A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities

A Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities
January 1, 2005
By Robert Fisk
Voices in the Wilderness

Who said this and when?
“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… We are today not far from a disaster.”
Answer: TE Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The Sunday Times in August, 1920. And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and September 11, 2001. We were lied to about the insurgents–remember how they were just “dead-enders” and “remnants”?–and we were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next month.
Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies–when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq–are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations–probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about -suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there asuicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create this extraordinary industry? Time was, in Lebanon, when a suicide bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in Palestine/Israel a once-a-week event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily or twice daily.
And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board–which had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne–that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up....