Blood and Betrayal

After four years of the badly botched "war on terror," are we ready to hear the hard words of Robert Fisk -- a gutsy war correspondent who says the West has wronged the Middle East?

By Gary Kamiya

Dec. 16, 2005 | The wreckage of the World Trade Center was still burning when the British correspondent Robert Fisk weighed in with a piece titled "The Awesome Cruelty of a Doomed People." "[T]his is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days," Fisk wrote. "It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1966 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana a few days later and about a Lebanese militia -- paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally -- hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps."

In the face of America's righteous rage, Fisk was one of few who dared to posit that America's policies had something to do with the attacks. And he did so with brutal honesty. "There will be those swift to condemn any suggestion that we should look for real historical reasons for an act of violence on this world-war scale," Fisk wrote -- and he didn't know the half of it. He was immediately savaged. Critics called him an appeaser, a traitor, an American-hater, an ally of Saddam, an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite.

This was nothing new for Fisk: For 30 years, the Beirut-based correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent has been an outspoken, even savage critic of America and Israel's Middle East policies, a stance that has made him public enemy No. 1 for conservatives and supporters of Israel. The neoconservative strategist Richard Perle called him "execrable." Right-wing bloggers have spent so much time attacking Fisk that they actually named a verb after him: To "fisk" something is to tear it apart. Some of them would like to tear him apart. When he was almost killed by an enraged mob of Afghan refugees during the American invasion, Fisk wrote a column saying if he had been in their shoes he too would have attacked any Westerner he saw, which led some readers to send him Christmas cards expressing their disappointment that the Afghans hadn't "finished the job."

This sentiment was more or less echoed by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which ran an article bearing the subhead "A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due." The right-wing columnist Mark Steyn wrote of Fisk's column, "You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter."

In the aftermath of 9/11, when large sections of the American intelligentsia moved to the right -- proving the truth of the old adage about conservatives being liberals who had been mugged -- even some leftists parted company with Fisk. One editor who was against the war told me he thought Fisk had gone off the deep end -- his writings were too strident, tendentious and reflexively anti-U.S. "Fisk is a legend, he has enormous experience and respect," one Middle East-based journalist told me recently. "But it's like he sees the Iraq war through the perspective of his experiences in Lebanon, through the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. And that isn't really adequate to describe what's going on in Iraq."

Now this polarizing figure has written an enormous book, "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East." It is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, an attempt to do nothing less than combine 30 years of war reporting from conflicts all over the region with a historical analysis of the Middle East from World War I to the present and, for good measure, a personal narrative about his father. Fisk had already written an epic book "Pity the Nation," a classic 1990 work about the Lebanese war. But his new work aims to go it one better. In its scope and sheer size -- it runs 1,107 pages -- "The Great War for Civilisation" is Fisk's magnum opus, the culmination of his professional career.

Inevitably, this Herculean task falls short of complete success. There is simply no way that any writer can tie together the Armenian genocide, the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Gulf War I, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the current Iraq war, and the Algerian civil war. Much of "The Great War for Civilisation" consists of more or less free-standing chapters of war reportage, often-brilliant work informed by Fisk's critical intelligence and keen historical sense, but nonetheless essentially on-the-spot dispatches. (Much of the book seems to consist of repurposed pieces, but Fisk has edited it smoothly enough that you don't notice.) What holds his book together is less a unifying historical narrative -- for no such narrative exists -- than his corrosive skepticism toward the powerful and his revulsion at war. But skepticism and revulsion, however justified, do not always make for coherent historical analysis. In particular, they do not help us choose among the bad alternatives that exist in the real world. Fisk excels at pointing out the lies and sins of the powerful, but he offers few suggestions of his own: His moral outrage can make the perfect the enemy of the good. He is not a consistent political thinker; his anger leads him to embrace positions that are problematic and even self-contradictory.

Yet despite its flaws, "The Great War for Civilisation" is a magisterial achievement. It largely succeeds in its audacious double mission, to show and to explain the bloody tragedies that have afflicted the Middle East. Fisk's eyewitness reports from the killing fields are more than just bang-bang accounts: They are implacable and indispensable documents, grim reminders of what actually happens when nations go to war. And his devastating analysis of the reasons for those wars exposes the sins not just of the West, but of the Arab world as well. Fisk is a polemicist, but his anger derives from a Swiftian humanism. He is appalled by official lies and hypocrisy and driven to show, in nightmarish detail, the human suffering and death that results from them. And if he emphasizes and perhaps at times overemphasizes the culpability of the powerful -- in particular of America and Israel -- that perspective is not just excusable, but much needed in an intimidated intellectual climate in which received positions have gone largely unchallenged.

Timing is everything. Four years ago, Fisk was a virtual pariah. But as America begins to realize that its self-righteous "war on terror" has gone terribly wrong, perhaps his passionate, unrelenting voice will finally be heard. The fact that Fisk's new book is published by Knopf, one of the most prestigious houses in the country, may be a sign that he has become more respectable.