War correspondent Robert Fisk gave a rare talk in London this week to launch his new book, The great war of civilisation: the conquest of the Middle East.
Weighing in at 1.7kg and 1300 pages, the book represents thirty years of Fisk’s career as a journalist in Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosova, Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. His source consists of 328,000 notes made over those years, and his famous contact book. This makes Fisk sound like a figure from a bygone age when war reportage was “an honourable profession”. Certainly his own record is an honourable one in an age when war correspondents are “embedded” with the invading and occupying forces.
Fisk himself is quick to dismiss any romanticism. He recounted only one story of bravery, characteristically not about himself but about Jon Snow, now with Channel Four News, who swam out into the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which lay at the disputed heart of the Iran-Iraq war, in 1980. His mission was to rescue the crew of a merchant ship, caught between the two armies. Snow completes the rescue and they both file their reports, writes Fisk:
“Then I sank into the deepest bed of the Intercontinental Hotel and woke to find a telex with a nudge-in-the-ribs question from the foreign desk in London: ‘Why you no swam in shark-infested Shatt al-Arab river?’ But here the sweet stories must end.”
Fisk explained to his London audience that, in writing the book, he realised that this story, which appears on pages 237 to 242, would indeed be the last light-hearted moment of the book. From there on in, it would be a painful recounting of horror and death.
The book is not written in chronological order, but flits about. Nevertheless, the First World War and its immediate aftermath forms a multilayered motif for Fisk’s own experiences. Its title is taken from the inscription on the back of his father’s medal from that war. Fisk told us how Britain drew the borders of Palestine, Ireland, Iraq and Yugoslavia in the eighteen months following WWI, and that he had “spent my life watching people die in those borders”.
The echoes between the two eras are sometimes co-incidental. Fisk points out that Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Colonel Gerald Leachman in Khan Dhari, near Fallujah in 1920, at the start of the anti-British insurgency; “in 2003 it would be the scene of the first killing of an American occupation soldier by a roadside bomb” (p177).
But Fisk’s serious point is that 1918-20 witnessed Britain, France, etc. carving up of whole areas of the globe. As he told the London audience, “When I talk to a Palestinian I realise that the Balfour Declaration [which established the mandate of Palestine and the Jewish right to settle] was signed yesterday, last night, because he is still living with the consequences.”
So what is Fisk’s view on the current situation in Iraq? He dismisses the US/UK strategy to see off the insurgency through a combination of the ballot box and the bullet as hopelessly wide of the mark. “The constitution and referendum are not the subject of talk in the living rooms of Baghdad. They are not relevant to the horror and terror of their world.” He says the British conduct a heavily armoured patrol of Amara in the south once a day; the rest of the time, it is patrolled by militiamen. Yet the Brits say they’re “in control”.
Fisk says a conundrum lies at the centre of the situation: “America must leave, America will leave. America can’t leave.” His assessment of how this will end is that the Iraqis will eventually force the US and British troops out of the country. Mediators will have to be found, though this will be harder even than during the Algerian war for independence because so many have been killed. On questioning, Fisk predicted that Iran would – indeed was already in the shape of Shia parties in the governmental coalition – play a role in negotiating an acceptable withdrawal for the occupation forces.
His opinion on what will happen next seems to be less clear. On the one hand, he says, “The insurgents are trying to get the US out. But that’s not all they want. Afterwards they want to say, ‘we are the liberators'”. On the other hand, he thinks civil war is unlikely: Iraq has never had a civil war. Fisk claims never to have heard an Iraqi predict civil war at the end of the occupation, and points out that in large part Iraq remains a tribal society, within which Sunnis and Shias are mixed. When Fisk asked one tribal leader about his fears of civil war, his reply was, “What? You expect me to kill my wife?”
There is, however, a problem with this perspective, and it is related to Fisk’s lack of a theoretical framework with which to put together his unrivalled experiences into a unified whole. Fisk is a sceptic. He quoted approvingly Amira Hass of the Haaretz newspaper that “our job is to monitor the centres of power”.
This scepticism shows clearly, as one might expect, in Fisk’s use of language. Asked why he calls the resistance fighters “insurgents”, he said that he had “banned the word terrorist from his brain,” but that neither could he call people who blow up mosques and marketplaces a “resistance”. Similarly, though he does refer to the “American Empire”, the word “imperialism” is never to be found in a Fisk article.
But this is a problem. Only by placing the Iraq war and occupation in the context of the epoch of imperialism can we chart the dangers and possibilities of a progressive solution. Imperialism is the strongest social force on the planet with huge resources at its disposal. The USA is its only superpower. However, this is not to say that it can rule in the manner of its choosing. It has to deal with other imperialist forces and even with other, minor capitalist classes in order to protect its global and regional power bases.
The Iraqi constitution – which now looks like it will be endorsed by the referendum due to the lockdown in the west and Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s instruction to all Shias to vote “Yes” – will further entrench sectarianism as the basis for economics and politics. The Iraqi bourgeoisie is exceptionally weak and divided after thirty years of dictatorship, war, sanctions and occupation. Fractions of this class – among the Kurds, the Shias, the Sunnis – will jockey for prime position regarding territory and resources, and seek favour with the US and other imperialist and regional powers like the European Union and Iran. This is inevitable – unless a national resistance movement can be formed.
By giving potentially far-reaching powers to Iraqi regions – including rights over future gas and oil finds and the right to form their own militia – and by making the central government weak, US imperialism – along with its British sidekick – hope to play the role of all-powerful arbiter, playing one fraction off against the other.
This is a very dangerous strategy, which could lead to years of fratricidal skirmishes and even civil war. Tribal loyalties would, unfortunately, count for little in such a situation. Indeed, Bosnians, especially in the urban centres, would have scoffed at the idea of civil war there before the final collapse of Tito’s Stalinist reign. Intermarriage – as in Rwanda between Tutsi and Hutu – was common.
But Bosnia also gave us a glimpse of what might have been. In the strong working class areas like Sarajevo, Tuzla and Srebrenica, multi-ethnic militia prevented pogroms and fought for a solution based on solidarity and social ownership and control of the resources. This glimpse needs to be transformed into a beam of light in Iraq. The success of trade unions like the General Union of Oil Employees shows that the Iraqi working class is willing and able to resist both sectarianism and imperialism, that it can fight for a working class solution to the economic crisis gripping the country.
It is hardly surprising, given the counter-revolutionary role played by the Iraqi Communist Party and the reactionary positions of the various other populist parties, that the GUOE has developed a syndicalist, anti-party ideology. Unfortunately, this will leave the union – and the wider working class – at best off the field while other, hostile class forces shape the future of the country; at worse, workers and poor farmers will be swept along into opposing camps. Only a revolutionary working class party can unite the urban and rural poor behind a programme which links the tasks of ejecting the imperialist occupation to those of establishing a socialist society.
In short, the working class has to come to the head of the anti-imperialist resistance.
It would be too much to ask Robert Fisk to provide such an analysis in his book. But what he does do is provide much of the information that can help put flesh on such a skeletal programme. And for that he is well worth reading – and thanking for a lifetime spent critically monitoring the centres of power.