How Fisk was inspired by Pat Buchanan

From our strange bedfellows department: Robert Fisk (pictured), the Middle East correspondent for the Independent, writing today to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, recalls that among his inspirational reading material at the time was a clipping of an article by Pat Buchanan, ultra-right American commentator who twice sought the Republican presidential nomination in the 1990s.

Holed up in a filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, waiting for the Americans to reach Baghdad, Fisk's bedside reading included something Buchanan had written five months before the war started. "Still, today," writes Fisk, "I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty".

He quotes Buchanan as writing: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war. (Continued below)

"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."

Buchanan was back in the headlines last week when he defended Geraldine Ferraro for her controversial comment that Barack Obama was only ahead of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race because he was black. Amid the howls of protest, Buchanan said on MSNBC that Ferraro's comment - disowned by the Clinton camp - was "utterly inoffensive" and "a simple statement of fact."