Robert Fisk
London: Fourth Estate, 2005, £25.00
This very fine book runs to more than 1,300 pages, is well footnoted, referenced and indexed, carries a helpful bibliography and is written by one of the most fluent, knowledgeable and thoughtful journalists of our time. That part of its dedication is to Fisk’s parents ‘who taught me to love books and history’ should also commend it to Lobster readers. It is, in short, a rare example of joined-up journalism – the work of a reporter who has not only been based in Beirut for half his life, but one who has troubled to get to know the region that extends from Algeria to Afghanistan and from Syria to Saudi Arabia.
Since its borders were largely settled by the victors of the First World War, Fisk makes this the starting point of his account. But he also takes in the Armenian massacres that had begun well before the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire after that war, and other events that set the context for the subsequent Western interventions in the region.
He not only draws on the history but talks to those who helped make it. These include Christopher ‘Monty’ Woodhouse whose covert activities in the region after the Second World War included the Iran coup of 1953. This is Fisk’s observation on that 1997 meeting at Woodhouse’s retirement home in Oxford:
‘The coup against Mossadeq, the return of the Shah, was, in Woodhouse’s mind, a holding operation, a postponement of history. There was also the little matter of the AIOC, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company – later British Petroleum – which Mossadeq had just nationalised. You could tell from the way he spoke, the urgent movement of his hands, that this had been one of the most exciting moments of Woodhouse’s life. The return of the young Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi was the ultimate goal. It cost a couple of million pounds, a planeload of weapons and perhaps five thousand lives. And twenty-five years later, it all turned to dust.’
In a later chapter on Israel Fisk writes:
‘When I first visited the West Bank scarcely nine years after the 1967 war, there was in the occupied territories an Israeli-controlled Palestinian police militia, an army of collaborators – they even wore black berets – who “controlled” a supine and humiliated Palestinian people. North of the Israeli border, a Lebanese population lived in fear of Israeli military invasion. Israeli troops had only to cross the border to send a quarter of a million Lebanese civilians fleeing in panic to Beirut. To the east, millions of Iraqis lived in grovelling obedience to the Baath party.
Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid…… The old Sharon policy into which the American neo-conservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq – of beating the Arabs till they come to heel or until they “behave” or until an Arab leader can be found “to control his own people” – is now as bankrupt as the Arab regimes that continue to work for the world’s only super-power.’ This is a book of intelligent journalism and warm humanity. It is greatly commended.