Tim Blair catches Robert Fisk, ordinarily protected these days from blogospheric/cheapskate scrutiny by what Tim calls a "cash firewall", in the act of invoking the Wolfowitz "swimming in oil" quote that caused the Guardian so many headaches, and required a final humiliating retraction.
Fisk doesn't explicitly say, as the original die Welt-based Guardian piece did, that Wolfowitz admitted that "oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq." Rather, he simply inserts the strategically truncated quotation, deceptively divorced from its context, into a list of stories the American authorities would like to censor, calls it "revealing," and lets the reader draw the intended, baldly erroneous, conclusion. (This is the "and then there's the..." gambit, perfected long ago by Alexander Cockburn, by means of which practically anything can be plugged into an article, regardless of relevance and with no explanation expected or provided.)
Is it conceivable that Robert Fisk does not read the Guardian? That he is unaware of the flap, of the universally-acknowledged fact that this reading of the quote is inaccurate? Not bloody likely, as he might say. This is, as far as I can recall, the clearest example I've seen of Fisk having deliberately set out to mislead his readers. Because he had to have known what he was doing, had to have made the conscious decision to do it. Had to have made the conscious effort to deceive.
To what end? Well, who knows? The guy is clearly off his rocker. But regardless of how many pages he currently has stuck together, perhaps the answer nonetheless lies in this curious follow-up paragraph:
The one suspicion held in common by both Saddam's former Baathists and Saddam's bitterest opponents in Iraq is that Britain and America invaded their country, not because of chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, not because of human rights abuses, but for oil. Clearly, Wolfie's words are highly provocative, could give valuable propaganda to Saddam's "remnants"-- who are becoming as lethal as the now famous Taleban "remnants"-- and stir up disorder among the vast majority of peace-loving Iraqis who trust the Americans.Here's hoping, Fisk seems to be saying. But just to make certain, he wants to ensure that the bogus, uncorrected quote makes it into the google-able record, so that it can be reproduced, uncritically, on sites like Kilafah.com. Pretty slick. Posted by Dr. Frank at June 22, 2003 08:46 AM | TrackBack