The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings. Robert Fisk

       We should have listened to Bin Laden

      I belong to that generation of undergraduates who cut their teeth on linguistics. Lancaster University in its second year of existence – Class of ’67, if I’m not mistaken – was as innovative as it was a bit odd. ‘Digs’ were on the Morecambe seafront, lectures in a converted chapel, and tutorials in an old linen factory. But the books we studied invariably included the immensely boring Zelig Harris and the stunningly brilliant Noam Chomsky.

      Less famous then than now, he it was who introduced me to the ‘foregrounded element’. ‘Foregrounded’ is when someone places words in such an order that a new meaning is attached to them or deliberately leaves out a word that we might expect. The big bad man emphasises the meanness of the man. But the bad big man makes us think of size. ‘Big’ has been ‘foregrounded’. Real linguists won’t like the above definition but journalists, I fear, sometimes have to distort in order to make plain. Presidents too, it seems. Because I did a little linguistic analysis on George W. Bush’s Fort Bragg address to Americans on 28 June – and came up with some pretty strange results. First, of course, was his use of the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’ thirty-three times. More interesting was the way in which he deployed these massed ranks of terrorists. If you divided his speech up into eight parts, ‘terrorists’ or ‘terror’ popped up eight times in the first, eight times in the second, three times in the third, nine in the fourth, two in the fifth, none at all in the sixth, a measly three in the seventh and again none at all in the eighth.

      The columns in which ‘terror’ disappeared were full of different clichés. Challenge, a good constitution (an Iraqi one, of course), a chance to vote, a free society, certain truths (I won’t insult you by telling you where that was snitched from), defending our freedom, flying the flag, great turning points in the story of freedom, prevail (one of Churchill’s favourite words) and no higher call. Put through Chomsky’s machine, Bush’s speech begins by frightening the audience to death with terrorism and finishes triumphantly by rousing them to patriotic confidence in their country’s future victory. It wasn’t actually a speech at all. It was a movie script, a screenplay. The bad guys are really bad but they’re going to get their comeuppance because the good guys are going to win.

      Other elements of the Bush speech were, of course, woefully dishonest. It’s a bit much for Bush to claim that ‘terrorists’ want to ‘topple governments’ when the only guys who’ve been doing that – in Afghanistan and Iraq – were, ahem, ahem, the Americans. There are plenty of references to the evil nature of ‘the enemy’ – tyranny and oppression, remnants, the old order – and a weird new version of the Iraqi–11 September lie. Instead of Saddam’s non-existent alliance with al-Qaeda, we now have the claim from Bush that the Iraqi ‘terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens’ on 11 September 2001. Whoops! It’s no longer the Saddam regime that was involved in these attacks, it seems; it’s now the post-Saddam insurgents who are part of the same gang.

      It’s strange that for a White House that writes screenplays, the words of Osama bin Laden appear so uninteresting. Whenever bin Laden speaks, no one bothers to read through his speech. The questions are always: Was it him? Is he alive? Where is he? Never: What did he say? There are real perils in this. Bin Laden, who hated Saddam – he told me this himself, in person – made a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’s Iraqi Baathist ‘Socialists’. This was the moment when Iraq’s future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the message that would create the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice. The US ‘experts’ waffled about whether bin Laden was alive – not what he said. For once, Bush got it right – but he was too late. Always, as they say, read the text.

      Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell at the UN when the US secretary of state was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn’t refer to evidence of WMD as a ‘slam dunk’, he says. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn’t lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

      I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Tony Blair’s lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read ‘Saudi reforms lose momentum’ – surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press – it quoted our dear prime minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians because their government represented a ‘different political system’. The ‘foregrounded’ element, of course, is the word ‘different’. This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason the committee declined to return these men to their country was not – as Blair well knew – because Algeria possesses a ‘different’ political system but because the Algerian ‘system’ allows it to torture its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Châteauneuf police station in Algiers – where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui, whose foot was broken under torture. She was a ‘terrorist’, this man announced. This is the ‘different’ political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

      Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. So how does he dare lie about the ‘different’ political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A ‘different’ political system indeed.

      And now I have before me Blair’s repulsive ‘goodbye’ speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn’t mean ‘doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the ‘prevailing consensus’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant ‘what you genuinely believe to be right’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Britain’s oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) ‘I did so out of belief,’ he told us. Foregrounded element: belief. Am I alone in being repulsed by this? ‘Politics may be the art of the possible [foregrounded element: may] but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.’ What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? ‘Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.’ Excuse me? Is that Blair’s message to the families of all those dead soldiers – and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an ‘honour’ to ‘serve’ Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

      Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo–Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour – and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

      My dad used to call people like Blair a ‘twerp’ which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair