The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  I sat on my hotel bed, flicking channels, watching the towers burn and their biblical descent in dust and ash. Our New York correspondent, David Usborne, had been called by the office with the story of the light aircraft hitting one of the towers and took the subway downtown, only to find the south tower falling at his feet. Again and again, the towers fell. Then the planes came in again. Only ash and smoke were taped at the Pentagon, and in that pit in the Pennsylvania field, but New York remained the iconic image that would now justify the “war on terror.” September 11th, I suspected, was to become a law, a piece of legislation that would be used to close down any conversation, lock up any suspect, invade any country. Opposition? Why, just show those bodies hurtling once more towards the streets of Manhattan.

  I lay on my pillow, watching them again on the television at the foot of my bed. They moved at such speed, they had a kind of symmetry to them until you realised that their legs were kicking, that this was the moment of awfulness, the moment I had tried to understand when I looked into those monstrous, carbonised faces of the dead at Mutla Ridge. Those figures cascaded out of the sky and they fell, over and over at the bottom of my bed, plummeting into the blankets.

  And then I realised what Karsten had meant when he urged me to concentrate on the pictures. The message was the act. Even if the casualties had not been so appalling, this wickedness so awesome, the attacks themselves so professional, this was not a routine act of “terror.” There would be no claims of responsibility, I was sure of that. There would be no statements from bin Laden or al-Qaeda, no explanations. The message—the statement—was the act itself. The claim was contained in the pictures. Our own television cameras were the claim of responsibility. I remembered again what bin Laden had said to me about his wishes for America. And looking at those pictures of the thunderous, concrete-thick clouds that surrounded Manhattan, I had to admit that New York was now “a shadow of itself.”

  But why? I was right about the reaction to this question. Next morning, a blizzard of emails began to descend on The Independent, mostly in support of my article, many demanding my resignation. The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and bin Laden have been spreading,” said one. According to the same message from Judea Pearl of UCLA, I was “drooling venom” and a professional “hate peddler.” Another missive, signed Ellen Popper, announced that I was “in cahoots with the archterrorist” bin Laden. Mark Guon labelled me “a total nut-case.” I was “psychotic,” according to Lilly and Barry Weiss. Brandon Heller of San Diego informed me that “you are actually supporting evil itself . . .” How quickly the pattern formed. Merely to suggest that Washington’s policies in the Middle East, its unconditional support for Israel, its support for Arab dictators, its approval of UN sanctions that cost the lives of so many Iraqi children, might lie behind the venomous attacks of September 11th was an act of evil.

  This harsh and unrelenting shower of emails came in by the thousand, many of them—as the days went by—using identical phrases and, in some cases, identical sentences. Clearly this was turning into an orchestrated campaign—the kind that is taken far too seriously by American papers but treated with the scorn it deserves in Britain—and when a “reader” in San Antonio announced that he would “no longer take your magazine” because of my article, it was clear that something was amiss. The Independent does not (alas) circulate in Texas—and it definitely isn’t a magazine.

  But reporters continued to avoid the “whys.” We could examine the “hows”— the hijackers had learned to fly, taken business class seats, used box-cutters—and the “whos.” The fact that the hijackers proved to be all Arabs—and that most of them came from Saudi Arabia—posed no problem to reporters or readers. This fell into the “where-and-what” slot. “Arab terrorists” are, after all, familiar characters. The sin was to connect the Arabs with the problems of the lands they came from, to ask the “why” question. All of the mass murderers came from the Middle East. Was there a problem out there? In articles and lectures in the United States, I was to raise this issue repeatedly. If a crime is committed in Los Angeles or London, the first thing the cops do is look for a motive. But when an international crime against humanity in the United States was committed on this unprecedented scale, the one thing we were not allowed to do was seek a motive.

  George Bush Junior now talked about a “crusade” against evil. The “why” question was quickly disposed of by the U.S. administration—and left unvisited by American journalists—with a one-liner: “They hate our democracy.” You were with us or against us. “We are good people.” And in the national grief that clutched every American town and city, the latter made sense. The idea that the United States somehow “deserved” such an assault—that more than three thousand innocents should pay some kind of death-price for America’s sins abroad—was immoral. But without any serious examination of what had caused these acts of mass murder—political, historical reasons—then the United States and the world might set themselves on a warpath without end, a “war on terror” which, by its very nature, had no finite aim, no foreseeable conclusion, no direction except further war and fire and blood. The credo now set up by the United States and obsequiously embraced by the world’s statesmen and media—that September 11th, 2001, “changed the world for ever”—was a lie. Countless massacres of far greater dimensions had occurred in the Middle East over previous decades without anyone suggesting that the world would never be the same again. The million and a half dead of the Iran–Iraq War—a bloodbath set in train by Saddam, with our active military support—elicited no such Manichaean observation.

  Nineteen years earlier, the greatest act of terrorism—using Israel’s own definition of that much misused word—in modern Middle Eastern history began. Typically, on 16 September 2001, no one remembered the anniversary in the West. I took a risk and wrote in the Independent that no other British newspaper— certainly no American newspaper—would recall the fact that on that date in 1982, Israel’s Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon—designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then U.S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig—which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That was more than five times the death toll in the September 11th, 2001, attacks. Yet I could not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon—no stirring speeches about democracy or liberty or “evil.” In fact, the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for “restraint.”

  No, Israel was not to blame for what happened on September 11th, 2001. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America’s failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington was the principal supporter—all these were intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged New York into an apocalypse of fire. And I began to regard the response of the United States administration and the British government as a form of cowardice. If September 11th, 2001, really did “change the world,” then bin Laden had won the moment the hijackers boarded their four airliners. In the days that followed the attacks, I felt it ever more necessary to oppose this chicanery. Bush wanted to persuade the world that it had changed for ever so that he could advance a neo-conservative war— cloaked in honourable aspirations of freedom, democracy and liberty—that would plunge the Middle East into further chaos and death. But why must I let nineteen Arab murderers change my world?

  While Bush and Tony Blair prepared their forces for an inevitable attack on Afghanistan—whose Taliban priests predictably declined to surrender their “guest” bin Laden—they went on explaining tha
t this was a war for “democracy and liberty,” that it was about men who were “attacking civilisation.” Bush informed us that “America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” But this was not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab–Muslim apocalypse, then it was intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America’s stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of the democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr. Bush was telling them about. Instead, they got a president who had just won a Saddam-like 98 per cent in Egyptian elections181—Washington’s friend, Hosni Mubarak—and a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortured and sometimes killed its people in prison. The Syrians would like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America—in many cases, educated at U.S. universities. No, it was “our” democracy and “our” liberty and freedom that Bush and Blair were talking about, our Western sanctuary that was under attack, not the vast site of terror and injustice that the Middle East had become.

  Yes, it was shameful of Arabs to rejoice at the horrors in New York and Washington. Not only did Palestinians express their satisfaction in the streets of Ramallah, they handed out celebratory sweets to motorists in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Arab friends told me later that these comparatively small demonstrations were not the only manifestations of their kind. On a bus carrying officials to the Egyptian opera in Cairo, there was cheering and hand-clapping when news of the carnage was broadcast over the bus radio. “We didn’t believe that Americans deserved this, no,” one of those present told me later. “But we were thinking to ourselves: ‘Now they know what it’s like.’” And as Palestinians would point out, America’s name is literally stamped on the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. In August 2001, I had identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in—of all places—Florida, the state where some of the September 11th suiciders trained to fly.

  Now at last, the suicide bomber had made his way west. Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis had retreated from Lebanon in 2000. Specifically because of a suicide bomber in 1983, the Americans fled Lebanon. Now the suicide bomber was here to stay. It was an exclusive weapon—it belonged to “them,” not us—and no military power appeared able to deal with this phenomenon. As long as “our” side will risk but not “give” their lives—cost-free war, after all, was partly an American invention—the suicide bomber is now the other side’s nuclear weapon. The suicider did not conform to a set of identical characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves to bits—and, more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis—had little or no formal education, a poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizballah suiciders were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

  The September 11th suicide bombers created a precedent. There were nineteen of them. Did they all know each other? Did they all know they were going to die? They must have had a good working knowledge of the fly-by-wire instrument panel of the world’s most sophisticated aircraft. It was the number that kept recurring to me in my exhaustion. If only four of them knew they were going to die, we had never seen this kind of suicide-cooperation before. In the Middle East, the suicide bomber is admired by millions of Arabs. Not because he is a mass killer— which he is—but because something invincible, something untouchable, something that has always dictated the rules without taking responsibility for the results, has now proved vulnerable. What if the numbers went on increasing? What if the school of self-immolation could produce a suicider a day, or two or three a day, calling them up Wal-Mart-style and deploying them against Western targets? It would take just twenty-two years from the first suicide bombing in Lebanon in 1982 for this fearful possibility to become reality. Iraq proved that suiciders could be summoned off-the-shelf, constantly replaced, repeatedly activated.

  I studied the notes which Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the September 11th killers, supposedly left behind. They were fearful, grotesque—but also very, very odd. If the handwritten five-page document that the FBI said it found in Atta’s baggage was genuine, then the murderers believed in a very exclusive version of Islam—or were surprisingly unfamiliar with their religion. “The time of fun and waste is gone,” Atta, or one of his associates, is reported to have written in the notes. “Be optimistic . . . Check all your items—your bag, your clothes, your knives, your will, your IDs, your passport . . . In the morning, try to pray the morning prayer with an open heart.”

  Part theological, part mission statement, the document raised more questions than it answered. Under the heading of “Last Night”—presumably the night of 10 September—the writer tells his fellow hijackers to “remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 per cent . . . Obey God, his messenger, and don’t fight among yourselves where [sic] you become weak . . . Everybody hates death, fears death . . .” The document begins with the words: “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate . . . In the name of God, of myself, and of my family.”

  The problem was that no Muslim—however ill-taught—would be likely to include his family in such a prayer. He would mention the Prophet Mohamed immediately after he mentioned God in the first line. Lebanese and Palestinian suicide bombers have never been known to refer to “the time of fun and waste”— because a Muslim would not have “wasted” his time and would regard pleasure as a reward of the afterlife.182 And what Muslim would urge his fellow believers to recite the morning prayer—and then go on to quote from it? A devout Muslim should not need to be reminded of his duty to say the first of the five prayers of the day—and would certainly not need to be reminded of the text. It was as if a Christian, urging his followers to recite the Lord’s Prayer, felt it necessary to read the whole prayer in case they didn’t remember it.

  However, the full and original Arabic text was not released by the FBI. The translation, as it stood, suggested an almost Christian view of what the hijackers might have felt—asking to be forgiven their sins, explaining that fear of death is natural, that “a believer is always plagued with problems.” A Muslim is encouraged not to fear death—it is, after all, the moment when he or she believes they will start a new life—and a believer in the Islamic world is one who is certain of his path, not “plagued with problems.” There were no references to any of Osama bin Laden’s demands—for an American withdrawal from the Gulf, an end to Israeli occupation, the overthrow of pro-American Arab regimes—nor any narrative context for the atrocities about to be committed. If the men had an aspiration—and if the document was above suspicion—then they were sending their message direct to their God.

  The prayer/instructions may have been distributed to other hijackers before the massacres occurred—The Washington Post reported that the FBI found another copy of “essentially the same document” in the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. No text of this document was released. In the past, CIA translators have turned out to be Lebanese Maronite Christians whose understanding of Islam and its prayers may have led to serious textual errors. Could this be to blame for the weird references in the notes found in Atta’s baggage? Or was there something more mysterious about the background of those who committed these crimes against humanity? American scholars had already raised questions about the use of “100 per cent”—hardly a theological term to be found in a religious exhortation—and the use of the word “optimistic” with reference to the Prophet was a decidedly modern concept.

  From the start, the hole in the story was the reported behaviour of the hijackers. Atta was said to have been a near-alcoholic, while Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, had
a Turkish girlfriend in Hamburg and enjoyed nightclubs and drinking. Was this why the published text referred to the “forgiveness” of sin? The final instruction, “to make sure that you are clean, your clothes are clean, including your shoes,” may have been intended as a call to purify a “martyr” before death. Equally, it may reflect the thoughts of a truly eccentric—and wicked—mind. The document found in Atta’s baggage ended with a heading: “When you enter the plane.” It then urged the hijackers to recite: “Oh God, open all doors for me . . . I am asking for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel . . .” Was this an attempt to smother latent feelings of compassion towards the passengers on the hijacked planes—especially the children—or towards the thousands who would die when the aircraft crashed? Did the nineteen suicide bombers say these words to themselves in their last moments? Or didn’t they need to?