Washington Post, DC
June 3 2006
The Roots of Rage
An angry reporter blames a region’s turmoil on local despots and
Western meddling.
Reviewed by Stephen Humphreys
Sunday, June 4, 2006; Page BW06
THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Knopf. 1,107 pp. $40
This is first of all a book about war — in particular, the wars that
have scarred the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Algeria, throughout
the author’s long career as a correspondent for the London Times and
then the Independent. It switches back and forth across the 20th
century in a way that seems driven more by stream of consciousness
than by any linear design, and, as befits its topic, it is a book of
almost unremitting violence. The author presents himself both as
unflinching witness and implacable judge of the events he recounts,
for he believes that he is telling a story of unrelenting perfidy and
betrayal — in part a story of Middle Easterners being betrayed by
themselves and their leaders, but mostly one of the Middle East being
betrayed by the power, greed and arrogance of the West.
Fisk has thrown himself into the fiery pit time after time, often at
grave personal risk — Afghanistan at the beginning of the long
struggle against the Soviets, the bloodbath of the 1980s Iran-Iraq
War, the civil war in Algeria after 1991, the second Palestinian
intifada since the fall of 2000. When he is not personally in the
midst of conflict and destruction, he evokes them, as in his lengthy
discussion of the Armenian deportations and massacres of World War I
or (in a different register) his treatment of the shah of Iran’s
prisons and torture chambers.
However Fisk regards himself, he is at bottom a war correspondent,
and the fabric of his book is woven largely from his battlefield
reporting. Fisk’s writing on war is vivid, graphic, intense and very
personal. Readers will encounter no “collateral damage” here, only
homes destroyed and bodies torn to shreds. At times, as one horror is
heaped upon another, it all seems too much to absorb or bear.
That intensity is both the book’s great strength and one of its
principal weaknesses. After reading it, no one can hide from the
immense human costs of the decisions made by generals and
politicians, Middle Eastern or otherwise. But Fisk portrays the
Middle East as a place of such unrelieved violence that the reader
can hardly imagine that anyone has enjoyed a single ordinary day
there over the past quarter-century. That picture is a serious
distortion. Life in the region is far from easy, but in spite of
endemic anxiety and frustration, most Middle Easterners, most of the
time, are able to get on tolerably well. Fisk says little about more
abstract, less violent issues such as economic stagnation, the
complexities of political Islam or the status of women. This gap is
not a weakness in itself — Fisk is writing about different themes —
but readers need to be aware that, despite its staggering length,
this book is not The Complete Middle East.
It may well be The Complete Robert Fisk, however. It is full of
autobiographical reminiscences about the author’s troubled but
intense relationship with his father, Bill; indeed, that relationship
provides the book’s title. The elder Fisk had been awarded a campaign
medal for his service in France in 1918, and the medal (which he
bequeathed to his son) was inscribed with the motto “The Great War
for Civilisation.” The bitter irony of that motto is underscored by
another gift, this one from the author’s grandmother to his father —
a boy’s novel, Tom Graham, V.C. , which recounts the adventures of a
young British soldier in Afghanistan in the late 19th century. For
the author, both the medal and the novel symbolize the West’s
arrogant and destructive intrusion in the Middle East throughout the
last century.
If this is a book about war, it is equally a book about the hypocrisy
and indifference of those in power. Fisk is an angry man and more
than a little self-righteous. No national leader comes off with a
scrap of credit here; he regards the lot of them with contempt, if
not loathing. Among the men in charge — whether Arab, Iranian,
Turkish, Israeli, British or American — there are no heroes and
precious few honorable people doing their inadequate best in
difficult situations. Jimmy Carter is lucky to escape with
condescension, King Hussein of Jordan with a bit better than that.
Fisk is not fond of the media either (though he grants some
exceptions); CNN and the New York Times are particular targets of his
scorn for what he sees as their abject failure to challenge the lies,
distortions and cover-ups of U.S. policymakers. Only among ordinary
people, entangled in a web of forces beyond their control, does Fisk
find a human mixture of courage, cowardice, charity and cruelty.
Given the present state of things in the Middle East, one is tempted
to agree with him. The mendacity and bland pomposity of the suits and
talking heads, both Western and Middle Eastern, are infuriating to
anyone who has any direct knowledge of what is going on there. Again,
however, there is a problem: Fisk excoriates politicians for the
awful suffering they have imposed on the peoples of the Middle East,
but he never seriously asks why they make the decisions they do or
what real alternatives they might have. It is all very well to flog
Western and Middle Eastern leaders for their ignorance, moral
blindness, lust for power, etc. That might instill shame and guilt
(though it rarely does), but it provides no serious principles or
criteria that serious policymakers might use to develop something
better.
In short, The Great War for Civilisation is a book of unquestionable
importance, given Fisk’s unmatched experience of war and its impact
in the contemporary Middle East and his capacity to convey that
experience in concrete, passionate language. Still, novices will find
themselves both overwhelmed by the book’s exhaustive detail and hard
put to follow the author’s leaps across countries and decades. The
Great War for Civilisation is also a deeply troubling book; it may
well confirm the conviction of many that the Middle East is incurably
sunk in violence and depravity and that only a fool would imagine it
could ever be redeemed. As tragic as the last three decades have
been, there are different lessons to be learned — one must hope so,
at least. ·
Stephen Humphreys is a professor of Middle Eastern history and
Islamic studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and
the author of “Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a
Troubled Age.”