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Summary: Massive, meticulous and magisterial
Comment: Probably one of the few books to which the overused `tour de force' can rightly be applied, Fisk's massive tome is as thorough an exploration of the labyrinthine twists and turns of recent Middle East history as you could hope to find. From the Armenian genocide and mandate Palestine to the Iran/Iraq war and meetings with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains, Fisk leaves no stone unturned in his examination of how the failures of Western policy and Arab/Muslim infighting alike have shaped the region's destiny. He rides shotgun with the Russian army on patrol in Afghanistan; gets caught up in bombardment on the frontline in the Iran-Iraq war; and `returns to sender' fragments of American Hawkeye missile used by the Israeli army to destroy a civilian military ambulance in Lebanon: whatever subject he tackles here, Fisk is never dull. From time to time he bludgeons the reader with a welter of detail and the sheer force of his argument, but he is fired by a righteous anger at the deceit, duplicity and sheer failure to learn the lessons of history that would be sad - if only their consequences weren't so deadly.
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Summary: angry
Comment: By gum is this man angry. I took six months to read this book last year (nad yes it was worth it). Each time I opened it I sunk slightly further into depression as I understood more of the evil man does to man in the name of an ideal, or imperial self-interest, or tribal loyalty, or religious fealty, or a sense of post-colonial national inferiority.
I would recommend that anyone who expresses half an interest in what motivates bright young men (usually) with a future before them to fly aircraft into tall buildings to read this book.
It will depress you. It will enlighten you.
Robert Fisk, of all western journalists, has the moral authority to carry off a book like this. He has lived through most of the post-World War II horrors in this region.
My only (albeit slight) criticism is the lack of photgraphs - you can access some on his web-site, but it would be illuminating to see in pictures some of the episodes his words desribe.
Please read this - it will help you understand the complexities facing our government and 'brave boys' in Afghanistan and Iraq right now. But for the grace of God...
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Summary: Wide-ranging, if biased, view of the Middle-East
Comment: The job of a journalists arguably has two functions; to report on what is going on in the world and to explain why it is happening. Robert Fisk does a fairly good job fulfilling the first role. In his thirty years of reporting from the Middle-East he managed to be at most of the scenes of conflict and upheaval. The "why," however, is really where he falls down. Here he tends to take the sort of infantile approach favoured by someone like George Galloway. He takes the simplistic view, believing that all this conflict can be simply traced to the West. And by the West he means the USA, Israel of course and things like the settlement imposed by Western countries like Britain and France on the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
At times, this bias reaches a ludicrous level. Take this exert:
" In Lebanon in the mid-1980s, in Algeria and then Bosnia, our protection as neutral correspondents had disintegrated. We were abducted, murdered because we were Westerners or because we were regarded as combatants. Two months before I was beaten at Kila Abdulla, I had attempted to interview a Muslim cleric in a village mosque outside Peshwar. " Why are you taking this kaffir into our mosque?" a bearded man had shouted at the mullah. I conducted the interview outside the building. But I was a kaffir. So was Pearl. So, it seemed, were we all. Where did it all go wrong?
I have always believed the rot started in Vietnam..."
This is classic Fisk. He manages to go from one anti-Western tirade, to another, without managing to notice that, in the middle he gives substantial evidence that there are other people in the world with prejudiced, totalitarian mindsets, people who are not Western. But he finds himself strangely reluctant to criticize them. Why? Does he take the patronizing approach that only the West can be criticized?
This is one of the great weaknesses of this book. An informed observer would know that Arabs are indigineous to one country in the world, the Arabian peninsula, now known as Saudi Arabia. Virtually every county which became Arabic ( or indeed Islamic) became so due to military invasion. This huge exercise in Arab Imperialism should be kept in mind, if only to put in perspective the endless accusations of imperialism Fisk charges the West with. And this is not simply a matter of historical, academic interest. The ideology which fuelled these conquests, Islamism, is being revived, in fact, it never really went away.
At times, this book creates the illusion that it is well-researched. For instance, he quotes missile serial numbers with great accuracy but I recall that elsewhere he tells you that the first sentence of the Koran is " There is no G_d but G_d and Muhammad is his prophet."
This is the Shahadaah, the Islamic declaration of faith. Actually the opening is known as the Fatiha; something totally different. A howler on this scale shows how little Mr Fisk knows about Islam.
Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that The Koran is not in chronological order; chronologically, the first lines of the Qur'an are in sura 96. In fact, the suras of the Koran can be very clearly divided into two groups. The first date from the Meccan phase of Muhammed's career when he was simply a preacher. The second date from the Medinna period when he became a military and political leader.
I am not the only one to notice Mr Fisk's capacity for factual inaccuracy.
Take , Efraim Karsh , author of "Islamic Imperialism: a history,"
In his review of "The Great War for Civilization: The conquest of the Middle-East," he states
" It is difficult to turn a page of The Great War for Civilisation without encountering some basic error. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, not, as Fisk has it, in Jerusalem. The Caliph Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was murdered in the year 661, not in the 8th century. Emir Abdallah became king of Transjordan in 1946, not 1921, and both he and his younger brother, King Faisal I of Iraq, hailed not from a "Gulf tribe" but rather from the Hashemites on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. The Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, not 1962; Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed by the British authorities, not elected; Ayatollah Khomeini transferred his exile from Turkey to the holy Shiite city of Najaf not during Saddam Hussein's rule but fourteen years before Saddam seized power. Security Council resolution 242 was passed in November 1967, not 1968; Anwar Sadat of Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, not 1977, and was assassinated in October 1981, not 1979. Yitzhak Rabin was minister of defense, not prime minister, during the first Palestinian intifada, and al Qaeda was established not in 1998 but a decade earlier. And so on and so forth."
Actually Fisk denies that he wrote that Jesus was born in Jerusalem and I must admit I didn't spot this. There are other mistakes, for instance, he states that Saladin was an Arab Warrior, when actually he was a Kurd. Fisk almost gives the impression that he has covered every major conflict in the Middle-East for the last thirty years. But where is the coverage of the ongoing slaugher in Darfur, for instance? Fisk's critics accuse him of factual inaccuracy and ideological bas and, I have to say, this book bears this out.
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Summary: This book changed my life.
Comment: I read this book a couple of years ago having decided to read it after listening to Robert Fisk on Desert Island Disks. It occured to me that I was approching 40 and had no understanding what so ever of the history or politics or wars of the Middle East and frankly up till then I had no interest in the subject. However I decided it was time to find out and so read this book. I have never looked back and it set me on a journey that as a nearly 40 year old housewife with a husband and 3 children I never dreamed that I'd take. I have now studied certain areas of this book in much greater detail in other texts and have travelled to the Middle East and actively take part in peace initiatives. I know my title sounds melodramatic but it happens to be true.
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Summary: Whodunnit story of the middle east
Comment: I was reading this book on Christmas Day and a friend of mine noticed me doing this and remarked jokingly "have you worked out who did it yet?" I replied yes, you meet the guy who did it in the first chapter. The rest of the book is an examination of why.
The guy who did it is, of course, Osama bin-Laden and Fisk details his three meetings with him pre September 11th. As might be expected, he's analysed his interviews with hindsight to see if there was any indication he missed that might indicate what was being planned. There were some indications, but who could have believed that he was serious or doing other than boasting? Fisk printed his interviews with Osama bin-Laden before September 11th and they elicited no stir of opinion - nobody took his threats seriously or figured he'd be able to carry them out.
The rest of the book details why he did it. The history of pretty much every country in the middle east and an examination of how the west was and is complicit in shaping the problems that afflict the region now. Much of this Fisk tries to connect to his father, who fought in the first world war when the boundaries and spheres of influence that define the middle east today were set up. I get this - it's not hard to see - but I think he fails to connect his father explicitly to these events (he was only a soldier, after all, not a policymaker or diplomat) and these sections don't gel that well - Fisk is trying to come to some accommodation with his dead father, some closure with his father's death, which is all very well but sort of private, IMO.
But the rest of the book is well worth reading. A country by country account of the middle east (with the exception of Lebanon, as he's covered that in detail in another book) starting with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, going through The Gulf Wars, the Armenian Genocide, Israel, Algeria, etc. and ending with the American invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. Full circle.
Definitely worth reading. Sort of long, but you can read each chapter separately.
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