKY-BBC-CNN-FOX-CBS-NBC-ABC axis of shlock-and-awe to play the Iranian game. Will they put Faye on trial? Will our boys be threatened with execution? Answer: no, but be sure we'll soon be told by the Iranians that they are all spies. A lie, needless to say. But Blair will fulminate and Bush will roar and the Iranians will sit back and enjoy every second of it.

The Iranians died in their tens of thousands to destroy Saddam's legions. And now they watch us wringing our hands over 15 lost souls. This is a big-time movie, the cinemascope of political humiliation. And the Iranians not only know how to stage the drama. They've even written Blair's script.

And he obligingly reads it to cue.

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Tags: Iran, UK, Ahmadinejad, Blair, Bush, 15 captured sailors, Iranian waters, Iraqi waters

Robert Fisk: 27 July 1880. A date Mr Blair should look up

By Robert Fisk:

Out of the frying pan, into the historical fire. If only our leaders read history. In 1915, the British swept up from Basra, believing that the Iraqis would reward them with flowers and love, only to find themselves surrounded at Kut al-Amara, cut down by Turkish shellfire and cholera. Now we are reinforcing Nato in that tomb of the British Army, Afghanistan.

Hands up any soldiers who know that another of Britain's great military defeats took place in the very sands in which your colleagues are now fighting the Taliban. Yes, the Battle of Maiwand - on 27 July, 1880 - destroyed an entire British brigade, overrun by thousands of armed Afghan tribesmen, some of whom the official enquiry into the disaster would later describe as "Talibs". The Brits had been trying to secure Helmand province. Sound familiar?

Several times already in Helmand, the British have almost been overwhelmed. This has not been officially admitted, but the Ministry of Defence did make a devious allusion to this last year - it was missed by all the defence correspondents - when it announced that British troops in Helmand had been involved in the heaviest combat fighting "since the Korean War". The Afghans talk of one British unit which last year had to call in air strikes, destroying almost the entire village in which they were holding out. Otherwise, they would have been overrun.

General Burrows had no close air support on 27 July, 1880, when he found himself confronting up to 15,000 Afghan fighters at Maiwand, but he had large numbers of Egyptian troops with him and a British force in the city of Kandahar. Already, the British had cruelly suppressed a dissident Afghan army - again, sound familiar? - after the British residency had been sacked and its occupants murdered. Britain's reaction at the time was somewhat different from that followed today. Britain's army was run from imperial India where Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, urged his man in Kabul - General Roberts, later Lord Roberts of Kandahar - to crush the uprising with the utmost brutality. "Every Afghan brought to death, I shall regard as one scoundrel the less in a nest of scoundrelism." Roberts embarked on a reign of terror in Kabul, hanging almost a hundred Afghans.

The commander of the rebellious Afghans was Ayub Khan, whose brother was forced to abdicate as king after the Kabul uprising. When Ayub Khan re-emerged from the deserts of the west - he marched down from that old warlord territory of Herat towards Kandahar - the luckless General Burrows was sent to confront him. Almost a thousand British and Indian troops were to be slaughtered in the coming hours as Ayub Khan's army fired shells from at least 30 artillery pieces and then charged at them across the fields and dried-up river at Maiwand.

The official British inquiry - it was covered in red cloth and ran to 734 pages - contains many photographs of the landscape over which the battle was fought. The hills and distant mountains, of course, are identical to those that are now videotaped by "embedded" reporters in the British Army.

Outgunned and outmanoeuvred, the British found themselves facing a ruthless enemy. Colonel Mainwaring of the 30th Bombay Infantry wrote a chilling report for the authorities in Delhi. "The whole of the ground... was covered with swarms of 'ghazis' and banner-men. The 'ghazis' were actually in the ranks of the Grenadiers, pulling the men out and hacking them down with their swords."The wreckage of the British Army retreated all the way to Kandahar where they were besieged, until rescued by General Roberts himself, whose famous march of 10,000 troops from Kandahar - a distance of 300 miles covered in just 20 days - is now military legend.

History, it seems, haunts all our adventures in the Middle East. Who would have believed that after the British reached Baghdad in a 1917 invasion, they would face an insurgency which, in speed and ruthlessness, was an almost exact predecessor to the rebellion which the British and Americans would confront from 2003? Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, stood up in the House of Commons to insist that the British occupation force had to stay in Iraq. Otherwise, he warned, the country would be plunged into civil war. Sound familiar?

One of the greatest defeats of British forces anywhere in the world had occurred more than four decades before Maiwand, on the Kabul Gorge in 1842, when an entire British army was wiped out by Afghan fighters in the snow. The sole survivor, the famous Doctor Brydon, managed to out-horse two armed Afghans and ride into the British compound in Jalalabad.

So now the British are to reinforce Afghanistan yet again. Flying by Chinook to Kandahar will not take as long as General Roberts's 20 days. British soldiers are unlikely even to enter Kandahar's central square. But if they do, they might care to look at the few ancient cannon on the main roundabout: all that is left of General Roberts's artillery.

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Tags: Fisk, Afghanistan, UK, British military history

Robert Fisk: Iraqi insurgents offer peace in return for US concessions

By Robert Fisk.

For the first time, one of Iraq's principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.

Al-Jeelani's group, which also calls itself the "20th Revolution Brigades'', is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.

Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution - almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington's principal enemies in the Iraqi war.

"Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues," al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. "Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances."

Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.

Then come the conditions:

* The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as "proof of goodwill".

* Recognition "of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people".

* An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.

* The negotiations to take place in public.

* The resistance "must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades".

* The US to be represented by its ambassador in Iraq and the most senior commander.

It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as "terrorists" for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the "resistance" represented "the will of the Iraqi people" then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless.

Indeed, the insurgent leader specifically calls for the "dissolution of the present government and the revoking of the spurious elections and the constitution..."

He also insists that all agreements previously entered into by Iraqi authorities or US forces should be declared null and void.

But there are other points which show that considerable discussion must have gone on within the insurgency movement - possibly involving the group's rival, the Iraqi Islamic Army.

They call, for example, for the disbandment of militias and the outlawing of militia organisations - something the US government has been urging the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do for months.

The terms also include the legalisation of the old Iraqi army, an "Anglo-American commitment to rebuild Iraq and reconstruct all war damage" - something the occupying powers claim they have been trying to do for a long time - and integrating "resistance fighters" into the recomposed army.

Al-Jeelani described President George Bush's new plans for countering the insurgents as "political chicanery" and added that "on the field of battle, we do not believe that the Americans are able to diminish the capability of the resistance fighters to continue the struggle to liberate Iraq from occupation ...

"The resistance groups are not committing crimes to be granted a pardon by America, we are not looking for pretexts to cease our jihad... we fight for a divine aim and one of our rights is the liberation and independence of our land of Iraq."

There will, the group says, be no negotiations with Mr Maliki's government because they consider it "complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by militias, the security apparatus and death squads". But they do call for the unity of Iraq and say they "do not recognise the divisions among the Iraqi people".

It is not difficult to guess any American response to those proposals. But FLN [National Liberation Front] contacts with France during the 1954-62 war of independence by Algeria began with such a series of demands - equally impossible to meet but which were eventually developed into real proposals for a French withdrawal.

What is unclear, of course, is the degree to which al-Jeelani's statement represents the collective ideas of the Sunni insurgents. And, ominously, no mention is made of al-Qa'ida.

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tag: Iraq, withdrawal, pull-out, ceasefire, al Qaeda, Shia, Sunnis, surge and accelerate

Robert Fisk: Opposition demonstrations turn Beirut into a violent sectarian battleground

So the worst nightmare years may have begun again. There were thousands of them - Christians fighting Christians north of Beirut, Sunni and Shia Muslims in the capital, a rain of stones, shrieks of hatred and occasionally even gunfire - that turned Lebanon into a sectarian battleground yesterday.

At the corner of a street off Corniche al-Mazraa, I watched what historians may one day claim was the first day of Lebanon's new civil war, huge mobs of young men, supporters and opponents of Fouad Siniora's government screaming abuse and throwing tens of thousands of rocks at each other as a wounded Lebanese soldier sat next to me and wept.

For the army of this tragic country is now the thin red line ­ some actually were wearing red berets ­ that stands between a future for Lebanon and the folly of civil conflict.

After 31 years in this country, I never truly believed I would see again what I witnessed on the streets of Beirut yesterday, thousands of Shia and Sunni Muslims, the first supporting the Hizbollah, the second the government once led by the murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, hurling stones and hunks of metal at each other. They crashed down around us, smashing the road signs, the advertisement hoardings, the windows of the bank against which seven Lebanese soldiers and I were cowering. Again and again, the soldiers ran into the roadway to try ­ with a desperation all of them understood, and they were brave men ­ to drag the youths from each other. Some of the Shia men, Amal members, loyal (heaven spare us) to the Speaker of Parliament, wore hoods and black face masks, most wielding big wooden clubs.

Their predecessors ­ perhaps their fathers ­ were dressed like this 31 years ago when they fought in these same streets, executioners-to-be, all confident in the integrity of their cause. Perhaps they were even wearing the same hoods. Some of the troops fired into the air; they shouted at the stone throwers. "For God's love, stop," one young soldier screamed. "Please, please."

But the crowds would not listen. They shrieked "animals" at each other and obscenities and on one side of the street they produced pictures of the Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and of Michel Aoun, the Christian ex-general who wants to be president and is Nasrallah's ally, and on the other side of the street, the Sunnis produced a portrait of Saddam Hussein. Thus did the cancer of Iraq spread to Lebanon yesterday. It was a day of shame.

Across Lebanon came reports of dying men ­ two according to one, six according to another, and at least 60 wounded ­ and the country's leaders were last night writing their narrative of Lebanon's modern history with predictable speed. Nasrallah, hero of last summer's war with Israel ­ or so he likes to think ­ demanding the resignation of the government while Siniora and his colleagues, trapped in the old Turkish "serail" downtown, called this an attempted coup d'état by the forces of Syria and Iran.

It is not that simple. The Shias are the downtrodden, the poor, the dispossessed, those who have always been ignored by the dons and patriarchs of the Lebanese government ­ for in one sense this is also a social revolution ­ and on the other were the Sunni population so beloved of Hariri and the Druze and the Christians still loyal to the Lebanese forces who were Israel's allies in 1982 and who massacred the Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Chatila, as well as a majority of Lebanese innocents who voted Siniora's government into power.

Thus north of Beirut, Aoun's Christian forces tried to block the roads and were set on by Samir Geagea's thugs. In Tripoli, supporters of Hariri's son Saad were fighting Alawite supporters of Syria. In Hazmiyeh, it was Shias versus Christians and in Corniche al-Mazraa, it was Shias against Sunnis. No, as Nasrallah would be the first to say, this is not necessarily a civil war ­ and it has to be said that the Hizbollah's tens of thousands of fighters were by far the most disciplined men on the streets of Beirut ­ but it was he who called a general strike yesterday on the eve of the Paris economic conference that is supposed to save Lebanon's economy and who blocked all the main roads of Lebanon with burning tyres and concrete blocks and pipes and rubble from last summer's war.

My driver, Abed, and I tried to reach the airport but vast swaths of black smoke poured from the burning rubber on all the approach roads. I walked three miles to the terminal, only to find the Hizbollah protecting both the airport and the Lebanese troops who were guarding it. When we turned round, Abed tried to drive over the burning tyres but trapped one beneath our car, the flames curling up the sides of the bodywork, desperately reversing to clear our wheels as Hizbollah men screamed abuse.

Siniora condemned it all last night, demanding an emergency session of parliament. He still plans to go to the Paris summit. But how will he get to the airport? "We will not be scared," Nasrallah said yesterday. " We will not retreat ... We will not be dragged on to the streets [of civil war]." But he should have been on Corniche al-Mazraa. All across Beirut, the Hizbollah, most dressed in black trousers and shirts (for this is the holy month of Ashura, is it not?) had closed the roads, and the army stood and watched. It is a largely Shia army, for it is the Shias who are the largest community in Lebanon, but in the streets they were forced to fight. As I sat with the soldiers amid the crashing stones ­ many of the projectiles hurled into the street from the roofs of eight-storey apartment blocks ­ I watched them wilt under the pressure. One knelt down and vomited; others were almost overcome by their own tear gas, fired uselessly at the vast crowds. For these were not Belfast-sized riots or Gaza-sized demonstrations.

The mobs were there in their thousands, chorusing their hatred for those who lived across the other side of the boulevard. There were few officers. But after an hour, a Lebanese colonel ran down the street, a smartly dressed man, not even wearing a flak jacket, who walked straight into the highway between these two great waves of angry people, the stones banging off his helmet and body and legs. And the soldiers around me stood up and ran into the road to join him between these two enormous forces.

I don't like journalists who fall in love with armies. I don't like armies. But yesterday it seemed that this one man was a lonely symbol of what stood between Lebanon and chaos. I don't know his religion. His soldiers were Sunnis and Shias and Christians ­ I had checked, of course ­ all dressed in the same uniform. Could they hold together, could they remain under his command when their brothers and cousins, some of them, must have been among the crowds? They did. Some even grinned as they hurled themselves at the hooded men and youths too young to have known the last civil war, pleading and shouting for the violence to end. They won. This time. But what about today?

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Strike turns to riots as Lebanon is 'shut down' in struggle for power

tag: Lebanon, Hizbullah, Siniora,

Robert Fisk: Bush's new strategy - the march of folly

So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue...

There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.

President Bush's announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq ­ still to be referred to as the "democratically elected government" ­ march in lockstep with America's best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa'ida. It will take time ­ oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington's top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week ­ but the mission will be accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Wasn't that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. "Bring 'em on!" he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. "We haven't yet killed enough of them," their videotaped statement announced.

Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become "hell" .

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders ­ but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies ­ Moore and Wellington ­ of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision "to relaunch the machine" and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

"We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the 'On to Berlin' bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict ... For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world ...

"The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon... We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before."

But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans ­ let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis ­ already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia "insurgent strongholds" ­ as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn ­ because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be " evenhanded". This time, he said, "we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists".

But a "believable approach" is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.

"Democracy" should have been introduced at the start ­ not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America's second proconsul, did not hold elections ­ just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown "Axis of Evil", Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.

And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men's lives.

But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.

Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government ­ except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage ­ ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.

But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future.

Pat Buchanan ended his prophecy with imperishable words: "The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

tag: Bush, Iraq, Iraq war, Stay the course, Iraq Survey Group, The Baker Report, sacrifice, surge and accelerate

Robert Fisk: The whole bloody thing was obscene

By Robert Fisk:

The lynching of Saddam Hussein - for that is what we are talking about - will turn out to be one of the determining moments in the whole shameful crusade upon which the West embarked in March of 2003. Only the president-governor George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara could have devised a militia administration in Iraq so murderous and so immoral that the most ruthless mass murderer in the Middle East could end his days on the gallows as a figure of nobility, scalding his hooded killers for their lack of manhood and - in his last seconds - reminding the thug who told him to "go to hell" that the hell was now Iraq.

"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it," Malcolm reported of the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth. Or, as a good friend of mine in Ballymena said to me on the phone a few hours later, "The whole bloody thing was obscene." Quite so. On this occasion, I'll go along with the voice of Protestant Ulster.

Of course, Saddam gave his victims no trial; his enemies had no opportunity to hear the evidence against them; they were mown down into mass graves, not handed a black scarf to prevent the hangman's noose from burning their neck as it broke their spine. Justice was "done", even if a trifle cruelly. But this is not the point. Regime change was done in our name and Saddam's execution was a direct result of our crusade for a "new" Middle East. To watch a uniformed American general - despite the indiscipline of more and more US troops in Iraq - wheedling and whining at a press conference that his men were very courteous to Saddam until the very moment of handover to Muqtada al-Sadr's killers could only be appreciated with the blackest of humour.

Note how the best "our" Iraqi government's officials could do by way of reply was to order an "enquiry" to find out how mobile phones were taken into the execution room - not to identify the creatures who bawled abuse at Saddam Hussein in his last moments. How very Blairite of the al-Maliki government to search for the snitches rather than the criminals who abused their power. And somehow, they got away with it; acres of agency copy from the Green Zone reporters were expended on the Iraqi government's consternation, as if al- Maliki did not know what had transpired in the execution chamber. His own officials were present - and did nothing.

That's why the "official" videotape of the hanging was silent - and discreetly faded out - before Saddam was abused. It was cut at this point, not for reasons of good taste but because that democratically elected Iraqi government - whose election was such "great news for the people of Iraq" in the words of Lord Blair - knew all too well what the world would make of the terrible seconds that followed. Like the lies of Bush and Blair - that everything in Iraq was getting better when in fact it was getting worse - butchery was supposed to have been presented as a solemn judicial execution.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that the hanging of Saddam mimicked, in ghostly, miniature form, the manner of his own regime's bestial executions. Saddam's own hangman at Abu Ghraib, a certain Abu Widad, would also taunt his victims before pulling the trap door lever, a last cruelty before extinction. Is this where Saddam's hangmen learned their job? And just who exactly were those leather-jacketed hangmen last week, by the way? No one, it seemed, bothered to ask this salient question. Who chose them? Al-Maliki's militia chums? Or the Americans who managed the whole roadshow from the start, who so organised Saddam's trial that he was never allowed to reveal details of his friendly relations with three US administrations - and thus took the secrets of the murderous, decade-long Baghdad-Washington military alliance to his grave?

I would not ask this question were it not for the sense of profound shock I experienced when touring the Abu Ghraib prison after "Iraq's liberation" and meeting the US-appointed senior Iraqi medical officer at the jail. When his minders were distracted, he admitted to me he had also been the senior "medical officer" at Abu Ghraib when Saddam's prisoners were tortured to death there. No wonder our enemies-become-friends are turning into our enemies again.

But this is not just about Iraq. More than 35 years ago, I was being driven home from school by my Dad when his new-fangled car radio broadcast a report of the dawn hanging of a man at - I think - Wormwood Scrubs. I remember the unpleasant look of sanctity that came over my father's face when I asked him if this was right. "It's the law, Old Boy," he said, as if such cruelties were immutable to the human race. Yet this was the same father who, as a young soldier in the First World War, was threatened with court martial because he refused to command the firing party to execute an equally young Australian soldier.

Maybe only older men, sensing their failing powers, enjoy the prerogatives of execution. More than 10 years ago, the now-dead President Hrawi of Lebanon and the since-murdered prime minister Rafiq Hariri signed the death warrants of two young Muslim men. One of them had panicked during a domestic robbery north of Beirut and shot a Christian man and his sister. Hrawi - in the words of one of his top security officers at the time - "wanted to show he could hang Muslims in a Christian area". He got his way. The two men - one of whom had not even been present in the house during the robbery - were taken to their public execution beside the main Beirut-Jounieh highway, swooning with fear at the sight of their white-hooded executioners, while the Christian glitterati, heading home from night-clubs with their mini-skirted girlfriends, pulled up to watch the fun.

I suggested at the time, much to Hrawi's disgust, that this should become a permanent feature of Beirut's nightlife, that regular public hangings on the Mediterranean Corniche would bring in tens of thousands more tourists, especially from Saudi Arabia where you could catch the odd beheading only at Friday prayers.

No, it's not about the wickedness of the hanged man. Unlike the Thane of Cawdor, Saddam did not "set forth a deep repentance" on the scaffold. We merely shamed ourselves in an utterly predictable way. Either you support the death penalty - whatever the nastiness or innocence of the condemned. Or you don't. C'est tout.

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tag: Iraq, Iraq war, Saddam Hussein, execution, hanging, death penalty

Robert Fisk: He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him

How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies', equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't squeal.

By Robert Fisk:

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at Abu Ghraib.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's request.

"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"

I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.

Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."

Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic concern".

I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows - and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.

We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.

In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult."

Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".

Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

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tag: Bush, war on terror, Iraq, Iraq war, Saddam Hussein, execution, hanging, death penalty