Robert Fisk - The Age of the Warrior - Selected Writings

SELECTED WRITINGS

ROBERT FISK

PREFACE

1 A firestorm coming

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Flirting with the enemy

‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

The pit of desperation

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

‘You are not welcome’

Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action

‘Our guys may kick them around a little…’

The wind from the East

2 Publish and be damned? Or stay silent?

So let me denounce genocide from the dock

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim

Sneaking a book out in silence

‘A conflict of interest’

Bravery, tears and broken dreams

A holocaust denier in the White House

3 Words, words, words…

Hack blasts local rags

We should have listened to Bin Laden

The jargon disease

Poisonous academics and their claptrap of exclusion

Soft words – hard questions

The pen, the telex, the phone and the despised e-mail

The forgotten art of handwriting

‘Believe it or not!’

Murder is murder is murder…

Ah, Mary, you poor diddums

‘A very edgy situation’

‘Abu Henry’: what diplomats can get up to

A lesson from the Holocaust

4 Cinema begins to mirror the world

Applause from the Muslims of Beirut

Saladin’s eyes

My challenge for Steven Spielberg

Da Vinci shit

We’ve all been veiled from the truth

When art is incapable of matching life

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one

Take a beautiful woman to the cinema

A river through time

5 The greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis

A long and honourable tradition of smearing the dead

Tricky stuff, evil

‘Middle East hope!’ – ‘Europe in crisis!’

A poet on the run in Fortress Europe

6 When I was a child… I understood as a child

Another of Arthur’s damned farthings

First mate Edward Fisk

‘Come on , Sutton!’

Cold war nights

‘All this talk of special trains…’

Fear of flying

7 The old mandates

God damn that democracy

Gold-plated taps

The man who will never apologise

The ‘lady’ in seat 1K

Whatever you do, don’t mention the war

‘The best defender on earth of Lebanon’s sovereignty’

Alphonse Bechir’s spectacles

The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast

The torturer who lived near the theatre

The temple of truth

We are all Rifaats now

The ministry of fear

‘We have all made our wills’

‘Duty unto death’ and the United Nations

8 The cult of cruelty

The age of the warrior

Torture’s out – abuse is in

‘The truth, the truth!’

Crusaders of the ‘Green Zone’

Paradise in Hell

‘Bush is a revelatory at bedtime’

The worse it gets, the bigger the lies

Let’s have more martyrs!

The flying carpet

The show must go on

‘He was killed by the enemy’ – but all is well in Iraq

9 We have lost our faith and they have not

God and the devil

The childishness of civilisations

Look in the mirror

Smashing history

So now it’s ‘brown-skinned’

The ‘faith’ question

Hatred on a map

‘If you bomb our cities, we will bomb yours’

The lies of racists

Dreamology

10 ‘A thing invulnerable’

What the Romans would have thought of Iraq

In memoriam

Read Lawrence of Arabia

A peek into the Fascist era

Who now cries for the dead of Waterloo?

Witnesses to genocide: a dark tale from Switzerland

‘You can tell a soldier to burn a village…’

Should journalists testify at war crimes trials?

Where are the great men of today?

11 America, America

Free speech

It’s a draw!

Fear and loathing on an American campus

How Muslim middle America made me feel safer

Will the media boys and girls catch up?

Brazil, America and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

From Cairo to Valdosta

Trying to get into America

12 Unanswered questions

Is the problem weather? Or is it war?

Fear climate change, not our enemies

Just who creates reality?

A letter from Mrs Irvine

Who killed Benazir?

The strange case of Gunner Wills

13 The last enemy

In the Colosseum, thoughts turn to death

Dead heroes and living memories

The ship that stands upright at the bottom of the Sea

‘Thanks, Bruce’

Those who went before us

Farewell, Ane-Karine

They told Andrea that Chris had not suffered

POSTSCRIPT

The dilution of memory

A street named Pétain and the woman he sent to Auschwitz

‘I am the girl of Irène Némirovsky’

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also by Robert Fisk

Copyright

About The Publisher

Iraq, I suspect, will come to define the world we live in, even for those of us who have never been within a thousand miles of its borders. The war’s colossal loss in human life – primarily Iraqi, of course – and the lies that formed a bodyguard for our invasion troops in 2003 should inform our understanding of conflict for years to come. Weapons of mass destruction. Links to al-Qaeda and the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. We were fooled. Yet I sometimes believe that we wanted to be fooled – that we wish to be led to the slaughter by our masters, to race for the cliff-edge with the desperate enthusiasm of the suicide bomber, our instincts awakened by something that should have been buried at Hastings or Waterloo or Antietam or Berlin or even Da Nang. Do we need war? Do we need it the way we need air and love and children and safety? I wonder.

This is not a war book in the traditional sense. You will find the torn and shredded bodies of the Middle East in my two histories, of Lebanon and of the West’s involvement in the region over the past century, a volume whose witness to suffering and pain caused me – during its writing – much distress; there is another to come, a companion volume that will take the reader down the road to perdition which is already being cut into the sand by our folly in Iraq and in Afghanistan and ‘Palestine’, in Lebanon and in Iran and in the dictatorships of the Muslim world.

The collection of articles in this book, most of them published in The Independent over the past five years, is therefore angry rather than brutal, cynical rather than bloody. They record, I suppose, a foreign correspondent’s thoughts amid war, a corner of the journalist’s brain that usually goes unrecorded; the weekly need to write something at a right-angle to the days gone by, the need to explore one’s own anger as well as the gentler, kinder moments in a life that has been spent – let me speak bluntly – that has been used up and squandered in watching human folly on a massive, unstoppable scale.

Anger is a ferocious creature. Journalists are supposed to avoid this nightmare animal, to observe this beast with ‘objective’ eyes. A reporter’s supposed lack of ‘bias’ – which, I suspect, is now the great sickness of our Western press and television – has become the antidote to personal feeling, the excuse for all of us to avoid the truth. Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers – but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror’. If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of 1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is on our side, call him a ‘strongman’. If he’s our enemy, call him a tyrant, or part of the ‘axis of evil’. And above all else, use the word ‘terrorist’. Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Seven days a week.