review of the book
The Great War for Civilisation
by Robert Fisk
book review by Augustus Richard
Norton
The Nation magazine, Febraury
6, 2006
In March 1991 Shiites in southern Iraq
were being slaughtered en masse. President George H.W. Bush had
called upon the Iraqis to topple Saddam Hussein after the US-led
coalition defeated the Iraqi army in Kuwait. The Shiites heeded
the call with vigor and savagery, as did their Kurdish countrymen
in the north, but now the reconsolidated Baathist regime was striking
back, killing tens of thousands. Using helicopter gunships that
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf rashly permitted them to operate under
the terms of the previous month's cease-fire agreement, as well
as ground forces, Saddam's forces pulverized the rebellion. Many
of the mass graves that have been recently unearthed are from
this period.
While this was going on the Americans
stood by and watched, often literally. One of the more disgraceful
moral lapses in US history, this moment of "betrayal"
fundamentally recast Shiite identity in Iraq. Advocates of the
latest invasion--who were caught off-guard by the lukewarm reception
Iraqi Shiites accorded their would-be liberators in 2003--seem
to have slept through that part of the movie. US officials up
and down the line did little to mitigate, much less end, the suffering
of the Shiites, perhaps in deference to the wishes of their ally
Saudi Arabia, for whom the prospect of a Shiite-dominated Iraq
is no more inviting now than it was then. Only Iran offered substantial
help, which would later yield dividends in credibility for Tehran
and for groups it supported, as the elections in Iraq have revealed.
There was at least one American hero
in 1991, Staff Sergeant Nolde of the First Armored Division. Robert
Fisk, who never learned Nolde's first name, met him at a crossroad
in Safwan, the southern Iraqi border town where Nolde's platoon
sat while refugees desperately tried to flee to Kuwait. Ordered
by a US official to turn them back to the killing fields in southern
Iraq, where they were almost certain to die, Nolde responded:
"I'm sorry, sir. But if you're going
to give me an order to stop these people, I can't do that. They
are coming here begging, old women crying, sick children, boys
begging for food. We're already giving them most of our rations.
But I have to tell you, sir, that if you give me an order to stop
them, I just won't do that." You could see the embassy man
wince.
Alas, US foreign policy is not set by
the likes of Nolde, which helps to explain why the United States
is widely derided and unloved, not just in the Middle East. This
makes it all the more important to come to grips with the double
standards and hypocrisies that have come to connote American foreign
policy to many people around the globe.
Fisk's magnum opus is not just about
America in the Middle East, but America has a starring role in
The Great War for Civilisation and it is not a flattering one.
She is America, righteous of voice but tone-deaf to history, jealous
of power but so entwined with Israel that she sometimes reads
the other character's lines as her own. Notwithstanding Fisk's
penchant for denying the powerful the benefit of the doubt, there
is more than enough truth in his depiction to show that George
W. Bush's promises to the oppressed (notably in his January 2005
inaugural speech) are more rodomontade than factual, especially
when the President claimed, "All who live in tyranny and
hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your
oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your
liberty, we will stand with you." It is impossible to read
Fisk's book--replete as it is with evidence of US complicity with
dictators, selective tolerance for political violence and erratic
respect for human rights--and hear Bush's claims as other than
crowd-pleasing boilerplate.
Fisk, the London Independent's senior
Middle East correspondent, is one of the best-known--and most
polarizing--war reporters, one of the few print journalists with
adoring fans and equally passionate detractors. The Independent,
after discovering that most of its web hits came from Fisk readers,
began charging a fee for his columns, well before other papers
in Europe and North America were charging for "premium content."
Now one may buy several news packages, including "Robert
Fisk" for £50 a year (about $90). It is tempting to
compare him to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh for the exclamations
of fierce loyalty or disdain that his pugnacious columns inspire.
But Fisk is more serious than either man and, as The Great War
for Civilisation exhaustively demonstrates, he has a command of
his subject worthy of a historian.
Fisk draws the title of his book from
an inscription on the flip side of the World War I victory medal
awarded to his father, Bill Fisk, whose service in that war was
the signal experience of an otherwise unexceptional life. As a
boy, Robert got a glimpse of war's ravages during family excursions
to European battlefields, and his father earned a rare ration
of filial admiration for demonstrating that moral bearings need
not be forfeited in war. Lieut. William Fisk apparently refused
to lead a firing squad charged with executing an Australian soldier
for desertion and murder; the elder Fisk would have recognized
a kindred spirit in Staff Sergeant Nolde, no doubt.
A few other heroes appear at the most
unexpected moments--a Muslim cleric who rescued the author from
a potentially fatal beating in Afghanistan comes to mind--but
The Great War for Civilisation does not offer many feel-good endings.
Fisk's often powerful reportage is steeped in a rich appreciation
of history, but the book is not chronologically tidy, nor does
it advance a sustained argument to guide the reader through a
vast body of work that represents thirty years of distinctively
tenacious, often brave journalism. I must admit that while reading
this massive, unruly book I imagined Fisk emptying all his drawers
on the bed. The book would have benefited greatly from a strong-willed
editor. It is not just that the prose is sometimes flabby but
that anecdotes and jabs are recycled, sometimes within the same
chapter. Perhaps the editors at Knopf believe that Fisk is so
important to Middle East journalism--or so revered by his readers--that
every nail clipping and bon mot needs to be preserved. If so,
they missed a chance to offer an even more compelling, less daunting
volume, especially for readers with a newly acquired curiosity
about the Middle East. Even so, this is a significant work that
is sure to endure well after the current flood of Middle East-related
books has crested.
In the Middle East, Fisk observes, "the
people live their past history, again and again, every day,"
and for two centuries that history has largely been shaped by
outside powers, especially imperial France and Britain, the expansionist
Soviet Union and for more than half a century the United States.
Certainly, were it not for the etching of borders associated with
seminal documents--the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour
Declaration, Lord Mountbatten's plan for the partition of British
India--the region as we know it would scarcely exist. Yet even
to conjure the region absent these decisive great-power intrusions
is such a complex exercise in recursion that it serves to demonstrate
how deeply implicated others have been in engraving the history
of the region. Long after the echoes of Napoleon's cannons firing
on the port of Alexandria in 1798 quieted, the profound changes
that the invasion launched in Egypt and the wider Arab world reverberated.
The deadly effects of "great wars" on the field of battle
are clear enough, whether in the mud and slaughter of the Somme
or on the hills of Maysaloun, where in 1920 the French vanquished
the Arab struggle for an independent Syria. But it was what followed
those episodes of mayhem that gave decisive shape to the modern
Middle East: the drawing of boundaries, co-optation of local elites,
economic subordination and the maneuvering of pieces on geopolitical
chessboards. French generals, British diplomats and American missionaries
were people with a plan. Their hubris, in Fisk's view, was to
impose Western civilization on the people of the Middle East,
and their efforts were part of a continuing "great war for
civilisation" that has as its goal the conquest of the region.
Fisk sees no good coming from these ceaseless
interventions. Indeed, he argues that campaigns in the "war
for civilisation" may begin with optimism but typically end
in catastrophe--America's invasion of Iraq in March 2003 being
a case in point. The invasion was informed not only by a willful
contempt for history and an extravagant display of ethnocentrism
but also by a framework of best-case scenarios and fantasies untouched
by empirical knowledge of Iraq, as the case of the Iraqi Shiites
illustrates. If a new Iraq emerges from the current violent stalemate,
it will look very little like the exemplary democratic state that
Bush or his chorus of war-boosters envisaged. In fact, it is likely
to be closer to the Iranian model of "Islamic democracy,"
provided it does not descend further into civil war. Fisk's cynicism
about Anglo-American policy in Iraq is richly borne out by the
legacy of deprivation, death and disorder that the invasion, and
the preceding decade of sanctions and nibbling attacks by the
United States and Britain, have yielded.
In the area around Basra in southern
Iraq, to take one of many examples in Fisk's book, there has been
a phenomenal epidemic of leukemia, breast and stomach cancer presumably
connected to the introduction of an estimated 340 tons of radioactive
material into the environment during the 1991 Gulf War. The source
of the radioactivity? The profligate use of depleted uranium ammunition
by the US military. In areas where the ammunition was fired in
great quantities, cancer rates in children are as high as 71.8
per 100,000 compared with a regional average of 3.9 per 100,000.
An Iraqi doctor reviewing his patient files tells Fisk, "Of
fifteen cancer patients from one area, I have only two left. I
am receiving children with cancer of the bone--this is incredible....
My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer
of the breast--one of them was only fourteen years old."
Fisk calls this the product of "a policy of bomb now, die
later."
But is Iraq doomed to wallow in misery, or might something good
come of this poorly conceived invasion? While there may be no
escape from history, Fisk's dour emphasis on history's recurrent
patterns risks producing a static picture of the region. In his
eagerness to discover historical parallels, he sometimes fails
to grasp the novel features of the present. As a result, he offers
neither feasible prescriptions nor a persuasive analysis of possible
outcomes. Even if one shares Fisk's skepticism of US motives in
Iraq--and his conviction, echoed by the vast majority of Iraqis,
that America's war is ultimately about oil--there is no question
that politics in the region have been thrown off kilter by the
occupation. The naïve conception of a democratic peace that
has preoccupied George Bush--especially since Iraq's WMD larder
proved to be empty--is irrelevant, except perhaps as an index
of presidential gullibility, but after years of political stagnation
there has clearly been a step-level change in the region.
Whether the outcome of the US-led invasion
of Iraq will be constructive political turmoil leading to serious
reform in obdurate autocracies, such as Egypt, Syria and Tunisia,
or more horrific bloodshed and instability as Iraq plunges further
into civil war, is a pertinent--and still unanswered--question.
Although I opposed the invasion, my sense is that the political
terms of reference have changed dramatically, if only because
the United States and other Western states have been forced to
acknowledge that the Islamist parties are the major opposition
force in the region. Fanciful presumptions about secular oppositionists
have been shelved, at least for now. As the recent elections in
both Iraq and Egypt reveal, the Islamist parties will be an indelible
component in whatever new equilibrium emerges in the region's
political systems. Oddly, for all that Fisk has to say about the
errors, deceptions and missteps of US policy, he sheds scant light
on the possible future of regional politics, other than showing
how America's policies have been a boon to followers of Osama
bin Laden. Given his long years in the Middle East, it is surprising
that his book lacks a serious assessment of how the region might
be affected by America's Iraq adventure.
Then again, Fisk is not offering a volume
of prognostication but a work of memory. And if there is one clear
lesson of this book, it is that while wars, crusades and terror
may erase people, memories and the quest for retributive justice
are not so easily extinguished. In his reporting on the region's
wars, Fisk has waged a campaign against forgetting and deliberate
amnesia.
Fisk arrived in Beirut in 1976, at the
age of 29, to report on the year-old civil war. Thirty years later,
he is still there. While some of his contemporaries, notably John
Bulloch, Kamal Salibi, Jonathan Randal, Ehud Ya'ari and Ze'ev
Schiff have produced important accounts of major phases of the
Lebanon conflicts, no journalist, or scholar for that matter,
can match the breadth, nuance or tenacity of Fisk's meticulous
history of Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war, Pity the Nation.
Fisk was one of the first reporters to enter Sabra and Shatila,
the Beirut camps where, in September 1982, as many as 1,000 Palestinian
refugees and displaced Lebanese Muslims were massacred at the
hands of Christian militiamen allied with Israel. The atrocities
that occurred in the camps left a deep imprint on Fisk's psyche,
and he has often recalled those gruesome scenes, emphasizing the
integral role that Israeli officials, including then-Defense Minister
Ariel Sharon, played in permitting the killings as well as in
the subsequent disappearance of as many as 1,800 Arab, mostly
Palestinian, male prisoners, who were turned over to the Christian
Phalange. Most have never been seen again. On September 11, 2001,
Fisk was on a flight to the United States, and he was putting
the final touches on a story revisiting the 1982 massacres.
His eventful career spans two Israeli
invasions, the rise and fall of Syrian suzerainty in Lebanon,
the eight-year war launched when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the
defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war,
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and,
of course, September 11 and its aftermath. During the civil war
in Algeria, which erupted in 1992 after the army canceled elections
the Islamists were poised to win, Fisk was one of the few reporters
writing for an English-language paper to report from the ravaged
former French colony, where perhaps 200,000 died at the hands
of government forces or Islamist insurgents. His seventy-page
chapter encompassing Algeria's victorious revolution to break
free of Paris, the accelerating decay of the authoritarian single-party
state that emerged in 1962 and the calamitous civil war that raged
for most of the 1990s could easily be a fine stand-alone essay
on a society nearly eviscerated by violence.
Fisk's writing has always been notable
for its graphic depictions of violence. He jerks our heads and
forces us to gaze upon disemboweled corpses, decimated families
and the anguish of war's victims, as if he wanted to infuse our
nostrils with the secondhand stench of death. He has no patience
for the Gameboy euphemisms--target-rich environments, collateral
damage, surgical strikes--so favored by cable news coverage of
America's wars.
Although it is not his intention, Fisk's
parade of dreadfully suffering victims can lead to a kind of numbing
war porn. "Please stop," I found myself muttering, "you've
made your point." He notes that "war is also a vicarious,
painful, attractive, unique experience for a journalist. Somehow
that narcotic has to be burned off. If it's not, the journalist
may well die." Perhaps Fisk is himself addicted to war. I
suspect that he needs to feed the habit.
He writes wearing a hairshirt of empathy
for the victims of oppression, never more notoriously than when,
in 2001, he was nearly murdered by angry Afghans in a war-ravaged
village on the border with Pakistan. "If I were an Afghan
refugee," Fisk wrote from his hospital bed, "I would
have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."
His adversaries had a field day of schadenfreude. The Wall Street
Journal editorialized that he had finally gotten "his due,"
suggesting that his defense of the attackers was tantamount to
absolving mass murderers, particularly the nineteen perpetrators
of the September 11 terrorist attacks, of their crimes. Fisk has
done nothing of the sort, in fact, and he makes no secret of his
loathing of the terrorists responsible for the attacks. But he
insists on providing a context for Al Qaeda's atrocities, something
that infuriates many people who prefer the convenient simplicity
of a black-and-white world. He had the effrontery to suggest that
US policy, including its skewed stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict,
has something to do with the enmity and distrust that America
faces not just in the Middle East but in much of the world:
No, Israel was not to blame for what
happened on September 11th, 2001. The culprits were Arabs, not
Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle
East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those [i.e., the IDF
in particular] who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard
for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions
of which Washington was the principal supporter--all these were
intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who
plunged New York into an apocalypse of fire.
Fisk's trenchant criticism of US Middle
East policy has doubtless opened doors for him in the region (Osama
bin Laden, for one, has praised his objectivity), but it also
raises suspicion in the West, especially in the United States.
Fisk does not help his case with his often strident prose and
intemperate criticism, not to mention the egocentrism that runs
through much of his reporting. There is a clear line between acceptable
criticism and irresponsible insinuation, and Fisk sometimes crosses
it. Consider, for example, his gloss on the bedlam and looting
that marked the first days of the occupation of Baghdad, when
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quipped that "stuff happens,"
evidently unaware of the occupier's responsibilities under international
law. That there was no serious effort to bring the looting to
a halt for days--even as the oil ministry was protected by American
troops--reflects a level of strategic stupidity that has haunted
the United States in Iraq ever since. This is fair game for tough
reporting by Fisk and others. Fisk goes on, however, to hint that
the looters were organized by some dark force--not Saddam's deposed
regime but Iraqis presumably allied with the United States. He
asks the conspiracy theorist's "who benefits" question:
In whose interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided,
burned, de-historied, destroyed? Like many people in the region
that has been his home for the past three decades, Fisk seems
to think the United States is capable of anything--anything, that
is, except incompetence.
Yet for Americans fed a bland diet of
government-manipulated news about the Middle East, The Great War
for Civilisation should be a bracing, troubling book. American
journalism does not come off well, although Fisk doffs his cap
to several veteran reporters, including John Kifner of the New
York Times and the late Peter Jennings. During the 1991 Gulf War,
he writes, journalists became "mere cyphers, mouthpieces
of generals, discreetly avoiding any moral questions, switching
off their cameras--as we would later witness--when the horrors
of war became too obvious. Journalists connived in the war, supported
it, became part of it. Immaturity, inexperience, upbringing: you
can choose any excuse you want. But they created war without death.
They lied." (Fisk has never been accused of mincing words.)
The ease with which the mainstream media became accomplices to
the White House in the rush to war in Iraq less than three years
ago suggests that Fisk's charges apply with equal force today.
The New York Times comes in for particularly
tough criticism in Fisk's book. He accuses the Times of being
gutless for its elliptical coverage of Iraq's use of chemical
weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Fisk was one of the few
Western journalists who reported from both the Iranian and Iraqi
fronts during the war, and he wrote of Saddam's use of gas several
years before Iraq's defiance of Washington made it politically
acceptable to do so in the paper of record. His description of
riding on a troop train returning casualties from the front is
a rejoinder to the Gray Lady's doubts (at the time) about the
Iraqi use of gas:
Then I pull open the connecting door
of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen,
the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic,
coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open
carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling
blood and mucus from their mouths and noses.
Times columnist Thomas Friedman, described
as "messianic" and featured for certitudes with short
half-lives, might wonder what Fisk would write about him were
he not a "friend" from their days in Lebanon during
the civil war, when Friedman made a name for himself as a fine,
honest war reporter. Policy experts are not spared either, including
the Brookings Institution's Kenneth Pollack, who is assailed for
his "most meretricious" book The Threatening Storm,
which convinced many liberal intellectuals to endorse the Iraq
War. As Fisk notes, the book was no less flawed and biased in
its blinkered assumptions than the Bush Administration's self-deceptive
paradigm of Iraq.
But in decrying the timorousness of intellectuals,
he makes his own no less bold claims to special knowledge, if
not truth, grounded in appreciation of history's lessons in the
Middle East. One of those lessons is that foreign intervention
typically leads to catastrophe, particularly for the region's
residents and often for the intervening state. There is precedent
for the claim, including Lebanon in the early 1980s and Iran in
the 1970s. Yet reading The Great War for Civilisation the credulous
reader would imagine that the US invasion of Afghanistan was wholly
unpopular with the Afghans. In fact, the toppling of the Taliban,
while not universally applauded, was welcomed by many, many Afghans.
He even wrote in 2003 that the American mission in the country
was "collapsing," which reveals that Fisk may sometimes
be as blinkered as those he derides.
Fisk also has an unfortunate weakness
for lazy harangues, as in his evocation of the buildup to the
war against Saddam Hussein:
This war, about oil and regional control,
was being cheer-led by a president who was treacherously telling
us that this was part of an eternal war against "terror."
The British and most Europeans didn't believe him. It's not that
Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just didn't want to fight
for Bush or his friends. And if that included the prime minister,
they didn't want to fight for Blair either. Still less did they
wish to embark on endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner
who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, was
now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that had
nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September
2001.
Fisk is at his best when he gets off his
soapbox and concentrates on his strengths: telling the stories
of history's victims and exposing the lies of the powerful. Some
of the most impressive writing in The Great War for Civilisation,
which ranges across a century of regional conflict, explores events
that took place decades before the author's birth, notably the
Armenian genocide of 1915, the subject of a chapter titled "The
First Holocaust." Fisk's prodigious skills as a narrator
are on vivid display in his moving account of Armenians marching
off to death, based on interviews he conducted with survivors
living their last days in a home for the blind in Beirut. "The
First Holocaust" will make it more difficult for Turkey and
its well-placed friends (among them Princeton historian Bernard
Lewis, a favored guest at the Vice Presidential mansion) to sustain
its campaign of denial.
The Great War for Civilisation is also
peopled with extraordinary characters, whom Fisk wisely allows
to speak for themselves in all their fascinating--and disconcerting--dissonance.
When he meets Mikhail Kalashnikov at an international arms fair
in Abu Dhabi, the inventor of the eponymous rifle assures him
that good prevails in the end and that "the time will come
when my weapons will be no more used or necessary." (Needless
to say, Fisk does not share his optimism.) And there are indelible
scenes, notably an interview in Iran's Qasr prison with Sadeq
Khalkhali, the infamous cleric who summarily dispatched many functionaries
of the Shah's regime to the firing squad. While offering a religious
defense of stoning, Khalkhali attacks a tub of ice cream, digging
"his little spoon into the melting white ice-cream, oblivious
to the bare-headed prisoners who trudged past behind him, heaving
barrels loaded with cauldrons of vegetable soup." Not far
away women in chadors, clutching children, seek the release of
their imprisoned husbands, but the smiling Khalkhali pays them
no mind.
Fisk is sometimes rather too eager for
the spotlight, making himself a character in the dramas he reports.
Writing of the assassination of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr,
a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric, he says, "Only when I asked
to visit Najaf in [July] 1980 did a Baath Party official tell
the truth." But my recollection (I was then in Lebanon) was
that months before his "scoop" there was no lack of
knowledge about the savage killing of the revered cleric in Abu
Ghraib prison. Sadr died as nails were driven into his head, after
he was forced to watch the abuse and then execution of his sister,
Bint Huda. Still, Fisk has captured many a scoop during his long
and distinguished career, from his reporting on Sabra and Shatila
to his revelations that the Iranian passenger jet blasted out
of the air in 1988 by the USS Vincennes was identified by other
American naval vessels as a civilian plane on a routine, scheduled
flight, contrary to official US claims at the time.
What is more, he has been especially
fearless in uncovering official deception, as in his reporting
on Israel's siege of the West Bank in 2002, when Palestinian residences
and government offices were ransacked, pillaged and smeared with
feces. Israel tried futilely to dismiss reports as "baseless
incitement whipped up by the Palestinian Authority," but
the stories by Fisk and others proved otherwise. He contrasts
American journalists "who report in so craven a fashion from
the Middle East--so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn
Israeli murder into 'targeted attacks' and illegal settlements
into 'Jewish neighborhoods'" with their Israeli colleagues,
notably Ha'aretz's Ramallah correspondent Amira Hass, who abjures
pablum and writes with deep moral insight about Israelis and Palestinians.
Although he is often vilified by Israel's
friends for his criticisms of the Jewish state, Fisk is no less
scathing about the late Yasir Arafat and other Arab and Muslim
politicians and despots, many of whom, he notes, have benefited
from the self-interested patronage of the powerful, including
the United States. After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993,
the United States and Israel were content to allow Arafat to establish
himself as a petty autocrat, one of a number of aspects of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Fisk treats in a fifty-page
chapter and at various other points in his book. A different choice
might have been made by insisting on building democratic political
structures in Palestine. Instead, there was a myopic focus on
Israeli "security," with Arafat cast as Israel's gendarme
in Palestine. In 1994 I asked Yossi Beilin at a private meeting
in Boston whether a peace built between societies would be more
durable than one made by forging a deal with Arafat and his cronies.
Beilin was then Deputy Foreign Minister in the government of Yitzhak
Rabin, and he was a key architect of the Oslo "peace process."
He replied impatiently: "The Palestinian state is going to
be a dictatorship just like all the other Arab states." As
Fisk notes, neither the Israelis nor the Americans objected to
Arafat's allergy to democracy until the outbreak of the second
intifada, when the call for Palestinian political reform became
a virtual mantra in Washington and Tel Aviv:
Far from condemning the ever-increasing
signs of despotism on the other side of their border, the Israelis
lavished only praise on Arafat's new security measures. U.S. State
Department spokesmen, while making routine reference to their
"concern" for human rights, welcomed and congratulated
Arafat on the vitality of his secret midnight courts--a fact bitterly
condemned by Amnesty International. Equally secret meetings of
Arafat's inner cabinet, which led to mass arrests of political
opponents, were ignored by the U.S. administration.
After the assassination of Rabin in 1995,
the Clinton Administration pursued an anemic policy vis-à-vis
the new Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Clinton privately
characterized Netanyahu as unable to "recognize the humanity
of the Palestinians," but the Israeli prime minister was
permitted to undermine the very peace process Clinton had welcomed
with ceremony and fanfare on the White House lawn in 1993.
Only in his last six months in office
did Clinton get out front on peacemaking, first through an enormous
effort at the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 and then
at Taba in the Sinai. Arafat was unfairly condemned by Clinton
for sabotaging the effort because he would not accept then-Prime
Minister Ehud Barak's take-it-or-leave-it offer. Even so, in the
final months of the Clinton Administration the Palestinians and
Israelis came close to nailing down the details of an agreement,
but the new Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, was uninterested
in a deal that would jeopardize his beloved West Bank settlements.
The new American President, George W. Bush, espoused no interest
in Middle East peacemaking and certainly did not want sloppy seconds
to the despised Clinton. In any case, Bush's fixation was Iraq.
By the time Arafat died, in 2004--unmourned
by Washington, hounded and surrounded by Sharon--he had long since
become the villain, the sole "obstacle to peace." Then
Israel departed forlorn Gaza, and in return "vast areas of
the Palestinian West Bank would now become Israeli, courtesy of
President Bush." With characteristic sarcasm, Fisk wonders
about Bush: "Does he actually work for al-Qaeda?"
Few reporters in the West have gotten
as close to the leader of Al Qaeda as Fisk, who landed two meetings
with Osama bin Laden: the first in Khartoum in 1993, the second
in Afghanistan in 1996. His accounts of the meetings are valuable
for revealing bin Laden's concern for the fate of the Palestinians,
which is often glossed as opportunistic by Western observers,
as well as his contemplative demeanor and his confidence that
"sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia"
and that "the war declared by America against the Saudi people
means war against all Muslims everywhere." "Resistance
against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries,"
he tells Fisk. Later, in February 2003, as the United States was
poised to invade Iraq, bin Laden seized the opportunity to mobilize
Muslims against the invaders and grasped the need to put aside
his differences with secular Muslims opposed to America's presence
in Iraq: "Despite our belief and our proclamation concerning
the infidelity of socialists [i.e., Baathists], in present-day
circumstances there is a coincidence of interests between Muslims
and socialists in their battles against the Crusaders." This
was bin Laden's call to arms in Iraq.
Yet Fisk fails to put bin Laden in context.
Considering the many years that he has lived in and reported from
the Middle East--and the formidable heft of his book--it's striking
that he has not provided readers with a richer sense of the weave
and texture of Muslim societies, where bin Laden's pursuit of
cataclysm is widely abhorred and rejected, even as it inspires
worrying numbers of jihadists to join the battle. Indeed, by the
end of The Great War for Civilisation the reader is left with
an extraordinary Hieronymus Bosch regional mural in mind. It is
fascinating to gaze upon, often grotesque, but also quite incomplete.
Not only does Fisk risk reducing complex societies to war zones,
in a kind of anti-imperialist version of Orientalism; he also
risks suggesting that most of the tensions and conflicts in the
region, including the struggle over the meaning of Islam and Islamist
politics, are simply a reaction to Western interference. The rise
of the Arab Shiites, for example, has arguably more to do with
local politics (and intra-Muslim struggles) than international
relations--although nothing is merely local anymore. Fisk has
an "externalist" view of the region, despite having
lived there for decades. And one hardly gets a flavor of the various
cultures within it. This is a systematic shortcoming of the book,
which presents the Middle East as a cockpit of bloodshed and sorrow,
not as a place where people face mundane challenges that ultimately
must be addressed peacefully.
The Great War for Civilisation is 1,000-plus
pages of history with attitude. It is not an impartial reading
of contemporary Middle East history, but it is generally clear-eyed
and consistently unflinching. The book seals Robert Fisk's place
as a venerable, indispensable contributor to informed debate in
and about the Middle East. If there are no realistic remedies
on offer, there is generous informed criticism and a storehouse
of rare detail and erudite reportage that serve as testimony to
an exceptional career, one that is unmatched in its sustained
intensity, moral introspection and courage. Lieut. William Fisk
would be proud.
Robert
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