Iraq Power Handover 'A Fraud'
By Robert Fisk
& Tony Jones
22 April, 2004
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
TV Program Transcript
TONY JONES: Back now to the day's developments in Israel and Iraq.
The assassination
of Hamas leader Dr Abdel-Aziz Rantissi at the weekend has unleashed
rage and fury on the streets of Gaza just days after President George
W Bush backed Israel's sovereignty over West Bank settlements in return
for a total pull-out of settlers from the Gaza Strip.
In Iraq, meanwhile,
troops from Spain are preparing to go home just as America has announced
the death of its 700th soldier in fighting there.
Well, joining me
now is Robert Fisk.
He's a correspondent
for the British newspaper the 'Independent' and is a 25-year veteran
of reporting from the Middle East.
Robert Fisk, thanks
for joining us.
ROBERT FISK, WRITER
& JOURNALIST: Thank you.
TONY JONES: Let's
start with Iraq if we can and the immense problems the United States
now faces in handing the country back to Iraqis.
Just to start with
that, anyway.
The June 30th deadline
now looks like it's going to be postponed.
What will be the
consequences if it is?
ROBERT FISK: Nothing.
The handover is
basically a fraud.
The governing council,
which is appointed by the Americans, and which is the Iraqi Government
at the moment would merely be handing over to another group of American-picked
Iraqis.
They're not democratically
elected, the new institution, whatever it is.
We don't even know
what it's going to be.
I notice that when
President Bush gave his press conference three days ago, he said that
Mr Brahimi was working on that, referring to Lakhdar Brahimi, the former
Algerian foreign minister who's special envoy to Iraq for the UN's Kofi
Annan, but Mr Brahimi found that quite a surprise.
He's not trying
to put together a future government - he's trying to arrange elections
and that may not be until next year.
Even if there was
a democratically elected government to hand over sovereignty to, which
is there not, the sovereignty doesn't mean anything because under the
laws that Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Baghdad has already enacted
for post June 30, all the Iraqi security forces will be commanded by
United States officers, so that's not a handover of sovereignty.
TONY JONES: The
Americans obviously were putting a lot of faith in Mr Brahimi performing
some kind of miracle.
You think that's
not going to happen.
Could, however,
the United Nations be under much more pressure now to get seriously
involved in perhaps taking over the administration of Iraq?
ROBERT FISK: Well,
the poor old UN.
You know, when we
wanted to rush into war, we batted the UN donkey around the ear and
told them it wasn't standing up enough and now we're trying to drag
the old UN donkey to save us in Iraq because after all we realize it's
all gone wrong.
I don't think that
the UN is going to go into Iraq on June 30.
I cannot see the
end, or the depth, to which the current bloodshed is going.
I can't see a way
out at the moment.
Ultimately, I think
it will have to be - if it's not just going to be an abandoned Iraq
with Iraqis trying to run it, I think it would be - it has to be Arab
force, an Arab league force.
We're going to have
to see Syrians in there, Emirates, the Saudis, Egyptians, but even that
will start to fracture and fragment across the Arab world in the Middle
East.
I simply can't see
a way out, when you build a war on illusions and fantasies and you don't
get international mandate to run it, then your occupation will fail.
The British occupation
in Iraq took three years to fail between 1917 and 1920.
It took us, the
British, three years to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis behind us.
It's quite an achievement
- the Americans have managed to unite the Shiites and the Sunnis against
them in just one year.
TONY JONES: I'll
come specifically to that possibility in a moment.
First, let's look
at the immediate crisis faced by the US administrator, Paul Bremer,
in Najaf.
The Americans have
already said they're going to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.
What will happen
if they go into Najaf with guns blazing?
ROBERT FISK: I don't
think they will.
I think that there's
a kind of discontinuation of serious political relations between Bremer
and the US military.
Because what Bremer
says and sometimes what Bush says doesn't bear any relation to what
people like Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy chief of US operations
in Iraq, or General Sanchez for that matter actually say.
I don't think Bremer
ordered anyone to arrest or kill, certainly arrest but not necessarily
kill, Moqtada al-Sadr.
But the direct result
of what the Americans have said is quite simple.
Shiites, who would
never have dreamt of supporting Moqtada al-Sadr, are now prepared to
fight the Americans if they come into Najaf.
Of course, the Americans
have boxed themselves in.
First of all, they
were going to go into Fallujah and capture the men, the terrorists -
everyone's a terrorist if you fight the Americans - who had so brutally
murdered those four American mercenaries three weeks ago but they're
not Fallujah, they realize they've killed so many Iraqis, at least 600,
many of them women and children, that they simply can't go on.
Now they're standing
around Najaf with what?
2,500 troops.
You can't conquer
a city of so many Shiites with 2,500 troops.
It's going to need
a massive bombardment.
To do that to the
major Shiite shrine in the world, one of the major Shiite shrines, it's
unthinkable.
I think the Americans
have reached a point where they can't do much more militarily and politically
they finished quite a while ago.
It's a terrible,
terrible situation but mostly, remember, for the Iraqis.
They're doing more
dying than our soldiers are doing.
TONY JONES: What
role then do you think the old Ayatollahs, particularly Sistani, are
going to play as this situation starts to play itself out around Najaf?
ROBERT FISK: Well,
Sistani, you see, still hopes that if there is a future administration
the Shiites will basically run it.
They are the majority
population.
They are 60 per
cent of the population of Iraq.
He doesn't want
to do anything which is going to allow the Sunnis to come back and run
the country as they did under Kassim, Saddam, the Ba'ath Party and so
on.
There's going to
come a time and he's beginning to speak much more harshly - when he's
not going to be able any longer to hold back an overall Shi'ite resistance
against the United States.
He's not going to
be able to do it.
If the Americans
do try to enter the holy city of Najaf, they're in the suburbs at the
moment but they're nowhere near the shrines, if they do try to enter,
then I think Sistani will have to call for a war against them.
He'll be finished
if he doesn't.
TONY JONES: This
is before the war, you predicted on this program, you predicted a likely
civil war in Iraq if the invasion went ahead.
The Americans are
now saying that the thing they most fear as you started referring to
at the beginning of this interview is a temporary alliance between the
Shiites and the Sunnis and some of the American analysts are pointing
to what happened in Lebanon when the Sunnis and Shia got together to
push the Israelis out.
They're saying that's
the analogy they most fear, not Vietnam but Lebanon?
ROBERT FISK: The
Americans have got it wrong.
As so often happens
in the Middle East, the Sunnis played no part in throwing the Israelis
out of Lebanon.
That's what the
Shiites did and the Sunnis did very little about the resistance.
It was basically
a Shi'ite resistance on its own that threw the Israelis out of Lebanon.
I think, although
unfortunately my prediction of serious resistance more than a year ago
is proving tragically to be correct, I think I was probably wrong in
saying there would be a civil war.
The only people
who are talking about civil war at the moment in Iraq are the Americans
and the British and the Western journalists who suck up their lines
and push it back out as their own analysis.
I haven't actually
met an Iraqi who wants a civil war or who's talked about a civil war.
There's never been
a civil war in Iraq.
I rather suspect
that this danger of civil war - and I'm guilty before the war quite
rightly predicting there might be --is being pushed out by the Americans
and the British in order to frighten the Iraqis into obedience.
"If you don't
put your guns, down look what might happen, you'll have civil war."
I think the reason
why they're wrong and why I was wrong is that they never appreciated
that the Iraqi tribal system covers both communities - many Shiite tribes
also are Sunnis, they're in the same tribes.
I went out the other
day - and this is an interesting example, to go to the funeral of a
doctor, of a Sunni, who had been murdered almost certainly by a Shiite
gang of gunmen.
When I said, "What
does this make you feel about your neighbors?", they said, "Nothing.
"They're our
friends and our comrades and our neighbors"
"Because,"
he said "our tribes include the Shiites."
The brother of the
doctor said, "Look, my wife is a Shiite.
"Want do you
want me to do?
"Go and kill
her?
"Because my
brother was killed by a Shiite?
"No, we will
not have a civil war."
So I think possibly
there will not a civil war and I think it is becoming highly provocative
of the occupying power to constantly talk about it in this way as if
they almost want a civil war.
If we journalists
started talking it about after the occupation we would have called irresponsible
by the occupying power.
So why are they
suddenly talking about civil war now?
TONY JONES: Going
back to what you said at the beginning of the program and as a summary
of what you just told us, are we likely to see a temporary alliance
between the Shia and the Sunni to throw the Americans out?
ROBERT FISK: I think
it's going that way.
We're not yet at
a serious alliance.
After all the British
are in Basra, a major Shiite city and compared to the Americans there
is some violence but compared to the Americans they're getting off lightly.
This at the moment,
remember, is primarily an anti-American resistance.
Although, we know
the Italians have been attacked, the Spanish have been attacked and
are leaving, the British have been a little bit attacked, it is primarily
an anti-American resistance.
But if the Shiites
do join in full it will become an anti-Westerner resistance just as
the whole hostage-taking fiasco is turning into an anti-Western campaign.
But, again, I stress
there have never been a civil war in Iraq and I think that the tribal
system there which is everything, unfortunately, that stands against
the possibility of democracy, the tribal system might save Iraq from
that, if in the end we have to go and leave Iraq with our tail between
our legs which of course Mr Bush has no intention of doing because he
wants to win an election in November.
TONY JONES: Let's
move to the other flash point.
We've just seen
the assassination of yet another Hamas leader and only days before that
Ariel Sharon was cutting a deal in Washington with the President to
allow effectively the cessation of West Bank settlements.
Those two things,
how do they fit together and what's the future hold do you think, at
least the immediate future, in that part of the Middle East?
ROBERT FISK: Well,
let's bring Iraq and the Palestine-Israeli conflict together.
They have one thing
in common - they are about occupation.
President Bush in
his letter to Sharon, PM Sharon of Israel, has effectively said, he
has said in fact, that there is no obligation on Israel withdrawing
to the '67 borders which they were behind prior to the '67 Middle East
war which means that the whole of UN Security Council resolution 242,
the fundamentals of peace has been overruled by the Bush Administration.
Now, it is apparently
legitimate for the reality of the statements to be accepted so that
land taken from Arabs illegally under international law for Jews and
Jews only by the Israelis, that's now OK around Jerusalem.
Well, what we're
dealing with here, and with Hamas which is an extremely brutal organization
- let's not get romantic about it - both with the Palestinians and with
the Iraqis two groups of people who say, "We will not be occupied
by other people, we want to keep our land."
Whether you are
talking about the Palestinians who say, "We'll accept the Palestine,
22 per cent of Palestine left as opposed to all of Palestine including
what is now Israel, or whether you're talking about the extremists and
whether you're talking about Iraqis who don't really want warfare in
their streets but hate the occupying power, what we're dealing with
in the Middle East is two occupying forces coming up against an unstoppable
opposition.
The brutality that
that can give way we saw in Fallujah with the murder of the four American
mercenaries and their mutilation and we've seen it again with the massive
causalities the marines have inflicted on the people if Fallujah.
But if you want
to know how bad it can get, go back to the French war in Algeria from
1954 to 1962, it has followed identical patterns - the French put settlements
in or the French said, "We will crush any opposition."
It started off low
yield - bombs beside the road, a bomb in front of a train then it went
on to kidnapping then it went onto bombs in discos, the same as pizza
houses or the same as hotels in Baghdad, and then it escalated to mass
killings in the cities of Algeria and, of course, it ended with a humiliating
French retreat which changed French history forever.
TONY JONES: Robert
Fisk on that rather grim note we will have to leave it.
We thank you once
again for coming in to talking to us tonight.
© Copyright
2004 Australian Broadcasting Corporation