[lbo-talk] Robert Fisk

[C. G. Estabrook]

I don't think these quotations are as contradictory as they may seem.  In
each case Fisk speaks of the coming of a civil war that does not now
exist, provoked by the advent of the American troops.  That such a thing
could be the conscious policy of the US and/or its collaborators seems to
be regarded as unthinkable by some on this list.  I don't see why. --CGE

On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Michael Pugliese wrote:


> Robert Fisk, March 2, 2004:
> 
> Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never
> heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.
> 
> Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though
> al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American
> occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even
> produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative,
> advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have
> enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.
> 
> Somehow I don't believe it.
> 
> Robert Fisk, August 30, 2003:
> 
> General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, said only 24 hours
> earlier that he needed no more troops. Clearly, he does if he wishes
> to stop the appalling violence. For what is happening, in the Sunni
> heartland around Baghdad and now in the burgeoning Shia nation to the
> south, is not just the back-draft of an invasion or even a growing
> guerrilla war against occupation. It is the start of a civil war in
> Iraq that will consume the entire nation if its new rulers do not
> abandon their neo-conservative fantasies and implore the world to
> share the future of the country with them.
> 
> Robert Fisk, April 13, 2003:
> 
> And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property
> owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia
> Muslims. By failing to end this violence by stoking ethnic hatred
> through their inactivity the Americans are now provoking a civil war
> in Baghdad.
> 
> Robert Fisk, March 19, 2003:
> 
> The nightmare is not so much the cruel bombardment of Iraq, whose
> inevitability is now assured, as the growing conviction that the
> Anglo-American invasion will provoke a civil war, of Shia against
> Sunnis, of Sunnis against Kurds, of Kurds and Turkomans. Driving
> through the streets of the great Shia slums of Saddam City – the
> millions here originally came from the Amara region of southern Iraq
> – it is possible to comprehend the fears of the Sunni minority, that
> the poor will descend in their tens of thousands to pillage Baghdad
> City the moment central authority crumbles.
>