“Those who oppose war are not cowards,” Fisk

WASHINGTON, February 16 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Famous British writer Robert Fisk has lashed out at the governments of Washington and London for their “unjustified war rhetoric” against Iraq, insisting that anti-war people are not cowards, but rather “humans”.

“We are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the Middle East to their advantage,” Fisk wrote in The Independent Saturday, February 15.

“No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.

“The British don't like Hussein any more than they liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being lectured and whined at by men whose experience of war is Hollywood and television,” he added.

Accusing Washington and London of planning an unjustified war against Iraq, Fisk said that the U.S. is “now sending its poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September.

“Jack Straw, the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when Saddam was ‘one of ours’.

“Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included – though we play down the (British Royal Air Force) RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s.”

Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and are outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running U.S. policy in the Middle East.

So much for Blair's influence over Washington – the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least one has to acknowledge that Sharon – war criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres – treated Blair with the contempt he deserves, according to Fisk.

Nor can the Americans hide the link between Iraq, Israel and Palestine. In his devious address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the three when he complained that Hamas, whose bombings so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.

People have talked out loud for peace, will Bush-Blair-Howard trio listen?

Just as he told us about the mysterious Al-Qaeda men who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a free hand again in his campaign of rape and murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to the UN General Assembly last 12 September about the need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear when one realizes that Turkomans make up two thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil fields.

The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation.

Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected U.S. President.

Israeli and U.S. ambitions in the region are now entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and regional control. It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that this is part of an eternal war against "terror".

The British and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for Blair either.

Gap Widened in U.S.

At a seminar at the University of North Carolina recently, Fisk listened to a group of professors and senior lecturers and activists debating how to influence the path to war.

"What we've got to do is to reach out to mainstream press and bridge-build to other activists," a lady with long grey hair announced, reading a list of proposals – all couched in the language of academic discourse that ensures her message is incomprehensible outside academia – which she wished to discuss, according to The Independent Sunday, February 16.

It was a telling moment, a symbol of the vast gulf of reason between the pro- and anti-war movement in America. They don't talk to each other. And if they do, neither comprehends the other. There is simply no contact between the intellectual "elite" of the left and the less privileged Americans who work with their hands and join the military to gain a free education and end up fighting America's foreign wars.

Fisk elaborates saying that the people with whom these liberal academics should be building bridges are the truck-drivers and bell-hops and Amtrak crews, the poor blacks and the cops whose families provide the cannon fodder for America's overseas military adventures.

But that, of course, would force intellectuals to emerge from the sheltered, tenured world of seminars and sit-ins and deal directly with those whose opinions they wish to change.

''When I made this very point at Harvard and several other universities,'' Fisk was told, rather patronizingly, that these people had "so little information" or are "not very informed". This is, in fact, untrue.

Black Americans, for example, are uninhibited in their sympathy for Palestinians under occupation. But when I told a lecturer in Austin that I had asked hotel staff and air crews to turn up to my lectures on the Middle East and America I was treated with a kind of weird amazement, puzzlement that I should bother to ask such unpromising material to think about the Arab-Israel conflict mixed with faint pity that I should ever expect them to understand.

Sometimes I rather suspect that the anti-war left in America likes being in a permanent minority. Yet I have an uneasy feeling that many on the intellectual left are fearful that America will lose its next war amid massive casualties – but are even more fearful that America may win with minimal casualties.

In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed up as "intelligence".