The dangers of Fisking

15 November 2003

David Pryce-Jones accuses the Independent journalist Robert Fisk of hysteria and distortion in his reporting on the Middle East

After another break, Fisk was back in Baghdad in July, in time for the shoot-out in which Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed. The dead men, in Fisk’s initial reaction, ‘were said to bear an impressive resemblance to Uday and Qusay’. The city of Baghdad burst into cheering at the news, but Fisk held that everybody was asking for proof that the brothers were dead. The Americans duly published photographs; whereupon Fisk changed tack and said that ‘ghoulish wasn’t the word for it’. Publication of these photographs was likely to prove ‘a historic mistake of catastrophic proportions’. The real story of that moment was the failure of the Iraqi ‘interim’ government to choose a leader.

Fisk’s third stay in Baghdad lasted from the end of August to late September. Fisking involves both commission and omission. Once again, he reported nothing from Kurdistan, nothing about the return of the Marsh Arabs to their immemorial home. A journey to Basra provided a single story designed to show that the editor and publisher of a new paper there was a stooge who would give no trouble. Nothing about the new central bank, the opening of lines of credit or the currency reform. Nothing about goods and services, or supplies to hospitals. Nothing about markets. Nothing about private lives. Not a single interview with American officials or Iraqis trying to reconstruct their country. Nothing about Ahmad Chalabi. Fisk seems only to have haunted the prison of Abu Ghraib and the mortuary of Yarmouk hospital, exclusively searching for American brutality.

At present, a decent future for Iraq hangs in the balance. The Americans hope to create some suitable form of democracy or at least self-rule for Iraq. Failure to do so will expose that country to the risk of civil war and anarchy, and compromise the standing of the United States in the world as well. Public opinion in the West has its part to play in determining the outcome of these dramatic events. Perverting American purposes and practices in Iraq, fisking helps to bring about the doom that it anticipates with such glee and relish. Fisk seems to have left Baghdad for the present, but no doubt he will return, or from a distance continue to corrupt the Independent with his hysteria and disinformation. The Iraqis are his real victims. One of the oldest of imperial lessons is that the missionary does the natives no favours.