A Drama of Opposites

The Great War for Civilization By Robert Fisk (Knopf, 2005) Recently I was driving around Charlotte and decided, as I sometimes do, to check in on "the otherside" via the local AM talk station. The host that day was commenting on the discovery of two kidnapped US soldiers' bodies that day in Iraq. "Repeat after me," he instructed his audience. "Especially if you write for a newspaper." ("Don't believe I will," I replied to my radio.) "We're the good guys," he explained. "They're the bad guys." "What I want to see," he went on, "is for President Bush to go TV and say 'Look: That's it. To hell with the rules of war. To hell with the Geneva Conventions. We're not going to investigate Abu Ghraib. We're not going to avoid collateral damage. We're going to start fighting this war in a way that will make sure not a single other one of our soldiers is tortured and killed. We're going to wipe the terrorists out. Because we're the good guys, and they're the bad guys.'" Good guys, bad guys. Believers, infidels. Ubermenchen, undermenschen. "Governments," writes veteran British journalist Robert Fisk in the preface to his new book The Great War for Civilization, "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." The Great War for Civilization is a mighty work, covering Fisk's decades of work as a reporter in the Middle East, where he permanently resides and on the subject of which he is considered Britain's leading journalist. "I don't like the definition 'war correspondent,'" he writes. "It is history, not journalism that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism." It's a perfect hybrid of thoughtful history and sensitive journalism, world events examined through dozens of individual lives, most, given Fisk's chosen profession, shattered or ended by violence. More than 1000 pages are filled with his first-hand reportage of the Iran-Iraq war, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, the present US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and much, much more. It's a long book, because it takes a long time to name the many damaged and dead, to try to understand the complicated history that hurt them and inspires some of them to hurt us. It is a sad thing that Fisk's sympathy for victims rather than their executioners is such a radical deviation from the "mainstream" journalism perspective. Empathy remains intolerable in the news media–or at least subordinate to the priorities of the powerful–as Fisk learned very personally: In Pakistan in 2001, while meeting Afghans made homeless by the B-52 administered "War on Terror," Fisk escaped death at the hands of a mob of refugees only by fighting his way out long enough that an elderly man, "perhaps a mullah in the village," was able to lead him to the safety of a Red Cross-Red Crescent convoy. "What had I done? I kept asking myself. I had been hurting and punching and attacking Afghan refugees, the very people I had been writing about for so long, the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my country–among others–was killing, along with this Taliban, just across the border. God spare me, I thought.... The men whose families our bombers were killing were now my enemies too... "...the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me... should never have done so but [their] brutality was entirely the product of others–of us who had armed their struggle against the Russians, and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the War For Civilization just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them 'collateral damage.'" At the time, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the authoritative, untempered voice of the ruling classes, ran an article absolutely giddy with pleasure at Fisk's misfortune. "A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due," the writer titled the piece, observing that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter" at his fellow newspaper man having been almost beaten to death. The "Fisk doctrine," columnist Mark Steyn continued,–taken to its logical conclusion, absolves of responsibility not only the perpetrators of Sept. 11 but also the Taliban supporters who attacked several of Mr. Fisk's fellow journalists in Afghanistan all of whom, alas, died before being able to file a final column explaining why their murderers are blameless." (Soon after, the Journal requested Fisk's assistance in petitioning for the release of kidnapped WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl. Aware that Osama bin Laden read his articles, Fisk published a personal appeal to the al-Qaida leader for Pearl's release in the UK paper the Independent.) While rightist commentators like Steyn, Bill O'Rielly, Anne Coulter, the post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens pod person, and my local AM talk radio host celebrate organized murder and misery with the rowdy enthusiasm of a drunken Coliseum spectator, pro-war liberal talkers camouflage their death fetish (perhaps even from themselves) in more nuanced language–but their "pragmatic," "reasonable," and "tempered" criticisms of only the more grotesque and clumsy manifestations of empire propel the killing machine as sure as the rabid frothing of their right-wing rivals. Those two camps are given the bulk of airtime and column inches, and, therefore, the loudest voices, in America. Not so much space left for someone like Fisk. Although he often appears on the front page of the the Independent, which has a daily circulation in the way of 250,000, as unsurpassed a media observer as Noam Chomsky has never run across him in the US press, making The Great War for Civilization all the more welcome on this side of the Atlantic. It's not a fun read. Often neither are the stories from our domestic journalists of quality, like Amy Goodman, Seymour Hersh, or Jim Lobe, to name a few. But enduring the discomfort of listening to what they have to say is essential if we are to reshape the world into a place reflecting the triumph–rather than the failure–of the human spirit.