Fisk does not condone Palestinian terrorism, but he places it in historical context and addresses its causes -- the kind of dispassionate analysis rarely found in America, especially after 9/11 and under the angrily moralistic leadership of George W. Bush. Instead of thinking clearly, Fisk writes, we twitch to the knee-jerk word "terrorism." "'Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason for state-sponsored violence -- ourviolence -- which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously," he writes. "Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale."

Fisk makes the obvious point that when the Bush administration signed off on such injustice and occupation by approving the illegal Israeli settlement of the West Bank -- a departure from long-standing U.S. policy -- it gave an enormous boon to the very terrorists it is fighting. "Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States supports Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands, had now been proven true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could bin Laden have than George W. Bush? Didn't he realize what this meant for young American soldiers in Iraq? Or were Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?"

Like Ariel Sharon, George W. Bush has promiscuously invoked "terror," even coining a phrase, the "war on terror," for his apparently endless crusade against "evil." Fisk saves his most caustic prose for Bush's war on Iraq, which in a memorable phrase he calls "frivolous and demented." He dismisses not only the official American explanations for the war, but any possible moral justification it might have. Fisk never took seriously the idea that the Bush administration launched the war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, which was how the war was sold to the American people. Nor did he buy the fallback reason, thrust forward when the WMD proved nonexistent, that America had suddenly discovered its moral duty to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime. Nor the fallback after the fallback, the claim that the war would spread democracy in the region. Those were, he writes, familiar, official lies. This was a war, he writes, to redraw the map of the Middle East -- an imperial war, driven by irrational rage after 9/11, to control oil, protect Israel, and impose our will on the world.

Of course, the war did remove Saddam Hussein -- whose crimes Fisk had documented decades ago, when most Americans still thought of him, if at all, as a strongman ally. Some American liberals, like George Packer, author of "The Assassin's Gate," still cling to the hope that America's war on Iraq, however unsavory and hypocritical in its motivations and flawed in its execution, might nonetheless prove down the road to be morally justified. Fisk never addresses this argument directly, but it seems clear that he would regard it as obscene. War is not an instrument that can be used to achieve desired ends; violence begets violence, and at the end the noble ideals are gone and a heap of corpses remains. For Fisk, who has spent his career recording its hideous consequences, "war is not primarily about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit." Some wars, of course, are justifiable. Fisk seems to acknowledge that Saddam's invasion of Kuwait could not be allowed to stand. But the Iraq war, an illegal war of choice launched by a callous superpower with a dreadful track record in the region, is not one of them. America's hands are too dirty, its goals too selfish and it is too despised throughout the region.

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

By Robert Fisk

Alfred A. Knopf

1,107 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

Moreover, Fisk points out that the moral arguments put forward by the war's supporters are nakedly hypocritical. The "evil tyrant" Saddam had been our friend and ally just 15 years earlier, when he launched a brutal war against Iran that killed perhaps a million people, as our policymakers looked on in approval. Crimes against humanity? Weapons of mass destruction? "Iraq was already using gas to kill thousands of Iranian soldiers when Donald Rumsfeld made his notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad to shake Saddam's hand and ask him for permission to reopen the American embassy." Fisk points out that we knew he was using gas, as did the rest of the world, including the Arab states, which said nothing because they too wanted to smash Iran. Our outrage was selective and self-serving: When the Iraqis dropped cyanide gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja, the U.S. tried to blame Iran and paid little attention to it -- the incident only became worthy of our attention when Bush wanted to drum up reasons to invade Iraq. The Bush administration cited Saddam's failure to comply with U.N. resolutions as a casus belli, but it ignored Israel's flagrant defiance of them.

How could anyone take America's moral claims seriously, Fisk asks, when we had imposed sanctions on Iraq that may have killed 500,000 children -- an appalling policy, still grossly underreported, that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright defended, saying, "We think the price was worth it"? Who could believe we were suddenly deeply concerned about the suffering of the Iraqi people, when we had never paid the least attention to the miserable fate of the Palestinians, or of the millions throughout the region oppressed, tortured and killed by despots whom America props up because they serve our purposes?

And if the war in Iraq was so highly moral, Fisk asks, why has the United States refused to make any attempt to record civilian casualties in Iraq, which by some estimates, including nonviolent fatalities caused by the war, could amount to 100,000? (This week, Bush acknowledged that about 30,000 Iraqis had been killed.)

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