Fisk has come by his knowledge and his cold, clarifying outrage honestly. Few, if any, Middle East correspondents can match his résumé: He's been everywhere and seen everything -- and he's done his historical homework, too. He opens his book with intense accounts of his three interviews with Osama bin Laden, moves on to a harrowing description of the Russian debacle in Afghanistan, then writes at length about the 20th century's forgotten war, Saddam Hussein's endless, pointless war on Iran that may have cost a million lives -- and which the U.S. abetted. There follows a devastating excursus on the Armenian genocide, which he convincingly argues deserves to be called the first Holocaust, and the largely successful Turkish campaign to deny it. Fisk then relates the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, starting with the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire and the secret Sykes-Picot agreement that betrayed Arab nationalist hopes, and moving on through Oslo and the second intifada. There follows a ghastly chapter on the savage Algerian civil war, in which a bloody-handed regime confronted even more bloodthirsty Islamists; the first Gulf War; and the Jordanian and Syrian regimes. He closes with the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the exception of the Armenian genocide, Fisk was present at all of these conflicts, and rarely in the rear. An intrepid reporter -- he was one of the only journalists to remain in Beirut during the terrifying kidnapping epidemic of the mid-to-late 1980s -- he throws himself into the middle of the action again and again. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, when fierce fighting was raging on the Shatt al-Arab waterway and the Fao peninsula, a tough AP reporter sums up Fisk's proclivities neatly while telling him what they'll be covering that day: "Well, Fisky, I'm told it's a briefing at the usual bunker then a little mosey over the Shatt and a tourist visit to Fao. Lots of gunfire and corpses -- should be right up your street." Fisk is a first-rate writer, and his vivid accounts of being under fire capture the terror, the confusion and the very dangerous detachment that he says occasionally comes over someone in the face of imminent death.

Some of what makes this book compelling and, yes, entertaining (though there are long, hideous stretches that only a sadist could find enjoyable) is simply Fisk's full-throttle account of the life of a war correspondent. He does not deny that he was drawn to it in part because of the dangerous romance of the profession, and he conveys that romance without being enthralled by it -- or by himself. "Like so many journalists in time of war, we had been desperate to get to the front line -- and even more desperate to find a reason to avoid going," he writes. Fear vied with the adrenaline rush of danger and the addictive sense of being present at huge events. "Didn't John Kifner and I admit that we had enjoyed those heart-stopping, shirt-tearing, speed-gashing rides up the wadis and over those hundreds of burned-out tanks?," he writes. "Wasn't that what being a foreign correspondent was all about? Going into battle and getting the story and arriving home safe and sound and knowing you wouldn't have to go back the next day?"

During a particularly suicidal visit to a muddy causeway in Basra, surrounded by corpses and under artillery and small-arms fire, Fisk had enough. He told his minder, a crazed and fearless Iranian Revolutionary Guard named Mazinan, that he wanted to leave. When Mazinan angrily roars, "Why?," Fisk writes what he was thinking. "Because we are cowards. Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony."

"The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East"

By Robert Fisk

Alfred A. Knopf

1,107 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

Like all foreign correspondents, Fisk has a thousand amazing stories, which he tells with gusto. Some of them are hilarious, like his account of the time when, under fire from a Soviet helicopter, he dived through a doorway into an Afghan home to find himself staring at a terrified family. Needing to assure them he wasn't Russian -- to be identified as Russian was a death sentence -- he racked his brain for the Pushtu word for journalist and triumphantly announced, "Za di inglisi atlasi kahzora yem!" But the family, far from being reassured, became even more afraid. Fisk realized that he had told them "I am an English satin bag." In addition to thinking he was an infidel and an intruder, he writes, they were now convinced he was insane.

Then there are stories of journalistic derring-do. As Russian troops poured into Afghanistan in January 1980, Fisk and a BBC film crew -- one of the only ones to make it into the country -- went undercover, driving around the country in a battered yellow Peugeot taxi, "its front and back windows draped in plastic flowers and other artificial foliage behind which we thought we could hide when driving past Soviet or Afghan military checkpoints ... Packed into Mr. Samadali's cramped Peugeot, we were recording history. Steve and Geoff sat in the back with Mike sandwiched between them, hugging the camera between his knees as Gavin and I watched the Soviet troops on their trucks. The moment we knew that no one was looking at us, I'd shout 'Go!' and Gavin -- he was, after all, the boss of our little operation -- cried 'Picture!' At this point, he and I would reach out and tear apart the curtain of plastic flowers and greenery, Mike would bring up the camera -- the lens literally brushing the sides of our necks in the front -- and start shooting through the windscreen. Every frame counted. This was the biggest Soviet military operation since the Second World War and Mike's film would not only be shown across the world but stored in the archives forever. The grey snow, the green of the Soviet armor, the dark silhouettes of the Afghans lining the highway, these were the colors and images that would portray the start of this invasion. A glance from a Russian soldier, too long a stare from a military policeman, and Gavin and I would cry 'Down!,' Mike would bury his camera between his legs and we would let the artificial foliage flop back across the inside of the windscreen."

But autobiography and the romance of being a foreign correspondent play only minor roles in this book. The ironies of history, the follies of governments and the endless, stupefying tragedy of war are its major themes. Describing the sublime vista of the mountains of China as he and the film crew descend into the Valley of the Indus, Fisk writes, "We felt, we young men, on top of the world." But then he goes on: "The tragedy of this epic had not yet gripped us. How could I know that 17 years later I would be standing on this very same stretch of road as Osama bin Laden's gunmen prayed beneath that fiery comet? How could I know, as I stood with Gavin on that hillside, that bin Laden himself, only twenty-two years old, was at that very moment only a few miles from us, in the very same mountain chain, urging his young Arab fighters to join their Muslim brothers at war with the Russians?" The "fearful tragedy" of Afghanistan, Fisk notes, "would last for more than a quarter of a century and cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America."

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