By Robert Fisk

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 honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… We are today not far from a disaster.”

by Robert Fisk

Margaret? Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, “there will be more than one lost generation” in Iraq?

Is there no end to the kidnappers’ targets? Margaret Hassan was abducted at 7.30 yesterday morning on her way to work running Care International’s Iraq operation. Soon afterwards, Arabic al-Jazeera television showed her sitting in a room looking calm, if concerned. It also showed close-ups of her identification papers and said an unnamed Iraqi group claimed it had kidnapped her.

Margaret was the enemy of United Nations sanctions on Iraq. She is the symbol of all those who believe that Iraq - a real, free, unoccupied Iraq - has a future; and all we can be told is that she, too, has joined the legion of the unpersons, the “disappeared”, the list of those who, because of their language or the colour of their eyes or their nationality, have slipped into Iraq’s dark hole.

By Robert Fisk

June 29, 2004 “The Star” — Beirut

So, in the end, America’s enemies set the date.

The handover of “full sovereignty” was secretly brought forward so that the ex-CIA intelligence officer who is now premier of Iraq could avoid another bloody offensive by America’s enemies.

What was supposed to be the most important date in Iraq’s modern history was changed - like a birthday party, because it might rain on Wednesday.

Pitiful is the word that comes to mind.

Here we were, handing “full sovereignty” to the people of Iraq - “full”, of course, providing we forget the 160 000 foreign soldiers whom Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has apparently asked to stay on in Iraq, “full” providing we forget the 3 000 US diplomats in Baghdad who will constitute the largest US embassy in the world.

And we never even told the Iraqi people we had changed the date.

Few, save of course for the Iraqis, understood the cruellest paradox of the event.

By Robert Fisk - 17 June 2004

They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain’s 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books…

On the eve of our “handover” of “full sovereignty” to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.

Yes, we are preparing to give “full sovereignty” to Iraq. That’s also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.

Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens’s attention was Maude’s official “Proclamation” to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.

The re-writing of Iraqi history is now going on at supersonic speed

By Robert Fisk - 26 May 2004

I can’t wait to see Abu Ghraib prison reduced to rubble by the Americans — at the request of the new Iraqi government, of course. It will be turned to dust in order to destroy a symbol of Saddam Hussein’s brutality. That’s what President Bush tells us. So the rewriting of history still goes on.

Last August, I was invited to Abu Ghraib — by my favorite U.S. Gen. Janis Karpinski, no less — to see the million-dollar U.S. refurbishment of this vile place. Squeaky clean cells and toothpaste tubes and fresh pairs of pants for the “terrorist” inmates. But now, suddenly, the whole kit and caboodle is no longer an American torture center. It’s still an Iraqi torture center and thus worthy of demolition.

The rewriting of Iraqi history is now going on at supersonic speed.

Weapons of mass destruction? Forget it. Links between Saddam and al-Qaida? Forget it. Liberating the Iraqis from Saddam’s Abu Ghraib life of torture? Forget it. Wedding party slaughtered? Forget it. Clear the decks for both “full (sic) sovereignty” and “chaotic events.” This is, at any rate, according to Bush. When I heard his hesitant pronunciation of Abu Ghraib as “Abu Grub” on Monday night, I could only profoundly agree.