wow......

[Guest guest]

Was listening to a talk given by Robert Fisk, a british journalist....

He actually couldn't get into the US (he was in canada), and had to be uplinked

via satelite truck to the site of speech

anyways

i just had to run out and get his book

the great war for civilization..

here's the preface...

 

When I was a small boy, my father would take me each year around the

battlefields of the First World War, the conflict that H.G. Wells called 'the

war to end all wars'. We would set off each summer in our Austin Mayflower and

bump along the potholed roads of the Somme, Ypres and Verdun. By the time I was

14, I could recite the names of all the offensives: Bapaume, Hill 60, High Wood,

Passchendaele... I had seen all the graveyards and I had walked through all the

overgrown trenches, and touched the rusted helmets of British soldiers and the

corroded German mortars in decaying museums. My father was a soldier of the

Great War, fighting in the trenches of France because of a shot fired in a city

he'd never heard of called Sarajevo. And when he died 13 years ago at the age of

93, I inherited his campaign medals. One of them depicts a winged victory and on

the obverse side are engraved the words: 'The Great War for Civilisation'.

 

 

To my father's deep concern and my mother's stoic acceptance, I have spent much

of my life in wars. They, too, were fought 'for civilisation'. In Afghanistan, I

watched the Russians fighting for their 'international duty' in a conflict

against 'international terror'; their Afghan opponents, of course, were fighting

against 'Communist aggression' and for Allah. I reported from the front lines as

the Iranians struggled through what they called the 'Imposed War' against Saddam

Hussein - who dubbed his 1980 invasion of Iran the 'Whirlwind War.' I've seen

the Israelis twice invading Lebanon and then reinvading the Palestinian West

Bank in order, so they claimed, to 'purge the land of terrorism'. I was present

as the Algerian military went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible

reason, torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their

enemies. Then in 1990 Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans sent their armies

to the Gulf to liberate the emirate and impose a 'New World Order'. In the

desert, I always wrote down the words 'new world order' in my notebook followed

by a question mark. In Bosnia, I found Serbs fighting for what they called 'Serb

civilisation' while their Muslim enemies fought and died for a fading

multicultural dream and to save their own lives.

 

 

On a mountain top in Afghanistan, I sat opposite Osama Bin Laden in his tent as

he uttered his first direct threat against the United States, pausing as I

scribbled his words into my notebook by a paraffin lamp. 'God' and 'evil' were

what he talked to me about. I was flying over the Atlantic on 11 September 2001

- my plane turned round off Ireland following the attacks on the United States -

and so less than three months later I was in Afghanistan, fleeing with the

Taliban down a highway west of Kandahar as America bombed the ruins of a country

already destroyed by war. I was in the United Nations General Assembly exactly a

year later when George Bush talked about 'god' and 'evil' and weapons of mass

destruction, and prepared to invade Iraq. The first missiles of that invasion

swept over my head in Baghdad. Thus was George Bush's calamitous 'war on terror'

given in advance its own supposedly moral foundations.

 

 

The direct physical results of all these conflicts will remain - and should

remain - in my memory until I die. I don't need to read through my mountain of

reporter's notebooks to remember the Iranian soldiers on the troop train north

to Tehran, holding towels and coughing up Saddam's gas in gobs of blood and

mucus as they read the Koran. I need none of my newspaper clippings to recall

the father - after an American cluster-bomb attack on Iraq in 2003 - who held

out to me what looked like half a crushed loaf of bread but turned out to be

half a crushed baby. Or the mass grave outside Nasiriyah in which I came across

the remains of a leg with a steel tube inside and a plastic medical disc still

attached to a stump of bone; Saddam's murderers had taken him straight from the

hospital where he had his hip replacement to his place of execution in the

desert.

 

 

I don't have nightmares about these things. But I remember. The head blasted off

the body of a Kosovan Albanian refugee in an American air raid four years

earlier, bearded and upright in a bright green field as if a medieval axeman has

just cut him down. The corpse of a Kosovan farmer murdered by the Serbs, his

grave opened by the UN so that he re-emerges from the darkness, bloating in

front of us, his belt tightening viciously round his stomach, twice the size of

a normal man. The Iraqi soldier at Fao during the Iran-Iraq war who lay curled

up like a child in the gun-pit beside me, black with death, a single gold

wedding ring glittering on the third finger of his left hand, bright with

sunlight and love for a woman who did not know she was a widow. Soldier and

civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted

for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could

talk about 'target-rich environments' and 'collateral damage' - that most

infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing - and report the victory

parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.

 

 

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of

opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat. But war is

primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of

death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit...

 

 

When I first set out to write this book, I intended it to be a reporter's

chronicle of the Middle East over almost three decades. That is how I wrote my

previous book, Pity the Nation, a first-person account of Lebanon's civil war

and two Israeli invasions. But as I prowled through the shelves of papers in my

library, more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files, some written under

fire in my own hand, some punched onto telegram paper by tired Arab

telecommunications operators, many pounded out on the clacking telex machines we

used before the internet was invented, I realised that this was going to be more

than a chronology of eyewitness reports.

 

 

My father, the old soldier of 1918, read my account of the Lebanon war but would

not live to see this book. Yet he would always look into the past to understand

the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not

been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the

Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be

kept. And so those promises - the Jews naturally thought that their homeland

would be in all of Palestine - were betrayed, and the millions of Arabs and Jews

of the Middle East are now condemned to live with the results.

 

 

In the Middle East, it sometimes feels as if no event in history has a finite

end, a crossing point, a moment when we can say: 'Stop - enough - this is where

we will break free.' I think I understand that time-warp. My father was born in

the century before last. I was born in the first half of the last century. Here

I am, I tell myself, in 1980, watching the Soviet army invade Afghanistan, in

1982 cowering in the Iranian front line opposite Saddam's legions, in 2003

observing the first American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the

great bridge over the Tigris River. And yet the Battle of the Somme opened just

30 years before I was born. Bill Fisk was in the trenches of France three years

after the Armenian genocide but only 28 years before my birth. I would be born

within six years of the Battle of Britain, just over a year after Hitler's

suicide. I saw the planes returning to Britain from Korea and remember my mother

telling me in 1956 that I was lucky, that had I been older I would have been a

British conscript invading Suez.

 

 

If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the

years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call

the United States the 'centre of world arrogance', and I would laugh at this,

but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918,

at the end of my father's war, the victors divided up the lands of their former

enemies. In the space of just 17 months, they created the borders of Northern

Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire

career - in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad - watching the peoples

within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein's

mythical 'weapons of mass destruction' - which had long ago been destroyed - but

to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father's generation had done

more than 80 years earlier.

 

 

 

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain

other

sets of people are human: Aldous Huxley