Robert Fisk - Tag Search

(Updated below) I rag on Robert Fisk sometimes, but the man is doing some good reporting on the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh assassination. His latest piece looks at some of the inconsistencies in the British government's story -- remember, the UK says it doesn't know how the killers got British passports.

It was a source - impeccable, I know him, he spoke with the authority I know he has in Abu Dhabi - to say that "the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?"

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, said again today that his office didn't know about the British passports until February 15, shortly before Dubai police released the information publicly. But if Fisk's reporting is accurate -- if these passports have accurate biometric information on them, which is hard to fake -- well, that's an interesting wrinkle.

In Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk's epic tome about the formation and disintegration of Lebanon, Fisk recalls reading a faded 1950s newspaper story in which a European visitor writes of being wowed by the typical allures of the "Switzerland of the Middle East," while he glosses over a deadly anti-government protest - the beginning of Lebanon's first civil war - as the birth pangs of a young democracy.

National Geographic writer Don Belt, who has penned a knowing portrait of Syria for the magazine's November issue, seems determined to avoid missing such a historical boat. His wide-ranging story about the precariously perched Bashar al-Assad regime has impressed even Syria News Wire - never happy with carpetbagging foreign correspondents - which has called it "the best article on Syria in a decade."

Robert Fisk reports that the Gulf Arab states will stop selling oil in dollars by 2018, moving to gold in the short term and perhaps some other reserve currency in the long term. (Coincidentally -- or perhaps not -- the price of gold hit an all-time high today.)

I'm covering a Senate hearing this morning on Iran sanctions, so I don't have time to write more on this story, but I do want to highlight one particularly troubling paragraph:

The Americans... are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs... Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review.

In other words: The Middle East will be the battleground for yet another proxy war, this time between the U.S. and China.

Two stories out of Afghanistan this week probably bode well for Hamid Karzai's re-election bid -- but they also highlight why Karzai is so unpopular in the West, and raise questions about what kind of government the U.S. is protecting in Afghanistan.

The first, which Evan documented this afternoon, is Afghanistan's new "rape law," which allows Shi'a men to starve their wives if they "do not meet his sexual needs." Karzai promised to review the law, but broke that promise to avoid angering Shi'a clerics.

And now there are reports that Karzai picked up a last-minute endorsement from one of the most brutal figures in modern Afghanistan.

From Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, pp. 428, describing a proposal to stop Israeli settlement growth in September 1997, when the settlements housed 300,000 people:

... Netanyahu's spokesman, the piano-playing David Bar Ilan, described the proposal as "shameful" and "morally bankrupt" because it ignored world dangers while condemning what he mischievously called "the building of apartments for young couples."

Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, June 26, 2009, when the settlements had grown to almost 500,000 people:

"We cannot suffocate our own people. You know, babies are born. People get married. We cannot stop life. People want to build a synagogue or a kindergarten."

The "natural growth" exception never goes away. It gives Israel a license to continue growing the settlements in perpetuity.

Robert Fisk throws a little cold water on Western hopes about the Iranian elections:

And the thick, dark skin of clerical rule that covers Iran will remain, scratched occasionally perhaps, but unable to bleed or to re-imagine history or to reform a nation which so badly needs the change that only Mousavi, among the candidates, dreams of. Government for and by the dead - symbolised in the continued "supreme leader" ethos that old Ayatollah Khomeini constructed before his death, has effectively sealed off Iran from those human rights which obsess the West.

Fisk is right that a Mousavi victory will not mean instant rapprochement with the West. But I think it could have meaningful long-term implications for Iran.