The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

SELECTED WRITINGS

ROBERT FISK

CONTENTS

PREFACE

1 A firestorm coming

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Flirting with the enemy

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

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

The pit of desperation

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

‘You are not welcome’

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

‘Our guys may kick them around a little…’

The wind from the East

2 Publish and be damned? Or stay silent?

So let me denounce genocide from the dock

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim

Sneaking a book out in silence

‘A conflict of interest’

Bravery, tears and broken dreams

A holocaust denier in the White House

3 Words, words, words…

Hack blasts local rags

We should have listened to Bin Laden

The jargon disease

Poisonous academics and their claptrap of exclusion

Soft words – hard questions

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

The forgotten art of handwriting

‘Believe it or not!’

Murder is murder is murder…

Ah, Mary, you poor diddums

‘A very edgy situation’

‘Abu Henry’: what diplomats can get up to

A lesson from the Holocaust

4 Cinema begins to mirror the world

Applause from the Muslims of Beirut

Saladin’s eyes

My challenge for Steven Spielberg

Da Vinci shit

We’ve all been veiled from the truth

When art is incapable of matching life

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one

Take a beautiful woman to the cinema

A river through time

5 The greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis

A long and honourable tradition of smearing the dead

Tricky stuff, evil

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

A poet on the run in Fortress Europe

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

Another of Arthur’s damned farthings

First mate Edward Fisk

‘Come on, Sutton!’

Cold war nights

‘All this talk of special trains…’

Fear of flying

7 The old mandates

God damn that democracy

Gold-plated taps

The man who will never apologise

The ‘lady’ in seat 1K

Whatever you do, don’t mention the war

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

Alphonse Bechir’s spectacles

The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast

The torturer who lived near the theatre

The temple of truth

We are all Rifaats now

The ministry of fear

‘We have all made our wills’

‘Duty unto death’ and the United Nations

8 The cult of cruelty

The age of the warrior

Torture’s out – abuse is in

‘The truth, the truth!’

Crusaders of the ‘Green Zone’

Paradise in Hell

‘Bush is a revelatory at bedtime’

The worse it gets, the bigger the lies

Let’s have more martyrs!

The flying carpet

The show must go on

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

9 We have lost our faith and they have not

God and the devil

The childishness of civilisations

Look in the mirror

Smashing history

So now it’s ‘brown-skinned’

The ‘faith’ question

Hatred on a map

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

The lies of racists

Dreamology

10 ‘A thing invulnerable’

What the Romans would have thought of Iraq

In memoriam

Read Lawrence of Arabia

A peek into the Fascist era

Who now cries for the dead of Waterloo?

Witnesses to genocide: a dark tale from Switzerland

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

Should journalists testify at war crimes trials?

Where are the great men of today?

11 America, America

Free speech

It’s a draw!

Fear and loathing on an American campus

How Muslim middle America made me feel safer

Will the media boys and girls catch up?

Brazil, America and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

From Cairo to Valdosta

Trying to get into America

12 Unanswered questions

Is the problem weather? Or is it war?

Fear climate change, not our enemies

Just who creates reality?

A letter from Mrs Irvine

Who killed Benazir?

The strange case of Gunner Wills

13 The last enemy

In the Colosseum, thoughts turn to death

Dead heroes and living memories

The ship that stands upright at the bottom of the Sea

‘Thanks, Bruce’

Those who went before us

Farewell, Ane-Karine

They told Andrea that Chris had not suffered

POSTSCRIPT

The dilution of memory

A street named Pétain and the woman he sent to Auschwitz

‘I am the girl of Irène Némirovsky’

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also by Robert Fisk

Copyright

About The Publisher

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

That’s the kind of anger that journalists are permitted to deploy, the anger of righteousness and fear. It is the language of our masters, the Bushes and Blairs and Browns, the Kinkels and the Sarkozys and, of course, the Mubaraks and the King Husseins and the Arabian kings and emirs and the Musharrafs and, indeed, anyone – even the crazed Muammar Ghadafi of Libya – who signs up to the war of Good against Evil. For journalists, this has nothing to do with justice – which is all the people of the Middle East demand – and everything to do with avoidance. Ask ‘how’ and ‘who’ – but not ‘why’. Source everything to officials: ‘American officials’, ‘intelligence officials’, ‘official sources’, anonymous policemen or army officers. Above all, show respect. For authority, for government, for power. And if those institutions charged with our protection abuse that power, then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age in which we now live, the age of terror – which means that we must live in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies.

As Middle East Correspondent of The Independent of London, I endure a charmed but dangerous life. I travel to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, ‘Palestine’, Israel. I live in Lebanon. I have covered, over thirty-two years in the Middle East, eleven major wars, countless insurgencies and more massacres – more sheer bloody slaughter – than I care to count. And I have a newspaper, The Independent, which also encourages me to tell it how it is, to report not the clichés and blusterings of ‘think tanks’ and ‘experts’, but what I as a reporter see and believe. Each Saturday my editor, Simon Kelner, allows me to let rip in a column in which I can – like a journalist in paradise – swim in any direction in the sacred pool, examine any monster, visit any graveyard, talk to any murderer or friend, examine any document, write about any empire, look back even at the history of my own very ordinary English family in which my dad was a soldier in the First World War, in which his father was first mate on the giant tea clipper Cutty Sark. And I can say what I think.

It is a privilege and it is a trust – especially in a country, Britain, where the system of democracy has been so badly stained (principally by former prime minister Blair) that the press has come to play the role of parliamentary opposition – but it must be used, I think, with vigour and fury and cynicism, yes, and gentleness and, sometimes, with despair. This book therefore reflects my life as a journalist, largely over the past five years, but it also shows the need, I believe, to speak out against the fraud and injustice of a world in which consent has become automatic, in which criticism, however mild, is regarded as subversive. This is not my battle. I have colleagues who try to do what I try to do: to call our masters liars and mock their mendacity and their provable untruths and to bite them – hard – for the way in which they have damaged and soiled our world. I am not sure if history has a special integrity. But we should show an integrity towards the history which we are now creating in the hell–disaster of the Middle East.

I have sometimes strained the patience ofmy readers. Several have complained that they found my constant references to ‘Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’ repetitive or childish. One of our Independent readers complained to the Editor, Simon Kelner, in October of 2007 that Fisk:

should be more careful with his words. One thing I certainly cavil at is his snide reference to our current Prime Minister, whom he delights in calling Lord of Kut al-Amara. Not all his readers will understand his reference, but I do… It was a terrible tragedy when it happened in the Great War, and even worse when the POWs had to march to Turkey. Surely Fisk must have read about it…

Indeed, I had read of it. Kut al-Amara was the greatest British defeat at the hands of a Muslim army – the Ottoman Turks – in the First World War, a humiliating collapse of imperial power after Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris in a vain attempt to reach Baghdad. This comprehensive military disaster – Townshend was surrounded at Kut and watched his captive soldiers set out on a death march to Turkey – seemed to me to sum up both the arrogance with which Tony Blair took his country to war and the swamp in which our army found itself in Iraq. So Blair remains, for the most part, ‘Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’ in these articles.* A columnist must sometimes write with a cartoonist’s strokes.

Books occasionally write themselves. Reading the proofs, it became clear to me that my own journalism over the past five years has concentrated more and more on the sheer hypocrisy of the political–military–journalistic nexus of power which is deployed to fool us, to persuade us to follow policies which are contrary to our national interests and against all morality. Indeed, the use of power to terrorise us – to put more fear in our hearts than any ‘terrorist’ is capable of doing – seems to me to be one of the most frightening and damning characteristics of our age.

The blood of Iraqis flows through these pages, but The Age of the Warrior is neither a story of unrelieved carnage nor of unremitting journalistic rage. I examine the use and misuse of words, the influence of the cinema and of novels on our age, the need to create some form of beauty even amid war. You will meetmy former Latin professor, the old boys ofmy English school, you will walk round the mass grave of the Titanic’s passengers in Canada and read the battle honours in the oldest church in Wellington, New Zealand, and you will sit beside Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of his age, as he travels to a Beirut still ravaged by war, his ‘wife’ – his most precious musical instrument – strapped beside him in seat 1K. And you will meet again my soldier father Bill who bravely refused to execute a comrade in the First World War – an Australian who did indeed stand before a firing squad but who died, it now turns out, with an extraordinary secret in his heart.

*By extraordinary irony, Amara was the first city that British troops abandoned to insurgents. Under a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in 2006, UK forces were permitted a single afternoon patrol through the city in return for handing over power to armed tribal leaders. The British could thus claim they had not retreated, while at the same time giving up all responsibility for the tens of thousands of local inhabitants: a truly Blairite solution.

Collections of this kind are bound to be a patchwork, but in this case I have found a meaning in the compilation. I have deliberately allowed some few repetitions to preserve the integrity of articles as they were originally published. But a journalist’s life – however specialised – revolves around a theme. And in this case, my columns have returned, again and again, to the semantics of politics and war and the need to expose the needless mass suffering that we inflict on our fellow humans. Death, as usual, walks through these pages until, at the end, Denise Epstein – surviving daughter of that wonderful Jewish–French novelist Irène Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz – warns us of the ‘dilution of memory’. It is this dilution, this wilful refusal to see and recognise cruelty, which will push us back into the inferno.

Beirut

February 2008

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after he’s avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing – in every sense of the word – when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, ‘pour encourager les autres’. ‘Bardolph,’ laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen, ‘a soldier firm and sound of heart… hanged must’ a be –

A damned death!

Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free, And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate: But Exeter hath given the doom of death… Therefore go speak, the duke will hear thy voice; And let not Bardolph’s vital thread be cut… Speak, captain, for his life…

How many such military executions have been recorded in the past thirty years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolph’s cause – not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said – to Henry himself.

… I think the Duke hath lost never a man, but one that is like to be executed for robbing a church, one Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’ fire, and his lips blows at his nose…

But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:

We would have all such offenders so cut off. And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compell’d from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language…

In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell.

And I never pass the moment when Shakespeare’s French king asks if Henry’s army ‘hath passed the river Somme’ without drawing in my breath. Did some faint moment of Renaissance prescience touch the dramatist in 1599? But I have still to be convinced that Shakespeare saw war service in the army of Elizabeth. ‘Say’st thou me so?’ Pistol asks of a cringing French prisoner who does not speak English. ‘Come hither, boy, ask me this slave in French/What is his name.’ I heard an almost identical quotation in Baghdad, shorn of its sixteenth-century English, when a US Marine confronted an Iraqi soldier- demonstrator in 2003. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he screamed at the Iraqi. Then he turned to his translator. ‘What the fuck’s he saying?’ At the siege of Harfleur, the soldier Boy wishes he was far from battle – ‘Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety’ – and Henry’s walk through his camp in disguise on the eve of Agincourt evokes some truly modern reflections on battle. The soldier Bates suggests to him that if the king had come on his own to Agincourt, he would be safely ransomed ‘and a many poor men’s lives saved’.

The equally distressed soldier Williams argues that if the English cause is doubtful, ‘… the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left…’

This bloody accounting would be familiar to any combat soldier, but Shakespeare could have heard these stories from the English who had been fighting on the Continent in the sixteenth century. I’ve seen those chopped-off legs and arms and heads on the battlefields of the Middle East, in southern Iraq in 1991 when the eviscerated corpses of Iraqi soldiers and refugee women and children were lying across the desert, their limbs afterwards torn apart by ravenous dogs. And I’ve talked to Serb soldiers who fought Bosnian Muslims in the battle for the Bihac pocket, men who were so short of water that they drank their own urine.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s censorious Caesar Augustus contemplates Antony’s pre-Cleopatran courage:

When thou once

Was beaten from Modena,… at thy heel

Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against,… with patience more

Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink

The stale of horses and the gilded puddle

Which beasts would cough at…

Yet Wilfred Owen’s poetry on the ‘pity of war’ – his description, say, of the gassed soldier coughing his life away, the blood gargling ‘from the froth-corrupted lungs’ – has much greater immediacy. True, death was ever present in the life of any Tudor man or woman; the Plague that sometimes closed down the Globe Theatre, the hecatomb of child mortality, the overflowing, pestilent graveyards, united all mankind in the proximity of death. Understand death and you understand war, which is primarily about the extinction of human life rather than victory or defeat. And despite constant repetition, Hamlet’s soliloquy over poor Yorick’s skull remains a deeply disturbing contemplation of death: