Dilip Hiro: Fair and Balanced?

Dilip Hiro has the reputation of a serious and objective reporter on Iraq. It is not deserved, certainly not recently. This was made clear again today when, interviewed on BBC News 24 about the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein, scheduled for September. Hiro said that Saddam’s defence team had been provided with no information (untrue), that the charges were very old, and, anyway, ‘There was an attempt on Saddam’s life .. so he surrounded the village and punished the people’. The trial, he said, is just ‘a diversionary tactic’.

Imagine if someone dared to say ‘well, Heydrich had been murdered so Himmler and Hitler surrounded Lidice and punished the people’. The BBC audience is now in an important sense disconnected from reality, fed on a diet of this stuff.

Hiro ended his 2003 book ‘Iraq: A Report from the Inside’ with the idea that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was nothing but a continuation of the 1991 Gulf war and that both wars had been about NOTHING BUT OIL. He concluded the 2003 book with these words. “Explaining the 1991 Gulf War the worldly wise Muhammad Bagga, an old resident of Saddam City, Baghdad, told me: “The big Western powers got angry because Saddam Hussein wanted to benefit all Arabs from Iraq’s oil”’. Yeah, right, Saddam wanted to benifit all Arabs, why didn't we see it before? (AJ)