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Robert Fisk's "The Great War For Civilization": A Thousand Pages OfR

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  • Robert Fisk's "The Great War For Civilization": A Thousand Pages OfR

    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].

    --Boundary_(ID_2Y7Dgjv MjMMVJuAye4jX1g)--
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