22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb studies of the Middle East, July 16, 2008
This review is from: The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk (Hardcover)
This book is a selection from Robert Fisk's Saturday columns in the Independent from 1998 to 2007. These writings cover films and novels, the World Wars, the first British war of occupation of Iraq, the wars in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, the Turkish genocide of Armenians, and many other themes.
He sums up this period as the age of the warrior, describing how Bush changed the US Army's official `Soldier's Creed' to "I am a warrior" whose sole mission is `to destroy the enemies of the United States of America'. An American veteran wrote that the new creed "allows no end to any conflict except total destruction of the `enemy'. It ... does not allow one ever to stop fighting (lending itself to the idea of `the long war'). It says nothing about following orders, it says nothing about obeying laws or showing restraint. It says nothing about dishonourable actions ..." Change the word American in the creed to Muslim and it could be bin Laden's creed.
The American veteran wrote that this new creed encouraged the committing of atrocities. For example, the CIA had videos of prisoners being waterboarded, recently admitting that it had destroyed them. Americans in authority believe, wrongly, that `Torture works', as one Special Forces major put it.
Fisk notes how politicians impose policies against our national interest and against all morality, and how they use power to terrorise us. But our consent is not unthinking or automatic; the thought is that `authority is trustworthy', despite the evidence. He noted that some of his fellow journalists refuse to see cruelty and use the notion of `balance' to avoid the truth. He also notes the growing efforts to censor criticism, whether of Israel or of Islam.
Bush tells us that `we' are fighting `evil', so his wars are nothing to do with the occupation of Palestinian land, Afghanistan and Iraq. He tells us that `we' must blame `them' for the violence that threatens us all.
But if we keep the same Middle East policies, there will be more bombings, followed by harsher laws. As Fisk wrote of the Middle East, "the Americans must leave if peace was to be restored and the sooner they left the better."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The truth hurts, February 21, 2009
This review is from: The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk (Hardcover)
It's unfortunate that the people who really should read this book won't. The truth,as seen through the eyes of an eyewitness,is what too often is missing from the news we read or see or hear. As painful as it is, the stories of everyday people must be told. Mr. Fisk is a master at separating fact from fiction. This book is a chronicle of history in our time and exposes those who have turned their backs on our world. As a species, we can't continue to be led by our self-inflicted ignorance and continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. This book is an excellent means to achieving awareness of the world we live on.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
25 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Important, but ..., August 19, 2008
This review is from: The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk (Hardcover)
This is not actually a review of this book, which contains mostly selections of Fisk's work from the last few years, but rather of The World of Robert Fisk, a two-volume collection of samples of Fisk's reporting covering the 20-year period 1989-2008, which appeared recently as a supplement to The Independent. However, I think my observations should be relevant and possibly useful to people interested in this book.
I would give Fisk three stars on the basis of the intrinsic merits of his writing, but have added a fourth star due to its importance. The quality of Fisk's writing seems to have deteriorated over time, becoming more and more emotional, polemical and reliant on epithet, especially since the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent US attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. While I can well understand his anger, I think a professional writer shouldn't need to be told how important it is for the quality of his writing to keep a cool head while working.
Fisk's reporting on issues such as the consequences of the use of depleted uranium in armaments deployed in wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia is undoubtedly very important. Given the extreme pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian bias of the US media, it is also very important for people like Fisk to balance our picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some of Fisk's work from the 1990s is of particularly high quality. I was particularly impressed by a brilliant piece, dated 19 June, 1994, on the forces that tore apart Yugoslavia, and another, dated 12 October, 1995, on the suffering of women working as domestics in the Gulf States.
However, Fisk's increasing tendency to let his emotions take over sometimes leads to writing that I find downright unintelligent. First, there is his language, which grows increasingly tiresome the more frequently he uses words like "obscene," "outrage," "thugs," "atrocity." Or take, for example, his "despair" at an international arms fair in Abu Dhabi in the spring of 2001, when he found the arms salesmen advertising their wares with glitzy language in which the word "death" did not appear. What the hell did he expect? How does he expect us to take him seriously when he writes that he is driven to despair by the fact that arms dealers don't see what they are doing as immoral? Moreover, while his reporting on the civilian casualties of war is of undoubtable value, the degree of rage he injects into his writing on this subject often seems out of proportion to the actual extent of the suffering in conflicts like those in Lebanon and the former Yugoslavia if one takes a historical perspective and compares it with, for example, the scale of civilian suffering in the two world wars or the Vietnam War. Much of his writing would be more powerful if Fisk refrained from editorializing and just let his descriptions of the facts speak for themselves.
On the other hand, sometimes the epithets that seemed unintelligent to me have been borne out by further reading on the subject. For example, I sneered at first at his reference to "Israel's rabble of an army." The mighty Israeli army a rabble? But then I read what Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld had to say about the current state of his country's military in a 2002 interview I found online. He said that the Israeli army's struggle against the Palestinian resistance was turning Israeli soldiers into "cowards," "zeroes," "idiots," and says: "As long as we were small, few and weak, we were smart, and we were bold and won. `A small and courageous people', you remember? This was in 1967. Most of the people don't remember. In my class at the university, by the nature of things, most of the students are young and can't imagine to themselves that at one time people would be writing on the walls `Hats off to the [Israel Defense Force]'. They can't conceive of this. `There was such a thing? What, really? Were such things being written on the walls?', they ask me. The problem began in Lebanon, when we began fighting those weaker than us. Since then we are going from failure to failure." When asked what would happen if the Israeli army were forced now to fight against a regular army such as that of Syria or Egypt, he replied: "My guess: it will flee. If tomorrow a war in the style of 1973 breaks out - a majority of the IDF, not all of it, picks up its legs and runs." A rabble.
Fisk knows his history better, I suspect, than most Western journalists covering the regions about which he writes, but for real understanding I am afraid that we need more than journalism. In the end Fisk's work is important enough to read because of the facts that he brings to our attention, but I think that for a genuine understanding of the events in places like the Middle East or the former Yugoslavia one has to go beyond Fisk's work to other sources that take a broader perspective more informed by history and less by today's news.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
