For most people, a mere mention of the term ‘Middle East’ evokes confusion, avoidance, and a deep sense of dread.
Iconic images of women in black merge in the mind with fearsome, swarthy, bearded and kaffiyah-wearing warriors, their eyes glazed with bloodlust.
As much of the corporate media loves nothing better than to implant and reflect negative images of others, Robert Fisk, a natural-born iconoclast, breaks the mold. In his recent work, “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East”, Fisk combines memoir, history and keen reportage to tell tales about a part of the world that most Americans are woefully unaware of. Fisk, a reporter for The Independent (London), brings a depth of knowledge that one rarely finds in Americans reporting on the region. That may be because Fisk has lived in the Middle East (Lebanon) for 30 years, from which he launches his interminable forays into Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, The Emirates, London, and beyond.
His impressive knowledge of history gives him a perspective that also escapes most Americans, who feel more comfortable looking into the future than peering into the past.
Much of his historical perspective comes from his British heritage, and the long, ugly experience of colonialism throughout much of Asia, and the Middle East. The carving up of imperial colonies has left us with a shattered world, of false nationalisms, of people divided by regions, religions, sects and tribes, often cobbled together into countries where a tenuous sense of nationhood is the only thing holding things together.
In the early 20th century, Fisk relates, British military forces marched into Iraq with promises that have a disturbing similarity to what is happening now:
“As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality (as in southern Iraq) and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition.’ But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle.” [p. 142]
Fisk’s point here isn’t so much the military defeat, of course, but the readiness of foreigners to listen to ‘advice’ by people like those who promised that Americans would be greeted as liberators when they invaded Iraq.
His works has dozens of examples like this, of foreigners who invade on false pretenses, or loaded with false promises, only to fall.
He devotes a chapter to the Iran-Iraq War, the brutal, almost decade-long killing spree, when Americans armed the Iraqis with the biological weapons precursors that they would later use to justify launching a war against them. He also recounts how the U.S. provided satellite data to the Iraqis on Iranian troop movements. And yes, the poison gas used against the Iranians? Fisk reminds us that an American intelligence officer, Col. Walter Lang would later tell the New York Times, “[T]he use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of strategic concern.”
In its broadest strokes “The Great War for Civilisation” is a study in betrayal. It illustrates how the West enters the Middle East with words, and invariably leaves with acts of profound betrayal. He writes movingly of the plight of the Palestinians, and how Israelis have coopted American fear and ignorance to transform a liberation struggle against illegal occupation into another wing of the fictional ‘war against terrorism.’
If the countless and continuous wars in the Middle East leave you dizzy, Fisk’s work will enlighten you, even as it outrages you.
While it is foremost a work of contemporary history, it all but predicts the disaster waiting for America because of its latest adventure in the Gulf, just as disaster awaited others.
More than anything, Fisk shows us the limits of empire.
