Politics & Power Quote by Robert Fisk

“Liberation” is doing double duty here: the official slogan and the punchline. Fisk takes the Pentagon’s clean, cinematic verb and drags it through the rubble-strewn streets of post-invasion Baghdad, where freedom arrives not as ballots or rebuilt schools but as opportunists “in families” cruising for “booty.” That family detail matters. He’s not describing a few isolated criminals; he’s sketching a social phenomenon unleashed by power vacuum and institutional collapse, the sort of chaos that follows when a regime is toppled and the occupying force either can’t or won’t secure the city.

The intent is accusatory but not melodramatic. Fisk’s weapon is specificity: trucks, cars, tens of thousands, the mundane logistics of looting. He makes “liberation” sound like a clearance sale. The irony is sharp because it’s earned; he doesn’t have to sneer at American rhetoric, he just places it beside the scene it produced and lets the contradiction flare.

Subtext: this isn’t merely about thieves. It’s about whose definition of freedom gets to win. “The Americans may think” signals a collision between narrative and lived reality, between press-briefing abstraction and street-level consequence. Fisk is also indicting a media ecosystem that treats the fall of a statue as a neat ending. His line insists the story of liberation begins, uncomfortably, when cameras move on and ordinary life is left unpoliced, unprotected, and up for grabs.