The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest Of The Middle East (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
Updated 18/06/09 (it's coincidence I finished this book exactly one year ago - currently rereading the chapters on Israel-Palestine)Sorrow. Indignation. Dismay. Abhorrence. Horror. Disgust. Wrath. All the things that haunt you through the nights. If there’s one history book that totally changes the way I see the world, it must be this one. It is an extremely hard read, not so much because of its length but the gruesome story told. Robert Fisk leads us through a harrowing journey of tremendous human sufferings, repugnant betrayal and indifference of the West, monstrous dictators and deplorable cowardice and hypocrisy of Western media and journalism. While reading this book, the horror haunted me and a voice in my mind kept screaming: wtf? Isn’t it enough? How can we stop this? It was almost impossible not to cringe even when I skimmed through the passages describing the Armenian genocide, Saddam Hussein’s gassing his own people, Iraqi children withering away into oblivion in despair without medicine, Algerian babies dying with their throats slit open. The Middle East is a hell disaster, as Fisk describes it, and it has a lot to do with colonialism, conquest, war and “human folly at an unstoppable scale”. If you ever wonder why some “terrorist”, “barbarous” Palestinians, Iraqis hate America so much, this book offers a perfect explanation. It does not take that much, if your enemy is all-powerful and can kill your people with impunity or your would-be “liberators” imposed sanctions that silently killed and stunted half a million children and blasted your whole family to “liberate” you. No, it does not take that much at all. Just a “little” bit of indifference, cowardice, prejudice, ignorance and lots of “strategic interest”. The tragedy started soon after the fall of Ottoman empire. The Middle East was carved up and given to a bunch of families without any regard for the wish of the people, despite Woodrow Wilson’s good intentions. The Kurds were betrayed, so too were the Armenians, the Syrians, the Palestinians, the Algerians, and later on the Iranians, the Saudi Arabs, the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds alike. One has all the right to doubt the Western slogan of democracy when they support all the most ruthless demons as long as they are on our side and typically conveniently walk away once their enemies are defeated without casting a single thought on those left behind. Maybe the chapter that outraged me the most was the one on Iraq, with all heinous hypocrisy of the Americans. After liberating Kuwait and dropping more bombs on Iraq than on Japan and Germany during WWII, the USA appealed to the Iraqis people to stand up against Saddam Hussein and grotesquely abandoned them to Saddam’s callous forces. They stood a very good chance of getting rid of Saddam that year, but fearing the instability the Kurds might have caused to our good friend Turkey, the Americans preferred Saddam. And during that same decade, covert bombings destroyed the lives of thousands of people, with other millions dying without any medicine or clean water. And how ludicrously the Americans expected to be greeted as heroes years afterward. Fisk’s story is one of human wickedness and viciousness, both from the powerful and the vanquished. It’s a vicious cycle of greed and brutality, despair and revenge, and more punishment, and more revenge. And I think this is exactly the problem with unquestionable power and the lack of just punishment for all sides, Americans or Israelis or Arabs. He also righteously expresses his disgust at the bias of western media in the face of authority and censorship. I believe Fisk has a clear bias, a bias toward the victims, the weak, the defenseless to bring their voices to the world, to speak strongly and harshly against power, empire and violence. Not only a depressing and brutally honest history work, the book is a passionate and bitter memoir of a man of impeccable courage and integrity.There’s something very poignant and profound about this book that deeply affected me. It is perhaps our attitude toward history and responsibility in the present. I am not an American, not a Western, but let me pretend I am one just for a moment. There is something disgraceful and horrifying about the functioning of our democracy. When I saw the huge Gaza demonstration in Sydney, something very odd occurred to me. Somehow, our governments no longer represent our public opinion, which is against war and for a Palestinian state. America went to war in 2003 when the rest of the world was against it. Somehow, our voices no longer count, somehow, our government have this tremendous power to ignore us to go their way.Our policy, often made by people who are ignorant of history or culture of the local people, indifferent to their wishes and have no idea what it is like to shiver in fear under the torrents of bombs and missiles, can kill and bring tragedy to so many people living on the other side of the world: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chile... The wounds never heal. That makes us bear this responsibility of learning about the past, the history, the disasters made by our past leaders, to avoid repeating the same blunders in the present, to ceaselessly remind ourselves that somewhere in the world, people are suffering because of our governments’ actions. As Noam Chomsky says, everyone becomes a nationalist when it comes to criticizing our own country. But we must hold our government accountable for all the “collateral damage” and civilian killings and violation of international law if we ever want to keep our humanity intact. It is so easy to sit down, watch tv and believe in the endless soap opera of the war on terror. But we must ask ourselves: why are they so angry at us? I think it is incredibly irresponsible to not know, to be ignorant and to label them all as “terrorists”, “fundamentalists”, “generically violent”. Every story of rage is one of despair, despair in the face of unstoppable power and endless humiliation. Fisk probably believes in collective guilt, and I must agree with him to a certain extent that each of us living in a democracy is inevitably partially responsible for these atrocities and the silence from our leaders to the injustice visited upon the people in the region. Learning history is vital especially in times of war, to understand that our conquest is doomed to fail in the end, that no one wants to be occupied and they will fight until the end of days to get rid of us. I wonder if Obama remembers that the Afghans were one of the fiercest armies that fought the Russians and British out of Afghanistan more than a century ago, and then the Soviets 30 years ago, why is he still sending more troops to this unwinnable war? “Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we talk about “target-rich environments” and “collateral damage”-that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing-and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the important of peace. Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, “them” and “us”, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.I have witnessed events that over the years can only be defined as an arrogance of power. After the Allied victory of 1918, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career- in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad-watching these peoples within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam’s Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction” but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier. We journalists should try to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so no one can say: “We didn’t know- no one told us. “Our job is to monitor the centers of power”. That is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority-all authority especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.” I was delighted by Obama’s speech in Cairo last week. For the first time, a US president acknowledged his country’s errors in the past and criticized Israel openly before a Muslim population. Finally, there is genuine apology and change of direction. Obama probably realizes that war does not work, terror does not work, and the healing must start from honestly facing the past. How he is going to translate his rhetoric into action, that is left as an open question that remains to be seen.
A Tour de Force...This book is a literary opus. It is extremely well-written; and I am talking of a book of 1,000 plus pages. Surprisingly, it is written in the first person; based on interviews and up front experiences. The author has lived in the Middle East for over thirty years and the book is journalistic-history with the emphasis on journalism. This is a book about war - this is no dry, academic dissertation - it is a personal experience and I suspect somewhat of a catharsis and a labour of love for the author to have written this book. I am no expert on the Middle East, but I felt I learnt a lot from this book. Also, after reading this book I have no great desire to visit the Middle East - I prefer my quiet and peaceful Canadian homeland. The book made me re-evaluate my views on Israel. To borrow a christian expression: there are NO saints in the Middle East - or more to the point; no peacemakers. Mr. Fisk has spent considerable time in Lebanon and Israel - plus Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Algeria. He writes with authority about each of these countries - about the turbulent catastrophic events that have occurred there: the Iran-Iraq wars, the Russian, and then American invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War and the current disastrous American invasion/occupation of Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian-Lebanese war (or annexation of Palestinian land)- it is all in this book. Even the Armenian genocide has first-hand accounts by Mr. Fisk. With war, Mr. Fisk does not spare us - some of the descriptions are horrific and some are beyond the horrific. There are mutilations of children by "Smart bombs," Israeli helicopters kill children in ambulances, suicide bombers kill children in pizzerias, Iranian armies recruit teenagers who believe they will go to "nirvana" to walk through minefields. Torture is endemic. None who have gone to the Middle East have resisted this disease (we all saw the pictures of Abu Ghraib). Mr. Fisk also does a Michael Moore by reclaiming the remnants of a missile that killed children. He returns with these fragments to the manufacturers in the United States and presents them with the photographic consequences of their nefarious product. No one is spared or excused by Mr. Fisk. All come under scrutiny in his writings and first hand observations. In a sense the book (all 1,038 pages) can be quite relentless. Part of this is because there are no solutions offered. How does one plea with a suicide bomber? How does one reason with a people who believe it their right to dispossess another group from their homes? There are times when Mr. Fisk seems to feel he has a monopoly on the truth - he is for the most part quite scathing of other newspapers and media except his own. I am a frequent reader of "The New York Times" and cannot remember a favourable article on the Bush administration in that paper for several years. From reading Mr. Fisk's book, one would think that The New York Times was a virtual mouthpiece of the Bush administration; constantly trumpeting the alleged successes of the U.S. in all Middle Eastern countries. Also in a chapter on Afghanistan, Mr. Fisk states that the Taliban were not actively profiting from the exportation of narcotics. Mr. Fisk cites a reference from "Taliban" a book by Ahmed Rashid -on the treachery of Afghan warlords. In the same book by Mr. Rashid, there is an entire chapter devoted to describing how the Taliban were profiting enormously from heroin and drug trafficking. I also found Mr. Fisk on shakier ground when describing the world after-effects of 9/11. What does he expect a superpower to do when major cities are senselessly and ruthlessly attacked - initiate peace talks with Al Qaeda?! Though it is deplorable and has cost massive human loss - the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are "civilized" if we compare them to other 20th century invasions - like the German invasion of Poland, or for that matter; the American invasion of Vietnam. In Iraq a vicious dictator was deposed and arrested. In both countries, real elections have occurred for the first time in many years. Nevertheless this is a very moving and passionate book - there is much to be gained from a thorough reading of it. I now have a different perspective and will read articles on the Middle East with a more discerning eye.
What do You think about The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest Of The Middle East (2007)?
I am not quite done with this 1300+ page book, but am finally very close to the end. I have been slugging along for more than a year now at about the rate of a chapter a month. Part of the reason for the slow pace is the subject matter, it isn't exactly rosy, but the book is as thorough as it gets. Robert Fisk has had a long distinguished career as a Middle East news reporter, and gos through his knowledge of the region in the 20th century incident by incident, country by country. In between he takes out time to describe overarching themes such as the role of religion, governments, and private arms dealers in the chaos, as well as telling a few personal stories along the way. While some might call him Anti-American or Anti-Israel, Fisk paints an interweaving story of history that should be read by any interested in the region no matter what their allegiances may be. The biggest theme is that the problems of the Middle East are the fault of no one party, and both outside and inside forces from all sides can be assigned blame. It is a rather hopeless outlook, but Fisk gets his hope from the lives of the ordinary people he meets who struggle on in the midst of endless conflict and suffering.So it is a story of the dark side of the human condition that is hard to deal with but necessary to accept, but also a story of the bright side that refuses to be fully crushed.So give this book a year of your time if you have it. :)
—Errol
Noble-winged seraphs of the jury, look at this tangle of thorns.See the eruption of this area in flames, see the piles of skulls disintegrating in the wind, see houses ridden with bullets and children torn apart in martyrdom, see trenches full of soldiers, dead of gas.I would like to read his thoughts on current events, on new revolutions and civil wars, and faint hopes on democracy, but I doubt, after what he has seen and heard, he has any hope.This is a fearsome history, scourging and lamenting, leaving none as the moral victor. Only war, and the failings of the human spirit.Read it, damn you.
—Hadrian
A big honking thick tome, not pleasant reading. Author is a war correspondent, of the non-embedded type, covers from Algeria to Afghanistan, with stops in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and a little expedition in time to cover the Armenian genocide in Turkey. No noticeable good guys. Except maybe the US sergeant who, after a State Dept or CIA type told him to turn back refugees fleeing Saddam's repression following King Bush I's first Gulf War, told the suit to go fuck himself and let the people by. Fisk is one hell of a writer, and war correspondent. At first it is hard to get past his being sort of center stage in the book, he is not shy about his accomplishments, but his reporting I have come to know well, and trust. His thesis, that much of the trouble in the Middle East can be traced back to WWI and the parceling up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French Empires (and the assumption of Britain's part by Uncle Sugar), and his stuff from the Iraq war of 1920, where the Brits chose to use massive air bombardment and gas to keep the people down, is telling.
—Jack Radey
