In an incandescent moral piece Fisk tears apart the veil of legitimacy over the invasion, including on the issue of torture where it appears to stand most in the right.
But I think his analysis is wrong about the fire-setting. (see extract below)
He assumes, like the hegemons, that a society that used physical brutality including torture, to ensure social norms must be deeply unpopular. He assumes that "Saddam's former supporters" would only do something for money.
In fact the strategy of the regime was to melt away into the population. This is what the soldiers, the fedayeen, and the Baath members have done. Very few have been handed in yet, perhaps partly out of fear, but also out of patriotism. Also because the Iraqi state was actually of the order of 40,000 people and not just 4,000 people. Those 40,000 are tied by connections of marriage, deference and mutual help in all sorts of subtle ways.
Fisk gives evidence with his own eyes that there is organisation behind these arson attempts. It is consistent with a scorched earth strategy of the retreating forces, except that the earth that is scorched is the structure of a large city. It assumes a degree of chaos. in which the blame will fall in many ways rightly on the invaders. In this chaos snipers and occasional suicide bombers (just one a fortnight?) can pick off the invading troops if they guard isolated buildings. Meanwhile mass opposition and resentment can grow.
Ironically the Shia opposition forces may be the main beneficiaries, but they will also have had innumerable ties and compromises with the Saddam Hussein state. They will want to settle affairs themselves.
They will know what is happening better than Fisk, but they will not rush to form a colonial administration to guard all the buildings. It is easier to criticise the Americans,.
Fisk has not got a sense of the place of baathism in Iraqi society, and of the religious communities as centres of both resistance and compromise with the regime. A lack of a dialectical understanding of the society and the current situation, which his moral denunciations strive to cut through.
I think Fisk has got it wrong on the arsonists
Chris Burford London
________________________
> This is not liberation
>
> By Robert Fisk
> The Independent
> April 17 2003
> Then there's the fires that have consumed every one of the city's
> ministries - save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the
> Ministry of Oil - as well as UN offices, embassies and shopping malls.
> I have counted a total of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the
> number goes on rising.
>
> Yesterday I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded
> by US troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths
> because of the clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the
> neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural Irrigation. Hard to believe,
> isn't it, that they were unaware that someone was setting fire to the
> next building?
>
> Then I spotted another fire, three kilometres away. I drove to the
> scene to find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of
> Higher Education's Department of Computer Science. And right next to
> it, perched on a wall, was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a
> neighbouring hospital and didn't know who had lit the next door fire
> because "you can't look everywhere at once".
>
> Now I'm sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest - should
> the Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of
> the 3rd Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiancée, Jessica,
> in the States for him to pass on his love - but something is terribly
> wrong when US soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast ministries
> being burnt by mobs and do nothing about it.
>
> Because there is also something dangerous - and deeply disturbing -
> about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including
> the great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The
> looters come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in
> blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had set the
> Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.
>
> The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an
> explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started
> by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no
> doubt, who feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in
> Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these
> fires. And neither do I.
>
> The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to
> be paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to
> their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the
> fires. The moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money
> and forgotten the whole project.
>
> So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognised one the other
> day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time
> he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of?
> Who was he working for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire
> physical infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why
> didn't the Americans stop this?