The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Fourth Estate 2005
1366 pages, $39.95
REVIEW BY MICHAEL GOLDSTEIN
This book makes compelling reading. It is a record of Fisk's first hand experiences of events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, where he resides.
Not many journalists resign from a newspaper when unscrupulous editors pervert their stories for political reasons. But this is what Robert Fisk did when he was Middle East correspondent for that most prestigious of British newspapers — the London Times — after it was blighted by the takeover of Rupert Murdoch. Fisk's story was about the shooting down of an Iranian domestic airliner by the USS Vincennes in 1988 with the loss of 290 lives.
Fisk laid the blame fairly and squarely on the United States. When his article was finally printed he found that the US was entirely exonerated. And who was on the foreign desk at the time? Fisk tells us that it was a certain Piers Ackerman.
He is scathing in his attitude to the weakness of so many journalists who choose to be "embedded" with the occupation forces in Iraq and elsewhere. Fisk stands apart from these misguided, timeserving members of his profession. He is also distinguished from his fellow journalists by his sensitivity to the debasing of language in which the words "occupied territory" can become "disputed territory" and the misuse of the words like freedom, liberty, democracy and, of course, that ever present catchall — terrorism.
He witnesses, in sometimes quite gory detail, the horror of war as it affects ordinary human beings — those innocent victims for which the US invented the term collateral damage.
This massive book comprises twenty-four chapters, each of which treats a subject of political turbulence. The chapter "Why" deals at length with the 9/11 disaster and how that particular question (why) was censored out of almost the entire US media.
Early meetings with Osama bin Laden gave Fisk a premonition of the fateful events which were to follow. There is a pungent account of Fisk confronting Alan Dershowitz on the Eamon Dunphy program from Dublin. Dershowitz is a law professor from Harvard, notorious for his advocacy of torture. Fisk tried to explain that the events of 9/11 must have had a reason. Dershowitz became uncontrollable in his hysterical, fenzied anger. Fisk was a bad man, a dangerous man, a Nazi, anti-American, which is the same as anti-Semitic. He also shouted at Dunphy until the latter took him off the air.
Readers might like to know that Robert Fisk has some good words to say about some journalists; such as John Pilger. The latter discovered an internal British government memo recommending the sale to Iraq of some chemical constituents of mustard gas. They justified this by saying that it could be used for making ink for ballpoint pens. This was when Saddam was in the West's good books. Later, Pilger found that the same department banned the shipment of vaccines for diphtheria and yellow fever saying that it could be used in weapons of mass destruction. As Fisk points out, Pilger was one of the few reporters who had the courage to condemn the UN sanctions on Iraq as wicked and immoral.
This book highlights the part played by US neo-cons in the current disaster in Iraq. Fisk describes how the occupation forces allowed the looting of all the ministries in Iraq except for the Ministry of Internal Security and the Ministry of Oil. The permitted plunder of the Baghdad museum was no exception, as if the destruction of Iraqi culture and infrastructure was deliberately planned.
Fisk is one of the few honest journalists writing at the present time on the Middle East. He pinpoints the continued support by the United States for Israel, with its non-compliance with many United Nations resolutions, as the fester that infects the entire Middle East.
He received a standing ovation at his lecture on the subject of the Middle East at the Seymour Centre in Sydney on March 6.
His book contains extensive notes on his sources of information. It also has a useful chronology of events and a comprehensive index.
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
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