BOOK REVIEW:  The Great War for Civilization (Robert Fisk)

David Shasha

Posted Mar 6, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Review Essay: Death by History: Exploring the Middle Eastern Labyrinth

Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 2005

The study of history begins with the battle between Greeks and Hebrews over the ways in which history signifies.  The Greeks brought to their understanding of history a sense of randomness that is reflected by their pagan myths and the ways in which philosophers tried to allegorize them away in intellectual terms.  The Hebrews in their sacred histories saw in history the signature of their God who controlled history and infused it with both the ethical and the retributive.

Centuries later, the Italian poet Dante came to fuse these pagan and Jewish elements in his epic poem The Divine Comedy.  A strictly Catholic sensibility is brought to bear on the facts of history and a scorecard of historical figures is presented in order to make clear the difference between the “good” guys and the “bad” guys.  One of the developments at the time of Dante that should be duly noted was that in the interregnum between the ancient world which had to absorb the differences between Hebrew and Hellene that had become enmeshed in the Christian domination in late Roman times, was the emergence of a new Abrahamic faith, Islam, that had led Dante and his European compatriots to become so animated.

At the time that Dante was composing his epic reworking of history, the Muslims in Andalusia were continuing to produce translations and studies of the ancient classical wisdom.  While Europe was embroiled in theological controversies that stemmed from a Catholic faith that had yet to completely extricate itself from the pagan idea(l)s of the so-called “barbarian” tribes, Spanish Islam had developed and evolved from its Eastern counterpart in Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus to create a robust and substantial literature in philosophy, poetry, science, mathematics and religion, all of which distilled ideas and traditions from the sprawling world of antiquity.

The famous schools of translation in Spain that were run by Christians, Jews and Muslims who all worked together to create a new scholasticism fed the emerging schools of Europe which had lost the classical traditions.

This ecumenism was still alien to the Europeans who learned from the new texts that were being produced in Spain, but continued to maintain racial and religious categories that set Christians apart from their non-Christian neighbors.  Religious Humanism was emblematic of the new learning in Spanish Muslim contexts, but quite alien to the Christian world.

The emergence of the Crusades was a sign of the way in which the West would continue to blur the lines between intellectual adaptation and barbarity. 

Born a year after the death of Dante, the scion of a famous Andalusian family, Ibn Khaldun drew a new philosophy of history that stood in contrast with the often barbaric mythos enshrined in Dante.  Ibn Khaldun found that history was a process unto itself that could be understood within its own categories.  Breaking the stranglehold of static Platonic and Aristotelian ideas on the process of history, Ibn Khaldun almost single-handedly invented a secular modernity that was to reach into the future through the work of the obscure Neapolitan rhetorician Giambattista Vico.

The space that separates Dante and Vico was filled by the stark contrasts of the new Arabic wisdom and the violence of the Crusades.  Over four centuries the West had completely absorbed the new learning and yet rejected one of its foremost tenets; the new wisdom spoke of the merging of the old Hebrew monotheism with a fierce scientism that was most pronounced in the works of Averroes and Maimonides. Breaking the shackles of the theosophic interpretation of history that was enshrined in mystical and Neo-Platonic texts and in the neo-pagan magical traditions of the Renaissance, Vico re-energized the old Khaldunian paradigm of history as the process of human beings to create and understand their world through the products of their own actions in time.

The Crusades formed a bulwark of a “civilized” Europe against a “barbaric” East.  But by the time of Vico’s book The New Science, a book that would not find its place in the intellectual currents of European thought until the late 19th century when its take on history would come to be seen as the breakthrough it had not accomplished back when Vico first wrote it, new forms of European colonialism and Imperialism had taken root in the East.

One of the most famous and outstanding studies of the East was composed by Reinhart Dozy, a Dutchman writing in French, called Spanish Islam.  But rather than actually compose a history of Islam in Spain, Dozy wrote a long and bloody book about the wars of succession among Arab and Berber chieftains in Spain during the so-called “Golden Age” of Andalusia.  Dozy’s book is so important because it looks at the Arab world almost exclusively through the prism of blood and war; presenting the Arabs as a bloodthirsty people who lacked any sense of civilization in their politics and civic life.

Dozy throughout the book faces the problem of Arab acculturation in Spain which he grudgingly points out from time to time.  Side by side with the ostentation and the brutality that he recounts with relish and gusto, is a form of civilization which was completely alien to the Europe of the same period. 

But Dozy rarely makes the comparison between Europe’s own barbarity and the bloody mess of war in Al-Andalus.

This pattern of understanding history continues into the modern period.  Our own modern view of the Arab world is based upon similar conceptions as that of Dozy.  Rather than infusing our historiography with the Vichian ideals of Religious Humanism and cultural diversity functioning as central tenets in our own view of civilization, we are too quick to reduce the history of the Middle East to simply a progression of bloody conflicts involving a desperate West pitted against a brutal East.

It is often remarked that those who forget history are fated to repeat it.  And such is the first thing that comes to mind when assessing the historical import of the events of what are now known as “9/11.”  The attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center(s) and tried to hit the White House and Pentagon were not merely physical in nature.  As intended by the designers of these attacks, led by Al-Qa’ida and its head Usama Bin Laden, the attacks were to inflict not just physical damage in deaths and in blood, but would also have embedded within them a massive psychological component that would also inflict a deep trauma on the American people.

This trauma was framed within an understanding of history as violence that was deeply ensconced within Arab hearts and minds.

The lines of this history are loosened from the chains of the Ottoman defeat in World War I.  This defeat is not so well-known and even less understood in the United States though it is the source of much of the discord that has led to so great a chunk of US foreign policy.  The British journalist Robert Fisk is deeply aware of this history and its effect in the Arab world.

The Ottoman Empire held together a world that had existed from the earliest days of the Islamic conquests.  This was the same world that produced Baghdad, Cordoba and Damascus and the great civilization that emerged from those places and others that led intellectual and scientific advances in medieval society.  Far from breaking off from that world, the Ottoman Empire continued to extend its advances.  Though the Crusades allowed the Europeans to drink from the well of Arabic learning and culture, Europe continued to lag behind the Arabs until the 18th century.

Just think that if you lived in the year 1700 and had a physical ailment, where would you go for a doctor, Istanbul or London?

But as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble at this time, Europe saw that it could not only develop its own internal strength and cohesion, but could realign the world order and encroach on the East and attempt to dominate it.

This lengthy process came to an end with the Allied victories of World War I. 

Since the United States had little to do with this series of developments, it had very little understanding of the damage that it was causing to the Arab world.  In spite of the dangers that were posed by the so-called Barbary states to the early colonies and addressed by a resolute Thomas Jefferson, America was more concerned with its domestic agenda than with the Imperial policies that fueled the European states.

But the emergence of an Imperial Great Britain which created an Empire that stretched all over the world – an Empire upon which the “sun never set” – brought a new dimension to the conflicts that had existed historically between East and West.  As pointed out by Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism, European states did not only dominate the East by military conquest, but reframed the entire discourse of civilization by portraying the Arabs and the Orientals as backward and barbaric peoples.

For this to become actualized in the European mind it was necessary for history to be suppressed and reinterpreted.  The myth of European supremacy and Oriental indolence was thus created.  Looking back to the historical understanding of Dante which as we have seen existed in isolation from the rational and philosophical interpretations of history put forward by Ibn Khaldun and re-affirmed in a European context by Vico, we can see that the hoary stereotypes and pre-modern demons of the Arabs were re-established to support the work of Empire.

And as the Arab world was caught in the throes of a despair that was itself inexorable, the new understandings of history developed in the West, primarily by that great theoretician of nationalism, G.W.F. Hegel, voided the greatness of Arabic culture in ways that reinforced the new paradigm of Aryan glory that had been adopted by the Americans in their genocide against the Indians; an echo of the Christian exclusivism that had been so important a part of the Crusader mentality that had been at the center of Anti-Semitism which in turn had created the Inquisition and led inevitably to the tragedy of Nazi Germany’s attempted extermination of the Jewish people.

In his brilliant reconstruction of the modern Middle East, Robert Fisk allows himself the huge canvas of history upon which he can tell his story.

From the death of the Ottoman Empire to the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration to the colonization of North Africa by the French to the overthrow of Mossadegh by the Americans and British to the tri-partite invasion of Nasserite Egypt in the wake of the Egyptian takeover of the Suez Canal to the Iranian Revolution to the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan and way beyond, Fisk does not miss very much when it comes to the history of the Middle East since the 19th century.

The Great War for Civilization is a book where history destroys everything that it touches. 

All those who have drunk from the well of history have thus become poisoned by it: The Arabs who struggled against their European overlords won their independence only to establish one-party fascist states that led to the creation of an equally insupportable theocratic opposition.  Each side, and often there are more than two sides battling each other, remains intoxicated by history – the way that IT sees history and the way that IT has accorded meaning to that history – and relives that history through the blood and violence of what it has itself suffered.

History in this context is reduced to schematic patterns.

• Israel is created after the Nazi slaughter only to resurrect negative stereotypes of Jewish life in ways that in a dialectical fashion create new victims in the Palestinian Arabs who then begin to appear as victimized as the Jews once were.
• Algerians fights valiantly against the French to take back their country from the colonists who created the illusion that Algeria had become as integral a part of France as was Paris.  After the victory achieved in 1962, the new Algerian government suppresses all forms of political dissent and violently wipes out all traces of the diversity that had grudgingly existed under the French rule.  Just as the French sought to privilege Europe over Arabia in Algeria, so too did the revolutionary Algerian ruling cadre privilege Arab national life at the expense of democracy.  Most famously, this privilege was only extended to the ruling class itself and led to a revolt by the Islamic clerics viciously suppressed in the 1980s.
• Iran eventually brought to an end decades of European domination in 1953 with the election of Mossadegh – but that revolution was overturned by a coup reinstalling the Shah of Iran to power.  The Shah created a veritable police state with his SAVAK agents which led to a revolt of students and clerics that brought back Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran as the leader of the revolution.  This of course led to the taking of the American embassy – a close ally of the Shah and his police state – and the ordeal of the American hostages.
• Out of this Iranian experience emerges the towering figure of Saddam Hussein whose first important role in the region is to beat back the Iranian mullahs who have now created a state where Shari’a law functions.  Hussein is the West’s bulwark against the Iranian “fanatics.”
• After many years of supporting radical insurgents in the region from the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, the US finally links itself after its 2003 invasion of Iraq to the murderous ways that have become ubiquitous in the region.  Taking over the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the US military commits acts of torture and molestation that brings to mind the actions of the Iraqi Ba’athists that the US has overthrown.

As we now know, Saddam Hussein becomes the final straw man after the attacks of 9/11 and the effort to depose him transforms the place of the Americans in the Middle East in a very pro-active way.

Fisk has a deep and penetrating knowledge of all this history and is completely unafraid to recount it and draw conclusions from it. Discussing the British occupation of Iraq it is clear to see the ways in which that occupation so frighteningly presages the current American experience in the country:

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia – the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that – and that “clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it that we have compensation, or we may defeat our end” – which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917.  Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, agreed in 1915 that “taking Mesopotamia … means spending millions in irrigation and development…”  Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed and reconstructed by a “Council,” formed partly of British advisers “and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants.”  Later, they thought they would like “a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives.”

Compare this to the American-led regime change almost 90 years later:

And now I do begin to understand.  Two thousand years ago, a little to the west of here, we would have sat by the roadside as the ground shook to the tramp of Rome’s legions.  Now we live in the American empire.  Yes, this war was about oil.  Yes, it was ruled by folly and arrogance and lies.  But it was also about the desire – the visceral need – to project power on a massive scale, based on neo-conservative fantasies, no doubt, but unstoppable, inexorable.  Our army can go to Baghdad.  So it will go to Baghdad.  It will pour over Sumeria and Babylon and all the caliphates and across the land where civilization supposedly began.

Fisk enters into this battleground with a definite partisan attitude.  He traces the story through the centuries of Western misdeeds in the region and does little to hide his loathing of the Imperialism that was endemic to Europe and America in its dealings with the Arab world.

Equipped with a deep and penetrating knowledge of modern history, he is less sure of the history of the more distant past; the history that informed Ibn Khaldun and Dante, the history that anchored the very world of the Crusaders and the Arabs who were forced to defend their homelands from the marauding fanatics of France, England and Germany and the ignorant popes that signed onto the Crusader project.

It is one thing to see a parallel in these Crusades, which Fisk does, but quite another to impose such a mode of understanding on the internal dynamics of world history and civilization as it implicated itself in these infernal wars of conquest and civilization.  The history of the Modern Middle East does not fit quite so easily into the Crusader paradigm; power shifts have taken place over the centuries and absolute correlations often distort our view of the present circumstance.

More often than not, Fisk paints the Arabs as the ultimate victims, as living in a warped and violent world that is not of their own making.  In the endless series of schematic quid pro quos he frequently loses himself amidst the pain of the violence he is forced to report.  In describing the horrible effects of the UN sanctions imposed after the end of the first Gulf War, he relates the following:

I walked with Dr. Ismael on his morning rounds.  Youssef Abdel Raouf Mohamed from Kerbala – close to military bases bombed in 1991 – has gastro-intestinal bleeding.  He still has curly hair and can talk to his parents but has small blood spots on his cheeks, a sure sign of internal bleeding.  And Dr. Ismael is bothered by a memory. “Since the UN embargo, patients often die before they can even receive induction treatment,” he says, looking at the floor because he knows his story is going to be a terrible one.  “They get thrombocytopenia, a severe reduction of blood platelets.  They start bleeding everywhere.  We had another child like Youssef.  He was called Ahmed Fleah.  And after we started the cytotoxin treatment, he started bleeding from everywhere – from his mouth, eyes, ears, nose, rectum.  He bled to death in two weeks.”

Such stories can be multiplied in Fisk’s epic of a book many, many times.  He does not shrink back from describing the most grotesque and disgusting acts of human cruelty in stark and harrowing detail.  He becomes particularly animated when it comes to retelling the barbarity of Western soldiers towards the Arab people.

In this I do not see a specific penchant for anti-Israeli or anti-American invective as many of his critics do.  Fisk is too cautious a reporter; his narratives speak of a too-cautious and too-careful statement of the facts.  The book is over 1,000 pages because as a writer Fisk refuses to leave one fact out – he sees it as his job to provide his reader with as much information as can humanly be put onto the page.  But once he has reported the facts, he does not shut off his moral sense; this is a reporter who continues to maintain his humanistic frame of reference.

No one is spared in Fisk’s journalism.  Even Fisk himself frequently becomes a part of the news that he is telling to his readers.  So much of The Great War for Civilization concerns itself with the ways in which the role of journalism has achieved an importance way beyond the story itself.  Fisk cites the Israeli journalist Amira Hass who claims that the role of the journalist is not simply to tell a story, but to challenge the centers of authority.  And in this Fisk clearly excels.

Most memorable are the episodes where Fisk is caught in Afghanistan and almost lynched by a group of hostile Muslims and his meetings with Usama Bin Laden where he is invited to become a member of Al-Qa’ida.  And there is a whole chapter which traces the provenance of an American-made bomb that killed a number of innocent Lebanese civilians.  Fisk travels to the company that made the bomb and unbelievably presents them with a piece of the shell which he has brought from Lebanon to the US; the shell has the markings of the company that produced it and Fisk wishes to take them to task for their role in the tragedy.  In this manner Fisk himself becomes part of the story that he is telling and engages in a form of advocacy journalism where moral issues are no less significant for the journalist than the actual facts of the story.

And there is enough material on Saddam Hussein here to make what is seen on FOX NEWS or what comes out of the Bush White House seem benign in comparison. 

To add to this sense of completeness is the larger context in which this information is to be processed.  Rather than repeating the litany of accusations against the Iraqi regime since the Ba’ath junta and the installation of the barbaric Saddam decades ago to live out his “Scarface” and “Godfather” fantasies along the lines of his hero Joe Stalin, Fisk does not cease to remind us of the support that the US gave to his regime and the numerous trips by people like Donald Rumsfeld and others during the 1980s that gave the Saddam regime strength and support in its calamitous war against Iran and the many business contacts between US companies, especially those in the Oil industry – an industry whose executives are very prominent in the two Bush administrations – who have remained a ubiquitous presence in the region.

Fisk does the American reader a great service by returning us to the proverbial scene of the crime.  Going back to the beginnings of the Iranian revolution and looking at it with new eyes we can see that our hatred of the revolution and their hatred for us were both based on a single principle that I am sure many of us have not thought about: The wrangling over the return of the Shah to Iran for execution.  At this point in time, I doubt that many in the West would see this request – better, demand – as unreasonable.  In fact, Fisk, like the many Israeli historians who have revised our understanding of that country’s relations with the Arabs, indicates that the new government was interested in restoring good relations with America and the West, but it was America that continued to deny its historical role in the internal politics of Iran and continued to provide safe haven for the corrupt and venal Shah. 

The importance of the Iranian Revolution for the subsequent history of the region cannot be underestimated.  It remains astounding how certain decisions once made take on a veritable life of their own.

This pattern continues with Usama Bin Laden.

As is known, the Mujahedeen were a product of Western intelligence during the Cold War as a bulwark against the Soviets.  And so the CIA trained those fighters who included future Taliban and Al-Qa’ida members.  The religious fanaticism of these Mujahedeen was even applauded by then-President Reagan, himself not averse to using the religious impulse as a political strategy, who would eventually do business with the Mullahs in Iran in order to support the Nicaraguan Mujahedeen, the Contras, in their Latin American war with the Soviet-inspired Sandinistas.

Just like the Israeli Mossad which had supported a fifth-column religious insurgency against the secularist PLO, so too had the Americans made the crucial mistake of funding the Saudi regime – a religious theocracy under the guise of a “secular” monarchy – which eventually brought Usama Bin Laden to the world stage.

This seemingly lethal game of Spy-Vs.-Spy is presented by Fisk in a bold and transparent manner in a way that allows us to make sense of all the madness that was unleashed with the violence.  One day a fighter can be your friend, the next day your sworn enemy.

And like the violence that led to the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan, so too did the Arab Muslim world tilt to the advantage of the religious fanatics.  With a combination of oil money and political power, the development of a new Islamic religious militancy was secured by Western interests.

So there is the Western role in this carnage, but what is the Arab role?

Here Fisk remains deeply circumspect and proves himself to be utopian in the manner of the debased Noam Chomsky.  While Chomsky does not detail the abuses of the Arab despots and their lackeys in the thorough-going manner of Fisk, Fisk himself adopts Chomsky’s anti-Western rhetoric on many occasions.  The problem with this is that he often eliminates the agency of the Arabs themselves; divesting them of the responsibility for the safety, security and humanity of their own world.

Thus, Fisk does not look closely enough at the phenomenon of the Suicide Bomber in the current Iraq War and the tragic ways in which this new cult of death has permeated Arab civilization.  He is keen to carefully parse the crimes of the Anglo-Americans, but when it comes to the crimes of the Arabs he is sadly less vocal.

Rarely does Fisk abandon his Western view of humanity and civilization when discussing the tragedy of the Arab world.  His is a world of moral absolutes that disregards the necessity to deal with reality as we face it.  In an imperfect world choices must be made that will affect millions of people.

For example: In discussing the malignant effects of Saddam Hussein’s regime on the Iraqis and the ways in which he chose to bring on the catastrophe of war – two times! – Fisk evades any sense of what could possibly be done to assuage the situation that innocent Iraqis faced.  It is all well and good to quote the despicable statements of Madeline Albright regarding her belief that the UN sanctions were a good thing, or to recount the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but what Fisk cannot or will not do is to suggest how these situations could be resolved.

And while I know full well that this is not his job as a journalist, his outspoken certitude in terms of what he sees as the ills created by the West and Israel is not matched by any sense of how the ills from the Arab side are to be ameliorated.

This point is particularly egregious in the lengthy section on Algeria.

Algeria’s revolution was the most bloody of any in the developing Arab world.  The guerrilla actions against the French, as we see them portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers,” created the suicide bomber and the use of civilians as a regular part of the armed struggle.  But in the years that followed Algerian independence, the day to day life of Algerians did not improve.  As in the case of Nasser’s Egypt, the enforced socialization of many economic structures and political entities in the country led to a restructuring of the nation and a collapse of epic proportion. 

By the time of the 1970s, a time of great social and cultural malaise in the Arab world and a time when the weakness and impotence of its leaders and societies became manifest, elites and the military wrested any sense of civil rights and freedoms from the citizenry.  It was the 1970s that also ushered in a new period of anti-American rejectionism fed by the Iranian hostage crisis and the subsequent oil embargo which attempted to stanch this internal Arab crisis.  Whether this crisis was indeed averted is a matter that can be constructively debated in the context of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Returning to the model of Algeria we see that, unlike that of the oil-rich Gulf kingdoms which were pumped up by the West, there was little Western interference in the descent of that North African state into horrifying anarchy.  Algeria as a model of Arab dysfunction was destroyed from within and not from without.  And there is little doubt of this in The Great War for Civilization.  Fisk is brutally honest even when he makes bold conclusions that often seem a little less than judicious.  Algeria’s struggle in the 1980s is presented as an intra-Arab affair where blood is spilled not because of colonialism or Imperialism, but because the execution of power remains intoxicating and exhilarating. 

This Algerian war which was little noticed in the United States because there was nothing there at stake for us in an economic or political sense – and Fisk’s point is that America does not act for altruistic reasons as is the claim of the Bush administration in the present Iraq conflict – was a war that did not fit the standard model of the Arab as Western victim.  In fact, the Algerian conflict made manifest the most radical propositions of the French racists of the 1950s: Arabs were brutal and venal and could not govern themselves.  Such an argument is similar to the arguments of Right Wing Zionists who make the claim that Palestinians cannot rule themselves and if they are given a country then that country will become a place of violence.

Fisk does not ever seem to address this issue with the sharpness and clarity that he does when assessing the damage done by Western violence.

While detailing in nauseating reality the actions of Saddam Hussein against the Kurds and Shiites, he neglects to analyze the internal dynamics of Arab civilization at the present time.  Such an analysis would deplete the reservoir of anti-Western animus that will certainly upset many readers who do not share Fisk’s worldview. Even as Fisk expertly recounts the variegated realities of the Middle East and does not shrink from presenting all the players in a negative light – in ways that do not spare either the Americans, Europeans, Israelis or the Arabs – he somehow always leaves the reader with the idea that the West is always wrong and the Arab is always the victim.

Such a victimology mars many of the cogent pieces of journalism within this most fascinating and brilliant of books.  Lacking the larger historical perspective that comes from knowledge of the medieval context, Fisk’s book ends up reading like a modern version of Dozy’s Spanish Islam; all blood and gore without the culture that Arab civilization had produced in its Golden Age.  That the current Arab world has produced so little of cultural value and has seen its foremost intellectuals and writers exiled or censored or imprisoned means that all that is left of the story that can be told is the violence and the dysfunctionalism of a world which has now become almost completely unhinged.

In spite of all this, I doubt that the story of the contemporary Middle East will ever be told with such a sure hand.  Fisk is a writer who is both literate and deeply sensitive to the human condition. In this sense he is a liberal in spirit.  Opposed to the “realist” Robert Kaplan, Fisk feels the human pain of the individuals he writes about and does not treat them as mere pawns in a larger game of chess.  Like Kaplan, Fisk is a voracious reader of history, but unlike Kaplan he refuses to create a schematic history to fit abstract paradigms of culture.

Kaplan believes in an amorphous Western tradition that is never wrong.  Fisk traces the traditions of the West in relation to an East whose own cultural riches were once ransacked by that very West.  So far, so good.  But Fisk loses the argument when he leaves us with no options in a world of great cruelty and violence.  I am well aware that this sense of balance is missing from a world of discourse that is so filled with polarization.  But it is such a balance that is necessary to process the gnarly and often disgusting facts that make up the bulk of The Great War for Civilization.

We learn from Fisk that he is against the Bush war, but do not learn how he thinks that the Iraqis could otherwise have been freed of the chains of the UN sanctions and the tyranny of their oppressor.  He is free in his criticisms of both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership and demands justice in the form of a Palestinian homeland based on the relevant UN resolutions, but does not confront the Algerian debacle and the dangers that it poses not just for Israel but for the region.

So in the end The Great War for Civilization is a deeply humane and comprehensive study of a subject that is at the very epicenter of our contemporary consciousness. It is required reading for each and every person who wants to understand what has happened in the Middle East since the end of the 19th century.  It is brilliantly written in a style that embodies the high standards of the journalistic enterprise but is enriched by an intellectualism that allows the reader to learn the background and the context of the events it is reporting on.  The book deals with the human condition in a compassionate manner that evokes the civilized values so missing from the subject it deals with.

But the book loses some of its moral equilibrium by creating impossibly high standards of behavior that can rarely be met by any of the protagonists.  The West has no monopoly on cruelty as we see laid out in the book example after example of Arab evil:

You have to appreciate Saddam’s ruthlessness of purpose.  After the Americans and British encouraged the Shia Muslims of Iraq to rise up against Saddam in 1991 – and, of course, betrayed them by doing nothing when he wiped out his opponents – deserting Iraqi soldiers and rebels who wanted to keep on fighting retreated into the swamps of Howeiza and Amara and Hamar where the Marsh Arabs, immortalized in Wilfrid Thesiger’s great work so many decades ago, gave them sanctuary.  Iraqi helicopters and tanks could not winkle them out.  So Saddam embarked on a strategy of counter-guerrilla warfare that puts Israel’s political assassinations and property destruction – and America’s Vietnam Agent Orange – into the shade.

It is at this point that Fisk’s moral sense becomes neutered and he cannot bring himself to adopt the cavalier attitude towards war that Conservatives like Robert Kaplan so blithely embrace.  It is here that the embattled humanism of liberals like Robert Fisk starts to grow weary of trying to provide any coherent responses to the brutality of the world.  And as much as Fisk despises war, and seems to reject any use for it, there is no exception to the rule of nations that has existed throughout history which authorizes the use of violence.

In fact, Fisk, like Chomsky, does not make absolute moral judgments in the face of Arab resistance which is characterized by the use of different words by the various sides.  The way in which we name things, as Fisk well understands, displays how we see reality.  But in the end we are left situated in a world that is frequently dangerous and violent.  We can recount in a rational manner how we got to where we are – and this is the chief value of Fisk’s work – he expertly presents the stark realities of the Middle East as no other writer has done in our time – but he, like many others, is unable to see his way clear to present ways in which we can all find a way to live peacefully with one another.

And as he does not recommend non-violence for Palestinians who are being killed by Israeli forces in the Occupied Territories, what does he recommend for Americans and Westerners being targeted by Arabs with legitimate grievances.

It is here that we run into a wall that Fisk cannot breach.  There are explanations and reasons for violence but no excuses.

It is here that history becomes a carcinogen whose effects serve to eviscerate those who have become intoxicated by it.

The Hispano-Arab historian Ibn Khaldun understood the cycle of war and violence that permitted the State to function.  He removed a primitive reliance on God from this temporal cycle.  His thinking was extended by Giambattista Vico who interpreted the symbolism of ancient history and its pagan and religious elements and found that Mankind was responsible for its own legacy, the product of its own actions.

In The Great War for Civilization Robert Fisk has substantially added to our knowledge of this historical legacy.  He has shown us how human vanity is responsible for the cruelty that Men do to one another. 

In the march for control of natural resources and the technologies that can be unleashed from such power, the battle now being waged between a Western civilization that continues to be informed by a barbarity that stems from the Crusading Christianity of the Middle Ages and an Arab Muslim world that is trapped within its own sense of victimization and inferiority vis-à-vis the West, has left us bereft of the possibility of utilizing alternative histories that do not carry with them this legacy of violence and evil.

And while Mr. Fisk is unable to show us a way out of this madness, his voluminous study is filled with pertinent, unforgettable and indispensable portraits intimately presented that will most certainly add in a positive way to a deeper and more penetrating understanding of the most significant political questions of our age.

The Great War for Civilization is therefore a vital and necessary book that is required reading for all of us to help us learn where we are and how we got there.

David Shasha

 

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