The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  I ran down the street towards the bombing. There were no cops, no ambulances yet, no soldiers, just a sea of flames in front of the St. Georges Hotel. There were men and women round me, covered in blood, crying and shaking with fear. Twenty-two cars were burning, and in one of them I saw three men cowled in fire. A woman’s hand, a hand with painted fingernails, lay on the road. Why? Not bin Laden, I said to myself. Not here in Beirut. I was staggered by the heat, the flames that crept across the road, the petrol tanks of vehicles that would explode and spray fire around me every few seconds. On the ground was a very large man, lying on his back, his socks on fire, unrecognisable. For some reason, I thought he might have been a kaak-seller, one of the army of men who provide the toasted Arabic bread that the corniche pedestrians love to eat. The first medics had arrived and another blackened figure was pulled from a car that was burning like a torch.

  Then through the smoke, I found the crater. It was hot and I climbed gingerly into it. Two plain-clothes cops were already there, picking up small shards of metal. Fast work for detectives, I thought. And it was several days before I realised that—far from collecting evidence—they were hiding it, taking it from the scene of the crime. I came across an AP reporter, an old Lebanese friend. “I think it’s Hariri’s convoy,” he said. I couldn’t believe it. Rafiq Hariri had been Lebanon’s billionaire prime minister until the previous year. He had been “Mr. Lebanon,” who had rebuilt Beirut, the symbol of its future economy, the man who had turned a city of ruins into a city of light, of fine new restaurants and shops and pedestrian malls. But the Syrians believed that he was secretly leading Lebanese opposition to their military and intelligence presence in Lebanon. They suspected that his hand lay behind an American–French UN Security Council resolution, number 1559, demanding the withdrawal of Syria’s remaining 40,000 troops in the country.

  Hariri had been a friend to me. He would call me from time to time when he was prime minister and invite me for coffee and warn me of the dangers of the Middle East. He would ask me what was really happening in Iraq, whether the insurgency had popular support. I reported after the civil war that I doubted if his ambitious reconstruction plans would ever work and whenever we saw each other in public he would bellow: “Ah, here’s the reporter who thought I couldn’t rebuild Beirut!” After I was beaten on the Afghan border in December 2001, he was the second person to call me as I lay bleeding in bed. “Robert! What happened? I will send my jet to get you from Quetta. Pervez Musharraf is my friend and we can get landing permission and have you in the AUH [American University Hospital] here tomorrow.” And I had thanked him and politely declined the offer. Journalists don’t take gifts from prime ministers.

  And now, half an hour after the bombing, his family knew he had gone; Hariri’s mobile had stopped working, along with those of all his bodyguards. The convoy’s anti-bomb neutralisers—a cluster of scanners on the roofs of the armoured four-by-fours—had failed to protect him. And next day, when I opened the Lebanese papers, there was a photograph of a large man lying on his back with his socks burning and he was identified as “the martyr prime minister Rafiq Hariri.”

  The Syrian army did leave—faster than expected, almost certainly because of the fury with which the Lebanese greeted Hariri’s assassination. A million Lebanese—almost a third of the country’s population—stood around Martyr’s Square to demand their withdrawal and the truth about Hariri’s murder. This would be another Hariri legacy. An initial UN investigation team, led by a senior Irish police officer, would discover that pro-Syrian Lebanese security officers had not only removed evidence from the crime scene—including all those burned vehicles which had formed part of Hariri’s convoy, which were taken away during the hours of darkness—but had also planted evidence in the crater.

  In the days that followed, I could only feel depressed. Death seemed to possess the Middle East and haunt my own life. Page after page of my contacts book would have little notes beside names. “Died, 2004,” I had written next to Margaret Hassan’s Baghdad telephone number. “Murdered 14/2/05” I now wrote beside Hariri’s name. Edward Said, that majestic Palestinian scholar—he who had once sworn to me that he would stay alive “because so many people want me dead”—had died of leukaemia in 2004, depriving Palestinians of their most eloquent voice. In March 2003, Rachel Corrie, a young American woman who had travelled to Gaza to try to prevent the Israelis from destroying Palestinian homes, stood in front of an Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer to force the driver to stop. But he drove over her. And then he drove over her again. When her friends ran to her help, she said: “My back is broken.” And she died.

  Did we react to these constant tragedies of life and death? No, I would say, journalism should be a vocation. One could be angry at death, but we were not here to weep. Doctors—and I’m not comparing journalism to the medical profession—don’t cry while they’re operating on the desperately sick. Our job is to record, to point the finger when we can, to challenge those “centres of power” about which Amira Hass had so courageously spoken. But I felt exhausted. There were times when I wondered how long I would continue flying across the Atlantic, escaping the kidnappers of Baghdad, increasingly stunned by the growing tragedy of the Middle East.

  In Baghdad in 2005, I walked to the voting booths with whole Iraqi families, men with babies in their arms, children with their mothers, as the air pulsated to the sound of the day’s first suicide bombers. It was a moving experience. Rarely do you see collective courage on this scale. And an Iraqi government was formed, of sorts, dominated for the first time by the country’s Shia Muslims but broken by the one phenomenon that undermined their legitimacy: the continued American occupation. In the polling stations, many of the families told us they were voting for power but also for an end to the occupation. And the occupation was not going to end. The Americans must leave, I used to say to myself. And they will leave. But they can’t leave. This was the terrible equation that now turned sand into blood. The Americans insisted that they wanted democracy across the Middle East. Iraq would be the start. But what Arab nation wanted to join the hell-disaster that Iraq had now become?

  Yes, Arabs and other Muslims wanted some of that bright, shiny democracy which we liked to brandish in front of them. But they wanted something else. They wanted justice, a setting-to-rights, a peaceful but an honourable, fair end to the decades of occupation and deceit and corruption and dictator-creation. The Iraqis wanted an end to our presence as well as to Saddam’s regime. They wanted to control their own land and own their own oil. The Syrians wanted Golan back. The Palestinians wanted a state, even if it was built on less than 22 per cent of mandate Palestine, not a 20-foot wall and occupation. The Iranians had freed themselves from the Shah, America’s brutal policeman in the Gulf, only to find themselves living in a graveyard of theocracy, their democratic elections betrayed by men who feed off the hatred for America that now lies like a blanket over the Middle East. The Afghans resisted the Soviet Union and wanted help to restore their country. They were betrayed—and finished in the hands of the Taliban. And then another great army came into their land.213 However much the newly installed rulers and the old, surviving dictators whom we had helped to power over past decades might praise the West or thank us for our financial loans or for our political support or for invading their countries, there were millions of Muslims who wanted something more: they wanted freedom from us.

  Israelis have a country—built on someone else’s land, which is their tragedy as well as that of the Arabs—but its right-wing governments, happily encouraged by that most right-wing of American governments, are destroying all hope of the peace Israel’s people deserve. When President Bush tells Israel that it can keep its major colonies on Palestinian land, he is helping to kill Israelis as well as Palestinians, because that colonial war will continue. And the Armenians. When will they receive their acknowledgement of loss and the admission of responsibility by the descendants of those who committed this holocaust?

 
; By the summer of 2006, the colossal tragedy of the Middle East had been made manifest across the region and, indeed, the world. In the darkness of Iraq, where few journalists now dared penetrate, a whole Arab society was uprooted, torn apart in an epic of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were now dying in suicide bombings, street-side executions and gangland terror. While Bush and Blair continued to boast that the country’s prospects were improving, it was plunging into a state of near civil war that the Americans were powerless to control. Indeed, the Syrians—blamed by the United States for encouraging the insurgency—were now suggesting openly that the mass murders and car bombings might be the work of the new Iraqi government, or mercenaries working for the Western occupiers—anything to turn Iraqis against each other rather than increase American casualties. In reality, the Iraqi authorities controlled only the few acres of Green Zone in the centre of Baghdad, a fortress within a city that was now the scene of daily gun battles.

  The bombing of the Shiite mosque at Samara created an open war between Sunni and Shiite militias. America’s killing of al-Qaeda’s local leadership in Iraq— represented by a Jordanian mafioso called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—only deepened a Western collapse that now embraced not only Iraq but whole provinces of Afghanistan that were reverting into the hands of the Taliban. America’s shame at Abu Ghraib was now compounded by their massacre of Sunni families in the Iraqi town of Haditha and by an atrocity south of Baghdad in which U.S. troops apparently raped an Iraqi girl, and murdered her and her family. Could Haditha, we asked ourselves, be only the surface of the mass grave? Could the corpses there be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America’s army of the slums reach further?

  The shadows of Iraq now spread wider. Sunni and Shia communities in Syria, Saudi Arabia—even in Lebanon—began to fear an inter-Arab civil war embracing the Arab lands from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. The corruption and cowardice of the old Middle Eastern regimes—Mubarak’s sclerotic government in Egypt, the PLO’s apparatchik gangs in Gaza and the West Bank—brought elections in which Islamic candidates scored astonishing successes, not least in “Palestine,” where Mahmoud Abbas’s powerless Palestinian Authority was replaced by a Hamas government democratically elected. Now Israel’s Islamic enemies were in power, but the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on them for refusing either to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist or abide by the PLO’s previous agreements with Israel—not that Israel itself had abided by many of these.

  Sharon unilaterally withdrew Jewish settlements from Gaza and was praised as a peacemaker. The ironies were obvious even if few perceived them. When Arafat, who was loved by Palestinians despite his nepotism, died, the West claimed there was now a chance for peace. When Sharon later relapsed into a terminal coma, the loss of this unindicted war criminal was hailed as a blow to peace. Urged by none other than George W. Bush to hold democratic elections, the Palestinians did so. But they chose the wrong party—Hamas—and when the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacked Israeli troops inside Israel, capturing an Israeli soldier and killing three others, the Israeli army moved back into Gaza and destroyed Palestinian Authority buildings and ministries. All this despite the fact that on 22 June 2006 Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, admitted that fourteen Palestinian civilians had been killed by Israeli forces in just nine days—most of them slaughtered as bystanders when Israel was murdering Islamic Jihad members. “There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel and Israeli army operations,” Olmert was reported to have told Abbas, “because the army does not intend to hurt innocents.”

  It was the same argument used by the Americans in Iraq. We are the power, so this morality ran. Those who do not behave as peaceful victims will be cut down. Those who resist us will be killed, no matter what the cost to innocent life. And all the while, Israel continued to enlarge its settlements on the West Bank, approving expansion of the “jurisdictional areas” of four Jewish colonies on Palestinian land on 21 May. Israel’s wall—dutifully referred to as a “security barrier” by the ever more craven BBC, apparently unaware that this was the former East German regime’s word for its own wall in Berlin—cut off tens of thousands of Palestinians from their land and homes. It was only a temporary “fence” to keep out suicide bombers, so the Israelis said—which meant, of course, that the wall could be moved farther forward into Palestinian territory as well as back to the 1967 borders that Olmert now said he would not return to. The purpose was obvious: there was to be no Palestinian state. Had not one of Sharon’s spokesmen remarked—in the months before the old man’s demise—that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza put any chance of a Palestinian West Bank state into “formaldehyde”? And when the Israelis arrested more than half the Hamas government in June 2006, even the quotation marks round the word “Palestine” seemed insufficient to indicate its collapse.

  It was little wonder that as the West’s moral and physical power was smashed in the Middle East, a new wave of al-Qaeda–style bombings reached out across the world, even taking the lives of more than fifty Londoners on 7 July 2005 when the city’s tube and bus systems were attacked by suicide bombers. Prime Minister Blair still insisted that this had nothing to do with Britain’s role in Iraq—a claim that seemed all the more mendacious when it was revealed that the British security apparatus had already warned of just such attacks after Britain occupied southern Iraq.

  America demanded an end to another crisis: Iran’s nuclear ambitions under its new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We were supposed to forget another Muslim state that has nuclear weapons as well as thousands of al-Qaeda and Taliban members within its frontiers. But Pakistan was a “friend of the West,” an ally in the “war on terror.” No one grasped that the leader of the Islamic side in this so-called war—bin Laden—was now irrelevant. The billions of dollars spent in trying to find him proved that we had still not understood the reality of the attacks of 11 September 2001: bin Laden had created al-Qaeda, but his role was now largely ceremonial, ideological rather than military. Seeking to discover his whereabouts was akin to arresting the world’s nuclear scientists after the invention of the atom bomb: al-Qaeda now existed in the minds of thousands of Muslims. The monster—as Western journalists like to refer to their enemies—had grown up and propagated.

  Iran’s own role consisted of giving support not to Iraqi insurgents, as the Americans and British maintained, but to the Iraqi government that was now run largely by Shia Muslims whose own political parties were created inside Iran during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The Iraqi ex-potentate appeared from time to time at a farcical “trial” in Baghdad, the lawyers there regularly murdered—his own among them— and Saddam himself ever more scornful of the proceedings. Should he hang for his crimes? This was the question we were all supposed to ask, the issue we were expected to debate as Iraq—with the sole exception of the nascent Kurdish state in the north—fell into the darkness of mass murder and genocide. We wanted, we Westerners, to keep turning the pages of Middle East history, to unearth some happier fortune for ourselves out of the Arab wasteland, to discover some mirror in which we could smile and watch the sand cloak the injustices of the Middle East. By July 2006, Lebanon’s renaissance had, too, descended into massive tragedy.

  We might be able to escape history. We can draw lines in our lives. The years of 1918 and 1945 created our new lives in the West. We could start again. We think we can recommend the same to the peoples of the Middle East. But we can’t. History—a history of injustice—cloaks them too deeply. Albert Camus, the pied noir who understood colonial oppression in Algeria all too vividly, wrote after the Second World War:

  It is true that we cannot “escape History,” since we are in it up to our necks. But one may propose to fight within History to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper province . . . Modern nations are driven by powerful forces along the roads of power and domination . . . They hardly need our help and, for the moment, they laugh at a
ttempts to hinder them. They will, then, continue. But I will ask only this simple question: what if these forces wind up in a dead end, what if that logic of History on which so many now rely turns out to be a will o’ the wisp?

  T. S. Eliot, writing in the same year, 1946, addressed history with equal cynicism:

  Justice itself tends to be corrupted by political passion; and that meddling in other people’s affairs which was formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention. Nations which once shrank from condemning the most flagitious violation of human rights in Germany, are now exhorted to interfere in other countries’ government—and always in the name of peace and concord. Respect for the culture, the pattern of life, of other people . . . is respect for history; and by history we set no great store.

  Have they all died for history, then, those thousands of dead—let me be frank with myself—whom I have seen with my own eyes across the Middle East? The dead soldier with the bright wedding ring on his finger, the slaughtered masses of Sabra and Chatila, the Iranians putrefying in the desert, the corpses of Palestinians and Israelis and Lebanese and Syrians and Afghans, the unspeakable suffering of the Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese, Afghan, Israeli—and, yes, American—torture chambers; was this for history? Or for justice? Or for us? We know that the Balfour Declaration was made eighty-eight years ago. But for Palestinian refugees, in the slums of their camps, Balfour spoke yesterday, last night, only an hour ago. In the Middle East, the people live their past history, again and again, every day.