Independent on Sunday (London)
October 16, 2005, Sunday

BOOKS: WITNESS FROM THE SAVAGE ZONE;
THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION BY ROBERT FISK FOURTH ESTATE £25

by NEAL ASCHERSON

Robert Fisk recovers after being beaten by a mob on a road near
Quetta, Pakistan, 2001 HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

Robert Fisk is the sort of reporter who walks in the opposite
direction. I first came across him as an absence, 30 years ago in
Belfast. We, the pack, had spent the day waiting for the big Paisley
briefing, but where was Bob? It turned out that he had gone off alone
to the battlefield of the Boyne, to see what the place and the past
would say to him. In the first Gulf war, he enraged ‘pool’ colleagues
under Army control by hiring an old car, putting on a borrowed helmet
and driving down forbidden roads until he reached the front. When a
‘facility trip’ is laid on for the press corps, Fisk stays behind,
suspecting ” usually rightly ” that it’s to get the hacks out of the
way while something interesting happens.

Right at the end of this book, he describes himself sitting in the
roadside mud with an Iraqi family, watching as a 40-mile convoy of
American armour thunders up Highway Eight towards Baghdad. For Fisk,
it’s a moment to reflect on Roman and American empires which have a
visceral need to ‘project power on a massive scale’. For the reader,
it’s almost a caricature: the journalist who wants to see the world
from down in the muck with the victims, rather than from a tank
turret as an ’embedded’ correspondent.

Today, Robert Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world.
Long before 11 September, he had an enormous following of readers who
had come to regard him as the only journalist consistently describing
the Middle East ‘as it is’. He has also accumulated a pack of
vengeful enemies, longing to discredit and silence him. Not all of
them are Israelis or American diplomats. Some are fellow-journalists,
maddened by his gift for being in the right place at the right time.
(The bomb which changed Near-Eastern history went off down his street
in Beirut; the dead man with his socks still burning turned out to be
his friend Rafiq Hariri, ex-prime-minister of Lebanon…)

For the last 30 years, Fisk has been covering an enormous arc of
territory which is not just ‘the Middle East’ but reaches from the
Moroccan Atlantic to the Punjab with a northward extension into the
Balkans. Almost all the peoples who live there are Muslim. All of
them, without exception, have been the objects of imperial conquest
and colonialism, of cultural suppression and big-power
frontier-drawing.

This is a book about what Fisk saw, heard, thought and wrote in those
years. It is not an autobiography. Apart from his relationship with
his parents, the door on his private life is locked. Neither is it a
complete chronicle. Having just written a separate book about them,
Fisk leaves out the experiences in Lebanon which generated some of
his best-known writing (his accounts of the Israeli shelling of Qana
in 1996, for instance). But what remains is overwhelming.

This is a very long book, allowing Fisk to interleave political
analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories
which concern him. These are the sufferings of ordinary people under
monstrous tyrannies or in criminal, avoidable wars. Fisk reported the
Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf war of 1991, the Palestine intifadas, the
Taliban rule in Afghanistan and its sequel as the Americans and their
allies invaded in 2002, the terror regimes of Saddam, the Shah and
the ayatollahs, the frenzy of bloodshed in Algeria as Islamists and
security forces competed to slaughter the innocent, and ” of course ”
the Bush-Blair war against Iraq and its outcome. His chapter on the
1915 Armenian genocide, still unpardonably denied and evaded and not
only by Turks, revives his famous report from Syria when he stumbled
across the mass graves at Margada (see extract, above).

The source of most of this horror, for Fisk, is the post-1918
carve-up of the Middle East between European powers. ‘We’ ” Britain,
France and much later America ” are responsible. Subtly, Fisk weaves
this sense of guilt around his own ambiguous feelings for his father,
a young officer in the Great War for civilisation who became at once
a cold, bullying husband and a stiffly proud parent. Shame for that
generation’s imperial mistakes, he seems to feel, is heritable, and
when he is attacked and almost killed by an Afghan refugee mob,
Fisk’s impulse is that they are not to blame. He might have done the
same to a Westerner, in their place.

All the same, the cumulative impact of these terrible accounts of
massacre, torture and almost unimaginable ruthlessness may not be
what Fisk wants. The case against ‘Us’ (the West) diminishes; the
unjust impression that this is a zone of endemic savagery grows
stronger. He writes with a marvellous resource of image and language.
His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking (see how he
pieces together the biography of an American missile which somehow
came into Israeli hands, was fired at an ambulance and killed an
innocent Lebanese family).

But the sense of inescapable doom which builds up in this book is
misleading. What’s missing is a sense that it’s not just Fisk but
most of the world which finds Western policy crazy. Fisk includes
here several unforgettable, marvellously observed meetings with Osama
bin Laden. Maybe he should try his talents on a meeting with George W
Bush.