The Great War for Civilisation, Notes, Part 2
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 middle third of the book, chapters 9-16.
Chapter 9: Sentenced to Suffer Death
This is a relatively short chapter, and if I am being honest, feels a little bit shoehorned into the book.
In this chapter, Fisk describes his father’s involvement in World War 1. Specifically, he mentions that his father spoke very little about his time in WW1, but would spend his life obsessively reading books about the war as well as biographies of key figures in the war. After his father’s death, he would look through some notes written by him about his time during the war, which would reference two events of great personal importance to him: an incident where he was involved (and injured) in a small massacre of Chinese workers in France who had been raiding French provision trains, and his refusal to command a firing squad to execute an Australian deserter who had killed a local military police officer (though another officer took command of that firing squad to carry out the sentence).
Fisk would fly to France to these locations to try to find more information about these two events, almost 70 years after they had happened. He reflects on the little ironies that these two very important events in his father’s life, were so minor in the scale that war, that it is extremely difficult to find out any information about it. After much investigating, he is able to go through the records of his father’s company where there is a brief note that is a single sentence about “quelling a disturbance of Chinese workers”. With regards to the execution he refused to participate in, after much digging he found records that it was an Australian who had actually enlisted with the British military, and official records make no mention of his father’s refusal to command the firing squad, but do confirm that the officer who led the execution was someone else, at a minimum, confirming that his father had refused to participate, something Fisk had greatly admired him for.
While this chapter did feel a little bit shoehorned in, I actually enjoyed it a lot because I identify with it, to some extent. My father was only 14 (an unfortunate consequence of a war fought primarily by militias) when he first picked up a rifle in defense of his community in Tripoli in the Lebanese Civil War, and he talks about it very little. His experiences played a huge role in my current political interests, and yet, despite my best efforts I can find very little detailed and concrete information about events in the northern part of the country for much of the war, aside from a few major events and massacres. Many of the histories written about the conflict focus on the Syrian and Israeli occupations as it related to the South of Lebanon and Beirut, internecine fighting between the Christian militias, conflicts between the Christian militias and the Druze and the PLO, and the involvement of the Shia fighting against local Christian militias and Israel. Most of the focus is on Beirut or further south.
And yet, the war was also fought in the North, just like everywhere else in the country for over a decade, and my father would fight intermittently for years before he was injured. There was fighting between multiple factions: Syrians, Sunni (multiple Islamist militias), communists, small isolated Shia communities, and Christians. My first inclination, is to wonder if his purported involvement is a fabrication (or perhaps an exaggeration), stolen valor, as it were. But speaking with my family members in Lebanon corroborates his stories, and my later readings of the war would match details of his stories with some of the major events that also affected the North (the siege of Tripoli that would drive the PLO out, for example). The North also saw a lot more activity of Sunni Islamists than elsewhere in the country, and so it was thought to be much more dangerous for Western journalists (like Fisk) reporting on the conflict, so there was much less exposure to this front in the war for Western audiences. Perhaps histories written in Arabic describe more than do the ones written in English. But the end result feels similar to what Fisk describes: these momentous events that dominated my father’s youth and were part of a brutal conflict, barely had so much as a footnote in the histories written about it.
Getting back to this book though, Fisk also does find ways to bring his time reporting on Middle East conflicts into this chapter. He describes that it would take his father’s generation 23 months after WW1 to create the artificial borders of artificial nations: creating Greater Lebanon from Syria, creating Yugoslavia the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, partitioning Ireland, creating the Mandate of Palestine, among other countries in the Middle East. Fisk’s father’s war would be WW1, but Fisk would spend the rest of his life reporting on the “burning of these frontiers, the collapse of the statelets that [his] father’s war allowed us to create, and the killing of their peoples”. Setting up nations on behalf of minorities that, with the possible exception of the Jews in Palestine and the Protestants of Northern Ireland, did not want these nations created.
He also ties in some additional history, when visiting the town of Douai in France to investigate his father’s stories, he tells us that eight hundred years before his father arrived in this city, some of the townspeople would head off on Crusades to the Middle East, settle north of Jerusalem in what is now Lebanon, and intermarry with local Christians to become the Douaihy family. Years before his visit to Douai in France, Fisk had interviewed Suleiman Franjieh about a massacre his men committed against members of the Douaihy family in Zgharta, just outside Tripoli.
While this chapter did feel a little shoehorned into this book, I nevertheless thought it was a great read.
Chapter 10: The First Holocaust
This chapter focuses on the Armenian genocide during WW1 by the Turks. Of course, he was not alive or able to report during those events, but he interviewed survivors of the genocide in Lebanon in the 90’s, and visited different sites (ie. mass graves) in Northern Syria and Türkiye where massacres happened.
During WW1, and more specifically in 1915, nationalism based on ethnic identity, shared culture, and language, was a widespread philosophy throughout Europe as the old Empires showed their age and dissolved in the wake of the war, so large multi-ethnic empires such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire would be broken up into smaller countries, ostensibly on a nationalist basis. One of the powerful forces in the Ottoman government, the Young Turks, during the war, decided to implement the policy of removal of the Armenian population from Asia Minor to create a Turkish-speaking Islamic nation. Other motivating factors included the fact that many Armenians living in Russia were part of the Russian army as well. Fisk emphasizes that the chosen method of “removal of the Armenians” was not simply relocation to other areas of the Empire, but a wholesale massacre of much of the population that would ultimately result in about 1.5 million Armenian dead. The Turks would use the industrial apparatus of the state to assist in these massacres, and in the stated goal of attempting to exterminate an ethnic group from within its borders using the industrial apparatus of the state, would carry out the “First Holocaust.” Indeed, Germany, allied to the Ottomans at the time, would eventually incorporate some of the lessons learned into carrying out their own Holocaust 20 years later.
Some interesting details mentioned include the fact that groups of armed Kurds carried out a lot of these massacres, essentially setting one ethnic minority against another. In the wake of WW1 when these old empires were falling apart and new national borders were being drawn by the victorious powers, Woodrow Wilson, the American president, was a strong proponent of creating nations for the Kurds and Armenians, as well as generally drawing rational borders for other countries in the Middle East. Wilson’s personal illness, as well as an isolationist tendency from the Americans meant they would step away from the table when drawing these borders, and it was the British and French who would primarily be responsible. Due to fears that Armenia would be used as a pawn of the Bolsheviks, it was kept relatively small and would ultimately end up as part of the Soviet Union, while land initially planned to be used for a Kurdish homeland was incorporated into Iraq.
The remainder of the chapter is devoted to criticizing those who do not acknowledge this event as a genocide at all. Part of the motivation for this is the fact that the Turkish government has significant geopolitical importance, as a strong ally of Western interests in the region, as a buyer of American arms, and as part of NATO, and they are very aggressive at denouncing any who call what happened to the Armenians as a genocide, and Western governments tend to back down. Their arguments include the fact that Armenians were mainly relocated not massacred (which Fisk claims is untrue), that the Armenians were moved to Lebanon for their own safety, and that there was a lot of domestic and civil unrest as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and the Armenians were actually using that as an excuse to launch armed attacks themselves against the government (in effect turning the victims into the perpetrators).
While many Jews do call what happened to the Armenians a genocide, there are also many who deny that it was a “holocaust,” likely to suggest that what happened to Jews and the suffering that they underwent at the hands of Germany during WW2 was singularly unique. In general, many prominent members of the Israeli government do not acknowledge what happened to the Armenians as a genocide for this reason, as well as to prevent causing diplomatic tension with Türkiye.
Chapter 11: Fifty Thousand Miles from Palestine
Here at last, almost 400 pages into this book, Fisk talks about Israel and Palestine, that conflict in the heart of the Middle East that has done so much to define the course of Arab history for the last hundred years. Fisk writes much about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his other, earlier, excellent tome, Pity the Nation.
He starts off this chapter talking about a time he visited the grave of Haj Amin al Husseini, and discusses some highlights of his life. He was a Palestinian born in 1895, who spent much of his adult life trying to safeguard the creation of an Arab state in the British Mandate of Palestine, and prevent creation of a Jewish state within the same area. Fisk discusses how in late WW1 and in the wake of the war, the areas of the Levant, Palestine, and Mesopotamia were carved up by the French and British. In order to secure their cooperation against the Ottomans, the British made promises to the Arabs about being given their independence in exchange for military support against their Turkish overlords, and in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, the British promised the Jews that they would create a homeland for them in Israel, in exchange for Jewish support against Germany throughout Europe. In the 20 years that would follow the end of WW1, there would be a steady flow of Jewish migration to Israel, and the formation of Arab and Jewish militias that would alternately target each other and the British. Haj Amin, in the wake of a failed Arab revolt against the British in 1939, would be forced to flee to different countries until he ultimately went to Germany to help the Nazis to gain support against the British. For this last action, he is roundly criticized and his legacy has been marred, though it must be viewed in light of the events of the preceding 25 years.
Following the end of WW2, in 1948 the state of Israel would be created, resulting in a failed invasion by Israel’s Arab neighbors and the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians (ie. the Nakba) (in addition to the “displacement” of so many Arabs, it is worth mentioning that thousands more were killed and many of those Arabs left behind in Israel that Israel likes to parade around as evidence of their tolerance were moved to ghettos under heavy guard). Interestingly, Fisk gives examples of how many high-profile British politicians knew that their policy of promising this land to two separate groups was untenable, and would ultimately lead to conflict. Ultimately, the Palestinians would have to bear the consequences of the British promise to the Jews. On the basis that these Jews’ ancestors had lived on their land two thousand years previously, the Palestinians whose ancestors had been living there for 50 generations were now to be displaced. And as a result of centuries of persecution and discrimination of the Jews in Europe by the “powers of Christendom”, it was the Arabs that would have to “foot the bill”. In the wake of World War 2, with the horrors of the Holocaust and its 6 million Jewish deaths revealed to the world, and with millions of refugees scattered across Europe, the plight of 750,000 Palestinians was, fundamentally, deemed unimportant by the prominent powers of the time.
Fisk then gives a very brief summary of how over the following decades, the Arabs would ineffectually fight Israel, and Israel through their soldiers’ high morale and the unwavering support of the Americans, would never experience anything approaching a military setback aside from the start of the 1973 War and Hezbollah ultimately driving them out of the south of Lebanon in 2000. The 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 War, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon would all serve to crush the Palestinians indirectly and directly. In 1967, the Israelis would gain control of Gaza and the West Bank and so gain control of the entirety of that former British Mandate.
When Palestinians or Arabs set themselves against Israel and take up arms, they are classified as being terrorists who are antisemitic and hate democracy or are simply evil. These acts of armed resistance are then used to justify further military adventurism on the part of Israel and the US. Always, the history for the basis of the current conflict is ignored, and it is the Israelis framed as the victims.
Following the end of the Cold War and the First Gulf War (ie. the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the American response to that), the Americans, under Bush Senior, organized negotiations between the involved Arab States, the Palestinians led by Arafat, and Israel, to try to achieve peace (it was not explicitly mentioned in this book, but the First Intifada was ongoing at this time). These negotiations proceeded very slowly without much progress (major sticking points included what was to be done with Arab land the Israelis were occupying following their victories over the Arabs in the preceding wars), and after over a year of negotiations, they were ultimately fatally undermined when the Palestinians separately reached out to the Israelis through back channels to come to an agreement. As Fisk puts it, the woefully unprepared Palestinians without a single lawyer among them would try to come to an agreement with Israel’s best-educated and shrewdest negotiators. It seems as though there were several motivating factors for these negotiations: Arafat’s overall personal weakness and desperation to be able to rule over a Palestinian state, the increasing brutality of the Israeli occupation, and the increasing power of emerging religious Palestinian groups such as Hamas that were gaining influence in Palestine at the expense of the less religious PLO.
Interestingly, it was the Israelis themselves that had helped fund Hamas in building mosques and the distribution of social services as a way to undermine their main opponent: the PLO. Without that looming specter of Islamism, the Israelis would have had little incentive to give Arafat anything at all. And so the 1993 Oslo accords were achieved, Arafat would accept the partition of Palestine, though he would give up 78% of Mandate Palestine to the Israelis.
When Fisk visited the West Bank as these Accords were being implemented, he found that the overwhelming sentiment amongst the Palestinians was a feeling of betrayal by Arafat, and it was not hard to see why. After decades of hostility and at times war between the Arab nations and Israel, decades of struggle by Palestinian militants, 5 years of a Palestinian uprising, and decades of promises by Arafat that there would never be peace until the millions of displaced Palestinians and their descendants could return to a state with Jerusalem as its capital, Arafat had decided on a peace where they would not get Jerusalem, they would give up 78% of Mandate Palestine, and Palestinians could not even freely return.
Chapter 12: The Last Colonial War
In this chapter, Fisk talks about the Arab-Jewish conflict from a new angle: that of the Israeli settlers, and he also discusses the aftermath of the Oslo Accords.
Prior to the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israeli had occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, and though they had not outright annexed them, they would establish many “settlements” such that by 1990, there would be over 100,000 settlers. These settlers were motivated by a religious conviction that the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, as they referred to it, had been promised to them and it was their duty to drive off the Arabs and make it into part of the Jewish state. By having thousands of settlers in lands that nominally belong to the Arabs, the goal is to create a situation where Israel can move in and outright annex the land by claiming they are simply protecting the Jews there. Part of this strategy involves making life difficult for Arabs living in the area, to encourage their emigration, and settlements often expanded at the expense of Arabs who had their land stolen and homes demolished even while they were actively living there.
The First Intifada, which ultimately led to the Oslo Accords, was driven moreso by the existence of the settlers as by any other factors. This was the conflict that saw the rise of Hamas as an influential player in Palestinian politics, an organization whose creation Israel had encouraged as a way to undermine the PLO.
He goes on to discuss that the implementation of the Oslo Accords did not go smoothly. There was significant resistance to it from many Palestinians, and the continued conflict between Palestinians and the Israelis meant that the Israelis did not withdraw based on the initial, promised timetables. There were also many right-wing Israelis who were eager to sabotage these Accords, primarily because these were the factions that believed the West Bank and Gaza should be annexed as part of a Jewish state.
There was a terrorist attack on 2/25/94 where Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims at a mosque, when Palestinians gathered to try to gain access to the mosque/massacre site, the Israeli soldiers killed 25 more. The vast majority of Western media would not call Goldstein a terrorist. Fisk also points out that this had been just the latest in a long line of attacks carried out by both sides against civilians. Always when it is a massacre committed by a Palestinians, the international media refer to them as a terrorist, but when it is an Israeli, they are referred to as deranged, or if they are an American immigrant, that is emphasized to somehow minimize the fact that they are Israeli.
Eventually Arafat would be able to come rule over the small bit of Palestine he had been allowed. When Arafat landed in Gaza, Fisk points out the absurdity of the situation, that Arafat and his men, the majority of whom had spent their entire life living in neighboring countries, would come to “rule” over a Palestinian population in Gaza that was primarily not from Gaza, they were from the land that was now southern Israel. And despite decades of his promises to these same people, Arafat’s agreements would codify the idea that these people would never be allowed to return to their homes. All while the majority of the armed forces in Gaza continued to be an Israeli occupying force, and the Israeli settlers continued to live in Gaza. These same absurd scenes would be repeated when he went to the West Bank.
With Israeli and American support, Arafat would fulfill the role of policeman in Gaza. With the typical style of an Arab autocrat, on the pretext of stopping terrorism on Israel’s behalf, Arafat had a robust security apparatus used to oppress and jail his political opponents, ostensibly aimed at stamping out Hamas. Press freedom was suppressed. This was supposedly because the agreement would be “land for peace”, and Arafat would be given the responsibility of ensuring that the Palestinians did not attack Israelis. And yet, despite these agreements, the number of Jewish settlers, protected by Israel, living in the West Bank and Gaza, would continue to increase. This policy of settlement is something that would be promoted by successive Israeli administrations, essentially since the occupation of the land by the Israelis in 1967. In addition to promoting Jewish colonization of these lands, the Israelis would also make it very difficult for Arabs to obtain building permits for themselves. Going even further, in addition to not granting building permits, Israelis would bulldoze thousands of Arab homes and drive people off of their land. Fisk goes on to describe the torture methods used by the Israeli security apparatus against Palestinians, as well as by the Palestinian Authority against their own people.
He discusses how the Israelis reneged on almost all of their promises in the Oslo Accords. Under these accords, the West Bank would be divided into Zone A (under exclusive Palestinian control), Zone B and C would be under Israeli control. Zone A made up 1.1% of the land, whereas Zone C comprised 60% of the land. This would allow the Israelis to rapidly expand the amount of Jewish settlements in Arab land. An investigation in 2000 showed that in the interim since the Oslo Accords, the number of settlers had increased from 80,000 to 150,000, and the Israelis had not met a single withdrawal deadline from these territories. By 2003, the number of Israeli settlers would increase to 400,000. Continued talks throughout the late 90’s between Netanyahu and Arafat to try to advance the promises of the Oslo Accords would amount to nothing. The Wye Agreement of 1998 would allow for increased CIA presence to suppress Palestinian resistance, but would do nothing to curb violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers.
The Camp David Summit in 2000 would be unsuccessful, and after a provocative visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount, the Second Intifada would kick off in 2000. The Second Intifada was characterized by similar actions on the part of the Palestinians as the First Intifada: widespread protests, economic boycotts, stone throwing, and armed resistance where possible. Over time, the increased prominence of Hamas and Islamic Jihad made suicide attacks a regular part of the war. The Israeli response was harsher this time, to the extent that shelling of Palestinian towns and strafing rocket attacks by helicopters scarcely made the news. This conflict would last for almost 5 years, and would see about 1,000 Israelis killed and about 3,300 Palestinians killed.
Chapter 13: The Girl and the Child and Love
Fisk starts this chapter talking about an Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, who lived among the Palestinians in Gaza to report on the cruelty of the Israeli occupation, and how many Israelis encouraged her to continue with her reporting, but many called her essentially a race traitor. She cited her inspiration as her mother’s experience during the Holocaust watching German women on the sidelines as the trains transporting Jews went by, and how this made her not want to be on the sidelines for the persecution of the Palestinians.
He also talks about an American Jewish reporter Eva Stern, who reported on the Israeli Massacre at Qana in southern Lebanon, where the Israelis shelled a UN compound killing 106 civilians, including 55 children. She writes about how her parents, who survived the Holocaust, refuse to see any attack on Israelis by the Arabs within the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and instead frame it as “the Arabs are antisemitic”, in the same way that they see Germans as Nazis because when they lived in Germany, that’s primarily who they encountered. But for the Palestinians, the only Jews they have come across in their life, are those who oppress and occupy them. He goes on to say not a single American newspaper would publish her work regarding the anniversaries of the Sabra and Chatila massacre or the massacre at Qana.
Fisk discusses the Israeli tactic of bulldozing Palestinian homes, and then shooting them or shelling them if there is any resistance. He also discusses the Israeli tactic of extrajudicial executions. This variously involves the use of hit squads or missiles, and often resulted in the deaths of nearby civilians. These were tactics used during the occupation of southern Lebanon as well. He discusses how the Palestinian Authority’s apparatus would begin to summarily execute Palestinians thought to be giving information to Israel.
He also discusses the increasing transition to the use of suicide bombers on the part of the Palestinians. Perhaps understandably, when these suicide bombings were successful and killed Israeli civilians, it only prompted fury and a desire for disproportionate revenge. And over time, as the Second Intifada drags on and becomes more savage, it becomes more commonplace on both sides to see the other as less-than-human.
One story he tells is of a suicide bomber, who worked in Arafat’s security services guarding prisoners. One of these prisoners was part of Islamic Jihad, who would intermittently be released to attend classes. One day, this prisoner picked up a phone, and within it the Israelis had planted a bomb and blew off his head. It was this event that inspired the suicide bomber (at the time a prison guard) towards taking up armed resistance. The Israeli assassination, meant to strike fear into Islamic Jihad, had instead inspired a suicide bomber. Fisk also talks about the time he spent in Lebanon, where it was among the Shia fighters of Hezbollah fighting the Israeli occupation that suicide bombing first became used as a tactic in the modern age (aside from kamikaze pilots).
He talks about how in a normal society, where people are treated equally and with justice, suicide is viewed as an aberration, as “the balance of the individual’s mind being disturbed”. When a society is dispossessed, when there appears to be no solution to the injustices thrust upon it, when the enemy is all-powerful and its own people are bestialized, then minds move beyond reason and become fascinated with the idea of an afterlife and that by their own death they can fight back. It is not an act of mindless terror, but the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured, and killed in terrible numbers.
And over time, it has led to a change in the attitude of Arabs. Where once the Palestinians may have been happy with the UN Resolution 242, granting them Gaza and the West Bank, increasingly they would accept nothing less than the entirety of Palestine. He discusses how as time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to report from inside Palestine: foreigners tend to get lumped in with the Americans, and the people are furious with the US for helping Palestine. With good reason, every time an Apache fires missiles into a Palestinian home and kills the family inside, it is with American missiles.
Techniques used to delegitimize Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” include the West’s penchant for: claiming the Palestinian territories were “disputed” rather than using the term occupied, claiming that there is no such thing as a distinct Palestinian culture that sets it apart from other Arabs, dehumanizing the Palestinians, and noting how Arafat had relegated Jerusalem and the settlements and the right of return to final status negotiations not to be mentioned in the meantime.
Unfortunately, 9/11 gave the Israelis the opportunity to further obtain American support by framing the hijackers (none of whom were Palestinian), as part of the same group/ideology as the Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation, and Arafat as a Palestinian Bin Laden. In this way, Sharon had cast this conflict as part of America’s new “War on Terror”.
Interestingly, at one point Fisk covers the re-occupation by the Israeli army of Ramallah. After withdrawing, as the Palestinians came back, they reported widespread looting and theft by the Israelis. Many of the Palestinians in Ramallah were also American citizens, and it was this fact that caused the Israeli military, some days later, to admit to “widespread looting”.
When Israel reoccupied Jenin, they faced stiff resistance and though exact numbers are unclear, it is likely that about 50 Palestinians were killed, of whom half were civilians. Initial reports were that Palestinian deaths were much higher, and many called it a massacre, but it would soon turn out that “only” 25 civilians were killed. Israeli media argued that this was not a massacre, but when much fewer Israeli civilians are killed by Palestinians, that gets called a massacre.
He also discusses that much of the Western media focused on Arafat as the obstacle to peace, glossing over the fact that the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, had spent his entire career, decades of it, voting against any measures for peace when they come up in the Israeli government. He strongly condemned NATO involvement in Serbia because he supported Milosevic’s goal of preventing the establishment of an Albanian state because it would be a “haven for Islamic terror”, but also because he feared it would set a precedent where Arab populations within Israel could use it as the basis for forming their own state within Israel.
He ends the chapter by highlighting that this was a colonial war, and this aspect of colonialism had been ignored by the media. Even Sharon himself, would reveal the truth of this in a conversation with Chirac, the French President at the time, by drawing parallels with the Algerian War of Independence.
Chapter 14: “Anything to wipe out a devil…”
In this chapter, Fisk discusses the Algerian Civil War of the 1990’s.
He first discusses the colonial history of Algeria, where it was invaded and conquered by France, with that same tired justification of bring civilization to a land ruled by the barbarous Arab, and with claims made that they would be welcomed as liberators from their oppressive government. Though they would militarily occupy Algeria without much difficulty, there would be a bloody 15-year insurgency that led to many deaths on both sides before it was finally quelled. Many French would move to Algeria and become the “pieds noir” class (Algerians of French descent) that would make up almost 10% of the population by the time of the war for independence. Under French colonialism, Algerians were considered second-class in their own country: recruited to fight and die for wars on behalf of the French, but barred from political involvement and the ability to vote. This would lead to many small demonstrations of resistance during its colonial history that would ultimately always be suppressed.
The Algerian war for independence in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s would be bloody, with the French initially insisting that they would never leave Algeria and committing huge numbers of troops, to eventually withdrawing (and taking many of the pieds noirs and Algerians who had supported them back to France, though many were left to be killed by the victorious Algerian rebels). This war would see about 1.5 million Algerians die (half a million at the hands of fellow Algerians), and about 27,000 French soldiers. Both sides were quite brutal, and annihilation of entire villages was routine on the part of the French. When Algerians living in France protested, a brutal response by the French police led to 300 of them being massacred inside of France. Following the end of the war, Fisk posits that as the French had shown the Algerians nothing but a corruption of democracy during its time as a colony, this shaped the initial post-independence governments, which were essentially corrupt dictatorships backed by the Army.
The next few decades would see a rising Islamist movement within the country, such that by the time of the 1992 elections the Islamic party (FIS) had won a majority of parliamentary seats in the election. The government in power, the FLN, responded by a mass arrest of FIS leadership and suspending elections. Ironically, whereas in many countries of the Middle East the strongest opponents to the dictatorships in place were the liberal Middle class (like in Egypt or Iraq or Syria or Jordan) while the more religious suffered in relative silence, in Algeria it was the opposite. The more liberal middle class in Algeria were in favor of the government suspending elections to avoid an Islamic government. This would result in a civil war. The Islamists were inspired by (and many had actually fought as) the Mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviets and by the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
For their part, the Western powers were looking to avoid another country with an Islamic government like Iran, and did not pressure the Algerian government in any meaningful way. The suspension of the electoral process would be responded to with violence on the part of the Islamists. Initially starting out slowly and then ramping up, this took the form of random assassinations by gunfire or knife of policemen, family members of policemen, or anyone felt to be sympathetic to the government. This would ramp up such that many of these officials at night would be forced to live in government compounds as the government had lost control of the streets at night. Eventually, large armed bands of Islamic groups would be able to operate in the mountains and areas between cities, and it would take the military much effort to bring this back under control. For their part, the government responded with summary executions of suspected Islamists or family members of Islamists, mass incarceration and use of torture, and death squads who would hunt down and kill those who had been released from prison. There is also evidence that the government death squads themselves were responsible for committing the wholesale slaughter of villages (particularly those who had supported the FIS in the elections), but would wear fake beards and robes and claim the Islamists had done it.
Though both the government and the rebels committed widespread atrocities, the difference was that the international community supported the Algerian government. Even when evidence was brought to light of the crimes committed by government forces (whether it be police, military, or their death squads), governments in Europe and the US refused to put any meaningful pressure on the Algerian government, and in several shameful instances, government defectors who fled and looked for asylum in Europe would be refused and deported back to Algeria, where their former coworkers would torture them to death. Eventually, in 2001, one of the members of the government death squads would defect and corroborate the stories of massacres, torture, and false-flag attacks carried out by the government.
Fisk discusses how dangerous it was for him to report from there, and the strategies he used to avoid making himself a target, including burying his head in newspapers when stuck in traffic, avoiding being in any store for longer than 4 minutes (any longer, and the Islamist spotters would have enough time to bring in an assassin), and refusing police escorts lest he be seen to be associated with them. Nevertheless, several journalists he worked with would be killed. He would himself be traveling with police when their convoy was ambushed and 4 roadside bombs were set off, but he would escape unscathed.
He also draws many comparisons to Iraq 10 years later after the Americans invaded: the wanton massacres and assassinations carried out by Islamist militants against either the Americans or their Iraqi police auxiliaries, or against other Iraqis deemed to be aiding them. As well as the reprisals carried out by the Americans and their Iraqi auxiliaries in turn. That loss of government control when the sun went down and in the spaces between cities.
Chapter 15: Planet Damnation
This chapter recounts Fisk’s experiences reporting on the First Gulf War (ie. the American-led multinational response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, something I need to clarify as the Iran-Iraq War is sometimes known as the Gulf War).
Shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, there was public disagreement between the governments of Iraq and Kuwait. Kuwait was producing and selling more than its OPEC-allotted share of oil, and the price of oil globally was going down, which was impacting Iraq’s economy. Kuwait had supported Iraq during its war against Iran, and there was a sense that it was Iraqi blood that had protected it from the Iranians, though whether Iran ever had any ambitions towards Kuwait is unclear. There had also been many such arguments about oil in the past between the two countries that had not amounted to much, so it came as a surprise to the international community when Iraq did end up invading Kuwait, occupying it, and deposing its monarchy, claiming it was historically a part of Iraq anyway.
The Saudis, with a very well-equipped military (they were prolific buyers of the latest British and American military tech), but that was small, poorly trained, and less experienced than the Iraqi military, were nervous that perhaps Iraq would invade them next, and invited the American military on their soil to help defend them. This was a shocking move for many Arabs, to invite the armies of Christendom onto the most sacred land of Islam. America was already unpopular in the Middle East because of their support for Israel against the Palestinians. There was also generally a belief in the Middle East that they would only intervene to “liberate Kuwait” or protect Saudi Arabia for oil. How could it be for maintaining international law or protecting human rights, when they had supported Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, and their occupation of Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights? While many Arab governments may have supported American help, the Arab people didn’t, and there were many protests across the Middle East in support of Iraq. This presence of the “soldiers of Christendom” on Islamic Holy Land, and the hypocrisy of the Americans with their continued support of Israel, coinciding as it did during this time period with the rise of Islamism throughout the Middle East, would put the Americans squarely in the crosshairs of these Islamist groups.
And many governments in the Middle East did support American help, even the Baathist Syrians contributed military support to the multinational coalition that was now being led by the Americans. The Iraqis, for their part, played the part of evil occupier well, and there were widespread reports of looting in Kuwait, some of it at the hands of the Kuwaiti-Palestinians living there as well as Iraqi-trained Palestinians (after the Iraqis were expelled from Kuwait, the Palestinians would be blamed as collaborators, despite the fact that many Palestinians were also part of the Kuwaiti resistance, and 300,000 Palestinians would be banished from Kuwait).
Fisk describes the difficult conditions that the multinational coalition had found itself in, in the brutal desert heat. He describes the carefully controlled information that the coalition provided to journalists. Journalists were given tremendous access to all sorts of military equipment, and the various command centers being used. The information they were given was carefully sanitized, such that there was an attempt to emphasize in the media not only the overwhelming might of the American military, but also to present a sort of sanitized version of the conflict that might arise: the focus was on the weapons and not what they’re used for and the effect they might have.
Eventually negotiations for the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait failed, and the war did begin. It started with a 40-day bombing campaign in Kuwait and Iraq, brief ground fighting in Saudi Arabia as the Americans failed to protect a town, and then a 100-hour ground invasion of Kuwait. Fisk discusses how journalists who did not agree to embed with the military were not allowed to travel to the “front”. However these embedded journalists were forced to comply by specific rules and were dependent on what the military told them, in effect acting more as propaganda mouthpieces rather than true journalists. Fisk, for his part, refused to embed with the military, and with a group of French journalists dressed up as soldiers and headed to the front, able to fool those manning the checkpoints, and therefore able to report in a more honest way where he was very critical of the amount of civilian deaths and damage to infrastructure within Iraq of the bombing campaign. And there was a tremendous amount of suffering inflicted with the air campaign. There were many incidents of huge numbers of civilians dying as a result of bombing in Iraq, in the most egregious case, a bunker that had been housing civilians was bombed, killing over 400 civilians in a single incident. While US officials would claim that they had believed it was a military target, a “command and control bunker”, Fisk would interview an Air Force official who would discuss that many bunkers, including this one, would be targeted if it was known that civilian family members of military officials were housed there, in essence, confirming deliberate targeting of civilians by the military.
He talks about how as he would interview Saudis on the ground, they were disgusted by the sheer loss of life inflicted by the Americans, and how the way it was sanitized in American media, discussed in terms such as “neutralization of Iraqi capabilities”, was particularly grotesque for Arabs who viewed it as Christian armies killing Muslims. It was clear that this would set the stage for renewed hate of the US across the Middle East.
When the Americans finally did invade Kuwait, Saddam ordered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces without any real ground fighting. Any ground fighting that occurred, was essentially a massacre of retreating Iraqi soldiers, and they died in the thousands, massacred from the air without any ability to defend themselves, a needless loss of life in the context of the fact that the US was not planning on invading Iraq, they had achieved their ground objectives. One of the other neglected aspects of this war was the amount of destruction the Iraqis had visited upon Kuwait while they occupied it, with wholesale looting, executions of thousands of civilians, as well as kidnapping of thousands of hostages who were taken back to Iraq. In fact, many of those massacred by the Americans on that “Highway of Death” were carrying their stolen loot from Kuwait.
The conflict was also an environmental catastrophe. The Americans were bombing the oil fields in Iraq, while the Iraqis in Kuwait were setting the oil fields there alight, choking the region in black fumes that would cause environmental damage thousands of miles away and turn the desert into an apocalyptic scene.
As Fisk reported on the thousands of charred corpses lining the highway back into Iraq, he would come across a handful of refugees fleeing from Iraq back into Kuwait, this first group was Egyptians who told him that they were shooting “all Egyptians in Iraq”, the first sign of uprisings occurring in response to the withdrawal from Kuwait, and the first sign that the real bloodbath was about to begin.
Chapter 16: Betrayal
This chapter discusses the aftermath of the Iraq War. Specifically, he discusses his experiences inside of Kuwait following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from the country. How in the immediate aftermath, roving bands of Kuwaitis would beat and kill Palestinians with the goal of forcing them out of the country. The American soldiers occupying the country turned a blind eye to the actions of the Kuwaitis in this regard, even ignoring torture being carried out in several instances in police stations that they were also occupying.
CIA-led radio stations on the border of Iraq were broadcasting messages instructing the Iraqi people that their only chance at salvation lay with taking up arms and overthrowing Saddam. In the context of the extremely punishing air campaign they had been forced to endure, the implication was two-fold: rise up or the air campaign continues, and the American army will move in to Iraq to help with the revolt. The Shia in southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north took up the call and revolted en masse.
Enough of the Iraqi military was still intact that these revolts were utterly crushed. The Americans did not move in, citing that it was an internal matter, and what would they do as occupiers of Iraq anyway (excuses they would have done well to heed 10 years later). The moral issue with this is that the Americans had encouraged these revolts to begin with. Cheney would thereafter call the First Gulf War a moment of “catharsis” for the US after the failures of the Vietnam War, which was a particularly grotesque way to frame it as the massacres continued in Iraq, victims whose only “catharsis” would be to die.
The Shia and Kurds who revolted were defeated, and their communities were harshly “punished”, with tens of thousands killed in mass graves and wholesale destruction of smaller towns. The surrounding Arab countries, each of which with minority populations of their own who they did not want to encourage, uttered not a word in protest of these massacres. While we will never know the full extent of these massacres, we know they are not exaggerations because of all the mass graves that were uncovered when the Americans did invade in 2003. Aerial flights carried out by the Americans showed the doomed course of the rebellion, with aerial images of barricades set up in the streets giving way to towns that were completely flattened and mass graves.
It seems, in the context of American inaction at the time, that it was preferable for the Americans to deal with a toothless Saddam, rather than a new government they did not know, particularly a Shia government that would set up another Islamic state like Iran. Fisk compares this to the Warsaw uprising in 1944, where the Soviets pushed the Germans back to the edge of Poland, the Soviets encouraged the Poles to rise up, and when they did they failed to invade, waiting until the Germans had crushed all of the nationalist Poles who had taken up arms so that when the Soviets moved in, those “elements” that would have most opposed Soviet rule were already defeated.
Eventually as international outcry mounted and the Kurds fled into the mountains on the border with Turkey, the Americans forced Saddam to stop attacking them (though it was too late for the Shia), and the American military (and several other countries of the coalition) launched a massive relief campaign. The Americans would point to this situation as proof of Saddam’s barbarism, though no mention was made that these Kurdish revolts happened because they were encouraged by the Americans to begin with.
Fisk describes how he was regularly flown around in cargo helicopters to report on food drops, but in one instance, when the weather was very rainy and people were in a rush, he was accidentally sent into an Apache helicopter full of CIA men to go to an area on the Turkish border where the British military and Turkish military were squaring off due to the Turks looting supplies that were meant for the Kurds. Fisk wrote an article about it, and as a result was deported by Turkey, though was able to sneak back in by way of Syria, as the Kurds were more than happy to work hard to get him back.
Eventually, the situation between Saddam and the Kurds was resolved by the creation of an autonomous area within Iraq for the Kurds. The Kurds took advantage of this news by summarily executing most of the Baath men that were still within that region that was being turned over to them. As the post-war situation settled down, it became clear that Saddam would stick around, though Iraq would be much weaker than before.