Home > Iraq is Lost: Bush and Blair are Deluding Themselves

Iraq is Lost: Bush and Blair are Deluding Themselves

by Open-Publishing - Wednesday 5 January 2005
36 comments

Wars and conflicts International USA UK Robert Fisk

"The American project for democracy or whatever its real purposes were, for oil, economic expansion, Middle East fit for Israel, whatever it may have been, that project is finished. It is hopeless. It cannot succeed. The insurgency in Iraq is so great now that American troops, however enormous their technology, cannot control it."

"Not only do our leaders suffer from this mania of deluding themselves, but the press by their silence or by their complicity, assist in this process of self-delusion. Indeed, they self-delude themselves. In Britain, we have, you know, some newspapers, my own, The Independent, The Guardian and increasingly, I suspect The Daily Telegraph, which is no longer prepared to do this. They say, hold on a second, we have got to live on Planet Earth."

– Robert Fisk

Well, I think that the whole project in Iraq is finished. We are not being told by Mr. Blair in my case and Bush in yours that this is the case, and perhaps through their own misjudgment or their own fantasies, they don’t even accept this themselves. But the American project for democracy or whatever its real purposes were, for oil, economic expansion, Middle East fit for Israel, whatever it may have been, that project is finished. It is hopeless. It cannot succeed. The insurgency in Iraq is so great now that American troops, however enormous their technology, cannot control it.

The Iraqi so-called ministers, and I include Iyad Allawi, the so-called interim prime minister, who was of course appointed by the Americans as a former C.I.A. asset, they behave like statesmen when they tour the world or turn up in Washington, but in Baghdad they’re not even safe inside their little Green Zone. They’re not even the Mayor of Baghdad, they have less power than the town clerk. So, we have reached a stage now where insurgents control much of the country. The only safe part of Iraq is Kurdistan in the north, which is effectively an autonomous region, outside of the control anyway of the Iraqi government. And the elections, which are coming up, appear doomed because already we’re hearing that if the Sunnis won’t take part, the Americans are trying to persuade the unelected government to appoint Sunni Muslims to make up for the voters who didn’t vote. This is not an election, this is a charade. And what has happened is that the alienation of the Iraqis as a people from the West has been brought about by lunatic policies by the State Department and by the Pentagon, I’m afraid by the behavior of American troops and a lesser expect, but nonetheless culpable British troops and by the fantasies, which drove this war in the first place, the idea that we were going to suddenly create democracy in the Middle East.

One of the things I have been studying for my new book on the Middle East, which comes out this year, is what happened when the rebellion first occurred in 1920, the time of which Lawrence of Arabia was talking, against the British military in Iraq. And exactly the same pattern took place. The Sunni Muslims became disenfranchised. The British laid seize to Fallujah, they laid seize to Najaf. The prime minister, in this case Lloyd George rather than Tony Blair, said if we believe there will be civil war and British military intelligence in Baghdad claimed that the terrorists were arriving - in 1920 this is - from Syria. Same old sorry. So I am afraid that even if you look at the pattern of history, there is no hope. If you look at the pattern today there is no hope. We come back to the equation, which I think I have set out on your program before, that the Americans must leave, and the Americans will leave, and the Americans can’t leave.

Sure. I mean, you have got to realize that this is now a constant sort of logo of American and British news-speak in Iraq. They announce that something wonderful is going to happen, an interim governments a new constitution, elections. And then they say that violence is going to increase, that things are going to get worse the nearer we get to it. In other words the better things to come, the worse things are. The worse things are, the better things are going to become. This is part of the self-delusional policy with which we tried to hide our total failure in Iraq, our total failure even to control the country and allow the citizens of that country to live in safety and security. We don’t even give the casualty figures. We don’t know, we don’t care about them.

This is just a partial transcript of Fisk’s interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Jan 3, 2005.

Click here for the full transcript or to listen to the show
-http://www.democracynow.org/article...

Forum posts

  • Finally someone has the courage to speak the truth. Wonder how long it will be before the troops will abandon the place like we did in Vietnam? The sooner we leave there the better for all. The Iraqi people want us out and they should be the ones to rebuild their country. We should give them the money we give Halliburton, and Kellogg Brown and Root, and Carlyle, and the hundreds of other neo con affiliated businesses and get the hell out of there before more lives are squandered for nothing.

    • I beleive America and Israel set off a thermonuclear bomb in the waters of S. Asia. With Afghanistan and Iraq already lost, the Wall Street bankers were all desperately looking for other ways to control our world, when suddenly and very conveniently, the Sumatran Trench exploded. An earthquake is always triggered by a resonant electromagnetic frequency in the range 0.5 to 12 Hertz, but it is not an instant process, because the resonant frequency must be precise. Thus as true resonance approaches, the fault line starts to tremble like a piece of rope under tension, and sends out warnings to the seismographs in the form of steadily increasing transverse shear waves. If all you get is a cluster of "P" compression waves, then you are almost certainly looking at an underground or sub sea explosion. These were in fact the only copious seismic signals that the Indonesians and Indians received, and they looked curiously similar to those generated many years ago by large underground nuclear weapons in Nevada. The Indian Government knew full well that this was not a "normal" earthquake. On 27 December India refused to join George Bush’s planned exclusive ’club of four’, which would have effectively pulled this Asian nuclear power out of its new coalition with Russia, China and Brazil. On 28 December the Indian Government politely warned the American military to stay clear of Indian sovereign territory, and on 29 December the India Daily Editorial publicly questioned the nature of the event: "Was this a showdown by a country to show the region what havoc can be created?" ... "Given the level of devastation and given the fact India is a regional power in South Asia, [the] Indian Navy has an obligation to investigate and tell the world what they found."

      When the World finds out that it was those evil men who want to control world events that were responsible for this disaster, Israel and America will been hit by Major bombs from over a thousand nations. Kill the bad blood that the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Crown, and of course the Black Pope who controls the Vatican, has caused to innocent people.

      It must stop NOW!

    • Bush is a Bonesman................

      http://www.reformation.org/don-francis-borgia.html

    • sick and twisted

    • You make some excellent points but your delivery will cause people to draw back and think that here is another paranoid rant. But truth to tell, I and many friends made several analyses of the tsunami phenomenon and came to pretty much the same conclusions as yourself. I will not be surprised if as a result of US nuclear testing in the region the groundwork was laid for this catastrophe. The US has the most fiendish weapons in the world, the true WMD and with these evil creatures in the White House, one cannot discount the possibiiity of their having a hand in this disaster- all the better to jump in and say: "Here we are to help you. Now love us!’

    • I agree completely

    • I’ve heard some BS before but this puts a cherry on the cake. Humm, let me guess. you wouldn’t be a musulm would you?

    • we are living the kind of life that is calling for another way of living, how much longer can the people of this world be manipulated, murdered, lied to, and befooled, this war has never been about terrorism, its about global domination of the capitalists and the puppets that they control.
      i believe that the tsunami could well have been caused deliberately to deflect the worlds attention away from iraq, very convenient! its time to wake up and smell the bulls#!t before its to late!
      steve.

  • Lets copy this interview with Fisk all over the net so that as many people as possible read it.

  • Fisk is right on again. I remember reading his ’Can’t Blair See that this Country
    is About to Explode? Can’t Bush?’ article in August forecasting what is happening now. (http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080204E.shtml) 6 months or more ago, the antiwar movement predicted with great clarity the events that are transpiring today. For those who’ve been monitoring the war current events are no surprise, as they are the predictable end result in the chain of causality set off by the desire to go to war in Iraq. The rhetoric of Bush and crew has glazed over their view of reality. Just like Vietnam, military leaders are caught between practical assessment (reality of what is going on on the battlefield) versus what their leaders want to hear.
    The consequences of this Double Think are that positive results are exaggerated and negative realities whitewashed. The truth does get out; once Fallujah is exposed as the pointless, wanton slaughter of civilians it was (is?), anti-US forces will have yet another rallying cry. Those who weren’t anti-US from Abu Ghraib will be made so with Fallujah. And what is the end result of this war? More US borrowing (forestalling economic unpleasantries to come), lost international credibility (Karl Rove’s magic is limited in that arena), and wasted lives.

  • Go get em Fisk! keep up the great work, ed@zeda.org

  • Giving the Iraqis the money marked for Halliburton is necessary, but insufficient to achieve the least measure of justice. Bushco and their counterparts throughout the Coalition of the Willing should be arrested and tried for War Crimes.

    • There is a great deal of money now being invested in the middle east by the oil companies. Believe me , these folks know what they are doing. No fool would put this kind of money there unless they knew for sure that the US wasn’t going to pull out. I don’t believe the US will ever leave no matter if all Iraq is blown to hell and we loose a lot more troops than we have to date.We are in for the very long haul even after Bush is out of office. My best guess, next stop Iran and I’m willing to venture within 12 months. If you think there’s gun power in the air now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

    • Wishful thinking....we are broke, thank God....so its going to be impossible to fight another war, two is about the limit now that we have defecits in the trillions. And we had better be careful, the countries that now loan us money for the US, Afghanistan, and Iraq will not loan us any more for waring. Although Americans are just bloodthirsty warmongers, even they have a limit to what they are willing to go into debt for....too bad Iraq wasn’t the cake walk Rummy told us it would be....if we had been greeted with cheers and flowers like they dreamed we would be, it would be easy to borrow more money, but as it is no one wants to back a loser...and it is becoming very evident that that is what we are.

    • "Americans are warmongers"? At last count, 65% of Americans opposed the war in Iraq, in other words, not even everyone who voted for Bush supports his actions (I still haven’t figured that one out). As Americans, we are speaking out against the war, and many of us have from the start. Our website, faulkingtruth.com , has been vocal in our opposition since our inception in March, and we’re from the Midwest, the heart of Bush country. Please don’t judge the entire country by our neocon administration.

    • Other people don’t lend us their money except to buy the goods they sell us. What we have is the Fed whichs creates money out of thin air enabling our government to do what ever it pleases. We can go to the moon, fight wars, pay doctors exorbant fees, anything our government chooses to do.Go anywhere in the world and the dollar will still buy what ever you want. It maybe declining in value but everyone still wants it. Its our leading export, we print ink on piecies of paper and everyone accepts it. We won’t stop making it until we run out of trees.Its what we do.

    • That visit followed a Sept. 18, trip, when Chirac visited the New York site. He said then: ``Today it is New York. Tomorrow it may be Paris, Berlin or London.’’

    • yes but not for very much longer , China is getting shut of the dollar, Russia is getting shut of the dollar, nearly all the countries that supply your oil are getting shut of the dollar or thinking of doing so due to the massive trade and financial deficits you have...no you can only print dollars if people want them and they don’t anymore....America your going to be in a world of #### no jobs , no food to feed yah kids, total anarchy is about to befall your once great nation and the people that caused it will be long gone living it up somewhere why you lot slaughter each other to survive.

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  • It would be nice if the so called insurgents would have that power as described in this article.
    The realitiy is that America has all the firepower and more bloodsheds will come to the Iraqi
    people. Right Iraq’s PM is a CIA puppet without any support from it’s own people and it is
    ridiculous if America/Britain present this joke around the world.
    America will go ahead with it’s war attrocities until the last "citizen/insurgent" of Iraq will
    be hunted down.
    Why is the world community watching again this American/Britain attrocities?

    • The US is now using helicopters to ferry troops, and C-130s to haul supplies around the country- they were losing too many troops in convoy attacks. It does not appear that they are winning. Things have progressively gotten worse, Fisk is right on in this article- Bush, Blair and the media are all delusional.

      I just hope this is enough that, once the truth is exposed, all media propaganda outlets lose their right to broadcast on our public airwaves, all of their assets seized and handed over to the people- no more lies from billion dollar corporate behomoths shaping public opinion. Then we could be free again. Power to the People!

    • With tons of explosives taken by insurgents or Iraqis right out from under the U.S.’s noses, why would our military or Great Britains military beleive we are in control? And why would we think the millions of people who hate our country more and more every day would hesitate to use a suicide bomb of nuclear magnitude against us? How did we get so into hate and war that we forgot how ugly it it when we get what we give? We’re so outraged about the death and destruction of 9/11, yet we have caused far more death and destruction in Iraq and elsewhere. Who does Bush think he is?

    • Bush does not think, he is mentaly retarded or is suffering from early demetia. he sure is an ambarrassment to our country. Well, he may burn in hell, Jesus promoted peace, he was not warmonger. And Jesus never lied. Good Christians always try to imitate The Lord.

  • Enough is enough. Bring back our troops home and stop the killing in Iraq. Impeach Bush! Convict him for war crimes!

  • Iraq is probably a warm up for Iran which is the real threat. Just because a war is difficult doesn’t mean you give up. Something you liberals can’t seem to fathom. Just because defeating Al Qaeda is difficult, give up? I don’t think so!

    • Don’t forget the stolen explosives and how our country is hated...a suicide bomb of nuclear magnitude is probably the next thing we’ll get...Why is our government acting so arrogant? Bush has compromised everything we hold dear...we must stop this murder and madness.

    • Remember the explosives stole right out from under our troops noses...and don’t forget the insurgent’s willingness to use suicide bombs...we’re probably going to get a suicide bomber with a nuclear size bomb! Bush has caused so much death and destruction, and for what? We are more insecure than ever.

    • Spoken like a true Israeli... The sad thing is that you guys are the ones writing these little notes keeping the morale of the ’people’ up and then sitting back and watching your enemies being fought by America.
      Well even America can’t fight forever and when it falters you will be left alone to deal with your enemies, and it wont be a pretty sight.

    • Here we go again another ignorant so called patriot. It’s funny how all of the war hawks are so gung ho as long as they are 6000 miles away from the battlefield. Invading Iraq didn’t have anything to do with fighting Al Qaeda when are you Bush Supporters going to get that through your reptilian brain. The Bush supporters seem to be so supportive of America invading more countries like there hasn’t been enough bloodshed, some of you Americans are like bloodthirsty animals actually you are worst than animals, animals kill to eat and survive Americans seem to kill for sport and pleasure. At the run up to the Iraq war there were some Americans in streets having War Rallies like a bunch of barbarians. Talking about invading Iran it seems the US military is catching hell with the insurgents in Iraq, I mean few thousand militants got the world’s most powerful military tied down. Do you red state Bush supporters think America can invade and occupy another nation, Iran is 3 times the size and has 3 times as many people than Iraq has. Personally I don’t think America can do it not with that incompetent administration running the show.

    • Would you like to suit up and grab a rifle and fight that difficult war yourself? If you’re for the war, get behind it and enlist.

  • Suicide Bombers with Nuclear Bombs! Why do we think it won’t happen? Where are all of those stolen explosives? I think we’ll find the the hard way.

  • I’m glad you guys weren’t around to criticize WW2 and rebuilding Europe and Japan... it took more than 3 weeks, 3 years, try 30. But our influence and control is still there. History will remember Bush as the one who finally stopped waiting on the UN and liberal approval and did what should have already been done a long time ago... when it would have been cheaper.

    Paul in Pensacola

    • We are in Iraq for nothing that has any bennefit for the American people, quite the opposite condisering the $128million per month bill we are all being asked to pay. The only reason some American people support the war is because of their Christian faith (minus Christ) and the propaganda ministries stories about al quada, 9/11, WMD, all lies that the Christians hold on to dearly as a smoke screen to continue to murder the Muslims in the "football" game of our God is bigger than your God. Meanwhile Bushco is laughing their asses off at the stupids that support the war for Christ versus Alla...... what a joke, too bad it isn’t funny.

    • one man was responsable for wwII and one man and his politics is responsable for iraq. Do not even try to justify what has been done. Because YOU HAVE NO IDEA. REBUILDING JAPAN? shame on you,that is the way of SOME american people if ou can not win proper way than destroy it so it takes 3o yeras and more to grow a simple tree...just a tree
      What would have been cheaper? Did YOU JUST PUT PRICE ON HUMAN LIFE? Your post should have been ERASED because it is abusive to all people who whitnesed war in first hand.

      im sorry for my english it is not my mother lenguage.

      Berber Branka
      Beograd

  • Here we go again, just another re-run, Generals ignored, intelligence manipulated nobody but the mad, ego driven maniac at the controls. Remember "STALINGRAD" and all the rest of that grotesque business, millions of civilians dead more millions maimed all because a ego driven maniac is at the controls. It was said after the last debacle and after Nuurenberg that it could not happen again, that was a lie because here it is in all it’s grossly corrupt glory, just exactly why we were fighting WW2, now it’s our turn to be "GODS" chosen and all that facetious malarky. What a collosal Lie!!

    • bush backers..
      bush is part of a secret society .. he doesnt give a XXXX about our american flag neither does his father.. He cares about money and largely power! IRaq was an illegal war.. as far as going into iraq it has made our country 10 times more vulnerable to attack. Iran is another story... I am iranian and i KNow through dedicated research that not only will iran sweep into israel, but they will take out the whole fleet of our ships in the persian gulf. Russia has placed anti aircraft in syria and iran .. and they are backed by the russians.. there is no way that U.S will send military presence into iran unless they decide to start world war III! this is part of the illuminati agenda in which they kill off 2/3rds of the worlds population.. when this happens bush backers you wont have a human form to fight with and bush will be in a bunker w/ his kronies sucking thumb and preparing for exploring the non living environment he will leave.