Interview with Robert Fisk
by Matthew Rothschild
The Progressive magazine, December 2002
Two common items circulating among progressives on the Internet
after September 11 have been Robert Fisk's dispatches for the
London Independent and W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939."
The last stanza of that poem begins: "All I have is a voice/To
undo the folded lie." That's what Fisk does: He uses his
voice to expose falsehoods and highlight injustice and, as Auden
put it, to "exchange messages" with the rest of us who
are in this together.
The most decorated British foreign correspondent, Fisk has
been based in the Middle East for the last twenty-five years,
and his knowledge of the area is unparalleled. He has interviewed
Osama bin Laden three times, once in the Sudan and twice in Afghanistan,
and his take on the man is instructive. So, too, is his warning
about the current war, which he views as a trap. Here's what he
said in his article of September 13: "A slaughter by the
U.S. in retaliation for the New York and Washington bloodbaths
might just move the Arab masses from stubborn docility to the
point of detonation.
Three years ago, I interviewed Fisk when he came through
Madison (see our July 1998 issue). This time, I called him in
his hotel room in Islamabad on October 24 and spoke with him for
an hour and forty-five minutes.
Unique in his ability to mix first-hand reporting with trenchant
analysis, Fisk is a storyteller at heart, and he interrupted his
conversation several times to check his notebook to make sure
he was giving me precise quotations. Toward the end, he cited
the British pacifist poet Siegfried Sassoon, and before we signed
off, he invoked Auden, whose "Epitaph on a Tyrant" is
about Stalin, Fisk said, "but is perfect for Saddam Hussein."
Auden wrote, "When he laughed, respectable senators burst
with laughter,/And when he cried the little children died in the
streets."
Just then, the operator broke in on the line, and Fisk said,
"Matt, we'll have to stop the poetry session."
Here is an excerpt of our talk.
Q: Where were you when you first heard about the September
11 attacks?
Robert Fisk: I was actually on an airliner, about to head
from Europe across the Atlantic. The plane hadn't moved away from
the stand when I got a phone call from the office saying that
it looked like two hijacked planes had just flown into the World
Trade Center. I walked back and immediately told the crew members,
and they told the captain, who came out and asked me what I knew.
We took off anyway and started over the Atlantic. The pilot was
talking to Brussels, and the co-pilot was coming back and telling
me what they were being told. Then we heard there was a fourth
aircraft that had somehow crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania.
After a while, they came on in French--it was a French airliner--and
said that America had just closed all its air space, so we're
turning around. Back I went toward Europe again.
Q: Do you think Osama bin Laden is responsible for the attacks?
Fisk: When you have a crime against humanity that is so awesome
in scale and death, it is more than permissible to look around
and say, who recently has been declaring war on the United States?
Of course, the compass points straight to bin Laden.
But why is it that we go to immense lengths getting the Serbs
who were responsible for the massacre of 7,000 at Srbrenica--that's
slightly more than the total figure for New York--and we take
them to a tribunal in The Hague, and one after another, we arraign
them, try them, convict them, and punish them in front of the
world, but no plans have been brought forward to get bin Laden
and his friends and put them on trial?
Q: What do you make of the evidence against bin Laden?
Fisk: I was very struck by the fact that Colin Powell said
he would produce evidence and then never produced it. Then Tony
Blair produced a document of seventy paragraphs, but only the
last nine referred to the World Trade Center, and they were not
convincing. So we have a little problem here: If they're guilty,
where is the evidence? And if we can't hear the evidence, why
are we going to war?
Q: At the beginning of the war, you said the U.S. might be
falling into a trap. What did you mean?
Fisk: If it is bin Laden, he's a very intelligent guy. He's
been planning his war for a long time. I remember the last time
I met him in 1997 in Afghanistan. It was so cold. When I awoke
in the morning in the tent, I had frost in my hair. We were in
a twenty-five-foot-wide and twenty-five-foot-high air raid shelter
built into the solid rock of the mountain by bin Laden during
the war against the Russians. And bin Laden said to me (he was
being very careful, watching me writing it down), "From this
mountain, Mr. Robert, upon which you are sitting, we beat the
Russian army and helped break the Soviet Union. And I pray to
God that he allows us to turn America into a shadow of itself."
When I saw the pictures of New York without the World Trade Center,
New York looked like a shadow of itself.
Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but
he will have worked out very coldly what America would do in response
to this. I'm sure he wanted America to attack Afghanistan. Once
you do what your enemy wants, you are walking into a trap, whether
you think it's the right thing to do or not.
Q: And what is that trap?
Fisk: To bring the Americans in, to strike so brutally and
with so much blood at an innocent Muslim people that an explosion
comes throughout the Middle East. Bin Laden was constantly revolving
in his mind the fact that he had got rid of the Russians; therefore,
the Americans can be got rid of, too. And where better than in
the country where he knows how to fight?
As things continue, it will be more and more difficult for
the dictators, kings, and princes in the Middle East to go on
justifying this. They are going to have to start saying, "No,
stop." When they do that, the United States is going to have
to ignore them. Once they are ignored, they lose the last element
of respect. The longer this war goes on, the better for bin Laden.
Q: You've interviewed bin Laden three times in the 1990s.
What's he like?
Fisk: He's very shrewd. But he struck me, even in 1997, as
being remarkably out of touch. I remember thinking this does not
look like the type of guy who walks to the top of a mountain with
a mobile phone and says, "Operation B, attack."
Bin Laden was very keen to point out to me that his forces
had fought the Americans in Somalia. He also wanted to talk about
how many mullahs in Pakistan were putting up posters saying, "We
follow bin Laden." He even produced a sort of Kodak set of
snapshots of graffiti supporting him, which had been spray-painted
on the walls of Karachi four and a half years ago. He gave me
some of the snapshots and said, "You can keep them, you can
keep them. See, this is proof that my word is getting out."
So when the Americans put a million-dollar reward on his
head, I thought, first of all, it probably isn't high enough;
he could out pay anyone who tried to get it. Secondly, I can't
think of anything he wanted more. Now he is America's number one
enemy. He's always wanted to be that.
The bin Laden I met each time was in a simple Saudi white
robe, with a simple, cheap kafiya and very cheap plastic sandals.
But a videotape released before September 11, which I saw on Lebanese
television, had him in a gold embroidered robe. When I saw this,
I thought, whoa, has this guy changed? I wouldn't have imagined
him ever appearing in such golden robes when I met him.
Q: What is bin Laden after?
Fisk: At the end of the day, bin Laden's interest is not
Washington and New York, it's the Middle East. He wants Saudi
Arabia. He wants to get rid of the House of Saud. There's a great
deal of resentment, even inside the royal family, at the continued
military presence of the United States there. Saudi Arabia is
the most fragile of all Arab states, though we're not saying so.
And, unfortunately, bin Laden puts his finger on the other longstanding
injustices in the Arab world: the continued occupation of Palestinian
land by the Israelis; the enormous, constant Arab anger with the
tens of thousands of Iraqi children who are dying under sanctions;
the feelings of humiliation of millions of Arabs living under
petty dictators, almost all of whom are propped up by the West.
Whether he's doing it cynically and has no interest in these
matters, or whether he's doing it out of genuine conviction, his
voice has a tremendous resonance throughout the Arab world. One
editorial in a Lebanese paper said it is a matter of great humiliation
for the Arabs that the only man who can outline, truthfully, what
our humiliations are is an Arab who has to say it from a cave
in a foreign country.
I've lived in the Middle East for twenty-five years. I know
exactly how these issues come up. Even my landlord, who is a moderate
Lebanese guy, says, "But bin Laden says what we think."
These people believe that bin Laden is being targeted not because
of the World Trade Center and Washington; they are not convinced
by the evidence that has been produced. They believe he's being
targeted because he tells the truth.
Q: Bush says this is a war of freedom-loving people against
the evil ones. What do you make of that?
Fisk: The three main Muslim partners of this so-called coalition
are Uzbekistan, whose president, Islam Karimov, has 7,000 political
prisoners, no opposition, and no free press; Saudi Arabia, which
is a complete autocracy, with absolutely no representation, and
women treated more or less as women are treated by the Taliban,
with regular Friday amputations and head-choppings; and Pakistan,
which has a military dictator running the show. The three main
local Muslim props of a famous coalition have nothing to do with
democracy at all, nor are we trying to bring democracy to these
countries. This isn't a war against terror; it's a war against
America's enemies.
Q: What's your opinion of the Northern Alliance?
Fisk: The Taliban are iniquitous, but so is the Northern
Alliance. Some of the guys in the Northern Alliance are war criminals.
One of the Northern Alliance commanders ran a slave girl network
in Kabul in 1994. Remember that there was a period when every
woman on the streets was at risk of being raped. This was the
Northern Alliance period of glory. These are our new foot soldiers.
What was it that Cheney said the other day? "Some of the
people who are on our side are not the kind of people we would
invite to dinner or we would want as neighbors." Now that's
sarcasm gone to obscenity.
Q: Do you think Mohamed Atta was the mastermind of the attacks,
or do you think he was taking orders?
Fisk: You know, the whole issue of orders is something I've
been debating. We live in a society in the West, where, when men
do violent things, they do them under orders. They are soldiers
carrying out orders or mafia men carrying out killings for bosses.
But the way things happen in the Middle East is not the same as
in the West. Look, international capital has been globalized,
so bin Laden is globalized. It's not surprising to find followers
of bin Laden in all these countries. There are followers of Dunkin'
Donuts and Colonel What's His Name, if you see what I mean. Individuals
in various countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia listen to the
tapes of bin Laden. They gather in groups of four or five. They
feel they want to do something to express their support for what
they've heard. The idea that they were taking orders is a particularly
Western idea.
I still wonder if the United States realizes how much planning
went into this. When we talk about "mindless terrorists,"
we are lying to ourselves. Because none of them--not the guy who
walks into an Israeli pizzeria full of kids, I was down that street,
I covered that story--get up in the morning, eat some hummus,
have a cup of coffee, and say, "Hmm. Let's go and set off
a suicide bomb today." I've invariably found out they'd spent
weeks and weeks and weeks planning it. It's not like they got
this religious feeling, and one week later they blow themselves
up. For example, the guys who drove cars into Israeli convoys
would for weeks practice driving the same car on the same piece
of road over and over again. Dummy runs, right?
Now these guys must have done dummy runs on the airplanes.
They must have spent months buying airplane tickets, going on
the same aircraft over and over, actually doing the whole journey,
checking to see if the flight deck was normally open and how many
crew members were on board. And of course, they worked out that
a full fuel load would kill everyone and bring the World Trade
Center down. These guys must have traveled up the elevators looking
at the buildings, deciding which side to hit, and how many floors
down you have to go. They must have worked out the structural
instability of the building. They must have taken many pictures
of it.
Q: What do you think are the roots of terrorism?
Fisk: These terrible acts occur because of political situations
and injustice in various parts of the world. The Middle East is
heavy with injustice. After September 11, Bush announced that
he had always had a vision of a Palestinian state. Why didn't
he tell us that before September 11, when it would have been a
bit more impressive? Then Tony Blair announces that he's always
wanted a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as the capital,
and Arafat gets invited to Downing Street. Then Powell arrives
here in Pakistan and announces he wants to solve the Kashmir crisis.
All of which shows that the United States and Britain realize
that there is a connection, otherwise why are they trying to patch
up all these longstanding injustices suddenly now?
Q: What about other causes of terrorism, like poverty and
Islamic fundamentalism?
Fisk: We love to think this is all about poverty, and, of
course, it has a connection. You can see that these people not
only are poor but they have no outlets. These governments allow
no opposition. So what do people do? They go to Islam. It's the
only organizational institution where they can express their feelings.
But it's not about poverty. I've never seen a single demonstration
in Pakistan, in the streets of Gaza, in the West Bank, in which
the people have come out with signs saying, "Please give
us better roads. Please give us new prenatal clinics. Please give
us a new sewage system." I'm sure they'd like those things,
but it's not what they demand in the demonstrations. In the demonstrations,
they talk about justice, they talk about an end to Israeli occupation.
In the demonstrations here in Pakistan, they talk about their
anger at the killing of innocent Afghans. They talk about their
need for democracy. But they do not talk about poverty. Fundamentalism
is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in
the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there
is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy. The violence
stems from injustice, because people feel they have been treated
unfairly, whether that means military occupation, starvation under
U.N. sanctions, whether it means that they have a dictatorship
imposed on them, propped up by the West. This is why people turn
to violence, because they have no other avenue left.
Q: And what about Islamic fundamentalism itself?
Fisk: The Muslim world has not begun to ask about the bin
Ladens, and the Mullah Omars, and the Mohamed Attas. There hasn't
been a single sociological inquiry, not one serious discourse
about how these people came to be what they are. When are Muslims
in the Middle East and in the subcontinent going to ask these
questions? How could believers, people who regard themselves as
true Muslims, get on those planes, quoting the words of God delivered
through the Prophet to themselves, knowing they were going to
kill innocent people? They saw the other passengers on the plane.
They could see the woman with her little daughter. They saw people
making phone calls to their wives or their husbands. They knew
who they were killing. These guys got on airplanes with kids and
women and innocent people on board, knowing that they were going
to vaporize them. And they came on board allegedly rereading quotations
from the Koran. There is a problem here. And I don't think that
problem has got anywhere near being addressed in the Muslim world.
Whatever the political injustices are that created an environment
that brought this about, it was not Americans who flew those planes
into those buildings. And we should remember that. The crimes
against humanity were perpetrated by people who were Arab Muslims.
And I haven't seen anyone address that issue out here. And they
should.
Q: What's your take on the theological language coming out
of Bush's mouth, as when he said: "God is not neutral"?
Fisk: All I can say is that I remember the Siegfried Sassoon
poem in which God is listening to the soldiers on the German front
lines and on the British front lines, both praying for victory.
The line goes: "God this, God that. 'My God,' said God, 'I've
got my work cut out.' "
Q: What happens if Bush gets bin Laden?
Fisk: I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm
much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.
Q: Then what?
Fisk: We're going to have to produce a whole plate load of
things that we've achieved and say that he's been neutralized,
and that he may be dead. But when the next videotape comes up,
I don't know what we do. It's very easy to start a war but the
muftah, as the Arabs say, the key to switch off a war, is very
difficult to find. Invariably, if this goes on, the civilian casualties
will go into the thousands. That's what happens in wars. And when
we reach 5,000 are we going to say, "OK, that's equal"?
Or are we going to go to 12,000 and 24,000? In about three or
four weeks time, this could turn into a tragedy of biblical proportions,
as the starving and dying of famine arrive at the borders. They're
going to die in front of the cameras. At which point, there's
going to be a most unseemly and revolting argument in which we're
going to say, "It's the Taliban's fault. They got all the
food; they didn't distribute it. If they weren't there, we wouldn't
be bombing." And the Taliban and a lot of Muslims are going
to say, "These people are dying because they are fleeing
from your bombs, and now you're not going to help them."
That's where this war is going to go off the tracks. And that's
what's going to enrage Arabs.
The Arabs have seen the pictures of emaciated Iraqi kids
dying. Are they now going to see pictures of emaciated Afghan
kids dying?
Q: What do you make of the talk in Washington about the possibility
of going to Baghdad next?
Fisk: If the Americans really want to make the Middle East
explode, that's all they have to do. I mean, how much further
can you go before you turn a whole people against you? How much
more provocative do you have to be? You know, when you see what
is happening out here, and you see it in the perspective of how
many dead over how many years, the surprise to me is that we didn't
see planes flying into buildings long ago. How come it took so
long? This is not an excuse for these wicked crimes against humanity,
but I'm very surprised this didn't happen earlier. And if we go
into Iraq as well, then stand by for more bin Ladens.
Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.
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