Some times, all you can do is cry ...

If Only the World Had Listened by Robert Fisk in The Independent

I don’t know if I met Tom Hurndall. He was one of a bunch of “human shields” who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall’s journals (soon to be published) show a remarkable man of remarkable principle. “I may not be a human shield,” he wrote at 10.26 on 17 March from his Amman hotel. “And I may not adhere to the beliefs of those I have travelled with, but the way Britain and America plan to take Iraq is unnecessary and puts soldiers’ lives above those of civilians. For that I hope that Bush and Blair stand trial for war crimes.”

Hurndall got it about right, didn’t he? It wasn’t so simple as war/no war, black and white, he wrote. “Things I’ve heard and seen over the last few weeks proves what I already knew; neither the Iraqi regime, nor the American or British, are clean. Maybe Saddam needs to go but ... the air war that’s proposed is largely unnecessary and doesn’t discriminate between civilians and armed soldiers. Tens of thousands will die, maybe hundreds of thousands, just to save thousands of American soldiers having to fight honestly, hand to hand. It is wrong.” Oh, how many of my professional colleagues wrote like this on the eve of war? Not many.

Where is it easy?

Robert Fisk’s World: I told him I admired his refusal to sign the death sentences by Robert Fisk in The Independent.

I told him I always admired him for refusing to sign the death sentences on two condemned men. He smiled faintly and pointed out to me that as soon as Rafiq Hariri became prime minister – yes, the same supposedly saintly Hariri who was cruelly murdered in Beirut just over four years ago – Hariri signed the death sentences and the two men were hanged. Word has it that even then, the executioners messed up their work and at least one of the two had to be throttled to death by policemen who pulled on his legs. Did they ever, in their brief extension of life, thank the prime minister who tried to save them? "They didn't have time," Dr el-Hoss replied. Defenders of human rights have a tough time in the Middle East.

OK, where in the world do 'defenders of human rights' have it easy?

Or, another question that comes to mind. America was one of the few great powers left after World War II. America had a 'sphere of influence' over which it had a great deal to say about what happened there. Around about 1990, the other great superpower, the Soviet Union, collapsed, leaving America as the world's only remaining superpower.

Given that we've been the world's only superpower for nearly 20 years, and were one of only two or so for fifty years before that, lets ask this question again. Where in the world is it easy for defenders of human rights? Not just merely less awful than some other place, but what places in the world truly respect human rights? And, did America have anything to do with its creation?

Since America has been fighting to defend freedom for fifty years now, and since the country that was supposed to be our main opponent left the field 20 years ago, isn't it worth asking just how well we are doing?