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A page of Robert Fisk's columns, opening with "The crushing fear that stalks America". Its argument is that the United States is not at war — its military is, in Iraq — and that the gap between the two is filled by fear. Fisk draws it from a week spent lecturing at two campuses, Cairo University and Valdosta in the Deep South, which he describes as two distant constellations on the same gloomy journey, guided by Iraq and by Fear. At Cairo his students, most of them young women, asked why "you" invaded Iraq, to which he answered: oil; and asked what he thought of their own government, which let him run through the US State Department's own catalogue of Egyptian arbitrary detention, torture and unfair trials.
Précis by Red Mole.
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