The Only Lesson We Ever Learn Is That We Never Learn
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a “hell-disaster”.
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry - but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people - the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world - not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam’s links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn’t plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning - of which more later - but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I’d brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror - I recommend the Battle of Borodino - along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: “With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
“They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill’s brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia - “Mission Accomplished” - and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians - ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents - annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus’s head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair - as we should always have called this small town lawyer - should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war - and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper - daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith’s proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us - be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or “terrorism” - are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam’s capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had “penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks”.
Why didn’t Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere “dead-enders”.
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: “The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune.” Why didn’t Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved - even just a few tears for a minute or so - for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders “the Allies” - they did, by the way - and painting Saddam’s regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders - Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States - had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen - Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz - have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like “Shock and Awe” appeal 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 won’t even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today - after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago - we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq - 176 - is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq - 29,395 - is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead - they range from 350,000 up to a million - these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom - 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded - from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or - more terrible still - two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan’s warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America’s massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa’ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto - in Afghanistan - unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror - yes, our terror - of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and “terror”. But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and “terror”. It’s not too complicated an equation. And we don’t need a public inquiry to get it right.
–Robert Fisk
©independent.co.uk
Mr. robert, or is it “fiskie”?
I’m so very glad that you are still in the game, haven’t retired, though you’ve tried to do so. Your historical perspective and your common sense is so desperately needed in the U.K. and especially in the USA.
Thank you for speaking truth to power and brining to bear your long service to history and sense.
great article Robert Fisk. we sense the end is near, mercifully so. someone take us out of our misery. Remember to smile on the way out..
Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.
Robert Fisk
Another excellent article…the historical perspective is highly relevant and sorely needed in these disturbing times…
The Middle East was taken by the English & French as the Spoils Of War after World War One.
Stabbed the Arabs in the back. They’d been promised a PanArab Nation if they helped the Brits throw out the Turks.
Instead the Brits replaced the Turkish boot on the Arab’s neck with the British JackBoot.
They formed and then occupied “Iraq” and created the “Jewish Homeland” in Palestine that would become the Military OutPost of the Anglo-American Empire called “Israel”.
Same way they’ve treated every traditonal culture they’ve encountered, for instance the Native Americans in North, Central and South America.
Colonial domination for Empire.
Manifest Destiny.
Genocide, plunder of resources, put up a parking lot and a WalMart .. and call it “Spreading Democracy”.
Kinda like bringing “Christianity” to the “Heathens” so that at least they have the opportunity to take “Jesus” as their Savior just in time to go to Heaven - immediately before being slaughtered.
Only now it’s not “Christianity” they’re spreading, it’s “Democracy” ..
Oldrascal;
Didn’t bush say that he was launching a crusade? In part this war is indeed a continuation of the medieval crusades, fought to spread Christianity to those who dare question the divinity of Christ and threaten the Holy land… It is likely to be as successful as all the previous crusades; that is an abject failure. Perhaps the question of why the war started is even simpler than the reason’s given in Fisk’s excellent article. Bush went to war because he thinks he talks to God, were he any other man he’d be safely locked away in a monastary or a psycho hospital.
Fisk writes:
“And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to “lose” Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror - yes, our terror - of Islam that is leading us into the abyss.”
#####################
This (to use FDR’s famous exhortation from his 03-04-33 innaugural address) is the fear we have to fear. Alas, how much we have lost in the last 75 years!
People learn. Corporations don’t want to learn; or rather, they learn how to profit off of war and manipulate governments and the gullible to launch illegal wars. No oversight, no accountability. Don’t blame the average person. Blame corporations, governments run and owned by corporations, media tied to military contractors.
It’s not “WE”–it’s THEM: corporations, war profiteers, corrupt politicians…
It’s funny really. The history of our world, both ancient and modern, is there for all to see. Yet history is something you read in a book whereas ‘now’ is now and, in the minds of most, it is unrelated to the past.
Shows just how stupid humans really are! We are our own worst enemy.
www.dangerouscreation.com
Here in the US we had more recent history- The Vietnam War. And the same people who supported the Vietnam War support the Iraq war and vice versa. Why is that?
History repeats itself because there is no lesson learned.
The real question is, how bad does it have to get before society will learn the lesson? The sad answer is that they is no lesson bad enough where society will learn from it.
By the way, Mr. Fisk is giving Colin Powell an unwarrented free pass. Powell probably had reason to doubt what he was presenting at the UN but still did it. Powell was involved with the investigation of the My Lai massacre (was he involved with the cover up?). His son is the head of the FCC who is allowing futher consolidation of our airwaves, which is a further limitation of the democratic process.
I will mention Mr. Nader, because there is someone who has learned some lessons that speaks for the public good in an educated manner.
so it goes…
Churchill was conservative, racist, imperialist, a tool of the moneyed classes and sometimes a blunderer, but I still have great respect for the man. He had a great gift for the English language. And he was willing to stick to his guns. So far as I know he was the only Conservative MP to oppose the 1938 Munich settlement while most people agreed with Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” pronouncement. Unlike today’s many chickenhawk warriors, Churchill also suited up and risked getting killed, first in the colonial army, then in WWI. He even escaped a Boer POW camp during Britain’s war in South Africa. Hard to imagine either Cheney or W. doing any of that.
I recall the words of Mark Shields during the Shields & Brooks segment of PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
He said something like: “An overwhelmingly Christian army, from a country that gives overwhelming support to the Jewish state of Israel, has invaded and occupied an overwhelmingly Muslim land. What part of this do Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld… …not get?”
Bush, Blair, How ard & now the Brown COW.
All spilling blood and treasure in Mesopotamia. What have they gotten from killing Humbaba and laying waste to the countryside besides loss, fear and the oblivion of death? This legacy was written in stone thousands of years ago. What has man learned?
Empire Red Soil
Blood red soil
Blood red bottom fed greed
Soils itself in the valleys of need.
While we worship the beast,
that devours us.
The empire US.
So worship and please the beast,
Appease your conscience with newspeak.
For ain’t it us that’s saving the weak.
For we’re the compassionate red
still savoring the garden apple led
That puts power, status, and wealth ahead
of sharing the bread.
We’re all inmates of the weapons of greed.
WMD indeed.
Inmates in our garden home
As the beast devours us.
The one lesson that has been learned is that war is profitable for the military industrial media complex and the thought of 100 years of profit is warmonger nirvana.
Britian has done almost as much as the US in the past to leave countries in ruins: India, Pakistan, South Africa, Iran, Palestine.
Your younger politicians, like ours, have inherited the arrogant mentality of a colonialist power but not the sobriety of having seen the fury of the resistance to it. They do not know war first hand.
They are the pampered scions of privilege, to whom nobody had ever said “No you can’t!”. They need a good slap in the face and a real job.
militantliberal-I believe Churchill was also the first to use chemical weapons on the Iraqis. The Great Game in the Mid East is full of curiosities.
Wars come. Wars go. Governments come & go. Constitutions and Bills of Rights come and go. Nobody except a tiny and inconsequential minority ever cared about any of them. I want you to be assured however that no one will ever take away the things that are REALLY important to America: Aryan Male Supremacy; Gender slavery; Human slavery; Massive child abuse; Constant war; & Genocide. These can never be taken away because if any one tries, we’ll kill them and make a revolution to restore the “Natural Order”. The rest never mattered and never will. This is Amerika.
Greg R and MIlitantliberal–Churchill did indeed authorize the use of WMD’s on the Iraqis along with drawing the screwed up boundaries many of the countries of that part of the world post WWI.
He is reknowned for telling his Tory colleagues after his wise and premature (to him anyway) retirement from the Prime Ministership by the British electorate that: “history will be kind to us because I plan to write it.” Ya gotta love the old drunk’s chutzpah!
I think that Fisk is mistaken about two or more points, but will just comment on two.
*) Al Qa’ida in Iraq is very likely NOT the same as that of Usama Bin Ladin et al in Afghanistan. ‘Al Qa’ida’ is a title that various groups have been said to be adopting, without being affiliated with the original, so real Al Qa’ida, for one thing. Another possibility is that the group in Iraq may certainly have recruited Iraqis, as was reported in recent enough article by Dahr Jamail; however, he did not speak therein of who the top controllers, bosses are, and they may likely enough be covert U.S. operators.
*) Iraqis may possibly win against this war of aggression, but if Leuren Moret and other experts on radiological poisoning and DU are right, then it’d be a lost cause anyway; Iraq will be radiologically poisoned for, in practical terms, FOREVER, not a place for humans to live.
In another article of Jamail’s, also recently enough, he reported based on views of some of the Iraqi refugees in Syria and whom he interviewed. They said that Iraq is NO PLACE to ever return to, it’s a finished country; and I believe they spoke of the radiological poisoning of Iraq, which we know would be due to this damn DU.
I agree with his concluding statement, and appreciate some of the historical notes he provides, but believe he has to spend some of his time READING. One good article for him to read is the one by Scott Ritter and posted here at CD on March 18th.
Is it that we never learn or, as Plato writes in Timaeus, that we forget the ancient lessons.
It’s not true we never learn. Dissention, regulators, grass roots, protestors, rebels, bloggers, and many others are only a Remnant of the population of people. To learn truth is only for some- that actually seek truth and are able to bring truth to others. I thank God for people like that, that have their opinions, and choices, and even courageous witness in the face of Greed, Domination, Deceipt and of course Murder. And I believe even with terrible disappointments- that accumulate daily- God’s Remnant continues to be in place, with honour and joy.