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Books of the Times | 'The Great War for Civilisation'
A Foreign Correspondent Who Does More Than Report
By ETHAN BRONNER
Robert Fisk is probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain. Based in Beirut for the past three decades, he rode with Soviet troops invading Afghanistan in 1980, chronicled the prison tortures of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980's, recorded the butchery in Algeria in the 1990's and interviewed Osama bin Laden three times, starting in 1993 when few Westerners knew the name. First for The Times of London and since 1989 for The Independent, Mr. Fisk, a writer of exceptional power, has brought readers deep inside the Muslim Middle East, laying bare its humiliation and suffering.

Yet for all the awards he has garnered, and despite his rare combination of scholarly knowledge, experience and drive, Mr. Fisk has become something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West's self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism.

All of Mr. Fisk's strengths and weaknesses are on display in this enormous memoir of the past quarter century. He seems to have saved all his notebooks and tape recordings and draws on the telling details in them to bring us into the heart of each story. During the Iranian revolution, for example, he watched Sadegh Khalkhali, the nation's chief justice, as he coolly sent hundreds to their deaths in half-day "trials." Mr. Fisk writes: "He stood now, this formidable judicial luminary, in the sunny courtyard of Qasr prison, brandishing a miniature pink plastic spoon, smacking his lips noisily and tucking into a large cardboard tub of vanilla ice cream. For a man who had just ordered the first public execution in Tehran for 15 years, he was in an excellent frame of mind." A footnote explains that the conversation had been taped "and on the cassette in my archives it is still possible to hear the Hojatolislam's lips smacking over his ice cream as he discusses the finer points of stoning."

The book is at times a numbing chronicle of electric torture, burnt genitals, sawed-off heads and mutilated corpses, a charnel house of the abuse that has characterized the Middle East in recent years. It is not for the faint of heart - nor at 1,100 pages is it for anyone who'd like to get to the point in a hurry.

Mr. Fisk's title, a reference to World War I, has a personal element - his father fought in that war, talked to his son often about it and won a medal with that phrase inscribed on it. The carnage is on a similar scale as well. In the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war alone, there were probably one million dead, yet few in the West noticed. (Mr. Fisk tells of risking his life accompanying Iranian troops in that war, only to be asked by his desk, can the story hold?) Finally there is Mr. Fisk's belief that Western treatment of the Muslim world - through the war on terror and the occupation of Iraq - is today's version of the Great War.

Mr. Fisk is most passionate and least informed about Israel. He calls Yisrael Harel - a founder of the Jewish settler movement who writes an opinion column - a journalist, as if his views were mainstream. He describes Israel's offer to the Palestinians at Camp David in 2000 as 64 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, when it was actually much higher. And his chapter on Israel is titled "The Last Colonial War," surely a misnomer no matter how offended he is by Israel and its policies.

But Mr. Fisk seems to have decided that even striving for objectivity is silly. He approvingly quotes the left-wing Israeli journalist Amira Hass as saying that it is a misconception to imagine journalists can be objective. Journalism's job, she says, is "to monitor power and the centers of power."

Mr. Fisk then adds: "If only, I kept thinking, the 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' - could listen to Amira Hass. She writes each day an essay of despair." So too does Mr. Fisk.

The West's sins of ignorance and aggression in the Middle East are real. Mr. Fisk lays them out in depressing detail, quoting American military men on "Eye-rack" and "Ay-rabs" and making clear that the failings of the Iraqi occupation were utterly predictable. But his many legitimate points are sometimes warped by his perspective.

A good example is a story Mr. Fisk tells of covering the United States invasion of Afghanistan. He was on the border, in Pakistan, when his car broke down and he was set upon by a group of Afghans, who struck his face repeatedly with large stones. Rescued at the last minute, Mr. Fisk says he asked: "Why record my few minutes of terror and self-disgust near the Afghan border, bleeding and crying like an animal, when thousands of innocent civilians were dying under American air strikes in Afghanistan, when the War for Civilisation was burning and maiming the people of Kandahar and other cities because 'good' must triumph over 'evil'?" And so he wrote of his attack in his newspaper: "If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find."

After reading that and his description of Palestinian suicide bombings as inevitable, you are not surprised to learn that Osama bin Laden urged Americans last year to listen to his interviews with Mr. Fisk because, the mass-murdering founder of Al Qaeda noted, Mr. Fisk was "neutral."


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/books/review/19bron.html?ei=5070&en=c9e4cdd830fcdd7d&ex=1154404800&pagewanted=print