1986 September 24 Horoscope

only learn that we never learn

Robert Fisk - The Independent

been five years and still learn. With each anniversary of the steps crumble beneath our feet, more crack rocks, sand thins. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and think of Churchill, in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster."

But even before we have used these parallels and dispersed in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is steeped in blood. However, what is our state of contrition? Sure, we have a public consultation, but not yet! Hopefully the inadequacy was our only sin.

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Today we are engaged in a futile debate. What went wrong? How did the Roman senate members of our era did not rebel when they told lies about weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's links with Osama Bin Laden and 11 September? How do we let it happen? And how was that we did not anticipate what would come after the war?

Yes, of course, the British that the Americans tried to listen, Downing Street now tells us. Really, really try, before we knew the total and absolute that it was good to embark on this illegal war. There is now vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning for later on this again, "but not about that. Our predicament in Iraq is in a much more terrible.

When the Americans entered the blood and fire in Iraq in 2003, with its whizzing cruise missiles on the sandstorm towards a hundred towns and cities, I used to sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep by the sound of explosions, and flipped through the books he had purchased to overcome those dark hours and dangerous. War and Peace by Tolstoy reminded me that a conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror, I recommend the Battle of Borodin, "along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there is a long harangue of Pat Buchanan, written five months before, and I still feel his power, his premonition and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency style in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach its peak. But then the tide will fall, because the only company in which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.

"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French in Algeria, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have taken the road to empire and from the next hill we will meet those who went before us. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history. "

How easily the little men took us to hell, without any knowledge of history or at least no interest in it. Read none of the Iraqi insurgency against British occupation in 1920, and the abrupt and brutal under the conflict that gave Churchill the following year.

In our historical radar appears even Crassus, the richest of the Roman generals, who claimed to be emperor after conquering Macedonia - "Mission Accomplished" - and vowed to destroy Mesopotamia revenge. Places in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians, ancestors of today Iraqi insurgents-annihilated the legions, chopped off her head with Crassus and sent back to Rome filled with gold. In these times would have videotaped decapitation.

With its monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now show that they have learned nothing. Anthony Blair, as we had always call the small-town lawyer should be put on trial for his mendacity. Assumed instead of bringing peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict that has contributed so much to exacerbate. And now the man who changed his mind about the legality of the war, and did so on a single sheet of letter paper dares to suggest that we should look to immigrants seeking British citizenship. Question 1, I propose, should be: what blood-soaked Attorney General helped to send 176 British soldiers to die for a lie? Question 2: how got away from that act?

But in a sense glib and silly nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the temporary structure and board of all our decision-making process. The major issues that confront us-Iraq or Afghanistan, the U.S. economy or global warming, armed invasions or "terrorism" - are not dealt with as serious political timetables but according to television schedules and press conferences. Do

first airstrikes in Iraq will come to U.S. television in primetime? Fortunately yes. "The first U.S. troops in Baghdad appear in the news of the breakfast? Absolutely. "The capture of Saddam Hussein will be announced simultaneously by Bush and Blair?

But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the time of the announcement that the war in Europe had ended. And the Russians are ahead. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and planted alarm and confusion in their ranks."

Why Bush and Blair did not tell us that when Iraqi insurgents began to attack the occupation forces? Well, they were busy telling us that things would improve, that the rebels were only "desperate."

On June 17, 1940, Churchill told the British people: "The news from France is very bad and I am shocked by the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why Blair and Bush did not tell us the news from Iraq was very bad and they were shocked-well, even a few tears for a minute, by the Iraqi people?

Because those were the men who had the temerity, the gall to dress up as genuine Churchill, as escenificarían a redición heroes of World War II, while the BBC dutifully called "allies" the invaders and painted the regime of Saddam Hussein as the Third Reich.
course, when I went to school our leaders, Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the U.S., had had actual experience of war. Not a single Western leader today has firsthand experience of the conflict. When Anglo-American invasion began in Iraq, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But now it's gone. Also Colin Powell, veteran Vietnam, which was pushed aside by Rumsfeld and the CIA.

However, one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American politicians, Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have never heard a shot fired in anger and made sure not to have to fight for their homeland when they had the chance. No wonder Hollywood titles like "shock and awe" are attractive to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict, the same goes for Blair and Brown.

Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed house. Brown or even accountable for Iraq until the war ends.

is grotesque that today, after all the positions of our political midgets five years ago, we are allowed to have even a true spiritualist meeting with the ghosts of World War II. Statistics are the medium, and the room must be dark. But the fact that the total of American dead in Iraq (3000 978) is well above the number of U.S. casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings in Normandy (3000 384 dead or missing), June 6 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (thousand 200).

represent little more than a third of all deaths (11 000 14) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of Britons killed in Iraq (176) is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of Baggins in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of Americans wounded in Iraq -29 000 395 - is more than nine times that of the wounded on D-Day (3 thousand 184) and more than a quarter of the total share of casualties in the Korean War of 1950-53 (103 000 284).

Iraqi casualties still allow a comparison closest to the Second World War. Even if we accept the most conservative of statistics on civilian deaths range from 350-thousand to one million, "it has long exceeded the number of British civilians killed in the Blitz in London in 1944-45 (6000) and now exceeds far the total number of civilian casualties in bombing raids across the United Kingdom -60 000 595 dead, 182 seriously injured 86 000, from 1940 to 1945.
In fact, the Iraqi death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military casualties in World War II, which reached a staggering 265 000 killed (some historians speak of 300 mil) and 277 thousand injured. Minimum estimates of Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresden or-more terrible-two Hiroshimas.

And yet, in a sense this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We did it for the sole support of Israel, whose own false reports on Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while shedding crocodile tears for the thousands of Iraqis killed so far.

The huge American military prestige suffered irreparable damage. And if today, as now calculated, is in the Muslim world 22 times the number of Western soldiers were there during the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, we must ask ourselves what we are doing. Are we there for oil? Why democracy? Why Israel? Merrily

connect Afghanistan to Iraq. Reportedly, if Washington had not been distracted by Iraq, the Taliban would not have been restored. But Al Qaeda and the nebulous Osama bin Laden is not distracted. And that explains why they expanded their operations in Iraq and then used this experience to harass the West in Afghanistan with the bomber, which had not been known before in that country.

I will venture a presumption terrible: we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and we will certainly "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our own horror, horror-Islam what precipitated us into the abyss. And while not learn to leave alone a Muslim peoples, our catastrophe in the Middle East will become more serious. There is no connection between Islam and "terror." But no connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror." There is a very complicated equation. And we do not need a public consultation to understand well. Translation