IRAQ: ROBERT FISK

ICH: A Glimpse of the Ghost of Vietnam in Iraq Lies and Atrocities

12/27/04 "The Independent" -- 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 honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that 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 Sept. 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.

The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear — of the occupier, of the dictator — is something that you cannot re-inject into people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.