Blood and betrayal

In the book's preface, Fisk writes that "we journalists try -- or should try -- to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'We didn't know -- no one told us.'" Fisk then describes a conversation he had with Amira Hass, the great reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz whose reports on the occupied Palestinian territories, he accurately notes, "have outshone anything written by non-Israeli reporters." "I was insisting that we had a vocation to write the first pages of history but she interrupted me. 'No, Robert, you're wrong,' she said. 'Our job is to monitor the centers of power.' And I think, in the end, that is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority -- all authority -- especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die." That this credo probably sounds extreme to many American journalists today is a sad commentary on the state of the profession.

But along with monitoring the powerful, Fisk is determined never to let us forget the powerless. He speaks up for the victims -- the small people, the ignored, the voiceless. Even those who disgree with some or all of his ideological convictions should be moved by his courage and tenacity in telling these stories. Beyond politics, he stands up for fairness and compassion in a world that sees too little of it.

One could choose from dozens of characters and episodes in the book to illustrate this point. But for me, three stick in the mind.

During the Iraq-Iran war, as Fisk staggers under fire down the beach at Fao, he sees a body in a gun-pit, "a young man in the foetal position, curled up like a child, already blackening with death but with a wedding ring on his finger. On this hot, spring morning, it glitters and sparkles with freshness and life." At the very end of the book Fisk again recalls the ring on that young man's hand, a symbol and memory of the waste of war, one death standing for the thousands he has seen.

Then there is an Iranian man of about 30, the brother of an Iranian soldier on trial in one of Khomeini's hanging courts, who furtively approached Fisk outside the courtroom. "'Do you think this is a fair trial?' he asked. 'My brother has no defense counsel ... This court has killed every prisoner it has tried.' There was a sad pause while the man tried to stop himself from weeping. 'My brother has a little boy. He has told the other children at his school that he will kill himself if the court killed his father.'" Soon afterward, Fisk learns that the soldier was executed. We do not learn what happened to his little boy.

And finally, there is the story of Raafat al-Ghossain, a beautiful 18-year-old artist who was killed when American planes bombed Tripoli in an attempt to get rid of Ghadafi. She was killed when the wall of the TV room where she was sleeping collapsed on her. Her mother, Saniya, treasures two crumpled pieces of paper she found in the destroyed villa. Papers containing the last brooding thoughts and dreams of an innocent teenager, they bear a poignant resemblance to the diary kept by another doomed young girl, a Jewish girl from Holland killed in a Nazi concentration camp more than 60 years ago.

"People are only faces, images, masks worn by each one of them to deceive the other ... Meanwhile, I am here watching, trying to survive, among a group of actors who try to show as if they understand it all but really have understood nothing, [the] hypocrites. Life is a game, a gamble, and people are its victims, its players ... I hope that one day I shall find that stream of light, that breath of life which will open my soul up and let [me] go FREE, FREE, FREE to eternity."

"At the bottom of the letter," Fisk writes, "Raafat has drawn the wings of four great white birds."

History has vindicated Fisk. As he predicted, George W. Bush used the 9/11 attacks to declare a war between good and evil -- between the blameless Americans and those, in Bush's infantile phrase, who "hate our freedom." As he also predicted, that war went terribly wrong, and has resulted in America being less safe, not more. Yet Fisk is accorded precious little respect for his prescience. Even liberals attack him for his excessive zeal, his unseemly frankness. In his review of "The Great War for Civilisation" in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote, "Fisk's condemnations, and his tone of voice, are so sweeping as to damage his own case." Citing Fisk's piece arguing that the 9/11 attacks did not just emanate from pure evil but also had to do with "American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes," Wheatcroft writes, "He still feels sorry for himself about the torrent of abuse he received, unable to see that, although there is a great deal to be said in criticism of American policy in the Middle East, Sept. 12, 2001, might not have been the best day to say it."

Yes, Sept. 12 was perhaps a little early to ask Americans to search their souls about their nation's foreign policy. But what is more important -- sounding an urgent alarm about matters of life and death, or tiptoeing around our delicate sensibilities? Is there a polite way to scream that someone's house is burning down? In fact, the point Fisk tried to make is scarcely being heard even now. When will it be?

Fisk is cantankerous and angry and tendentious. But as America sleepwalks through a self-destructive "war on terror," his cold-blooded clarity is essential. In this blinkered and timorous age, we need more Robert Fisks.

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