ROBERT FISK’S “THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILIZATION”: A THOUSAND PAGES OF RAGE
By Robert Bryce
New Socialist Group, Canada
March 13 2006
It’s 1,000 pages of rage. One thousand and thirty eight pages, to be
exact. And Robert Fisk, one of the best, most courageous Westerners
who writes about the ongoing military conflicts in the Middle East,
justifies that rage on every page of his magnum opus, The Great War
for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
Fisk, a reporter for the British newspaper, The Independent,
has covered the Middle East for nearly three decades. And he has
brought formidable skills to that assignment. Fluent in Arabic,
and incredibly dedicated to his job, Fisk repeatedly returns to the
very front lines of the war zones, telling the stories of individual
soldiers and their terrors.
Fisk’s willingness to repeatedly visit war zones proves his personal
bravery. He takes readers with him to the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq
War, the First Iraq War, and the Second Iraq War. And his unflinching
descriptions of what he sees are not to be read by the squeamish. In
one visit to a hospital in Baghdad, he writes “I’ll leave out the
description of the flies that have been clustering round the wounds
in the Kindi emergency rooms, of the blood caked on the sheets and
the dirty pillow cases, the streaks of blood on the floor, the blood
still dripping from the wounds of those I talked to.
All were civilians. All wanted to know why they had to suffer.” There
are dozens of other horrifying passages in this book descriptions
of bodies blown apart by bomb blasts, of severed heads. There are
vivid descriptions of the torture procedures used by the Iranians,
the Iraqis, the Israelis and others. And by page 1,000 or so when
Fisk catalogs some of Saddam Hussein’s favorite methods of torture,
it becomes too much to tolerate. But there’s a reason for Fisk’s
gruesome recitations: they are graphic (perhaps pornographic) pictures
of warfare and despotism.
Blood and guts aside, Fisk is a graceful, passionate writer. And it’s
the passion that makes this book sing. Fisk plays no favorites. He is
disgusted by the duplicity and mendacity of Western leaders and Arab
leaders alike. His passion is for the ordinary people that he meets.
And he introduces us to many: the survivors of the Armenian genocide,
the Iraqi victims of American bombing attacks, the Palestinian victims
of Israeli missile attacks, the Iranian soldiers who were hit by Saddam
Hussein’s poison gas assaults, the young Algerian who was subjected
to savage torture by Algerian policemen. (Again, vivid descriptions
of the torture methods that are not for the squeamish).
He also provides insights into the views of Osama bin Laden, who Fisk
has interviewed twice.
Fisk’s book is particularly interesting for American readers like
this reviewer who seldom see news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict that tells of the conflict from the Palestinian side. In 1982,
Fisk was among the first reporters to visit the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps in Lebanon after several thousand Palestinians were
slaughtered by the Christian Phalangists allied with the Israelis. Fisk
repeatedly points out how the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
has fomented the ongoing conflicts in the region. “There was one
outstanding, virtually unchanging phenomenon which ensured that the
Middle East balance of power remained unchanged: America’s unwavering,
largely uncritical, often involuntary support of Israel. Israel’s
‘security’ or supposed lack thereof became the yardstick for all
negotiations, all military threats and all wars.”
Fisk reserves special disdain for reporters from the western media
outlets and particularly for the New York Times, the paper that led
the American media’s cheerleading in the months before the launch of
the Second Iraq War in 2003. Fisk says that the Times was a “virtual
mouthpiece for scores of anonymous U.S. ‘officials'” all of whom
supported the war. And he shows how newspapers in Britain and the
U.S. trumpeted every bit of fabricated news about Saddam Hussein’s
alleged weapons of mass destruction while ignoring the data coming
from independent analysts which suggested that Iraq did not, in fact,
have any.
Fisk recounts the latest chapters of the West’s ongoing militarization
of the region. “In 1998 and 1999 alone, Gulf Arab military spending
came to $92 billion. Since 1997, the Emirates alone had signed
contracts worth more than $11 billion, adding 112 aircraft to their
arsenal” He tells of meeting arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov at
an Abu Dhabi arms bazaar in 2001. The man who created the AK-47,
the weapon that has become a symbol of warfare around the world,
was “a small, squat man with grey coiffed hair and quite a few gold
teeth.” And Fisk allows Kalashnikov to tell his version of history,
that he is not to blame for the violence done by the rifle that bears
his name, instead, “I think the policies of these countries are to
blame, not the weapons designers. Man is born to protect his family”
Fisk seems to have been at every important event affecting the Middle
East over the past three decades. He has seen the Israeli invasion of
southern Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, the defeat of the Soviet army in
Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He
was at the United Nations in February of 2003 to hear Secretary of
State Colin Powell presented his dubious evidence against Iraq. And
of course, Fisk was in Baghdad a few weeks later when the U.S. began
what he calls “this frivolous, demented conflict.”
The most powerful passage in this book comes on page 378, where Fisk
dismantles the rhetoric being used by the Bush Administration and
other politicians to justify the massive militarization of Iraq and
other regions of the Middle East. Fisk strips naked Bush’s vaunted
“global war on terrorism” by showing how Bush and others are debasing
the language. It’s a passage so powerful that I dearly wish I’d
written it myself. It deserves full quotation:
“Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary,
the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence
our violence which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever
more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.
It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech,
a sermon, a be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in
order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale.
Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an
orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news
agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time
or distilled in wearingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing
“commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or
the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over
Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history
have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned
themselves in such thoughtless unquestioning ranks. In August 1914,
the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today we are
fighting for ever. The war is eternal.
This is not a perfect book. I wished for better attribution and more
footnotes. Fisk helpfully place his footnotes on the page in which
the notes appears, rather than hiding them in the back of the book.
But there are too few footnotes and too few attributions of sources
and quotations. Second, and most obvious, this book is too long.
Better editing could have cut the book by a third and still made it
work. That said, Fisk’s ability to sustain his rage for 1,030 pages
is remarkable and laudable. And for the dedicated readers who finally
reach page 861, they will find Fisk’s personal credo. There he quotes
the Pakistani national poet Allam Mohammed Iqbal, who wrote “Of God’s
command, the inner meaning do you know? To live in constant anger is
a life indeed.”
Fisk’s a man of constant anger. And he directs it toward the
miscreants who have used their violence on the Middle East “ever more
outrageously and promiscuously.” And yet, amidst Fisk’s rage and
righteous indignation lies an unspoken, secular prayer for peace,
a prayer that the violence that has haunted the entire region for
decades might one day be stopped. It’s a long prayer 1,038 pages but
it deserves to be read by everyone interested in knowing the modern
history of the Middle East.
Robert Bryce is the author of Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and
the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate. He may be reached at
[email protected].
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