The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The knights of the First Crusade, after massacring the entire population of Beirut, had moved along the very edge of the Mediterranean towards Jerusalem to avoid the arrows of Arab archers; and I often reflected that they must have travelled over the very Lebanese rocks around which the sea frothed and gurgled opposite my balcony. I have photographs on my apartment walls of the French fleet off Beirut in 1918 and the arrival of General Henri Gouraud, the first French mandate governor, who travelled to Damascus and stood at that most green-draped of tombs in the Umayyad mosque and, in what must be one of the most inflammatory statements in modern Middle East history, told the tomb: “Saladin, we have returned.” Lara Marlowe gave me an antique pair of French naval binoculars of the mandate period—they may well have hung around the neck of a French officer serving in Lebanon—and in the evenings I would use them to watch the Israeli gunboats silhouetted on the horizon or the NATO warships sliding into Beirut port. When the multinational force had arrived here in 1982 to escort Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian fighters from Lebanon—and then returned to protect the Palestinian survivors of the Sabra and Chatila camps massacre—I counted twenty-eight NATO vessels off my apartment. From one of them, the Americans fired their first shells into Lebanon. And one night, I saw a strange white luminosity moving above the neighbouring apartment blocks and only after a minute realised that they were the lights of an American battleship towering over the city.

  Iranians I meet often believe that Beirut is populated by CIA agents; Americans are convinced that Beirut is packed with bearded Iranian intelligence men. Sometimes I suspect they are both right. For in a sense, Beirut continues the tradition of postwar Vienna, an axis for the world’s opponents to look at each other and wonder what common bond or hatred keeps them on this earth together. I recall that an American ambassador in Beirut once described how Lebanon was a beacon of democracy in the Arab world—in the very same week that Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah announced that Lebanon was “a lung through which Iran breathes.”

  Those were the days, in October 1983, when Vice President George Bush could announce—after the killing of 241 U.S. servicemen at the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks—that “we are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shake the foreign policy of the United States. Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror.” How archaic those words seem now, how lost in time. By 1998, we had found a new focus for what was to become “war on terror.” Al-Qaeda’s bombs were striking at the American jugular, at embassies and barracks. President Bill Clinton bombed Sudan—an innocent pharmaceuticals factory, despite Washington’s initial lies to the contrary—and then sent a swarm of cruise missiles into Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan. Where was this going to end?

  Against such history, what did Bill’s death matter? It was easy to forget, sitting on my Beirut balcony, that General Gouraud had arrived in Lebanon as a result of the Sykes–Picot agreement and the Anglo–French victory in the 1914–18 war, that even before the official collapse of the Ottoman empire, the French were deposing the Arab king, Feisal, who had taken Damascus. France would rule Syria and carve Lebanon out of its body and give it to a thin Christian Maronite majority that would soon be a minority amid the Muslims of the new and artificial French-created Lebanese state. Lebanon’s existence, like much of the future Middle East, was contingent upon the victory of the British, French and Americans, and was made possible by the peace that followed the armistice of 11 November 1918—on the evening of which Second Lieutenant Bill Fisk had marched to his billets in Louvencourt.

  I have in my Beirut home volumes of works on the French Mandate—most of them published in Paris in 1921, recording the reconstruction of the country, the restructuring of the Ottoman system of justice, the new currency and banks and railway renovation, all part of France’s supposed mission of civilisation to the Middle East. The French brought to the Lebanese–Syrian railway system a set of modern steam locomotives for use between Tripoli and Homs, big 08-0s which had been awarded to them under the Treaty of Versailles as wartime reparations from the Kaiser’s Germany.

  With a schoolboy enthusiasm for steam locos that my father understood all too well, I went up to look at them in the aftermath of Lebanon’s civil war. They still stood on their tracks, these great steamers, their boilers cut open by shells, their eight driving wheels chipped by bullets—they had formed part of the Palestinian front line against Syrian troops around Tripoli’s port in 1983—and their oil continuing to bleed from their gaskets, a railway junkyard of early nineteenth-century state-of-the-art technology. For when I wrote down the engine serial numbers and returned to Beirut and called that renowned expert of Middle East steam, Rabbi Walter Rothschild of Leeds, he informed me that they had indeed belonged to the Reich railway system. These behemoths, it transpired, had once pulled the middle classes of Germany from Berlin to Danzig. And I remembered how once, long ago or so it seems to me now—it was in 1991—a woman friend whom I treasured wrote me a poem in which she said that she loved “the little boy in you who wanted to drive steam trains.”

  And I did. I loved railways. Peggy’s French holiday scrapbook shows me loco-spotting at Creil, and one of Peggy’s first colour films shows me watching the red-and-cream Trans-Europe express pulling into Freiburg station in Germany. Once in Lebanon, I found that the government had temporarily restored the old track between Beirut and Byblos, and I sat with the driver as he steered his massive Polish diesel loco and its single, tiny wooden carriage—brought across from British India after the First World War—so slowly that Abed would travel alongside the train and wave at me as the engine-driver tooted cars out of our way.

  And then there came a day, of course, when it was my mother’s turn to die. Peggy had suffered from Parkinson’s disease since before Bill’s death, but she had carried on living in the home I grew up in at Maidstone, where three kindly ladies looked after her. She wanted to die at home and so in September 1998 there was another call from Maidstone and this time one of the women who cared for Peggy said she thought my mother had only a few more days to live. I still had time to reach England. Years before her death, Peggy told me there must be no black ties at her funeral. “Everyone must wear bright clothes,” she said. And so in the beautiful little Anglo-Saxon church at Barming outside Maidstone, she had the funeral she asked for. There were mountains of flowers, not a black tie in sight—even the bearers wore casual suits—and the congregation sang “All things bright and beautiful.” But my mother’s death was not as she would have wished. And it was certainly not a death she deserved.

  Like Bill, she was a patriotic soul, though with none of Bill’s bombast. In the Second World War, during the Battle of Britain, she joined the Royal Air Force, repairing radio sets in war-damaged Spitfires; her sister Bibby trained air gunners in radio navigation. Peggy became a flame of optimism over my young life. “Everything will work out all right in the end,” she used to say to me. And when I once asked what was the point of struggling with my homework when we were all going to die one day, she replied: “By the time you grow up, they may have found a cure for that.” In a way, my mother did believe in immortality, and I took her incurable optimism with me thousands of miles from Kent—to Afghanistan, through the terrible battles of the Iran–Iraq War and to the conflict in Lebanon.

  But there was another side to Peggy. As Father fretted in retirement, she became a magistrate. I recall how one day, gently arguing with my father—whose views on criminal justice might have commended themselves to Judge Jeffreys— Peggy said, quite sharply: “The accused often tell the truth—and I don’t always trust policemen.” When I was a small boy, the first book she urged me to read on my own was The Diary of Anne Frank—because she wanted me to understand the nature of good and evil. During the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, she discovered a rare telephone line into the Lebanese capital and used it to tell me how she deplored the cruelty visited upon the Palestinians. She asked me repeatedly why governments spent so much
money on guns.

  She took up painting, watercolours and oils, still life and portraits. Her diary testifies to the difficulties of living with Bill in his old age but she would talk quietly about the life of independence she would lead afterwards. She wanted to travel, to visit Lebanon, to go to Ireland. She saw a lifetime of painting in front of her. But after the onset of Parkinson’s, she steadily lost the physical ability to live a dignified life—as surely as she maintained the will to survive. Within four years, she could scarcely speak or walk. So she communicated by pointing with a stick to letters on a piece of cardboard. Then she could no longer point. She insisted on being pushed about the garden of her home in a wheelchair. Then Peggy became too ill to move. Her last attempt to paint ended when she threw her brush onto the floor in frustration. Almost to the end, she believed they would find a cure for Parkinson’s—the same “they” who might one day find a cure for mortality.

  In her last days, Peggy lost the power to swallow or eat and caught pneumonia. Bibby visited her and told her that she had been “the apple in your mother’s eye” and Peggy had managed a smile. When I arrived home, she was desperately trying to cough, apparently drowning in her own lungs, weeping with pain. And as I watched her dying, I remembered the cost of Bill Clinton’s latest adventure in the Middle East. In all, the U.S. government spent $100 million in five minutes firing those cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan. How much had it spent on investigating Parkinson’s disease? How much, for that matter, had the British government spent?

  On 11 September 1998, the day after Peggy died—there was no glimmer of recognition or emotion, Peggy just stopped breathing—I called the Parkinson’s Disease Society in London. Each year, they put up between $1.5 and $2 million on research. So did the British government. But in 1997, an official for the society told me, the Medical Research Council stopped funding neurological research. I called New York to talk to one of the top Parkinson’s groups in the United States. Around $45 million was spent by the U.S. government on neurological research (not all on Parkinson’s), another $10 million by private organisations, just over $3 million by the U.S. Defense Department (for veterans), and pharmaceutical companies spent about $35 million. So we—the West—were spending less on Parkinson’s research in a year than we spent in five minutes on weapons.

  It was the kind of human folly that would have angered Peggy. And at her flowered funeral, I decided to point this out. I suggested to her friends who came to Barming church that we spent far too much time accepting cruel deaths, uncomplaining when money that might have cured cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s was spent on weapons or military adventures. “Why do we not rage against those who accept the shameful idea that sickness must be ‘incurable,’ that our betters know what they are doing when they prefer missiles to medicine?” I asked. If resources had been better spent, I said, Peggy would not have been in that coffin in front of the altar.

  All this had an odd effect. You could have heard a flower petal drop when I was speaking. But the rector, a kindly, intelligent man though evidently not from the Church Militant, responded with a prayer, saying he would “commit this anger to God”—which, of course, entirely missed the point. Unless there is a Heavenly Post Office which redirects packages of anger to our presidents and prime ministers, there wasn’t much point in bothering the Almighty. It was Peggy’s friends I was addressing. Some of them had told me of their own relatives who were dying of supposedly incurable diseases; yet I felt afterwards that I had failed to make them understand as surely as I had the rector.

  They talked about Peggy being “at rest” now that she was no longer suffering. Letters arrived that spoke of Peggy’s “release”—as if my mother wanted to die. I heard from one old lady about “God’s will,” which would suggest, if taken to its logical conclusion, that God was a sadist. If the message of Peggy’s life was optimism and joy for others, the manner of her death—courtesy of our society’s inverted values—was totally unnecessary. My father, an old-fashioned man, would have condemned my remarks in the church. It was also, I suppose, the first time Osama bin Laden’s name had been mentioned in the sanctuary of the Church of England. Peggy might have objected to the vehemence of my words. But she would have wanted me to tell the truth.

  She missed September 11, 2001, by three years and a day. Would her love of life, her optimism, have been tarnished by the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Or would the sense of right and wrong which had provoked her anguished phone call to besieged Beirut in 1982 have surfaced? She had a sense of proportion that was quite lacking in the aftermath of 2001. I think it was because she had lived through the Second World War. She always complained when politicians used parallels with that Golgotha of a struggle. She knew that perhaps 50 million perished in those years, that thousands were slaughtered around the world every day between 1939 and 1945. Hard-hearted though it may be to ask, what are 3,000 dead compared with such a testament of blood? Certainly, Peggy—and, it has to be said, in old age my father too—would curse at the mendacity of our presidents and prime ministers. Peggy had finely tuned political antennae and—in the way that the dead come back to us and talk in our imaginations—I could hear her anger in the years to come, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, just as I could feel her confidence in life. And now that this life was becoming more dangerous—especially to journalists, especially for us—I could remember with ever greater clarity the words I had muttered to myself as Peggy lay dead in bed in the front room of her home. I suppose every child without brothers and sisters says the same thing: I’m next.

  I flew back to Beirut that wet September. I had known the Lebanese airline crews for years and I sat as so often behind the pilot’s seat. A journalist has a magpie’s instinct for the collection of useless facts, a rag-bag of inane details conjured from a thousand flights, visits to a hundred hospitals. The Lebanese pilots were political beasts, mines of gossip and information. They would soak up every story I told them and—by way of return, I suppose—they would try to interest me in their job. They would teach me to read the aircraft instruments, help me to understand the principles of powered flight, the purpose of the engine reverse thrust, the system of communication with ground control. Could it really be this easy to learn to fly?

  “I am lucky to be alive,” a local taxi-man said to me when I climbed into his car on the Beirut Corniche four years ago. “And you are also lucky to be alive.” And it was my companion who noted the significance of these words—and then I thought yes, I was lucky, very lucky to be alive. I had travelled so far over those years, I had criss-crossed the Middle East month after month, and by the mid-Nineties I was lecturing across Europe and America, flying to the United States from Beirut, often twice a month. One evening I would be lecturing in Los Angeles, next morning I would be in Paris and twenty-four hours later Abed would be driving me through southern Lebanon. I would wake up on airliners, perspiring, quite forgetting where I was travelling, anxiously peering through the windows. Was it morning or dusk? Had I arranged to call the office from Paris? Should I have filed a report from California last night—“last night” being mid-morning in London? My parents could never have imagined such a life.

  I was still Northern Ireland correspondent when I first visited New York in 1975. I was flying to see a girl from Clonmel who worked in Wall Street and I arrived in a snowstorm, bashed my hire-car against the side of a bus on the Verrazano bridge and then—with my date sitting beside me, impatient for dinner—I misread the route to our restaurant and got lost beside the East River. I brushed the ice off a phone booth and dialled the restaurant. They’d keep open for us, the waiter said, just follow the direction of the new World Trade Center towers and I’d drive past the restaurant. It was blizzarding across New York but we watched those two towers far across Manhattan for more than an hour until we drove right up to them and there was the waiter standing in the snow with an umbrella.

  The United States did not seem so
aggressive then. The British were angry that the IRA could raise funds in America—since these were the years before the “war on terror,” the RAF did not choose to take the conflict to the enemy and bomb Boston—and the United Nations seemed able to handle “peace” in the aftermath of the 1973 Middle East war. I had visited pre–civil war Beirut on holiday from Belfast and noticed that there were too many Lebanese soldiers in the streets, that the Palestinians lived, armed and resentful, in the slums of Lebanon’s refugee camps. But I was too involved then with the conflict in Britain’s own dependency of Northern Ireland to comprehend the fires that were being lit so far away.