 NATO,
in its war against the Serbs, committed a number of
acts which I think are very close to war crimes,
and General Clark was the
commander.
- Robert Fisk
Democracy
NowThursday, September 18, 2003. Robert Fisk on
Wesley Clark & Iraq:What is Happening Is An
Absolute Slaughter Every Night of Iraqi People
AS the number of U.S. troops
killed in Iraq approaches 300, we go to Baghdad to
hear from London Independent reporter
Robert Fisk on the virtually unreported
number of Iraqis killed in feuds, looting, revenge
killings and raids by U.S. troops. The number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq stands
close to 300. While figures of U.S. troops killed
or wounded in Iraq are widely disclosed, the number
of Iraqis killed or wounded are unknown. In an article last Sunday, Robert Fisk of the
London Independent writes: In Iraq there are thousands of
incidents of violence that never get reported;
attacks on Americans that cost civilian lives
are not even recorded by the occupation
authority press officers unless they involve
loss of life among "coalition forces". Go to the
mortuaries of Iraq's cities and it's clear that
a slaughter occurs each night. Occupation powers
insist that journalists obtain clearance to
visit hospitals - it can take a week to get the
right papers, if at all, so goodbye to
statistics - but the figures coming from senior
doctors tell their own story.In Baghdad, up to 70 corpses - of Iraqis
killed by gunfire - are brought to the
mortuaries each day. In Najaf, for example, the
cemetery authorities record the arrival of the
bodies of up to 20 victims of violence a day.
Some of the dead were killed in family feuds, in
looting, or revenge killings. Others have been
gunned down by US troops at checkpoints or in
the increasingly vicious "raids" carried out by
American forces in the suburbs of Baghdad and
the Sunni cities to the north. Fisk continues: "If you count the Najaf dead as typical
of just two or three other major cities, and if
you add on the daily Baghdad death toll and
multiply by seven, almost 1,000 Iraqi civilians
are being killed every week - and that may well
be a conservative figure." Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the
London Independent. Speaking from
Baghdad.
TRANSCRIPTAMY GOODMAN: Well, John Hlinko, we have
just reached Robert Fisk in Baghdad. We want to
thank you for being with us, cofounder of the
DraftWesleyClark.com
campaign. Zoltan Grossman, thanks for being
with us from the University of Wisconsin. We're going not to the break right now, which we
usually do, but because we have Robert Fisk on his
satellite phone at this moment we want to go
directly to him.  Robert
Fisk, we'll get your comment at the beginning,
hearing that Wesley Clark is now running for
president as the antiwar warrior. Then we'd like to
get your observations of what's happening right now
on the ground in Iraq.
ROBERT FISK: I have to say first of all about
General Clark, that I was on the ground in Serbia
in Kosovo when he ran the war there. He didn't seem
to be very antiwar at the time. I had as one of my
tasks to go out over and over again to look at the
civilian casualties of that have war. At one point NATO bombed the hospital in which
Yugoslav soldiers, against the rules of war, were
hiding along with the patients and almost all the
patients were killed. This was the war,
remember, where the first attack was made on a
radio station, the Serb Radio and Television
building. Since then we've had attacks twice on
the Al Jazeera television station. First of all
in Afghanistan in 2001, then killing their chief
correspondent, and again in Baghdad, this year.
This was a general who I remember bombed series
of bridges, in one of which an aircraft bombed the
train and after, he'd seen the train and had come
to a stop, the pilot bombed the bridge again. I saw one occasion when a plane came in, bombed
a bridge over a river in Serbia proper, as we like
to call it, and after about 12 minutes when
rescuers arrived, a bridge too narrow even for
tanks, bombed the rescuers. I remember General Clark telling us that more
than 100 Yugoslav tanks had been destroyed in the
weeks of that war. And when the war came to an end,
we discovered number of Yugoslav tanks destroyed
were eleven. 100 indeed! So this was not a man, frankly whom, if I were
an American, would vote for, but not being an
American, I don't have to. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk speaking to us in Iraq.
And then you have the time that the British
general, Michael Jackson, Wesley Clark had
told him to get his British troops to the airport
before the Russians got there, so it wouldn't be
perceived that the Russians were liberating and
General Michael Jackson responded to him, 'I'm not
going to start World War III'. ROBERT FISK: Yes. Jackson did indeed say that.
One member of Jackson's staff confirmed to me that
the quote is true. I think the words -- I think the
verb is wrong, but World War III is correct. It was a very strange atmosphere to that war,
over and over again when NATO has bombed the
target, it was clearly illegitimate. Or when they
killed large number of civilians, they were either
silenced, or they lied. We had the very famous occasion, infamous
occasion when American aircraft bombed an Albanian
refugee convoy in Kosovo, claimed later or NATO
claimed later it was probably Serb aircraft. It was
only when we got there and found the NATO markings
on the bomb, that NATO fessed up admitted that they
had done it themselves and had been confused. When I went to the scene months later and
tracked down the survivors, it turned out that
although they were confused, NATO aircraft had gone
on bombing that convoy for 35 minutes even though
there were civilians there, because mixed in among
them, most cruelly, this was an act of
Milosevic's regime, were military vehicles
as well. We shouldn't be romantic about the Serb military
or the Serb security police they were killers and
murderers. But NATO, in its war against the Serbs,
committed a number of acts which I think are very
close to war crimes, and General Clark was the
commander. So this is a man who wants to be the
president, democratic president of the United
States of America. Well I don't interest myself in
what he thinks about the last war in Iraq. I
watched it first hand and had my own opinions. But
I sure as hell know what it was like to be under
the bombs of his war in Serbia. AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, I want to ask you
about General Powell's visit, Secretary of
State General Powell's visit to Baghdad. But we
still have Steve Rendall in the studio who
is leaving in one minute as we listen to this
description of what's happening in Iraq. We were
wrapping up the discussion of Wesley Clark whether
or not he was for this war. Your final comments,
Steve? STEVE RENDALL: I'd like to just say that
politicians would like to be all things to all
people. Our problem is not with Wesley Clark's
campaign, it's with the media's portrayal of
him. One point I'd like to say, your listeners should
go look at the daily column that Clark wrote for
The Times of London, right around the time
of the fall of Baghdad. He wrote there, for
instance, the day after the fall of Baghdad he
wrote "Liberation is at hand. Liberation, the
powerful bomb that justifies painful sacrifices,
erases lingering doubts and reinforces bold
actions." He also wrote that George W. Bush
and prime minister Tony Blair "should be
proud of their resolve in the face of so much
doubt". This is the day after, this is on April 10, the
day after the so called fall of Baghdad. He was
cheering this event, and it's very hard for us to
see reporters casting him as antiwar candidate. AMY GOODMAN: Steve Rendall, Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting. Robert Fisk, nothing
succeeds like success. It sounds like people who
didn't know how it was going to turn out wanted to
make sure they were on the side of the winning
forces, which makes me think of the piece you wrote
where you said that Thomas Friedman was in
Iraq, he asked a U.S. soldier, he was looking for
something, for directions and they said to him,
'that's on the enemy side of the bridge'. ROBERT FISK: You have to be reality wise, Amy.
Here in Baghdad, American troops are attacked I'm
told up to 60 times a day, just in Baghdad, and
they're losing an average of a man a day. If you're
an American soldier, you're 20 years old, you
didn't think it was going to work out like this,
you were conned into believing the war was a great
thing for democracy and liberation, and you're
being shot every day, you regard an Iraqi as a
potential enemy. So of course the guy said 'enemy
side of the bridge'. That's a very telltale remark,
because it shows how terribly wrong everything has
gone for military, for the U.S. administration, our
own prime minister Tony Blair. But individually you find American soldiers here
who can be very sympathetic and who realize it's
gone wrong. I talked to U.S. troops in the streets
of Baghdad, and they do not want to vote for the
Republican party, if they ever did before in the
next election in the United States. You also find soldiers who behaving very badly
with lack of fire discipline, lack of discipline of
every kind. I was town in Fallujah a few weeks ago
where American soldiers saw a man sitting in a
chair in the street said, 'you get up and I'll
break your fucking neck'. Well, that is not the
kind of language that is going to win hearts and
minds. When I complained to his sergeant about the
way he had spoken, he made excuses and said 'well
the guy got up at 3:00 this morning, he's been shot
at every day, he's been here since March or
whatever'. So I said well, you know, I understand
all that. One has to have sympathy as a human being
for another human being in a predicament. But it
was your country that wanted to invade this place.
You were desperate to come in, you didn't want the
arms inspectors, you haven't found any weapons of
mass destruction. Now you're here, and you don't
like it. And this is the big problem over and over again,
I'm finding soldiers who say, 'yes, we believe we
can help the Iraqi people'. Then you find many,
many officers below that who say, 'I want to go
home'. And this is an Army that is tired, low
morale, low fire discipline, low discipline all
around. The number of shootings of civilians is
skyrocketing. I've just been talking to you about
today. If you go into the hospitals here in the
afternoon.. JUAN GONZALEZ: Robert, I want to ask you about
the issue of low morale. Those of us who remember
the Vietnam War understand that the major turning
point was when those soldiers there realized that
they were not engaged in a war of liberation, they
gradually began to build up resistance and enormous
morale problems with soldiers going AWOL and
shooting their own officers at times. Are you
seeing any signs that this demoralization among the
troops may possibly even lead to resistance within
the ranks of the soldiers? ROBERT FISK: Well, I'd say we haven't reached
Vietnam stage yet. No one is fragging their own
officers. There was one incident, I think it was in
Kuwait, where a grenade was thrown by a U.S.
soldier at other U.S. soldiers. We haven't reached the Vietnam point, and after
all America was losing thousands of troops in
Vietnam. And it's only in the hundreds in Iraq
since the war began. As I say when I talk to
ordinary soldiers, there's a great difference, for
example, between units that were here during the
war and haven't left and actually fought in the
war, lost quite a few people for them anyway, and
are still here and feel that they have been lied to
because they were supposed to have gone home after
the victorious, wonderful war in which they were
liberating people. And the newly arrived troops, for example the
101st Airborne up in Mosul whose morale seems to be
a lot higher, although frankly, their attitude to
house raids, breaking down doors and screaming at
people doesn't seem to be much better than say, the
Third Infantry division, who clearly don't have the
same morale problems. But we're not at the Vietnam
stage, and we shouldn't pretend that we are. What
we should compare it to is Lebanon in 1982, when it
was six months before anyone threw a stone at an
American soldier. But now within six months they
killed scores of American soldiers here in Iraq.
And what has happened is that there is a real
guerilla army working increasingly sophisticated. I
was very interested to note, when I met the U.S.
general who was in charge of prisoners of war at
the former prison outside Baghdad three days ago,
she actually referred to a resistance force. She
didn't talk about terrorists. not once did it cross
her lips. What you find is that the real soldiers, I'm
talking about non-reservists, full time U.S.
soldiers, they know they're involved in a guerilla
war. They know it's not working. They know the
place is falling to bits. What they tell me is when
it gets up to the generals on your side of the
lake, they don't want to admit it. I have colleague of mine on the State Department
Press Corps, which arrived with Colin Powell, I was
present at Powell's very strange press conference
here. And my colleague told me they still don't
realize in Washington how bad it is. That's the
impression I get on the ground here. AMY GOODMAN: Why was it strange? We only have 30
seconds, your phone probably has less, but I just
want to get to Fallujah, to the U.S. soldiers who
apparently came a day before, who killed something
like eight Iraqi policeman and a Jordanian guard
this month. ROBERT FISK: I went down there. What obviously
happened is the policemen, once they were on under
fire screamed 'we are the police, we're the
police', and the shooting went on. They then fled
into the Jordanian Army hospital compound, and the
Americans then opened fire at the compound for up
to 30 minutes, setting several of the buildings on
fire. This is a hospital run by America's Jordanian
allies. These were soldiers without fire
discipline. You told me for the first time, I haven't
learned this here, that they just arrived in Iraq.
Well clearly have a lot to learn, don't they. AMY GOODMAN: The report is American soldiers
just arrived in Fallujah, the day before. But
finally, the Powell press conference. ROBERT FISK: The extraordinary thing was, Powell
presented everything as upbeat. He suggested that
journalists were concentrating on negative things.
He wasn't trying, he said, to persuade us how we
should tell our stories or what our agenda should
be, but we should concentrate on all the goodwill
towards the occupation forces or the C.P.A., the
coalition. Ambassador Bremer, the pro-consul here,
the American pro-consul stepped forward to say
there were more than 1,600,000 barrels of oil
produced the previous day. That doesn't change the
fact that Iraqi is still importing oil, even though
it's one of the richest oil countries in the world.
But you simply couldn't get Powell in any question
to talk about the fact that so many things are
going wrong. You wondered had he brought the
fantasy from Washington, or was he being fed the
fantasy here in Baghdad by Bremer and his staff at
the C.P.A. A fact is that months after the war was
officially supposed to be over, there were hundreds
of people dying in this country every week by
violence. I'm just watching two Apache helicopters
as I speak to you now just flying over the
buildings in front of me, on 'antiterrorist
patrol', as it's called. There is a real guerilla
war underway here, and when you are on the ground
you realize it's moving out of control. Washington
is still trying to present this as a success story
and it's not, anymore than Afghanistan. AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank I very much,
Robert Fisk for being with us. Robert Fisk is
correspondent for the Independent newspaper based
in Beirut right now in Iraq. returning as he has so
many times. Thank you for joining us. You are listening to
Democracy Now! . 
Who'd a thunk it
Presidential
hopeful, General Wesley Clark boasted that he
comes from a long line of rabbis 
| and see Forward,
Jan 2003
| Later, Oct 12, 2003:
Wesley
Clark fesses up: I'm no rabbi's son-
Gulf News: Patrick
Seale: Patrick
Seale: Americans know they have gone well past
the point of no return
|
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write to David
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