British Journalist Robert Fisk

Interesting comments from Robert Fisk on the war in Iraq:

"Three days after the Americans came to Baghdad, I said the real story is about to begin and that is the story of war against American occupation. A lot of my colleagues thought that was very, very funny -- they hooted at me with laughter. But they're not anymore.

Look, apart from the Kurdistan area, Iraq is in a state of total anarchy and chaos. No roads are safe outside Baghdad. Much of Baghdad is in insurgents hands. Only the little green zones, the armored hotel areas where the westerners live and swim, and some cases don't even leave their rooms, and that applies to many journalists, only here are people allowed to have the illusion that things are getting better, things are improving. Outside in the streets where some journalists still go, including, for example, my colleague Patrick Cockburn of the Independent and myself and the Guardian Newspaper, not most Americans though one or two.

Out in the streets where few of us go is hell on Earth. I managed to get, a couple of weeks ago, to the mortuary in the city of Baghdad. As I often go in the past, counting the bodies of midday and midsummer out in the heat. There were 26 by midday. Nine had arrived by nine in the morning. I managed to get the official figures for July for the total number of violent deaths in Baghdad alone. The figure was 1,100 violent deaths, men, women and children. Shot, butchered, knifed, executed, death squad killings. A figure which, of course is not given out by the Iraqi Health Ministry and certainly not by the occupational authorities.

We now have a situation in Iraq where there is a full scale insurgency by both the Shiites and the Sunnis against western forces. Once an insurgency of that kind starts in a Muslim country, it is impossible to quench it. Sorry, you guys can we put the book back? Let's start again, we got it wrong at one point. You can’t do that. You can't do that. I was discussing with an Iraqi friend three weeks ago in Baghdad what he thought the answer was. He said, “There is no answer. You've got to go. You've got to go.” I wrote at the time that I thought it was a terrible equation in Iraq. It goes like this. The Americans must leave. And the Americans will leave but the Americans can't leave. And that's the equation that turns sand into blood.

Once you become an occupying power you take upon the responsibilities for the civilians which we have not done but you also have a responsibility to yourself. You have to keep justifying over and over and over again to your own populations. You were right to do it: ok, there were no weapons of mass destruction but we got rid of Saddam; ok, we haven't gotten the electricity yet but there will be a constitution. Well, we hope. And we did have elections. Remember them in January? And all the time people die in ever greater numbers. Remember that figure for July that’s just Baghdad. What does that mean for the whole country? 5,000 dead? In July? What does that mean in the whole of Iraq in a year? You see the problem? We're talking a 50,000, 60,000 dead a year now. The worst figure we've heard is 100,000 since 2003 yet still we don't get statistics. When individual journalists have to go to hospital mortuaries and count the bloated corpses on the floor, you have know you've got problems.

The last time I was in Baghdad I began to ask myself whether the dangers -- and I've never done this on any other war except for the Algerian war which was very similar in many ways, questioning whether the dangers of covering Iraq are any longer worth the story. I suppose I think they are. But I guess having looked at my face in the mirror occasionally and seeing the gray hairs, I wonder if I should keep going. I probably will, but I'm not sure.

The total figure of journalists who have died during and after the 2003 invasion up to date is now 68. The most recent being an Iraqi stringer again from The New York Times in Basra who was found dumped in a waste heap, executed with three bullets through the back of his head. I suspect the “Iraqi police” killed him like I suspect the Iraqi police killed the American journalist in Basra. Look, there's no doubt it's becoming the most dangerous story for journalists anywhere ever.

If you want to look at the worst period it would be in Bosnia in 1992 when a lot of journalists who had never been in wars before were sent in to Bosnia and were dying at the rate of dozens a month. That was primarily, I think, because they were sending in very young men whose experience of war was Hollywood where the hero, of course, always survives. And what is shocking about this is that almost all the journalists are being killed, almost without exception in Iraq, are experienced in many cases, middle-aged guys who have been under fire many times before, who know about the lethality of weapons and whose jobs and lives are simply no longer respected. I've never been in a war like Iraq war in which our lives are so endangered, so targeted by all sides it sometimes seems. And I'm not sure what we can do about it.

The American correspondents, some of them are guarded by armed Iraqis. The New York Times has a compound with four watch towers and armed Iraqis with “NYT” New York Times on their black t-shirts. NBC lives in a hotel in the Karada District with iron grills. The A.P. lives in the Palestine Hotel with two armored walls. Very rarely do they ever venture out and never do the American staffers go in the streets. As I say, we still go out with Iraqi friends. We actually go out to lunch in restaurants in Iraq. But I think that's probably because as long as we're with Iraqis and we look at our watch and say, 20 minutes, finish the meal, half an hour, got to be out. You're ok but it's a calculated risk.

As I said, I'm not sure the risks are worth it anymore. Our lives are worth nothing to the insurgents. Our lives appear to be worth virtually nothing to the Americans or the British. I think that when you reach a stage where our lives and our jobs are simply no longer respected, you do have to ask the question, is it worth it anymore. I think it is because I think Iraq is an appalling tragedy. Primarily for Iraqis, of course, who we don't put at the top of our list. We say 1,900 Americans, 93 Brits or whatever it may be. It's the Iraqis doing the suffering and the dying in fast numbers. Many of them because they trusted us and took our schilling and wanted to work for the police or wanted to work for construction companies building landing strips for the Americans or fortresses for the Americans.

But I think the whole Iraqi story for us as journalists is becoming almost impossible to cover. Certainly if you have a journalist who lives behind two armored walls of the hotel who just used a mobile phone to call British or American diplomats behind another concrete wall, you might as well live in County Mayo, Ireland or Santa Fe, New Mexico. There's no point in being there.
And for example, the last trip I made outside Baghdad it took me two weeks to arrange it to go down to Najaf. It was the most fearful trip. I drove the road with three Iraqi friends. One of them a Shiite proleter, a clergyman, a religious man. All the checkpoints of the Iraqi army had been abandoned. This just after George Bush says the Iraqi army is in the field. There were up-turned Iraqi police cars, burned-out American vehicles. I didn't see a member of the Security Forces until I reached the outskirts of Najaf about 80 miles from Iraq.
The whole of the countryside outside Baghdad is under the control, is now the property of the armed insurgents both Sunni and Shia. This, we are not being told. This, president Bush will not acknowledge. This, our own dear Mr. Blair will not acknowledge. And that is part of the tragedy. And it seems now to be part of our life that New Orleans flooding is not real until it's real, that the collapse of Iraq is not real until it's real.

With such poor television coverage, although we did get good pictures I noticed, of the British soldiers on fire, for heavens sakes in their armored vehicles. I don't know if it's possible to explain what is happening in Iraq anymore. Most journalists, western journalists are relying upon Iraqi stringers, Iraqi correspondents to risk their necks on the streets. And they are risking their necks and they are dying for it to bring in the news. But there are no by and large -- by and large there are no westernized, independently journalists on the streets unarmed. My newspaper does not have protection. We do not carry weapons.

But my goodness, as I say, I don't know how long we can continue doing this. Each time Patrick and I go to Iraq it's a little bit worse. And when we look back at what it was like a year ago, which was considered appalling, we're amazed at how free we were, how easily we went grocery shopping. I still go grocery shopping-- for six minutes only. Grab the bread, push my way to the front of the cue, pay, out. You learn a lot.

I went out to my favorite restaurant, the Ramaya, the other day to find it was no longer the Ramaya. It was now given an Islamic name and had a green neon sign. When I went inside, the menu was no longer in English, French, and Arabic. It was only Arabic. No more bottles of Lebanese red wine. It been totally Islamicized. You need to see this and understand it. But the problem is most of our colleagues are not permitted even by their head offices to do that.

~Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of Britain's Independent newspaper, speaking on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.