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The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk

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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."

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.

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.

How does one review a book by a man who has spent the past three decades reporting on the world's bloodiest conflicts, who has interviewed Osama bin Laden and who, by Air France calculations, travels more frequently than any Air France crew member? Robert Fisk's journalistic resume is impressive, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Israel's own invasion of Lebanon, Iran after the overthrow of the Shah to the US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the killing fields of Algeria, Syria, the Occupied Territories and other trouble spots in the Arab world.

The sum total of his death-defying forays into the Middle East is contained in his excellent Pity the Nation, which covers the Lebanese civil war, and The Great War for Civilization, a monumental, 1,300-plus page catalogue of man's inhumanity to man which, Fisk tells us, will eventually be followed by a second volume.

The Age of the Warrior departs from the blood-soaked pages of his previous books and offers more personal insights into Fisk the man. In it we find the ponderings, through a decade or so of editorials he wrote for the Independent, of a man who probably has seen more dead bodies than any reporter alive today. The 116 entries can be read as hiatuses, "a foreign correspondent's thoughts amid war, a corner of the journalist's brain that usually goes unrecorded," recorded here for our benefit.

Some entries, such as "The forgotten art of handwriting" or "The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast" -- a true story, by the way -- are light in tone, but underlying the whole volume is the same anger we have come to expect from Fisk in the face of injustice, double standards and Western complicity in the suffering that finds such fertile ground throughout the Middle East.

As in his reporting, Fisk spares no one, and his cast of characters is a rogues' gallery of the architects of catastrophe -- former US president George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, former British prime minister Tony "Kut al-Amara" Blair, Jack Straw, Ariel Sharon and other symbols of the West at its worst. Equally targeted are "our" dictators, ally-turned-foe Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Pervez Musharraf, Yasser Arafat, Hafez al-Assad, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Muamar Qadaffi and King Abdullah of Jordan. His skewering of these individuals will be nothing new to anyone who has followed Fisk's reporting over the past three decades or has waded through his immense The Great War for Civilization. But here Fisk, aware of the failings and limitations of his own profession, takes a step back and turns to equally important subjects such as our collective forgetting of history and how movies have come to define reality.

Especially useful is the section "Words, words, words," a modern-day version of George Orwell's famous essay Politics and the English language, in which Fisk confronts the insidious manipulation of language (starting from his own training as a journalist) that characterizes most reporting -- especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here Fisk draws our attention to the catchwords, euphemisms and "hygienic metaphors" used to distort reality, how illegal Jewish settlements become "Jewish neighborhoods," occupied land becomes "disputed," Palestinian attacks invariably "terrorist" while Israeli "retaliation" is self-defense," killed civilians become "collateral damage" and Palestinians who blow themselves to bits while making a bomb as dying from "work accidents." And so on, language that once again reared its ugly head during Israel's 22-day pounding of Gaza in December and January.

Later, Fisk explains why journalists should not be forced to testify at war crimes tribunals, at least not until courts abandon their double standards and become equally intent on trying war criminals in the Middle East, the perpetrators of Sabra and Chatila, Hama and the countless other massacres that have written the history of the region in blood. Until then, journalists testifying in court or providing evidence would risk being complicit in that system of double standards, he argues.

Fisk, who makes Lebanon his home, has often been accused by Western media and various Israeli groups of sympathizing too much with Muslims, criticism that has bordered on accusations he suffers from Stockholm syndrome -- especially after he was attacked by Afghan refugees in Pakistan on Dec. 10, 2001, whose anger at Westerners he said could be rationalized. Such accusations, however, are nonsense, and anyone who has paid attention to his long career will know that Fisk sides with justice, which in our world often means siding with those who ended up on the wrong side of history. In fact, his detractors (Zionists and others) will find in this volume many instances of Fisk at his most unsparing in his criticism of Holocaust revisionists or individuals, such as Maurice Papon, Marshal Philippe Petain and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who had a hand in it. He is equally implacable in his call for recognition of the Armenian Genocide and his criticism of the Turkish government, which to this day continues to deny it took place.

History conveniently distorted or altogether effaced by opinion makers and governments, Fisk argues, is a dangerous instrument that, over time, will come back to haunt us, as it did on Sept. 11, 2001. Though Fisk clearly calls the attacks a "crime against humanity," he insists that they did not occur in isolation, that they were a result of our actions in the Middle East. There is no doubt, he argues, that the London bombings of July 7, 2005, would not have happened had the UK not participated in the invasion of Iraq. And yet, to this day, an unrepentant Blair (a favorite villain of Fisk) and a complicit media claim there was no connection between the two events, as will those who continue to argue, against all evidence, that 9/11 was the result of Muslim "hatred" for Western democracy, that it had nothing do to with racism, support for or indifference to the Apartheid-like conditions Israel imposes on Palestinians, catastrophic sanctions against Iraq that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, support for Saddam as he used poison gas against Iran and support for repressive regimes that are allies in the "war on terrorism."

There is much, much more to Fisk's rich volume, which, as with his other publications, should come with the warning "danger, no light subjects therein." But then again, what should we expect from a book that concludes on such a note: "I wake each morning in Beirut and hear the wind in the palm trees outside my bedroom window and ask myself what we all ask ourselves these days -- or should ask ourselves: what horror waits for us today?"

(Published in the Taipei Times, February 15, 2009, page 14.)

i could have told you long before i opened the book that it would be worth reading. Having just read "the age of the warrior",I can tell you it's value far exceeds the price put on it by its publisher. If you've read his articles from the independent or have read "the great war for civilization" you will want to read this book. ****(see below)

It is immensely insightful, and intelligent. If you've only read his articles from the independent,then "the great war for civilization" would be best to start with. It is by far the most powerful book I've read. It does not gloss the truth or clean it up, but accounts some of the terrible acts the human race can inflict on one another. It was a difficult read and at times i couldn't read more than 4 or 5 pages at a time.

"Age of the Warrior" follows his articles in the last five or more years of his work in the Middle East covering governments,war,his insight on the "western media" and go's into several experiences of his childhood. (his love of trains, for one).

Though the events in this book happened years ago,reading the articles may give you the insight to better understand how those events came about and may just help you see how you can help prevent history from repeating itself.

I've heard someone say(Fisk maybe):

"It's the journalist's job of keeping governments in check, by seeing that the acts perpetrated by them don't go unnoticed,and reporting their acts to the public, so that those guilty be held accountable."

I believe we (the people) are not excluded from that responsibility.

**** Note: for those who have tried to find the 3-part documentary he did called "from Beirut to Bosnia", do a 'video' google search it should be the first thing that pops up.

Pt. 1. The martyrs smile -50min.
Pt. 2. The road to Palestine -50min.
Pt. 3. To the ends of the Earth -50min.

Mr Fisk relates a series of tales about the Middle Eastern world that we should pay attention to as we evaluate our actions and intentions viv a vis Iraq, Iran, Afganistan, Syria, etc. Too few Americans understand what the true underlying issues are and who the major polayers are, and have been.

Robert Fisk is one of the leading journalists in the world today writing on international politics and events, in particular as they relate to the Middle East, where he has lived for over two decades and has been a star correspondent. "The Age of the Warrior" is the title for this collection of his essays and articles in The Independent, his current newspaper, since he left the The Times when Australian right-wing magnate Rupert Murdoch bought it.

The articles for the most part dwell on the usual themes one would expect from Robert Fisk: the war-mongering, mendacity and hypocrisy on the part of the Western governments, be they American or British, German or French, with regard to the Middle East; the failures of the various Arab governments to be more than corrupt lids on the explosive mixture contained within their nations; the senseless violence and loss of life suffered in the area as well as all over the world due to political incompetence and imperialist malice alike in the past century; and more of that kind. However, unlike his two major books, "Pity the Nation" (Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (Nation Books)) and "The Great War for Civilization" (The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East), Fisk in this book is more reflective than angry in many cases, and the topics are broader in range as a result. He reflects (more) on his father and grandfather's legacies in the military, on earlier catastrophes such as World War I and the loss of the Titanic, and so on. Interesting is the addition of some cultural articles, in particular a collection of movie reviews, as well as some comments on journalism and even football.

In all of this, Fisk is his usual self, with his by now familiar 'cool anger', strong moral judgement, and fearlessness, as well as his tendency to put himself and his own reflections on events in the foreground more than the events themselves. Since Fisk is one of the best popularly accessible, non-academic writers on the political world of today, this book is very worth reading.

The "Age of the Warrior" is a selection of Fisk's contributions to The Independent since the turn of the century. To be frank this book seems to be an attempt to cash in on Fisk's hugely successful The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East and even fans of Fisk's anti-Bush, anti-Blair, anti-Israeli perspectives may be disappointed to find nothing much new here.

No doubt judging by this and other books and articles the December 2008/January 2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza - and the World's response - will have made Fisk very, very angry.