Robert Fisk has appeared on this weblog a number of times, particularly during the run up to the war in Iraq. I strongly agreed with his perspective that the war is about Bush & Co. projecting power in the Middle East and had nothing to do with WMD or toppling Saddam. By now it should be clear to any but the blind, deaf and dumb, that Fisk and those who were labelled the “extreme” anti-war crowd, were 100% correct in their analysis.
George Kamiya from Salon was one of the liberal haks who supported the war out of a misguided sense of militarism coming out of the 9/11 attack. In what can only be viewed as a mea culpa, Kamiya reviews Fisk new book on the Iraq war [view ad to read the article].
“Of course, the war did remove Saddam Hussein — whose crimes Fisk had documented decades ago, when most Americans still thought of him, if at all, as a strongman ally. Some American liberals, like George Packer, author of ‘The Assassin’s Gate,’ still cling to the hope that America’s war on Iraq, however unsavory and hypocritical in its motivations and flawed in its execution, might nonetheless prove down the road to be morally justified. Fisk never addresses this argument directly, but it seems clear that he would regard it as obscene. War is not an instrument that can be used to achieve desired ends; violence begets violence, and at the end the noble ideals are gone and a heap of corpses remains. For Fisk, who has spent his career recording its hideous consequences, ‘war is not primarily about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.’”
But Kamiya still can’t let go completely of his justifications of U.S. militarism. Like many liberals who should have known better, even though he now admits the war went horribly wrong, Kamiya uses the excuse that it could have or should have gone right, if only the U.S. had pursued a more competent policy.
Of course, when making this argument, Kamiya ignores what he himself writes just a few sentances earlier when presenting Fisk’s perspective. The U.S. went into Iraq and Afghanistan for all the wrong reasons. And so, no matter how “competent” we might have been in managing the post-invasion process, the final outcome was and is inevitable. Israel, unlike the U.S. was quite competent in its management of the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war. That didn’t change the outcome one little bit.
Ironically, as Asaf pointed out to me, Kamiya and liberals like him echo the extreme right’s arguments about the war in Vietnam. If only we had managed the Vietnam war competently, we could have won, they claim. Does Kamiya believe that as well? If not, what is the difference? That the Vietnam war was run by Democrats and the Iraq war by Republicans?
Fisk’s central point is that intentions do matter. Fisk was dead on about this war from the beginning. Kamiya wasn’t. Why should any reasonable person listen to Kamiya’s historical analysis over Fisk’s? It is Kamiya’s ideology (and ego) that get’s in his way. Fisk discarded those long ago, and lets people and events tell the true story. That is why Fisk is one of the few remaining great and true journalists.