March 9, 2006

BOOK REVIEW
War of the Worlds

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
1,136 pages $40.00

By John Siscoe
Contributing Writer

Robert Fisk is a British correspondent who has covered every major conflict in the Middle East for the past 30 years. The Great War for Civilization recounts his experiences and observations. Neither a standard history of affairs nor a conventional memoir, it is a narrative of rage and sorrow. Like William Shirer or Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Fisk writes with moral certitude. He knows who his villains are: the tyrants and meddlers who think they can shape the Middle East to suit their ends. His heroes are the men and women and children who are slaughtered in the process.

Fisk is scornful of reporters who copy government press releases and palm off the results as journalism. Similarly, he has no use for armchair opiners employed by “think tanks” who quote (and misunderstand) Clausewitz. For Fisk, war may indeed be a continuation of national policy by other means, but it is also “a total failure of the human spirit.” In The Great War, he spends more than 100 pages to show us why.

Fisk’s beat is the mortuary, the mass grave, the shattered hospital, the torture room, the field of execution, the bombed village, the burned home, the street of blood, the mad house. When Goya finished one of the most grisly of his “Disasters of War” etchings, he scratched under it “Yo lo vi” — “I saw that.” There is a moral purpose in that caption, the record of a witness. And so it is with Fisk, who relentlessly drags us from horror to horror. Algeria, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, Turkey, Armenia, Kuwait, Lebanon — the scene keeps shifting, the decades go by, but the act, the failure of the human spirit, remains the same. Come, Fisk tells us, look with me. See what I mean. I saw that.

For all its eloquence and scope, The Great War is an uneven book. Fisk is to be commended for tackling the Turkish massacres of the Armenians during World War I, but his account of the events is often confused and what is worse, he is sidetracked into personal complaints of being misunderstood. His portrayal of Israel as a colonial power is telling but overdrawn. Bumblers such as L. Paul Bremer attract unwarranted amounts of Fisk’s vitriol. Perhaps the weakest part of the book is Fisk’s attempt to link his father’s service in World War I to the book’s central theme. Fisk’s deep love for his father, a distraught man who never showed him much affection, is moving, though it probably belongs in another book. But love is blind.

There have been a mountain of books on the Middle East published since the American invasion of Iraq. There will be many more to come. Many of these titles will swiftly find their way to the remainder tables. The Great War may escape that fate and deserves to. For all of its weakness, this is a book that is likely to remain indispensable.

A final note: Almost all the factual errors, most minor, which marred the British edition of The Great War, have been corrected in the American edition. The book is improved as a result. n