DESPATCHES FROM BAGHDAD

www.robert-fisk.com

Robert Fisk is one of Britain’s most respected foreign correspondents. Visit his website to read his daily bulletins on life in Baghdad during wartime.

World War II was an obscenity. It ended in 1945. Yet you would think, listening to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bush who have launched a war in the Middle East, that Hitler was still alive in his Berlin bunker. You would think, too, that our leaders and journalists and — let us be frank — the Arab dictators too, have not understood this. The Luftwaffe, if you listen to Messers Blair and Bush, is still taking off from Cap Gris Nez, ready to bombard London after years of appeasement of Nazi Germany. Saddam, of course, is Hitler.
 
Yet it is our air forces that are about to strike from Iraq’s ‘Cap Gris Nez’’; Kuwait and Qatar and Turkey and assorted aircraft carriers — to pulverize not London but Baghdad. What is it about our Lilliputian leaders who dare to manipulate our massive sacrifice in World War II for their squalid conflict against Iraq, elevating the tinpot dictatorship of Saddam Hussein into the epic historical tragedy of the 1939-1945 war?
 
George Bush Junior tried to don the mantle of Churchill last year, pretending that he was the Churchill who stood up against the “appeasement” of anyone who objected to a war against Saddam. The theme has run like a sick justification throughout this fraudulent campaign for war. History, said Blair — who has never seen a war in his life — had important lessons for this crisis. Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler were the work of a good man who made the wrong decision, he told us. President Jacques Chirac, defending his country from charges of cowardice, recalled that when France wanted to take action in the Balkans, the country found itself alone, recalling “the West’s appeasement of Hitler.” Provoked by the promised French veto in the UN Security Council, the New York Post printed a photograph of American soldiers’ graves in Normandy. “They died for France but France has forgotten,” the paper announced — as if liberation from the Nazis in 1944 involved France’s surrender of free speech 58 years later. “Where are the French now, as American soldiers prepare to put their soldiers on the line to fight today’s Hitler, Saddam Hussein?” the Post asked.
 
Even Winston S. Churchill, grandson of the great man, weighed into the pages of the extreme right-wing Wall Street Journal’ to complain that the East European states which supported the US — with a motion drafted by a former US government official, though he didn’t say so — have not forgotten the debt of gratitude they owe to the United States, first for liberating them from the Nazis. Churchill was not alone. Saddam Hussein himself has joined this cynical crowd.
 
In his interview with Tony Benn, the “Hitler of Baghdad” advised his British visitor that if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation, they would fight bravely — just as the British people in World War II had defended their country in their own way. His prime minister, Tariq Aziz, later told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that “the truth is that Bush is dismantling the United Nations, like the Third Reich in the 1930s nullified the League of Nations.”
 
And so it goes, on and on and on. Poor old World War II, you can’t help thinking. Barbara Amiel, wife of the Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black, told readers of the Canadian Maclean’s’ Magazine that “destroying Saddam’s regime will genuinely be a liberation for the people of Iraq, and when it happens the liberators will be greeted with the same extraordinary joy that met the Allies in 1945 in France.”
 
But no matter. Forget that one of those nations which wants to use its veto in the UN Security Council — Russia — lost 20 million people (possible 30 million) in its battle against the Nazis. Even the BBC is now talking about “the Allies” who will invade Iraq. So here’s a voice — one of many I have received in my mailbag — from that appalling period of world history, a letter from a British soldier in Burma, appalled by the injuries inflicted on a young girl in an RAF air raid and the 30 dead British infantrymen accidentally slaughtered in a US bombing mission. “I cannot understand,” he wrote to me, “what our prime minister and Jack Straw think they are doing. The US policy on Israel/Palestine is evil.”
 
Last week, when Bush, Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Aznar met in the Azores, World War II symbolism reached its apogee. The Big Three — Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin — met in Potsdam to decide the future of the post-Nazi world. On Sunday, the Little Three — two prime ministers who no longer represent their people and a US president who may not even have been fairly elected — met on an obscure Portuguese island to decide the future of the Middle East. Shame upon these pygmies and their lies. Who remembers now that the BBC broadcast the first news of the 1944 Normandy landings with these words: “The armies of the United Nations have landed on the beaches of France.” That’s what we called ourselves then. So delete the recording. Erase the tape. Let the grass grow over the mass graves of 60 million dead. But for God’s sake, leave them in peace.

FISK’S WEASEL WORDS TO WATCH FOR IN WAR

'NEWLY LIBERATED'
– for territory and cities newly occupied by the Americans or British.

'INEVITABLE REVENGE'
– for the executions of Saddam's Baath party officials which no one actually said were inevitable.

'STUBBORN' OR 'SUICIDAL'
– to be used when Iraqi forces fight rather than retreat.

'ALLEGEDLY'
– for all carnage caused by Western forces.

'AT LAST, THE DAMNING EVIDENCE'
– used when reporters enter old torture chambers.

'OFFICIALS HERE ARE NOT GIVING US MUCH ACCESS'
– a clear sign that reporters in Baghdad are confined to their hotels.

'LIFE GOES ON'
– for any pictures of Iraq's poor making tea.

'REMNANTS'
– allegedly 'die-hard' Iraqi troops still shooting at the Americans but actually the first signs of a resistance movement dedicated to the 'liberation' of Iraq from its new western occupiers.

'WHAT WENT WRONG?'
– to accompany pictures illustrating the growing anarchy in Iraq as if it were not predicted.