The Great War for Civilisation, Notes, Part 1
This is less of a review, and more of a collection of notes I’ve written down as I was reading this book for the second time.
Robert Fisk was an English journalist who spent most of his professional life reporting on conflict in the Middle East. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East was published in 2005, and covers his time spent reporting on various conflicts throughout his career, with the except of the Lebanese Civil War, which he covers in a separate book (Pity the Nation). I first read it in 2015, and am rereading it in 2026. I had the great privilege to hear him give a talk at Rice University in 2015, when he discussed some of his experiences and shared some viewpoints on the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
This was an enormously important book for me when I first read it. It gives a detailed account of many of the various political events going on in the region that I’d grown up hearing about, while framing these events from the perspective of the people that were most affected (rather than framing it in vague, geopolitical terms).
There is also this sense of the weight of history. It’s something that Fisk incorporates a lot into his writing, drawing comparisons between the modern conflicts he is reporting, and historical conflicts in that area that parallel the modern events. It gives a sense of scale and tragedy to these events. These elements are pervasive throughout every page of this book, and, to me, give it a strong sense of melancholy. It’s also a reasonably entertaining book, with a fair amount of dry, British humor.
I cannot recommend this book strongly enough, and instead of reading any of this, go out and buy/read the book itself instead.
Because of its length (it’s a 24-chapter, 1000-page book) and because I’m trying to comment on it by chapter, I’ll divide this “review” into thirds to try to keep each section from being overly long. Through truthfully, rather than it being a review, I’m moreso commenting on aspects of the book that particularly stood out to me as I read it, as a way for me to take notes. It is, therefore, quite lengthy.
This one covers the first third of the book, chapters 1-8.
Chapter 1: One of our brothers had a dream
Fisk starts his book by describing his encounters with Osama Bin Laden, as he had interviewed him several times. Osama bin Laden, a Saudi national, had first become famous due to the fact that he was among the first Arabs to go to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets in the 1980’s. Bin Laden reports being disgusted by the slow reaction of the Saudi government to help. Bin Laden himself was wealthy due to owning a construction company, and used his money and the company itself to go to Afghanistan, recruit and organize Arabs who wanted to fight the Soviets, and helped create some of the infrastructure used by these fighters. During this time, he was widely hailed as a freedom fighter in the Western press.
Following the defeat/withdrawal of the Soviets, he went back to Saudi Arabia, however came into conflict with their government after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Bin Laden was opposed to having Americans stationed in Saudi Arabia, and instead offered the services of his mujahideen to the government but was rebuffed. This stationing of American soldiers in the Holy Land of Islam played a significant factor in shifting his attentions to the West. He went to Sudan, which was in the midst of its own conflict. He employed many of his former fighters as workers in his construction company creating various infrastructure projects (eg. roads) in Sudan. However during this time, it was believed that he was training fighters in asymmetrical warfare and organizing terrorist attacks against various countries. As a result of international pressure, he would be kicked out of Sudan and be forced to go back to Afghanistan, where the Taliban would host him; this was essentially the only country he could stay in.
Fisk interviewed bin Laden in 1993, 1996, and 1997, the first time in Sudan and the latter two times in Afghanistan. Particularly in the last two interviews, bin Laden discusses his plans for waging war against the US, and his belief in the primacy of Islam. His motivations for fighting the US are framed primarily by their support for Israel, which was oppressing the Palestinians under its dominion, and the American corruption of various Arab governments (but in particular, Saudi Arabia). He was confident that, just as the Soviets were a superpower that they defeated, they would be able to defeat the Americans. It also contrasts the worldviews and ambitions of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, with the Taliban, describing bin Laden’s goals as much more ambitious than the Taliban, who were primarily focused on implementing a very backwards and stagnant interpretation of Islam on their own population.
Chapter 2: They Shoot Russians
This chapter discusses Fisk’s involvement in reporting the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Britain’s imperial adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century. The portrayal of the Afghans by British media during that time was of backwards, essentially subhuman, people fighting the British due to their love of violence. They were ultimately unsuccessful in directly colonizing it, and suffered several significant military defeats at the hand of the Afghans.
Moving forward to 1980 (late 1979), there was significant instability within the nominally communist government of Afghanistan. Due to concern for a domino effect that the fall of a communist government in the heart of central Asia could trigger (and potentially at the invitation of the failing Afghan government), the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up the government and install people of their choosing within the government. The military of Afghanistan, as it was ordered about by people in the government who were purportedly friends of the Soviet Union, actually generally fought with the Soviets, or at least acted in support of Soviet objectives, against the tribesmen of the country who resisted the invasion.
Fisk describes how it was interesting to observe how the rebels in Afghanistan did not only have political motivations for fighting the Soviets, but very strong and overtly religious motivations for doing so. He mentions that no one at the time knew the depth of the tragedy that this conflict was inflicting upon Afghanistan. That, indeed, this would set off a chain of events that would lead to the fall of the Afghan government, the takeover of the country by the Taliban, the formation of the Mujahideen that would then disperse throughout the Middle East after the Soviets withdrew and that would essentially lead to the rise of fundamentalist (Sunni) Islam as the organizing principle behind non-state armed groups in the Middle East, and later the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the Americans (though this book was published before the Americans withdrew and the Taliban once more reclaimed power). He draws parallels between the stated aims of the Soviet Union when they invaded, and the stated aims of the Americans when they invaded, much of which revolved around modernizing the country, and introducing democratic and egalitarian principles to the poor backwards tribesmen of the country.
It’s also a pleasure to read about what an adventure (albeit actually quite dangerous) it is to be a journalist reporting out of Afghanistan at the time, and all the steps he had to take to get around the country, do so without getting noticed by the Soviets while avoiding putting himself in situations to be murdered by Afghans, and how he got his reports out of the country back to his newspaper. At one point, he is picked up by the Soviet Army and put on a transport back to Kabul, which is attacked by Afghan tribesmen.
Chapter 3: The Choirs of Kandahar
In this chapter, Fisk continues his narrative of his time spent covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He had initially arrived there in January 1980, left for Pakistan at the end of the month to renew his visa, and this chapter begins in February 1980. In this chapter, the insurgency of the mujahedin against the Soviets begins to pick up steam. And what initially appeared to be Soviet occupation of the country turns into an overt war against these rebellious elements, with a rapid escalation of military activity and number of Soviet military personnel and war material within the country.
He describes the fact that he was for the most part reporting from towns and cities, with periodic excursions into rural areas where there had been recent conflict. I thought it was particularly interesting how you could tell that the rebels were picking up steam and becoming more of a force to be reckoned with based on the fact that the more that government officials insisted everything was going well and things were essentially normal, the more you could be assured the opposite was true. He also draws parallels to how the Soviet propaganda portrayed the Afghan fighters and how British propaganda portrayed them in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
At one point, he takes a bus to Kabul using the busiest road in the country, and has to stop at a checkpoint manned by the mujahedin, where some members of the ruling Afghan party are taken prisoner. This despite all of the propaganda being told by the Soviets and the Afghan government that everything was under control and that the rebels are a small, weak, and undersupplied force that can only do hit and run attacks at night. And yet, here they were, in broad daylight, operating a checkpoint on the busiest road in the country with impunity. At the time, it highlighted how little of the country the government, and by extension, the Soviets, really controlled. Even if they controlled the cities, much of the rural areas were beyond their control, and this is something that would be mirrored with the American invasion two decades later.
He leaves Afghanistan later that month, and briefly returns during the summer later that year, where the military campaign has really stepped up and the Soviets are essentially doing everything in their power to defeat the mujahedin. Ultimately they will be unsuccessful, and this will result in about 20,000 dead Soviets and 60,000 dead Afghan governmental fighters, against roughly 100,000 dead mujahedin. However, the impact on the civilian population will be particularly catastrophic, with about a million dead, and millions more injured and displaced.
When the Soviets finally withdraw, the fighting will continue, with the tribes beginning to fight against each other for control of the country. Once the Taliban emerge victorious, a few years later the Americans will invade, ushering in another two decades of war.
Chapter 4: The Carpet Weavers
This chapter goes over Fisk’s time spent covering the Iranian Revolution in 1979. He opens the chapter by briefly discussing an interview he had in 1997 with a British agent (Christopher Montague Woodhouse) who was one of the principal organizers of the 1953 coup that toppled Mossadegh, the prime minister of a democratically elected government who was replaced by the authoritarian rule of the Shah; at the time of the interview, Monty was one of the last figures still alive who had helped orchestrate the 1953 coup.
And so, we learned about the details of that coup. How American and British agents helped organize the toppling of the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, and bring to power the authoritarian Shah. He writes that it is the first Middle East government toppled by the Americans, who in the post-WW2 world find themselves one pole of a bipolar world, and the last Middle East government toppled by the British, who will find themselves to have lost much of their influence in global affairs after WW2. I will say here that I think Fisk is actually mistaken, as the CIA help orchestrate a coup in Syria in 1949, and this was actually the first time the CIA worked to help carry out a coup. But it goes to show how the seeds were first sown for the hostility that so much of the Middle East has against, if not the American people, the American government and its foreign policy. Because now we almost take it for granted that a Middle Easterner will have an unfavorable view towards the US, but that was not always the case, and had to have begun somewhere. It was this 1953 coup that was the start of a pattern of meddling in affairs of countries of the Middle East. (though arguably, in the post-WW1 period the Americans certainly tried to give input on how Middle East borders were drawn after the fall of the Ottoman Empire)
Unfortunately, the government of the Shah was brutally repressive. Their secret police, the Savak, was organized and trained by the CIA, and exercised brutal methods of torture and execution against political dissidents while setting up an oppressive surveillance state. Political dissidents could mean communists, advocates for Islamic rule in Iran, or really any figures pushing for liberalization of the country. In exchange for American help, the government of the Shah acted as a key regional player to coordinate with Israel to act against the Arab countries as well as try to stymie Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Mass unrest and uprisings were met with a heavy hand resulting in the deaths of thousands of Iranians, but finally in 1979 the Iranian people were able to overthrow the government. It was religious figures, specifically Shia, like Ayatollah Khomeini who stepped in as leaders to focus the efforts of the masses. Fisk draws interesting parallels to the French Revolution, where the leaders of the revolution are very aggressive in their attempts to stamp out all elements and previous power structures of the previous regime, lest those individuals or power structures be used to foment a counter-revolution. This is, in general, one of the greatest priorities for revolutionaries once a revolution has occurred. Revolution necessarily means the toppling of a previous power structure and hierarchy, and given the chance, they will always try to bring themselves back into power. And indeed, when the American embassy was famously stormed and its employees taken hostage, the documents that they shredded were painstakingly restored by the Iranians and it showed that the Americans were trying to reach out to various figures in the government to try to “guide” the revolution in a way that was still favorable to America; the Americans were essentially trying to launch a counter-revolution.
Unfortunately for Iranians, the end-result of the revolution was the rise of a Shia theocracy that executed thousands of members of the Shah’s regime, and took steps to ensure that it remained in power regardless of whether or not it was what the Iranian people as a whole wanted (ie. it was also not democratic), and now forces the entirety of its population to live under its interpretation of Islamic law. But given the sequence of events in the latter half of the 20th century, and the role that the US played in these events, it’s perhaps not surprising that the Iranian government has been the most consistently hostile government in the Middle East towards the United States.
I also just want to point out that I find the situation with the storming of the American Embassy interesting. I’ve long pointed out that the concept of “International Law” is a ridiculous one because these are laws and customs put into place by those in power in order to help maintain the status quo, and are blatantly disregarded by those in power when it suits them with no consequence to themselves. The storming of the American embassy is an example of this. The diplomatic/ambassadorial team to a country is supposed to have immunity, and an embassy is supposed to be off limits. So in theory, storming the embassy and taking its people hostage is a gross violation of international law and custom. And yet, these same embassy employees were working for a government that had launched a coup to topple a democratically elected government a quarter of a century earlier, and were actively working towards trying to launch a counter-revolution to maintain the power structures of the Shah’s government (proven by the painstaking reassembly of fragments of shredded documents recovered by the Iranians after the storming of the embassy). For the US to make any sort of protest, given these circumstances, is almost farcical.
Chapter 5: The Path to War
In this chapter, Fisk is giving a brief overview of the modern history of Iraq, as well as the events that set the stage for the Iran-Iraq War.
He starts off the chapter by discussing the British invasion and occupation of Iraq during and after World War 1. During this time period, Iraq was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which the British were fighting against. He draws a lot of interesting parallels between the British invasion of Iraq, and the American invasion of Iraq. Namely, the British invasion was framed as being for the benefit of the Iraqis, that they were being occupied and oppressed by an unjust government, and that the British were not seeking to occupy and conquer Iraq for themselves, rather they were acting altruistically for the benefits of Iraqis so that they could reap the benefits of modernization and self-determination. While the British would ultimately be militarily successful against the force “oppressing the Iraqis”, they would run into many of the same difficulties that the Americans would almost a century later. The British forces were not popular, there was widespread popular insurrection against them, and the British would respond with heavy-handed force (including reprisals from the air) that would result in widespread Iraqi suffering. To me, it was almost astonishing how closely the events of the British invasion parallel the American invasion almost a century later. It highlights the importance and benefit of having a well-educated populace that knows history, would there having been popular support for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 if the American populace could make these parallels to prior “Western” intervention in Iraq, and see the disinformation they were being fed for what it was? A population that is educated and knows history is a population that is more difficult to manipulate and lie to.
From there, he briefly touches on further Iraqi history including the German invasion during WW2, independence after WW2 in the form of an Iraqi country ruled by a foreign Gulf monarch foisted upon them, a variety of coups that would see various forms of government brought to power, until the Baath party came to power in the 1960’s. The Baath party is, nominally, something I can’t help but like the idea of. A party devoted to secular pan-Arabism. For me then, it becomes particularly tragic that the two countries where the Baath party came to power, Iraq and Syria, betrayed that promise so completely. Both of these governments hated one another (so much for pan-Arabism), and committed unspeakable atrocities to their own population. This chapter focuses on Iraq, and from the outset of the Baath party’s rise to power (and particularly after Saddam would come to power in the late 1970’s), they were extremely aggressive about identifying their political enemies (under the guise of accusing them of being spies for Israel or the Soviet Union or the US or being Islamists) and committing profound violence upon them, whether that involved executions (for the lucky ones) or brutal physical torture (and family members of the accused would often be brought in to be executed or tortured as well in front of the accused to help elicit confessions). I won’t go into further detail, but Fisk does, and it is truly disturbing.
Saddam, it seemed, was intent on becoming the foremost Arab leader, and the individual around whom the Arab world was to revolve. This would bring him into conflict with the Shia within Iraq (where they are a majority), particularly when the Islamic revolution in Iran occurred and suddenly the prospect of a revolt by the Iraqi Shia, supported by a now-theocratic Iran, seemed more likely. Saddam would ultimately focus on persecuting and executing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the majority of whom were either Shia or communist. He would deport many Iraqi Shia to Iran. Because he was explicitly against the movement towards Islamization advocated by the newly ascendant Shia in Iran, Western governments actually supported him and minimized their criticism of his heavy-handed tactics.
And indeed, this was a bad time to be in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan. As Fisk puts it, Saddam was implementing brutal and repressive tactics to control his population, the Iranians were also persecuting and executing many of their own population who they framed as being against the Islamic Revolution, the Soviets were committing many war crimes in Afghanistan as their occupation was going poorly. Arab governments throughout the Middle East were generally quiet in regards to criticizing Saddam’s heavy-handed tactics, in part because they wanted Iraq as a bulwark against Iranian influence throughout the region, and in part because many of them were implementing their own torture programs against their own populace.
Ultimately, this tension between Iraq and Iran would culminate in the Iran-Iraq war.
Chapter 6: The Whirlwind War
In this chapter, Fisk discusses his time covering the Iran-Iraq War.
It started with an Iraqi invasion of Iran at the southern end of their shared border. There was such a strong feeling of confidence of victory on the side of the Iraqis that they allowed the journalists to come along essentially without restrictions. It was very interesting to read about Fisk’s experiences covering the opening of this conflict, as they were essentially able to advance with the front line soldiers and there were multiple instances where he and some of his fellow journalists were almost killed as a result.
The war did not go nearly as well as the Iraqis thought it would due to stiff Iranian resistance. They were very slow to meet their stated objectives of capturing the cities in the regions they invaded, and even after capturing those cities, the most they were able to do was demolish them before retreating back to Iraqi territory two years later.
It is instructive then to see the Iraqi propaganda that was being put out at the time about how quick the war was going to be, and the reality of what ultimately ended up happening.
It’s also interesting how, as it became evident on both sides that this would become a war of attrition, the secret police of both countries would work overtime to imprison and execute those they deemed to be political dissidents, and how the focus would also turn to intentionally targeting civilians in the major cities of the opposing countries to try to terrorize the population.
Eventually the tide began to turn, and the Iranians would recapture the territory they had lost as well as invade into Iraq itself. Iran had a much more populous country, and arguably a more motivated populace as well. The other Arab countries were particularly afraid that the fall of Iraq/Saddam would result in a Shia controlled stretch of countries from Iran to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon. So the other Arab countries bankrolled Saddam and provided him with arms, while other Western countries such as the US and Germany provided Iraq with war materiel and intelligence.
This birthed some relatively unique horrors of the war. The Iranians had entire units of children (teenagers) who signed up to be martyred and would ride motorcycles into minefields to clear the way for their advancing army (along with carrying out other roles in the army). At one point, when they had invaded into a marshy region of Iraq, the Iraqis poured oil into the marshes and set it ablaze, killing thousands of Iranians as well as their own Iraqi citizens who lived in the marshes. Perhaps the most disturbing crime however, was the use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis. The use of chemical weapons is considered taboo and a war crime based on international law, but just like the widespread use of trench warfare and human wave attacks, this conflict saw the most widespread use of chemical weapons since World War I.
What is interesting is that Saddam’s backers were aware of the use of chemical weapons. The equipment and materials to develop these weapons came from Germany, and the Americans provided intelligence to Saddam regarding Iranian troop movements for how to most effectively use it. The use of these weapons resulted in truly catastrophic loss of life, not only among the Iranian military but as well as against any civilians that happened to be caught up in these attacks.
In one particularly horrifying instance, a Kurdish region of Iraq (Halabja) had been captured by Iran and the people cooperated with them. In retribution, when the Iraqis were recapturing the area, they gassed the populace resulting in 5000 civilian deaths. The CIA, at the time supporting Saddam, sent messages to American government officials to the effect that it was not clear if the gas had been dropped by Iran or Iraq (though the Iranians did not possess chemical weapons), obfuscating the matter and preventing a unified global outcry against the Iraqis for this atrocity. Ironically, when Bush was trying to come up with justifications for the invasion of Iraq, he stated that “Saddam gasses his own people”, referring to this incident, which was ultimately facilitated by the Americans.
Fisk closes out this chapter discussing the after-effects of this chemical weapons campaign. He fast forwards to 2004, about a quarter of a century after the start of the Iran-Iraq War, and is in Baghdad, which under American occupation has become the most dangerous city on Earth, and interviews an Iraqi soldier who was a veteran of many campaigns during the Iran-Iraq war. It was, in my opinion, a masterfully used narrative device because it highlights not only the after-effects of this specific war crime, but also ties together how much had changes for the Iraqi people during that time frame and the sorry state that Iraq was in at the time as well, it was a region that had endured tremendous suffering, without an end in sight.
Chapter 7: “War Against War” and the Fast Train to Paradise
This chapter continues discussing Fisk’s experiences in the Iran-Iraq War. It was particularly in this chapter that you can begin to see an astonishing number of parallels with the conflict that is currently ongoing with Israel and the US against Iran.
He discusses the “sea war” aspect of this conflict. Namely that as the land war started going badly against Iraq, Saddam began to attack ships that were picking up oil from Iran’s Kharg Island in order to try to hurt the Iranian economy as it would impact their ability to sell their oil. In retaliation, the Iranians would begin to target the ships carrying oil from Iraq, but also from other neighboring oil-rich Arab countries that were overtly supporting the Iraqis with money and arms. American naval vessels would get involved to protect shipping, ostensibly all shipping, but in practice, only protecting Arab shipping, and so, essentially waging war against Iran in doing so. In 1987, an Iraqi fighter pilot came across an American warship that was in waters that the Iraqis had designated as “forbidden”, and this pilot failed to identify that it was an American ship, and hit it with two missiles, killing 37 Americans on board.
In another example of why individuals should be very wary of the information (read: propaganda) given to them by their government, only brief statements of criticism were leveled at the Iraqis, America’s allies, and instead criticism was instead leveled at the Iranians, who were portrayed as being at-fault for the incident despite not being involved at all. The Americans strongly criticized the Iranians across the world stage for generally being to blame for the war, for the attacks on shipping generally, and for the attack on the American ship as well, despite the fact that this was done in response to Iraqi actions (who started the war in the first place).
Due to both sides of the conflict targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf and in the Strait of Hormuz, trade was significantly impacted and crawled to a standstill, with many merchant ships being stranded. There are clear parallels to this in the current conflict between the US/Israel and Iran. Another piece of evidence that knowledge of history can inform a better understanding of current events, and a better understanding of the likely outcomes of taking a particular course of action.
Another parallel to the current conflict is the fact that the Iranians did not have very effective countermeasures to Iraqi air force raids of their cities at night. They did not have adequate anti-air ground-based defenses, and their air force could not meaningfully challenge the Iraqis at night, which allowed for unopposed Iraqi bombing of Iranian cities for much of the war. The Iranians would retaliate by targeting Iraqi cities with missiles. This is not dissimilar from the current situation, where the Israelis and Americans can operate with impunity in Iranian airspace. The Iranians tolerated this for years against Iraq, and despite huge numbers of deaths, this was not sufficient to meaningfully hurt the Iranian war effort or their willpower to continue to resist their attackers. More lessons that can be learned from history.
Fisk also describes some trips to the front embedded with the Iranian army. Specifically, he went back to Fao, where he had covered the first battles with the Iraqi invasion of Iran in that area (though he was with the Iraqi army at the time). This second time around, he was with the Iranians who had reconquered the Iranian territory the Iraqis had originally claimed, and then proceeded to invade into Iraq to capture some of their territory. Fisk also describes more of the horrors of war: the indoctrinated Iranian child soldiers, death and carnage affecting all sides, the nonstep stream of misinformation and propaganda from government officials who would stay with them as they were on the frontlines. One example I found particularly funny was an Iranian government official telling them not to worry about being on the front because the Iranian air force had setup patrols around them to keep them safe, and this official gestured at a fighter plane they could see in the distance as an example of the Iranian airforce, when the journalists could see it was clearly an Iraqi MiG.
Finally, he also discusses what we now know as the “Iran-Contra” scandal, which highlights the absurdity of war and how capitalists will scarcely turn away an opportunity to make a profit. One of Fisk’s close friends was involved in the sense that he had been taken hostage by Hezbollah in Lebanon (along with other Americans). In exchange for the release of the hostages, the Americans, through Israel, clandestinely sold arms (in particular anti-air missiles) to the Iranians, and then funneled some of the profits of those arms sales to the Nicaraguan right-wing Contras.
Chapter 8: Drinking the Poisoned Chalice
This is the final chapter that discusses the Iran-Iraq War. This chapter opens up with the 1988 shooting down of Iran Air IR655 by an American naval ship, and the 290 civilians that were killed as a result. Based on the conditions in the Gulf mentioned in previous chapters, it was almost inevitable that such a thing would happen. American naval ships were in place to help protect Arab shipping, attack Iranian oil platforms, and otherwise inhibit Iranian shipping. In the weeks preceding this accident, the captain of the Vincennes, the ship that shot down the airliner, had essentially parked the ship under a commercial air lane and would aggressively query every civilian aircraft going through the air lane routinely regarding its clearance and destination. The plane that was shot down was on a routine flight, and was behaving routinely when it was shot down and all aboard were killed. Immediately, the Americans proclaimed their innocence, and there were multiple explanations put forth that were blatant lies: that the Iranians had previously been using the plane to transport troops and had not changed its transponder signature, that the pilot had been trying to suicide-crash the plane into the ship and had been diving towards it, that the plane was not on a normal flight path, that the American ship was under attack from Iranian gunboats and thought the plane was part of a coordinated assault. Each of these explanations would be put forth in the following days to try to defer American responsibility for tragically taking these lives.
Fisk would interview different individuals, including airline pilots who worked with the pilot, air traffic controllers, as well as review official reports to help establish some of the facts: that another naval ship nearby the Vincennes had correctly identified the plane as a civilian airliner on a routine flight, the plane was on a routine route, there was no indication that it was on an abnormal route, and it was ascending (not descending) when it was destroyed. Ultimately, the fact that the crew of the Vincennes misidentified it as an attacking fighter jet came down to American incompetence: an overeager captain and a panicked crew. One of the particularly disgusting aspects of this tragedy is that the Americans involved all received medals for the way they behaved, and the ship’s captain would be honorably discharged 3 years later. (as an aside, this is not the only example of Americans hitting a civilian target in Iran, just recently at the outbreak of the most recent conflict with Iran, an American strike on a girl’s school in Tehran massacred hundreds of little girls)
Interestingly, Fisk was reporting for the Times of London at the time, and his report outlining all of the above was altered to remove all blame of the Americans (an act that he attributed to the purchase of The Times by Rupert Murdoch). He resigned as a result and started working for The Independent thereafter.
By this point in the war, Iran was in a financial crisis: their oil platforms had been destroyed by Iraqi and American attacks, their shipping in the Gulf was severely reduced, and the Americans were overtly on the side of the Iraqis. Ultimately, they were forced to agree to a ceasefire, which would finally end the Iran-Iraq War. Shortly after this ceasefire, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a Marxist Iranian political party armed with Iraqi military equipment, would launch an invasion into southern Iran. The Iranians would defeat them, the government’s secret police would act decisively to “liquidate” the party’s supporters throughout Iran, and as a result they would execute thousands of political prisoners related to the party, regardless of whether they were involved in that offensive or not.
Over the following years after the end of hostilities, POW’s would slowly be released from Iran and Iraq, but many thousands were held captive for years after the war ends. Many imprisoned Iraqis would return from conditions of starvation in Iranian prison camps, to an Iraq wracked by American sanctions after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to find that their families were starving back in Iraq. As many as a half-million Iraqis and a million Iranians were killed in the conflict, a staggering loss of life. And as for the survivors, as Fisk puts it, they had learned how to fight. In Iraq, they had spent the last few years engaged in one of the most high-intensity conflicts in the world since World War II, they had used their tanks as static gun platforms dug into the desert, bombarded the Iranians with gas, swamped them with tidal rivers, and electrocuted them in the marshes. A whole generation of military officers had come to regard war as the natural element of their lives rather than peace, and would remember these lessons when it came time to fight another great army in a decade’s time, when they would be motivated by patriotism and Islam rather than the prodding of their Baathist overlord.
Fisk finishes the chapter by revisiting Iran in 1995, 7 years after the end of the war. He contrasts the war with WW1, noting that the front line of the war, extending along the Iran-Iraq border from the Persian Gulf to Turkey, was larger than the front line of the Western front, and lasted twice as long, had many of the same elements (eg. trench warfare, human wave attacks, the use of chemical weapons), though fewer people died in the Iran-Iraq War (about ~1.5 million total however). He notes that at the start of the war, a lot of poetry written during WW1 put more emphasis on patriotism, but would shortly start to emphasize the utter waste of millions of deaths, and criticizing governments for allowing this to happen. In Iran in contrast, there was still, even years later after a longer conflict, an emphasis on the desirability of martyrdom and a lot of pride at having participated, rather than mourning the loss of so many of the nation’s young men. He mentions the Iraqis, in contrast, suffered from much lower morale, with widespread alcohol use, and even areas where units were assigned to kill those trying to retreat. Finally, he discusses how, in Iran, the war was seen the completion of the Iranian Revolution, which had occurred the year before the start of the war. Where people across the country, regardless of religion or ethnicity, came together to repel the Iraqi invasion. A significant portion of the middle class, the “Old Guard”, in Iran who had the resources to leave the country did so to avoid fighting, further alienating them from the post-Revolution order in the country.