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The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
Robert Fisk
An astonishing and timely account of 50 years of bloodshed and tragedy in the Middle East from one of our finest and most revered journalists.‘The Great War for Civilisation’ is written with passion and anger, a reporter’s eyewitness account of the Middle East’s history. All the most dangerous men of the past quarter century in the region – from Osama bin Laden to Ayatollah Khomeini, from Saddam to Ariel Sharon – come alive in these pages. Fisk has met most of them, and even spent the night out at a guerrilla camp with Bin Laden himself.In a narrative of blood and mass killing, Fisk tells the story of the growing hatred of the West by millions of Muslims, the West's cynical support for the Middle East's most ruthless dictators and America's ever more powerful military presence in the world's most dangerous lands as well as its uncritical, unconditional support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian land. It is also a story of journalists at war, of the rage, humour and frustration of the correspondents who spend their lives reporting the first draft of history, their weaknesses and cowardice, their courage and truth-telling. After reading ‘The Great War for Civilisation’ the reader grasps just why those 19 suicide pilots changed the world on September 11th.Assessing the situation right up to the present day and reporting from the heart of a bombed-out Baghdad, Fisk examines the factors leading up to the coalition forces entering Iraq, and discusses possible outcomes of long-term involvement there.
THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION
The Conquest of the Middle East
ROBERT FISK
COPYRIGHT (#)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This revised eBook edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2005
Previously published in paperback by Harper Perennial in 2006
Copyright © Robert Fisk 2005, 2006
Quotation of Carl Sandburg’s ‘Grass’ taken from Chicago Poems, copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston and renewed 1944 by Carl Sandburg, reproduced by permission of Harcourt Inc.
Quotation from W. B. Yeats’s ‘Lapiz Lazuli’ reproduced by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael B. Yeats.
Quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (edited and translated 1954 by Louis and Aylmer Maude) reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.
Quotation from G. B. Shaw’s Major Barbara reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate.
Quotation from T. S. Eliot’s preface to The Dark Side of the Moon reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Robert Fisk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The publishers have tried to trace and acknowledge copyright-holders,
but would be eager to rectify any omissions.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9781841150086
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2014 ISBN: 9780007370405 Version: 2017-01-12
PRAISE (#)
‘There is nobody in British journalism to match Robert Fisk. This book is his testament … His technique is well-honed: a vivid eyewitness account, unmatchable quotes and the killer detail that everyone else has missed’
Sunday Times
‘Brilliant … powerfully written. He has turned a slightly dubious and over-romanticised craft into an honourable vocation’
PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, Independent on Sunday
‘This book will make Robert Fisk an even greater star—deeply moving’
Literary Review
‘A remarkable book’
New Statesman
‘Fisk is one of the best-known reporters in the world … He interleaves political analysis, recent history and his own adventures with the real stories which concern him [and] writes with a marvellous resource of image and language. His investigative reporting is lethally painstaking’
NEAL ACHERSON, Independent
‘Part-memoir, all heart, this 1,328-page behemoth will delight Fisk’s fans, infuriate his foes and fascinate all’
DONALD MORRISON, Financial Times
‘A fierce indictment of Britain and the United States’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A mammoth and magisterial work, the definitive summation of what has gone wrong in the West’s foreign policies towards Arabia. It should be compulsory reading for those who aspire to lead’
Scottish Sunday Herald
‘It is a history book which journalists, politicians and academics will turn to again and again in the years ahead to grasp the details of the Middle East’
WILLIAM GRAHAM, Irish News
‘Fisk is a gifted writer and an accomplished storyteller … [readers] will enjoy the colorful narrative [and] the wealth of hard-won narrative detail accumulated over his decades of intrepid reporting’
Economist
‘Vivid, graphic, intense and very personal … this is a book of unquestionable importance’
Washington Post
DEDICATION (#)
For Bill and Peggy, who taught me to love books and history
CONTENTS
COVER (#ue9033bc8-1FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
TITLE PAGE (#ue9033bc8-2FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
COPYRIGHT (#ue9033bc8-3FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
PRAISE (#ue9033bc8-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
DEDICATION (#ue9033bc8-5FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
LIST OF MAPS (#ue9033bc8-7FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
PREFACE (#ue9033bc8-8FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
1 ‘One of Our Brothers Had a Dream …’ (#ue9033bc8-9FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
2 ‘They Shoot Russians’ (#ue9033bc8-10FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
3 The Choirs of Kandahar (#ue9033bc8-11FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
4 The Carpet-Weavers (#ue9033bc8-12FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
5 The Path to War (#ue9033bc8-13FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
6 ‘The Whirlwind War’ (#ue9033bc8-14FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
7 ‘War against War’ and the Fast Train to Paradise (#ue9033bc8-15FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
8 Drinking the Poisoned Chalice (#ue9033bc8-16FF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
9 ‘Sentenced to Suffer Death’ (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The First Holocaust (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Fifty Thousand Miles from Palestine (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Last Colonial War (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Girl and the Child and Love (#litres_trial_promo)
14 ‘Anything to Wipe Out a Devil …’ (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Planet Damnation (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
17 The Land of Graves (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Plague (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Now Thrive the Armourers … (#litres_trial_promo)
20 Even to Kings, He Comes … (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Why? (#litres_trial_promo)
22 The Die Is Cast (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist, Anthrax and Agamemnon (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Into the Wilderness (#litres_trial_promo)
KEEP READING (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
FOOTNOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
CHRONOLOGY (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
LIST OF MAPS (#)
All maps drawn by HLStudios, Long Hanborough, Oxford, except the Armenian Genocide, produced by the Armenian National Institute (ANI) (Washington DC) and the Nubarian Library (Paris). © ANI, English Edition Copyright 1998.
PREFACE (#)
When I was a small boy, my father would take me each year around the battlefields of the First World War, the conflict that H. G. Wells called ‘the war to end all wars’. We would set off each summer in our Austin of England and bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was fourteen, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood, Passchendaele … I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the overgrown trenches and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the Great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city he’d never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died thirteen years ago at the age of ninety-three, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on the obverse side are engraved the words: ‘The Great War for Civilisation’.
To my father’s deep concern and my mother’s stoic acceptance, I have spent much of my life in wars. They, too, were fought ‘for civilisation’. In Afghanistan, I watched the Russians fighting for their ‘international duty’ in a conflict against ‘international terror’; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting against ‘communist aggression’ and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as the Iranians struggled through what they called the ‘Imposed War’ against Saddam Hussein – who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the ‘Whirlwind War’. I’ve seen the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then reinvading the Palestinian West Bank in order, so they claimed, to ‘purge the land of terrorism’. I was present as the Algerian military went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a ‘New World Order’. After the 1991 war, I always wrote down the words ‘new world order’ in my notebook followed by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called ‘Serb civilisation’ while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading multicultural dream and to save their own lives.
On a mountaintop in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama bin Laden in his tent as he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I scribbled his words into my notebook by paraffin lamp. ‘God’ and ‘evil’ were what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on 11 September 2001 – my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States – and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a year after the attacks on America when George Bush talked about Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion swept over my head in Baghdad.
The direct physical results of all these conflicts will remain – and should remain – in my memory until I die. I don’t need to read through my mountain of reporters’ notebooks to remember the Iranian soldiers on the troop train north to Tehran, holding towels and coughing up Saddam’s gas in gobs of blood and mucus as they read the Koran. I need none of my newspaper clippings to recall the father – after an American cluster-bomb attack on Iraq in 2003 – who held out to me what looked like half a crushed loaf of bread but which turned out to be half a crushed baby. Or the mass grave outside Nasiriyah in which I came across the remains of a leg with a steel tube inside and a plastic medical disc still attached to a stump of bone; Saddam’s murderers had taken their victim straight from the hospital where he had his hip replacement to his place of execution in the desert.
