Robert Fisk

They die now so often that their names - even their jobs - escape us.

Tryon was held entirely responsible for the greatest peacetime disaster in the history of the Royal Navy

Hariri'yi öldürmeyi planlayan herkes, bunun iç savaşın bütün yaralarını nasıl tekrar açabileceğini bilir. Hortlaklar 15 yıllık uykularından uyandırılacak mı?

We knew something was coming. I had met an old journalist colleague for coffee on Saturday and we both said we felt there was a new, menacing atmosphere about Beirut.

They will bury Rafik Hariri today beside the city he rebuilt and next to the ruins of the Roman columns that made ancient Beirut famous. But his violent death on Monday has repercussions that go far further east than Lebanon or the Roman empire.

I saw the blast wave coming down the Corniche. My home is only a few hundred metres from the detonation and my first instinct was to look up, to search for the high-altitude Israeli planes that regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut.

İsrail, Batı Şeria'daki devasa yerleşimleri kapatacak mı? Filistinlilerin Batı Şeria'sındaki, sadece ve sadece Yahudiler için olan Yahudi yerleşimlerini genişletmeyi durduracak mı? Filistinlilerin Doğu Kudüs'ü başkent yapmalarına izin verecek mi? Dün bunlardan hiç söz edilmedi.

At no point yesterday did anyone mention occupation. Like sex, it had to be censored out

Tahrir - "independence" - is a word which a lot of people voted for on Sunday; not for "democracy" as the Western media would have it, but for freedom; freedom to speak, freedom to vote, freedom from the Americans.

"Hotel journalism" is the only phrase for it. More and more Western reporters in Baghdad are reporting from their hotels rather than the streets of Iraq's towns and cities. Some are accompanied everywhere by hired, heavily armed Western mercenaries.

Amerika'nın pro-konsülü Paul Bremer 2003'te Irak ordusunu dağıttığında hâlâ generaldi. Hayatının, Amerika'nın işgali ve Irak'ın ABD tarafından "özgürleştirilmesiyle"nasıl dönüştüğünü, "kurtarıcıları" tarafından tutuklanmasıyla da nasıl mutlak biçimde değiştiğini anlatmak istedi.

Sunday 30 January will be the day when myth and reality come together with - I fear - an all too literal bang.

The brush fires are already being lit but fear not, Bush and Blair will tell us they knew things would get violent on polling day

The General was a slim 58-year-old, his hair black, big hands, a suit that hung uneasily upon him, a bespoke tailor's work that could never equal his pea-green uniform with swords on the epaulettes.

Journalism yields a world of clichés but here, for once, the first cliché that comes to mind is true. Baghdad is a city of fear. Fearful Iraqis, fearful militiamen, fearful American soldiers, fearful journalists.

As usual, it was an inside job. Brigadier Amer Ali Nayef, the deputy head of the Baghdad police, and his son, Police Lieutenant Khaled Amer, were driving to work in an unmarked civilian car, hoping to move through the streets of Dora without being noticed.

I think that the whole project in Iraq is finished. We are not being told by Mr. Blair in my case and Bush in yours that this is the case, and perhaps through their own misjudgment or their own fantasies, they don't even accept this themselves.

It was the insouciance, the absolute indifference of the British military press office in Basra that shocked me.

Yesterday's ruling offers Mr Mousa's family the prospect of a proper investigation into the shameful, outrageous death of their 26-year-old son, who was arrested in front of his Iraqi police colonel father.

Video shows murder of aid worker Margaret Hassan, says her family

"I will not be away from my freedom fighters while they are facing death and dangers from death," says Arafat's voice, "It is my duty to be beside my freedom fighters and my officers and my soldiers."

The Battle for the White House," The final Gallup poll of the 2004 election was released yesterday showing President Bush and John Kerry in the closest presidential race in the history of Gallup Polls. The poll puts the two in a statistical dead heat, 49-49.

Margaret Hassan kidnapped? She who said to me that soon, very soon, "there will be more than one lost generation" in Iraq? Is there no end to the kidnappers' targets?

We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That's how we run the Iraq war - or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe.

Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal ­ and I have a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point ­ it was Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest

"I vomited," Mouffak Fathi Daoud says, and you have to understand why. Three young soldiers were brought to the trees on the hills outside Sulimaniyah. They had been retreating from the great battle against the Iranians on Jebel Maout. Saddam had ordered that all deserters should be shot.

Bu savaş bir sahtekarlık. Var olmayan kitle imha silahlarından bahsetmiyorum. Saddam Hüseyin ve el Kaide arasında hiç var olmamış bağlantıdan da bahsetmiyorum.

Their Kalashnikov automatic rifles regularly jam after firing two bullets, their flak jackets don't protect them, their promised £45 pay increase never arrived, their boss wants to take the air-conditioners from their vehicles and the hospitals can't cope with their wounded.

Yet again, the Iraqi police - and their hordes of impoverished would-be recruits - were massacred yesterday, up to a hundred of them in the Sunni Muslim city of Baquba as they lined up, unprotected, along a boulevard in the hope of finding work.

Iraq, we are told by Mr Blair, is safer. It is not. US military reports clearly show much of the violence in Iraq is not revealed to journalists, and thus goes largely unreported.