Eavesdrop on any gathering of Middle East correspondents huddled by the poolside of the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad or enjoying a late supper at Cairo’s Greek Club and the name Robert Fisk will inevitably enter the conversation. For three decades the reporter and author has energetically criss-crossed the Arab world and beyond, generating respect and loathing in equal measure from his colleagues and readers.
For some Fisk is the apologist for every dictator and fanatic from Belgrade to Bagram, a prophet of doom with a giant ego who blames all the region’s ills on American arrogance, Israeli conspiracies and Western meddling. To his supporters Fisk is the award-winning journalist who has defied the neo-cons and America’s Jewish lobby and risked his life repeatedly to stand up for the region’s downtrodden and dispossessed.
Whatever your view no one would doubt Fisk’s eloquence. He is not a great Arabic linguist, nor does he possess the keenest insight into the region’s politics. Often he allows his imagination to run away with a story or his partisan views to cloud its objectivity. But he can bring to life people and places caught up in conflicts about whom many in the West know little and would otherwise care less. His energy is remarkable. Approaching his 60th birthday, when most of his peers are considering retirement, he still turns up in Baghdad and other hotspots competing against reporters less than half his age.
So what to make of his gargantuan book that spans three continents, 90 years of conflict and 30 years of reporting? The most obvious reflection is that it is far too big and unwieldy. Were it dropped from one of Fisk’s hated US bombers it would flatten an entire Afghan village. The loosely constructed central theme is that the Middle East is still suffering from the aftermath of the first world war when the Ottoman empire was dismembered by Britain and France. The Arabs were betrayed, Israel was conceived and the result has been decades of war, culminating in the 11 September attacks and the invasion of Iraq. But this central argument is lost in a verbal avalanche, as Fisk empties 30 years of notebooks onto the page. The chapters jump from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the Iran-Iraq war, the civil war in Algeria, with diversions into the genocide of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks.
There are many passages of descriptive brilliance, like the horrors of trench warfare in the Iran-Iraq conflict, which the rest of the world cynically dismissed at the time as a conflict between two four-letter countries, but which consumed the lives of hundreds of thousands who perished in frontal assaults and poison-gas attacks. And when he sticks to straight reporting Fisk is hard to beat. His forensic investigation into a missile fired by an Israeli helicopter gunship at a civilian car in Lebanon leads back to the manufacturers in America who are confronted with the deadly consequences of their work.
But ‘the blood-drenched pages of this book’, as he describes them, are relentless. In his world Arabs are invariably victims or soon to be victims of American-inspired oppression. Good news may be hard to come by these days, but when it happens it is airbrushed out of this history. No mention then that Lebanon, Fisk’s adopted home, may finally be emerging from 30 years of instability and conflict because it is free from the meddling of its two larger neighbours, Israel and Syria. The decade of peace-making between Arabs and Israelis, which brought implacable foes to the table under American pressure, was simply a blip in the steady march towards the apocalypse. Those involved in the negotiation, including Mahmoud Abbas, the elected Palestinian prime minister, are dupes. The withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza along with 8,000 Jewish settlers on the orders of Ariel Sharon is a trick. The ouster of the Taleban in Afghanistan, which allowed the return of hundreds of thousands of refugees and two rounds of democratic elections, are a mirage. President Karzai is a collaborator and those who supported America’s efforts ‘patsies’.
Fisk’s most unappealing quality is the scorn he has for his colleagues. Amer- ican journalists are dismissed en masse as ‘craven’. Those who do not share his doom-laden predictions are naive fools. His hubris is astounding. Even friends were amazed recently when he described himself in the third person as ‘Robert of Arabia’ in a dispatch from Baghdad. The book is peppered with references to ‘the old Fisk prediction machine’ and ‘Lord Fisk’.
For the record, he has had his own share of howlers. He once memorably reported that Colonel Gaddafi had been replaced by a five-man military junta. Years later the Libyan leader is still comfortably on his perch. Before the first Gulf war he predicted that America faced another Vietnam with high casualties and a collapse in morale. The war was over in a matter of days with few US losses. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Fisk compared the defences he witnessed in Baghdad to those erected by the Red Army during the battle for Stalingrad. In the event the Iraqi capital fell in the short time it took the first American armoured column to drive into the city from the airport.
Time and again Fisk claims that he alone predicted disasters before they happened, including the civil war in Bosnia three years before the first shot was fired. More astoundingly he asserts that he anticipated the attacks of 11 September in America because of the violence he witnessed being perpetrated by the Israelis against Palestinians. He also suggests that the attacks, which were planned long in advance, could have been averted if the Bush administration had put more effort into tackling the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is utter nonsense. None of the 19 hijackers was Palestinian. Osama bin Laden’s primary goal was to drive US forces out of Saudi Arabia. The notion of 11 September being called off because of a fresh bout of US diplomacy in the Levant is ridiculous.
But no one ever got poor predicting death and mayhem in the Middle East and certainly one Fisk fan is in for a treat. In his last statement a year ago, bin Laden, who has met Fisk on three occasions, clearly found someone he trusted. ‘I consider him to be neutral,’ said the fugitive Saudi. If he has enough candles in his cave he will enjoy this book.
Richard Beeston is Diplomatic Editor of the Times.
Comments