ROBERT FISK
Tuesday 27 August 2013
Does Obama know he’s fighting on al-Qa’ida’s side?
Does Fisk know how dumb that sounds? It's just part and parcel of his Great War for Civilization.
Pissing on the guy occupying the Black House may be fashionable, but implying that he's stupid for opposing the same asshole as another asshole in the middle east is, well, stupid. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Fisk should know that, or at least, acknowledge the picture above.
Unfortunately, Fisk has become as disingenuous as the governments he rails against. He never passes up an opportunity these days to mock them for what he perceives as simplistic and ignorant stumbling through a Middle East where all problems can be traced back to "intervention". He accuses Obama of lining up with Al Qaeda and laughs at him. How the mighty Fisk has fallen.
He reserves none of his trademark vitriol for the villains in his immediate geographic area. Listening to Fisk rant and rave as he publicly fingers "Obama" as dumb and evil,
one cannot help notice his polite reservation as he fails to out and name Arabs who die at the hands of other Arabs with the same enthusiasm. Indeed, when asked last year about an Assad's propensity to dish out a chemical Hama, Robert Fisk diverted attention and changed the subject by penning an article that started and ended with a 1917 British chemical attack.
Maybe the Beirut sheesha smoke has gotten to the old man's head after all these years. More likely, he's sober enough to shut the fuck up and toe the party line, selling a few overly complicated paragraphs each week for his retirement paycheck.
His legacy as a legendary war reporter - a man who went partially deaf because he sat too close to Saddam's artillery watching them fire at Iranian soldiers - has been relegated to one of a borderline crackpot who re-bleats overly complicated conspiracy theories. He went from authoring two leading, indeed arguably unrivalled, masterpieces on the Middle East that bridged journalism and literature like few others have, to falling off that cutting edge into the same backward cesspool he's been covering.
It pains me to say it, but Robert Fisk has found himself caught in a race between relevancy and retirement. He's losing that race, much like the rest of the Umma.