Leave Muslims Alone
Robert Fisk: The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn
19 March 2008
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”.
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.
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.
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