The Great War for Civilisation, Notes, Part 3
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 last third of the book, chapters 17-24.
Chapter 17: The Land of Graves
In this chapter, Fisk continues to discuss the aftereffects of the first Gulf War on Iraq.
First, he discusses something I had never thought about before, which was the curious disregard by the American forces of the Geneva Conventions when it came to trying to accurately tally the Iraqi dead. It is stipulated by the Geneva Conventions that an effort must be made to try to identify the dead so that their government and families back home will know their fate, as well as try to inter them in a manner respectful of their culture/religion/customs. For some reason, the Americans made no effort of this, stating only that “a lot” of Iraqis had been killed, and burying them in mass graves. Humanitarian groups such as the Red Cross were only given access to literally 21 bodies. There are two theories for this: the first is that there were a lot fewer Iraqis killed than expected, casting doubt on American claims that “such a great victory” had really been won, and after all, enough of the Iraqi army remained intact that they were able crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions. Another theory is that there were a great number of Iraqis killed, and it would reflect badly amongst the Arabs that a quarter-million Iraqis had been killed by the Americans. When an American official, a US census demographer, made a serious attempt at estimating the dead, she arrived at 86,000 men, 40,000 women, and 32,000 children killed. She was initially fired, but the firing was reversed, but the official Pentagon report omitted the number of dead women and children.
Despite American claims of spreading democracy and limiting arms proliferation in the Middle East, though they had played a large role in arming Iraq, no serious attempts were made at either. Now that Iraq was out of favor, huge amounts of arms were sold to the Gulf Arab nations. No attempt at democracy was made in any Gulf nation either. Indeed, in Kuwait, after the royal family returned from their comfortable exile, they began the expulsion of 360,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were Kuwaiti-born. On a smaller but still-despicable scale, many Kuwaitis who had stayed behind to fight the Iraqis but were not citizens (due to a failure of their ancestors to register after Kuwait gained independence in 1920, propagating a citizen-less class within the country), were expelled from the country and those kidnapped by Iraqis were not permitted to return.
Fisk also discusses in a little more detail the environmental catastrophe of the war within Kuwait. Of its 940 oil wells, 632 were ignited by the Iraqis, blackening the skies and leading to soot deposition and environmental damage thousands of miles away. Fisk describes seeing lakes of oil, hundreds of square kilometers of desert flooded with oil: environmental damage that would leave its mark for hundreds of years.
This is also the chapter when he goes into more detail about the UN sanctions against Iraq. Initially put into place just before it seemed like he would invade Kuwait, following the end of the war they were significantly expanded, essentially with the stated aim of making life for Iraqis miserable enough for them to overthrow Saddam. These sanctions were a humanitarian catastrophe, forbidding virtually all exports from the country, and banning virtually all imports into the country, the Iraqi economy collapsed. Coming as they did after the American bombing campaign had destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, these sanctions led to runaway inflation, allowed for widespread famine, prevented medical supplies from entering the country (not even medical journals were allowed into the country, to prevent Iraqi physicians from learning the results of recent medical studies), and preventing the country from repairing its infrastructure. The result was an Iraqi people who were poor, malnourished, with little access to clean water, medicine, technology, or education, and with sewage running through the streets. Saddam, of course, could hoard the country’s few resources and so felt very little hardship, even expanding the number of his palaces. It is estimated that, in addition to the misery inflicted on the entire population, as many as half a million children died in the 90’s as a direct result of these sanctions.
When a people reach that profound level of destitution and misery however, there was evidence that rather than motivate them into facing certain death to overthrow their government, people were focused purely on trying to survive, and became more inward-facing, isolated, and fanatical. The sanctions, then, failed to be a real threat to Saddam while causing untold misery to the Iraqi people.
Chapter 18: The Plague
In this chapter, Fisk discusses the state of affairs in Iraq during the 1990’s.
While he had previously discussed the ongoing sanctions against Iraq, part of the stipulations against Iraq was for the UN to be able to inspect different sites in the country to assess for the development of WMDs.
Initially, Saddam allowed these inspectors in, but would later forbid any American inspectors from entering the country (though other UN inspectors could come in) on the basis that the Americans were acting as spies to gather intelligence for later missile attacks against Iraq, and that they were sharing intelligence with Israel. (it would later come out that this was 100% true, and that the CIA had operatives within these inspection teams that would plant devices to surveil Iraqi governmental communications). The UN, instead of continuing with their inspections without the Americans, withdrew their team altogether. Though during the time the inspections had been allowed, no evidence of ongoing WMD development was found, and even senior Iraqi officials who would defect would report that there was no WMD development within the country.
In addition to the sanctions and weapons inspections, the US enforced a no fly zone in the south of Iraq, nominally to protect the Shia from Iraqi reprisals, though this ignored the reality that any Shia who had rebelled were all either dead or in refugee camps in Iran by that point. A no fly zone was also enforced in the north, again nominally to protect the Kurds from the Iraqi military, though it did nothing to stop Iraqi ground forces from attacking them (which occurred once to suppress a CIA-led arming of Kurdish groups), and did nothing to stop a large Turkish campaign against them that ended up killing thousands of Kurds.
Following the end of the Gulf War, Kuwait’s borders were enlarged to cut off Iraq from the coast. And Saddam continued to be belligerent and in 1994 would mass troops on the border again to threaten an invasion, before eventually acquiescing to the new borders.
It was a combination of all these factors: not allowing American weapons inspectors on the ground, military buildup on the border with Kuwait, and military buildup in no-fly zones, that would be used as an excuse to launch bombing campaigns against Iraq through the 1990s. These bombing campaigns, especially in the latter part of the decade, took on such a regularity that in the US, they were hardly newsworthy. However, in the Arab world, the combination of bombing that continued to kill civilians, as well as sanctions that led to the deaths by starvation and disease of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was absolutely noticed, and would play a large role (along with support for Israel and the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia) in motivating hatred of the US in the Arab world.
It is also worth mentioning that these bombing campaigns seemed to intensify as a result of Clinton’s political problems back home, and were even used as an excuse to delay impeachment proceedings, a particularly despicable reason to kill civilians in bombing raids.
Fisk closes out the chapter by discussing a further aspect of the misery that was to afflict the Iraqi people: a huge increase in rates of cancer across all age groups. Due to a combination of reasons: the pollution from the burning oil, the bombing of Iraqi factories that released toxic chemicals into the environment and leeched into the soil, and likely most of all, the use of depleted uranium munitions by the American-led coalition, rates of cancer shot up as much as 20-30 fold in certain parts of Iraq, particularly in Basra. Fisk describes how he would visit hospitals full of children with leukemia, who in some cases describe picking up fragments of bomb shells following American air raids, and who would later get sick. To add another level of horror to this, as if this was not bad enough, the children could not be properly treated for their cancer due to a lack of medical supplies from the sanctions, and the mortality rate was virtually 100%.
The British and American governments, in response to Fisk’s article, would vehemently deny that depleted uranium could have such an effect, citing that there were no peer-reviewed epidemiological studies proving it. Of course, that was because none of their epidemiologists were going into Iraq.
Chapter 19: Now Thrive the Armourers…
In this chapter, Fisk discusses the military-industrial complex rather than any one conflict in particular.
He opens the chapter by discussing a weapons expo in Abu Dhabi he had been invited to in March 2001. During this expo, arms companies, the vast majority of whom were “Western” arms companies, show off the latest weapons that are available for sale. Much of the discourse around these weapons sales is around the narrative that the weak Gulf Arab countries need to arm themselves due to hostile neighbors (in this case, Iraq, not Israel). Huge amounts of money flow from the Arab nations to these arms companies as a result.
Fisk comments on the fact that he had spent decades prior to this expo witnessing the end-result of the use of these weapons in multiple conflicts throughout the Middle East, and how often both sides are armed by the same source (or else “Western” vs Soviet/Russian sources), and how these weapons sold by the Christian nations are overwhelmingly used to kill Muslims (or help Muslims kill each other). He discusses how the advertising literature around these weapons is obscene: the words “killing” or “death” are rarely used, rather words focusing on how advanced the technology is, or how strong or brave the weapon buyer/user is. Always, the focus is on “defense”, never on how these are weapons of war. The end-result of the weapon, when it is spoken about, is in terms of destruction of enemy materiel, “killing a tank” or “killing a ship”, not on the deaths they will cause. Of course, Fisk had, by this point, seen thousands of corpses who had these weapons used on them.
Of course, in their haste to sell weapons and make an immense amount of wealth off of conflict, these Western countries seem to hardly stop and think about the fact that the people who these weapons are used on, these Arabs, these Muslims, will hold the arms dealers accountable for the death they inflict on them, and cause more animosity against the West.
He finishes out the chapter by discussing the deaths of 6 Lebanese civilians in an ambulance in 1996, killed by Israel when an Apache helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at them. The fragments of the missile with the serial number were recovered, and he took the fragments to Boeing to confront them about the fact that their missiles were being used to kill civilians. While the men were evasive and apologetic, they were mostly afraid (and said as much) of being quoted to be critical of Israel. Fisk published this story, and a reader would contact him to give him more information about what the serial number meant, specifically that the weapon had been sold to the American military, and not the Israeli military. This led to further investigations on his part after which he was contacted by American soldiers angry about how the missile had been used, who told him that the missile was originally sent to Iraq for use in the Gulf War, and after the war ended, leftover military supplies were put on a ship to be sent back to the US, but stopped at Israel to give them weapons without going through the official channels of Congressional approval for weapons transfers. These soldiers were more than happy to talk to Fisk about this, as they reported multiple instances of arms (sometimes hundreds of tanks at a time) getting diverted from where they were needed by the Americans to get sent to Israel through back-channels.
Chapter 20: Even to Kings, He Comes…
This chapter was a little bit different because it doesn’t focus on a single conflict, per se, and is instead very meandering. Despite this, and indeed, maybe because of it, it is one of my favorite chapters in this book. In this chapter, he discusses a lot of different topics, including his 30 years living in Beirut, reflecting on historical events in Beirut from the First Crusade to the Lebanese Civil War, the deaths of his parents, a brief history of Jordan and their Hashemite ruling family particularly in the 20th century and their interactions with Israel and the Palestinians, the funeral of King Hussein (of Jordan) and the succession of his son King Abdullah, a history of Syria in the 20th century as well as the Assad family, the origin of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War 1, and throughout all of this a reflection on the nature of authoritarian governments and these governments’ relationship with their subjects.
Fisk opens up this chapter reflecting on his career, his 30 years living in Beirut, and historical events from the First Crusade to the Lebanese Civil War that afflicted his new home. It’s not terribly educational, but it is very well-written and as a lover of history who can strongly identify with the sentiments he’s expressing, it’s a powerful read. He talks a little bit about his personal life and about the death of his parents.
This segues into a discussion of the Hashemite ruling family in Jordan. He goes over their recent colonial history, how they came to control Jordan in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, how they would lose their original territory in the Hejaz to the house of Saud, and how in the years that followed, they would lose Iraq and the West Bank as well, ruling only over Jordan. He primarily focuses on the personalities of the ruling family, discussing the life of King Hussein and his successor, King Abdullah his son). He briefly discusses somewhat the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in 1973, and how Jordan’s relationship with Israel has been different from that of other Arab countries because of their special relationship with Palestine.
Ultimately, in the wake of Arafat’s bumbling management of the Oslo Accords, Jordan would formalize peace with Israel, and be highly praised by Western governments for doing so. These Jordanian monarchs then, already educated in the West and speaking English with British accents, would come to be seen as close partners for the execution of American and British will in the Middle East, and would collaborate fairly closely with Israel.
Fisk was present for the funeral of King Hussein in 1999, which was attended by many leaders of Western and Arab nations. He has a lot to say about the nature of authoritarian and dictatorial power and how that has taken shape in the Middle East, with Jordan being an example of an authoritarian government despite the fact that it is ruled by monarchs portrayed as decent and good men by Western media (likely only because of how willing they are to go along with American and Israeli plans for the region).
He goes on to discuss the history of Syria, including the coup that brought the Assad family to power and their nature as part of the Alawite minority. Alawites make up only 12% of the population of Syria, but under the rule of Assad most of the powerful governmental positions are handed to members of the Alawite minority. Alawites, as a Shia sect, are also part of the reason why the Syrian government is close to Iran and Hezbollah. Fisk goes on to discuss the brutal crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood rebellion in Hama, where 10,000 people were killed. At the time, the harsh government response was criticized internationally, and Fisk comments on the fact that this had strong parallels to the Algerian civil war that would occur a decade later, though during that conflict there was little international outcry against the heavy-handed measures of the government. When Fisk is back in Syria in the late 1990s for the burial of Hafez Assad, he interviews some people about the massacre in Hama, with most people saying it was terrible but it was necessary to stamp out Islamism from Syria. It’s ironic then, that years after this book would be published, the Syrian Civil War would break out, and after 12 years of vicious fighting, would result in Islamists toppling the government.
Fisk also discusses how Syria spent much of the 20th century becoming much-diminished, similar to the Hashemites of Jordan. Syria would lose Lebanon, have part of its territory carved out to be given to Turkey, and would lose the Golan Heights to Israel. He discusses the role Syria played as ardent foe to Israel, and how this resulted in their occupation of Syria.
He also talks a bit about Syria in the World War 1 period, namely the French and British promise of Arab independence if they took up arms against the Ottomans, the Ottoman execution of Muslims and Christians (mostly Lebanese) who had been caught discussing armed revolt with the French, how this event played a large role in causing Emir Feisal to take up arms against the Ottomans and trigger the Arab revolt, and the battle of Maysalun where the Arabs were crushed by the French forces in 1920 after their betrayal when they reneged on their promise of Arab independence. The execution of those Lebanese by the Ottomans is often pointed at as an example that Muslims and Christians can coexist and come together for a common cause. It’s a little sad then, that even then, the goals of these 2 groups were different. The Muslims wanted an independent Arab state free from Ottoman rule, while the Christians were hoping for French rule.
Throughout the chapter, he also comments on the nature of authoritarianism, something that is essentially ubiquitous across the Middle East, and how it serves to infantilize its subjects, and make them see their despot as a sort of paternal figure they are reliant on. There’s a lot of nuance in his descriptions of this phenomenon, and I can’t do it justice here.
As you can see, it’s a very meandering chapter, but it is excellent and well-written, and he does a lovely job incorporating different comparisons to history to help make sense of events.
Chapter 21: Why ?
In this chapter, Fisk talks about the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event which now that we are 25 years removed from, it can be easily to overlook the way in which it changed the course of history.
On that fateful day, Fisk was actually on an airplane flying first to Ireland and then going to the United States when he got a phone call from the editorial office of his newspaper that they were going to have to delay a story that he was on the verge of publishing: an investigation further delineating Israel’s involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres. He takes this opportunity to put the article in this book. While he is in the air headed towards the US, the US closes its airspace, and so the jet he is on has to fly in circles to burn fuel before landing back in Ireland. He describes feeling a sense of urgency, with putting an article out there that gives historical context for why anyone would want to commit an attack on the US, as obviously the initial reactions were not going to ask “why?” but rather “who?” and “how?”. And so without any notes he calls the editorial office and dictates to them an article that emphasizes the decades of destructive American foreign policy in the Middle East and their financial and military support for Israel that has led to so many of the denizens of the Middle East into hatred of the United States. He was roundly criticized for it, and received a lot of hate mail (though he states that he received many more letters supporting him for the article).
The actions of the US in the days, weeks, and months that followed would prove his fears correct however. So much of the focus in American media was who carried out this attack? And an answer of Arab terrorists was more than satisfying enough for most people. There was also a focus on how it was carried out, going over the minutiae of the pilot training and their coordination. But it was virtually forbidden in American media or in American governmental circles to ask “why would anyone want to do this?”. And so the bland answer of “they’re evil”, “they hate our freedom”, “they hate our democracy” is given, and anyone who dissents, who asks “why?” is labeled as a supporter of terrorism. Instead of this attack causing the American populace to take a greater interest in the wholly destructive actions American has undertaken in the Middle East in the preceding decades, instead it was used as an excuse by the American government to launch new destructive wars in the Middle East. Asinine wars, “wars against terror”, which by their nature are wars without end, wars without a clear objective.
Fisk takes a few pages to briefly discuss the fact that many of these hijackers were Saudis, and discusses the fact that it is Saudi-style Wahabism that was the driving ideology behind these attacks, and how this ideology had been promoted by certain individuals in Saudi Arabia, and had been allowed to spread and mature in Pakistan and Afghanistan. There is a curious relationship between the Saudi government which is overtly religious and whose historic ties with the creator of Wahabi ideology is what helped them rise to power in the first place, and the current religious fundamentalists, many of whom compare the Saudi royal family unfavorably to the last failing Ottoman sultans and call for their overthrow. But while Wahabism in Saudi Arabia may be kept in check by the government, the Taliban is an example of unchecked Wahabism and their brutal, misogynistic policies and their gleeful barbarity against Muslims who don’t follow their own narrow sect are the result.
And in answer to the question of “why?”, Bin Laden would broadcast sermons through the Afghan offices of Al Jazeera being very explicit about why. He named the American support for Israel, the devastating effect of U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq, the presence of American soldiers in the Middle East, and the corrupt Western-backed Arab governments all over the Middle East. This went against Bush’s narrative of a “mindless terrorist”, and the US administration applied intense pressure on Qatar to shutter the Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan.
The Americans would pass various laws aimed at allowing them to circumvent international norms around prisoners of war and the typical conduct of war. Fisk points out the irony that any time some massacre or tragedy happened internationally, it was the Americans urging caution and lecturing about liberal, humanistic, Western values, whether this related to the Chinese, the Soviets, Arabs, Africans, Bosnians and Serbs. Suddenly, after the deaths of 3,000 Americans, the Americans immediately passed laws allowing for secret military courts that would allow for what was essentially summary execution and indefinite detention.
Before long, the U.S. would begin its war against Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban that had emerged victorious after the civil war that erupted following the Russian withdrawal. Beginning, as is typical, with air strikes that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Afghan civilians, many of whom fled to the border with Pakistan. In preparation for a ground invasion, the U.S. would ally with Afghan tribal remnants who had lost the civil war against the Taliban, the “Northern Alliance”. With American backing, these militias would commit innumerable war crimes against members of the Taliban or those suspected of supporting the Taliban, torturing and executing thousands in America’s name. Ironically enough, one of the stated reasons given in the media justifying an invasion of Afghanistan was to halt drug production, but in fact, the Taliban had outlawed production of opium and it was the Northern Alliance that was growing the vast majority of it.
It would not take long for the Taliban to lose control of much of the country. When Kandahar was the last remaining city they controlled, they issued Fisk a visa from their embassy in Pakistan, the last such visa issued by the Taliban-controlled government, allowing him into the country to report on events. He would go on to report on the huge numbers of refugees, displaced by American bombs and Northern Alliance militias. At one point, he was beaten by a group of those refugees and was almost killed, saved only by the intercession of another member of that group who escorted him to a Red Cross ambulance.
He talks about how journalists had, over the years, lost the little bit of protection afforded to them and were treated as combatants by many, he segues this into discussing a documentary he had worked on in the early 90’s called “From Beirut to Bosnia”, where they showed the effects of “Western” and Israeli military actions on the denizens of the Middle East, warning about how even though the majority of the population of these Western countries may be ignorant of the actions their countries were taking, this suffering that they have inflicted will lead to hatred of the West by Muslims. After it aired, there was a coordinated letter-writing campaign organized by Zionist groups in the US that prevented any additional screenings of the documentary.
Fisk closes out this chapter discussing a girl who was killed by an American airstrike in 1986. Raafat al-Ghossain came from a well-educated family, her father was an American-educated Palestinian (whose father was an Oxford graduate), while her mother was half-Lebanese and half-Turkish. They lived in Lebanon for a time, then Kuwait, and then Algiers, where Raafat was born. Raafat was raised in Tripoli, Libya, but would be educated in Britain. In 1986, when she was 18 years old and visiting her family, the US launched air strikes against the Ghaddafi government, and one of these planes, which had taken off from a British airfield, dropped its bombs on the house next to the Al-Ghossain’s and killed Raafat. Fisk does a lot to humanize her over those 8 pages, reproducing some of her correspondence back to her family, and discussing how her death devastated the family. This “operation”, in which 30 civilians would be killed, was hailed as a success by the American government, and no apology or even an acknowledgement of the civilians killed would ever be issued. It is events like these that help answer the question of “Why?”.
Chapter 22: The Die is Cast
In this chapter, Fisk discusses the period in late 2001 and 2002 where events in Afghanistan included an increase in the American presence on the ground and a greater attempt to hunt down leaders of Al Qaeda, as well as the American preparation for an invasion of Iraq.
With regards to events in Afghanistan, Fisk emphasizes the clumsiness with which the Americans acted on the ground. There were literally dozens of instances where Americans bombed with faulty intelligence and ended up killing thousands of civilians just in the last 3 months of 2001. They would be fed information from incorrect sources on the ground, whether it was poor military intelligence or poor intelligence from their Northern Alliance allies is unclear, but probably a combination of both. This resulted in essentially the systematization of a procedure where Americans would raid a village where they believed the Taliban were present, confiscate any weapons that might be present (weapons generally owned for self-defense), restrain the women and children, and arrest all the men. These men would be kept in small cramped quarters, stripped naked and blindfolded, and interrogated for days. In most cases, as these men typically had nothing to do with the Taliban, after days of this abuse they would be released, lucky to receive so much as an apology. Meanwhile, their money and belongings confiscated during the raids were never returned. And in many cases, after all the men were taken away and weapons confiscated, bandits would descend on these villages where they were then pillaged and the women were raped. It was not only a cruel way to conduct this war, but extraordinarily ineffectual and ensured that the Americans would be seen as brutish invaders even by those Afghans who hated the Taliban. In just more examples of their clumsiness, there were multiple instances where Americans would massacre groups of armed men only to later find out that they were part of the American-supported government or part of the American-supported Northern Alliance militias. The propaganda that the Americans would be greeted as liberators was a lie, and there were multiple instances of mass graves, wherein were buried Al Qaeda fighters and Taliban fighters who had fought to the last man in Kandahar, that were treated with veneration by the local population, and their graves maintained by them.
With regards to events in Iraq, the US government would lobby the UN in late 2001 and in 2002 for a UN Security Council resolution to force the disarmament of Iraq, a resolution which once passed, would give an excuse for American involvement as the Iraqi government would doubtlessly not simply agree to neuter itself. Excuses used to justify such a measure included Iraq’s flouting of prior UN resolutions to allow for nuclear weapons inspections (though of course, no mention is made of Israel’s flouting of UN resolutions for withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land). Other excuses include the Saddam’s widespread use of torture amongst his own people and his targeting of ethnic minorities within Iraq, as well as his use of chemical weapons. Of course, little mention was made of the fact that these abuses were all known when the US was supporting him financially and militarily during the Iran-Iraq War.
Within the US, the media and book publishers were complicit in garnering public support for the war. It was virtually nonstop. Opposition to the invasion of Iraq was deemed as unpatriotic, and the memory of 9/11 was regularly invoked, despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Comparisons between Saddam and Hitler were regularly made, and to not invade was framed as being akin to Chamberlain’s appeasement. Very little voice was given to those opposed to the war.
Perhaps most grotesque of all, were reports put out by the British and Americans that if Iraq so desired, it could rapidly create a nuclear weapon, grotesque because in the preceding decade, the American-led UN sanctions against Iraq that led to the impoverishment of the country and deaths of half a million people were predicated on their efficacy at preventing Iraq’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon. So either these reports of Iraq’s capabilities were untrue, or else this crime against humanity that had been ongoing for a decade had been for nothing.
Shockingly, as the US stepped up its rhetoric in the UN, Saddam actually agreed to unconditionally allow UN nuclear inspection teams into the country. The American media then switched to attacking these UN inspectors personally (and curiously enough, these were men that the American government had advocated for, seemingly knowing precisely how they could be later discredited as needed), in order to discredit their findings when it would turn out that the Iraqis were not developing a nuclear weapon.
It begs the question, why? Why was the US so intent on invading Iraq and toppling Saddam. Fisk posits that the men who were driving the US to war, years before George W Bush ever took office, were pro-Israel lobbyists. After all, no one benefitted more from the destruction of the most powerful Arab country in the Middle East than the Israelis. This is in addition to the opportunity for stakeholders in arms manufacturers to make a lot of money, as well as the US’s ability to control Iraqi oil.
Fisk takes a few pages to shoehorn in some parallels about one of the few modern major Middle Eastern conflicts he had not yet covered in his book: the Suez Crisis of 1956, which has parallels to this preparation for the invasion of Iraq in that: the British public was largely unsympathetic to the plight of the Arabs, journalists were used as propagandists to further public support for the war, the UN was being used to legitimize the war, and an Arab dictator previously regarded as a friend to the West became compared to the worst criminals of the second World War.
In the Suez Crisis, the new government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, which was previously under control of a private company jointly owned by British and French shareholders. In response, the British and French set about creating a justification for war, framing Nasser as a dictator (the “Arab Mussolini”), drumming up support for the war at home using the media and using the UN to give their aggression a veneer of credibility. The British and French coordinated with Israel to have them invade Egypt first, and then used the excuse that they needed to step in to separate the two armies as a reason for invading, with goals that included controlling the Suez Canal and toppling Nasser’s government. The Egyptian military was decisively defeated wherever they fought these tripartite forces, and the French and Israelis were particularly brutal and tortured and executed many of the Egyptians they captured. When the Eisenhower found out that the Israeli attack used as an excuse for the British/French invasion had been coordinated in advance, he was furious and forced them all to withdraw. This would mark the end of the British imperial era, and establish the US as the dominant global force.
Chapter 23: Atomic Dog, Annihilator, Arsonist, Anthrax, Anguish and Agamemnon
Here at last, the conflict that had been hinted at for so much of the book begins. Fisk took the final civilian passenger flight into Iraq and was in Baghdad as the American invasion began in 2003. He describes his experiences in the city as it came under heavy bombardment, and describes the suffering of the civilians that he had witnessed firsthand, victims of America’s attempts to liberate them. I won’t go into too much detail about it here, but he describes some very vivid imagery about the brutality of the bombardment as he visits different sites around the city, including the defensive lines and hospitals. He describes an attack by Americans on the hotel journalists were staying at that had killed multiple journalists, and how the Americans claimed they were under fire from that building. Fisk himself was nearby and heard no such small arms fire, and a later investigation would prove it was a blatant lie by the Americans. One interesting thing he mentioned is that contrary to American and British claims that the invasion was proceeding smoothly, he would see unedited footage in the Al Jazeera office of cities that had been invaded that the Americans and British claimed that they controlled, that showed that the Iraqi army still controlled those cities, suggesting that the invasion was not as quick and effortless as we were made to believe. A particularly galling fact that I had not known about before was that there was a US military policy that any air strike that was thought likely to kill more than 30 civilians needed to be cleared by Donald Rumsfeld first, and in the first few months of the war over 50 such airstrikes were proposed, all of which were approved.
He also makes a special note of the very first suicide bomber of the conflict, an Iraqi Shia soldier who filled his personal car with explosives and drove it into an American checkpoint and detonated it. This was the very first time an Iraqi had turned to suicide bombing in the modern history of the country. The Iraqi government, a staunchly secular government that had suppressed an expression of religion that it had deemed a political threat, praised this man, and began to use overtly Islamic language in a chilling sign of what the occupiers would soon come to face: an Islamist insurgency that had historically been effective in driving the Israelis out of Lebanon, the Russians out of Afghanistan, and the British out of Iraq and Palestine. To add some additional irony, this first suicide bomber was a Shia, who the Americans were claiming to be liberating from oppressive Sunni minority rule. It goes to show, despite American propaganda, Iraqis did not fail to notice it was American sanctions starving them, American bombs killing them, and American soldiers invading their country. Fisk comments on the groups of militia fighters he saw still resisting the Americans after Baghdad fell. Interestingly, these men who he had seen were Arabs from outside of Iraq: Algerians, Moroccans, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians: another chilling sign of the fact that the American invasion would motivate armed resistance across the Arab world.
Eventually they would conquer Baghdad, which set off scenes of anarchy as widespread looting by the populace ensued. The American military did nothing to stop the looting that ravaged the Ministries of Education, Culture, Trade, Irrigation, and Industry. They did not stop the looting of the Archaeological Museum. But they stationed tanks and hundreds of soldiers to protect the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Oil, showing the lie in their statement that they were simply preserving infrastructure for the Iraqi people, as the Ministries of Trade, Irrigation, and Industry burned. Of course, it should not be overlooked that it was Iraqis doing the looting; it was Iraqis who smashed hundreds and thousands of artifacts of the thousands of years of civilization of Mesopotamia that were housed in the Archeological Museum. And it was Iraqis who burned untold numbers of historical documents housed in the National Library and Archives.
Individuals would fight back to prevent their homes from being looted, and so gunfire erupted throughout Baghdad, while the American occupying forces stood by and let it happen. What was not appreciated at the time, is that much of the looting was done by the poor Shia majority (who had suffered under Saddam) against the middle class Sunni minority (Saddam himself was a Sunni), and so the Americans stood by and watched and failed to appreciate that they were seeing the beginning of the sectarian violence that would define Iraq in the years to come.
Much air time was given to the crowds of people who celebrated the arrival of the Americans. Of course, this was how the crowds behaved when the Baath party had first helped topple the Iraqi monarchy years previously. And indeed, this was not the end of the repressive government structures and torture prisons, they just passed into new management: that of the Americans and the puppet government they would set up.
Fisk closes out the chapter by reproducing an article he wrote at that time in its entirety. An article where he critiques the almost-malicious clumsiness with which the Americans occupied Baghdad. The lack of interest in stopping looters, in trying to find out who was responsible for organizing the arsonists that burned down almost every government building except the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of Interior, that the Americans guarded. The lack of interest in searching through the files in intelligence headquarters to identify the men of Saddam’s security apparatus (men who would later be hired by the new government). The clear signs that rather than being seen as “liberators”, the real war, the war of liberation against the Americans, was about to begin.
Chapter 24: Into the Wilderness
The Great War for Civilization was published in 2005, and so at the time of its publication, the main current events in the Middle East were the Second Intifada in Palestine, the American invasion of Afghanistan, and the American invasion of Iraq. So it will be with the last of these events to have begun, the American invasion of Iraq and its subsequent occupation, that Fisk finishes out his book.
He describes sitting by the roadside in the desert on Highway 8, then the most dangerous highway in the world due to frequent insurgent attacks, as he watches the movement of an American brigade across the desert, and watches mile after mile of American tanks and troop carrier and helicopters in the largest movement of soldiers since World War 2, and reflects on how two thousand years before, just to the west of where he was, it was Rome’s legions shaking the Earth. But now was the time of the American Empire, and so partly for oil, but partly because of the neoconservative need to project power, to show that they could, these forces will pour over Baghdad and Sumeria and Babylon and the territory of the Abbasids, across all the land where civilization began.
Fisk accompanies the Americans as they attempt to fight the insurgency that has sprung up in Fallujah, and he watches them kick down countless doors of people’s homes, hold the occupants at gunpoint, and confiscate any weapons (most families in Iraq own one or two AK’s), and in the process continue to make enemies among the people that they “liberate”. He goes to the city of Samara, meets with the families of innocent Iraqis who were cut down by American gunfire as they broke into people’s houses to suppress an insurgency that their own actions were fueling. And more and more cities throughout Iraq were rising in rebellion.
As he writes this book in 2005, the state of American progress against the insurgency is pitiful. Huge swathes of the country between towns are out of American control. Within the cities, American soldiers and Western civilians brought with them spend most of their time in fortified enclaves, as going about the city is far too dangerous. Fisk draws comparisons to the Crusaders holed up in their castles, only able to look out of the arrow slits. In Western media, all we are told is that the war is going well. Of course, this ignores that each day dozens of corpses wash up on the ancient banks of the Tigris. This ignores that Iraq is so unsecure that Saddam is held in a secret base in Qatar. This ignores that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found. It ignores the fact that tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, and there are as many as 2-3 people blowing themselves up each day. It ignores the foreigners who have been kidnapped, and videotaped as they beg for their life and are decapitated in the Saudi style.
The American response to this is to only count the American dead, to collate them so that their sacrifice can be discussed, while the Iraqi dead can be safely ignored and disregarded. As the Americans invaded Fallujah once more when it fell under the control of the Iraqis, they reduced the city to rubble and could claim another “victory”. The Americans claimed that once Saddam was captured, the insurgency would disband, suggesting that the insurgency was occurring out of a devotion to Saddam, but his capture and execution came and went, and still the Iraqi people fought the Americans and each other, dying in huge numbers. Because at the end of the day they were invaders and occupiers. Just after Saddam’s capture, as Sunnis marched out to protest his capture, Americans shot dead 18 unarmed protesters. The Americans would claim that all they had shot were insurgents, but an independent investigation would prove these were unarmed civilians.
A government was elected, though most Sunnis boycotted the election, and still the insurgency continued. The Americans and their Iraqi puppet government took a page out of the Algerian government playbook during their civil war in the 1990’s, and so checkpoints would be manned by hooded men who lacked badges or any other identifiers who claimed to work for the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Men who were also insurgents, cops by day and killers by night. And their attacks on the Sunni population would inexorably lead the Sunnis into a resistance that was leading into a catastrophic civil war between Sunni and Shia.
As the war continued to go much worse than we were led to believe by the media, the American occupation army took increasingly heavy-handed tactics. As if the destruction of innocent people’s homes and execution of unarmed civilians was not enough, the Americans filled the prisons with anyone “suspected” of being involved in the insurgency, indefinitely detaining them often without bringing charges, and before long began to turn to torture in those prisons as well. Within a few months of the arrival of American soldiers in Iraq, Amnesty International had amassed a large amount of evidence of British and American soldiers torturing prisoners, refusing to obey Iraqi court orders to release those unlawfully detained, using excessive force on demonstrators, killing innocent civilians, stealing large sums of money from houses they had broken into, and forcing their own laws through to prevent the Iraqi courts of the new government from trying British or American soldiers.
Of course, the clock does not stop elsewhere in the Middle East. We’ve discussed the brutality ongoing in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Taliban and al-Qaeda experience a resurgence as they continue their fight against the US, and the US practices all the same heavy-handed tactics in Afghanistan that we just discussed for Iraq. As the US begins wars that will turn into the most protracted conflicts in its history, their actions help to create the very insurgents they claim to be trying to defeat. Domestically, the US passes laws to allow for mass surveillance of their own people, and passes laws to allow for indefinite detention of those they vaguely deem to be suspected of “terrorism”, flaunting the international order and human rights that they had spent decades after World War 2 paying lip service to. In Palestine the Second Intifada rages on, with Israel continuing its tactics of extrajudicial execution of Palestinian leaders, curfews, killings of unarmed Palestinians, expansion of settlements, demolition of Palestinian homes, mass incarceration without trial. Yasser Arafat dies in 2004, on the day of the 86th anniversary of World War 1, the war that led to British control of Palestine and their declaration of support for the creation of a Jewish state. Mahmoud Abbas takes over the Palestinian Authority, all too happy to work with the Americans and Israelis to surrender huge swathes of the West Bank in exchange for the removal of a few small Israeli settlements in Gaza. And all the Muslim world watches this. They watch the naked American imperial aggression as they invade and slaughter their fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, as they house their soldiers in bases all across the Arabian Gulf and in the land of Islam’s holiest sites, and they watch the American support for Israel who propagates its decades of abuses and oppression against the dispossessed Palestinians. The history of the modern Middle East has been shaped by the after-effects of colonial meddling, and the US shows that in their post-Cold War hegemony, this colonial approach is not something they plan to change.
The outcome of these American actions was plain to see in the years immediately following this book’s publication. In 2005 elections were held where a Shia majority was elected for the first time, with large crowds braving the polls as the blasts of the day’s suicide bombers could be heard in the distance, but with huge swathes of the country opting not to participate in the elections, to boycott them because of the decisive factor that made those very elections illegitimate: the American occupation. More than anything, the Iraqis wanted the Americans to leave. The Iraqis wanted a nation free of Saddam, but they wanted to control their own land and their own oil. The Palestinians wanted their own state. The Syrians wanted the return of the Golan. The Lebanese wanted to be free from Syrian occupation (interestingly, Fisk was a mere 400 meters from the event that catalyzed the expulsion of the Syrians from Lebanon: the assassination of Rafic Hariri). The Iranians wanted to be free of their smothering theocracy. The Afghans wanted to be free of the warring tribal drug lords that had taken over their country after the American occupation. Regardless of what the petty dictators across the Middle East said, regardless of the predatory loans provided to these countries by the West, what millions of Muslims wanted was freedom from the US.
By summer of 2006, the bombing of a Shia mosque led to open civil war between Sunnis and Shia. The Iraqi government only exercised control of a tiny portion of Baghdad, their fortress within the city known as the “Green Zone”, outside of which gun battles and bombings took place daily, and tens of thousands of Iraqis died in suicide bombings and gun battles and streetside executions. Hatred against the Americans continued as news came out of the tortures taking place in Abu Ghraib, massacres of Sunnis by the Americans in the town of Haditha, and the rape of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers and execution of her family.
Throughout the Middle East, in the second half of that decade, Islamist political groups became much more powerful and influential. With the Muslim Brotherhood achieving increased power in Egypt, and Hamas winning in Palestinian elections. The West Bank would be further carved up by Israeli walls and checkpoints, and Israel arrested fully half of the Palestinian government in 2006, after which there was virtually no feasible talk of a second Palestinian state.
There would even be some small consequences in the West, when dozens of people were killed by suicide bombers in London in 2005, and almost 200 people were killed in bombings in Madrid in 2004.
Bin Laden of course, during all these events still at large, was irrelevant, in spite of the billions spent searching for him. He founded al Qaeda, and he may have set some events in motion, but it had long since surpassed him.
I’ll finish out this collection of notes by reproducing the final paragraph in this book, where Fisk reflects on the colonial history of the region and the aftereffects it has had:
“Have they all died for history, then, those thousands of dead whom I have seen with my own eyes across the Middle East? The dead soldier with the bright wedding ring on his finger, the slaughtered masses of Sabra and Chatila, the Iranians putrefying in the desert, the corpses of Palestinians and Israelis and Lebanese and Afghans, the unspeakable suffering of the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Afghan, Israeli- and yes, American- torture chambers; was this for history? Or for justice? Or for us? We know that the Balfour Declaration was made 88 years ago. But for Palestinian refugees, in the slums of their camps, Balfour spoke yesterday, last night, only an hour ago. In the Middle East, people live their past history, again and again, every day.
And so, as I write these words, I prepare for my next fraught journey back to Baghdad, back to the suicide bombers and the throat-cutters and the fast-firing Americans. And through the veil of Iraqi tears, I will draw more portraits of suffering and pain and greed and occasional courage and I wonder if, when I eventually leave this vast chamber of horrors, I will try to emulate the advice of the only poem that always moves me to tears, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’;
‘Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad’
I think in the end we have to accept that our tragedy lies always in our past, that we have to live with our ancestors’ folly and suffer for it, just as they, in their turn, suffered, and as we, through our vanity and arrogance, ensure the pain and suffering of our own children. Which is why, as I have written this book, I have heard repeatedly and painfully and in a dreamlike reality the footfalls of 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk and his comrades of the 12th Battalion, the King’s Liverpool Regiment, marching on the evening of 11 November 1918 into the tiny French Village of Louvencourt, on the Somme.”