Fisking Fisk

Tim Blair does the honors on Fisk's Saddam/blame America piece:

Saddam’s death sentence has poor old Robert Fisk all in a muddle:

Of course, it couldn’t happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn’t be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one.

Give it to us straight, Bob! We can take it!

We can’t mention Abu Ghraib these days ...

You just did. In fact, “Abu Ghraib” has been mentioned in various press outlets 3,570 times since October 27.

...because we have followed Saddam’s trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don’t we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam. Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that.

More mentioning of the unmentionable. Fisk is on fire.

If Saddam’s immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ...

Fisk finally gets around to citing Lancet’s wild estimate. Which should prompt his editors to ask: “Robert, dear chap, how is it that you, the greatest Middle East correspondent of all time, somehow missed the deaths of some half-a-million people? Hmmm?”

...

More Fisking follows. The man who turned his last name into a verb, lives down to his reputation. There were so many such pieces on his previous work that the Independent put it behind its pay per view wall. Every now and then they embarrass themselves by letting another article into public view.