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Weekend Edition
April 26 /27, 2008
An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk
Fisk Fighting
By WAJAHAT ALI
"One thing I'm going to say to you now, please make sure - and I hope
you're tape recording this - but please make sure you're quoting me
accurately. Don't even for the basis of shortening something make me say
something I haven't said,' orders celebrated journalist Robert Fisk.
I reply, `You won't be misquoted, and if you want I'll -'
`Because the biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or
misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.'
I assuage him, `I've taped every single word, and I've got what you've
said down, and so far no interview has -'
`And when you're putting it together, because you're not going to use it
all, try to make sure my counteracting points are there. So, if I call
Ahmedinjad a `crackpot' keep it in, but make sure I'm also talking about
Iran in general. Where I'm criticizing the Israelis, make sure I also
criticize the Arabs.'
Throughout the interview I kept thinking the world's most decorated
foreign correspondent would have an equally brilliant career as a
headmaster or drill sergeant.
It took nearly a week of phone tag to secure interview time with Robert
Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who has lived in
the region for nearly three decades. Each time I called him, he seemed
to give me multiple numbers, one land line in Ireland and another cell
line in Lebanon, and ever changing appointments due to his frenetic
travel schedule. He finally agreed to a fifteen-minute interview that
quickly ballooned into a lengthy, hour plus conversation and an
enlightening and entertaining Middle East history lesson by the
celebrated reporter.
Allow me to state that rumors of Fisk's passionate, opinionated
garrulousness are indeed fact. Some detractors claim his personality
infects his writing with a biased bombastic flair reflecting arrogance,
while his supporters, who are many, highlight his impassioned voice as
authentic and refreshing. The seasoned veteran couldn't resist giving
this ingénue unsolicited pointers and tips, both concerning journalism
and Middle Eastern history.
This is an exclusive and candid conversation with one of the few
journalistic authorities on the Middle East.
ALI: A recent British report said Gaza is in its worst condition since
the last 30 years. Just last week, a seminary was targeted and several
civilians were killed. Americans see this and think `Arabs vs. Jews,
they're just always killing each other.' What's the ground scene reality
regarding the current volatility? Is one side to be blamed more than the
other for the recent conflagration?
FISK: Oh, God! Sounds like a CNN question! You know, this is about
history, this is about the way our societies develop and what we're told
and what we're not told. You've got the same situation in The West Bank,
Gaza, Israel or `Palestine' as you had after the end of the First World
War. Two groups of people want to live on the same piece of real estate
and they have conflicting claims, one of which is based largely on deed
which goes right back to the Ottoman period and the British period. And
the case of settlements seems to be based on the idea of what God has
promised. And those two things don't work out. You can't say on the one
hand, well, I have got the deeds to the land, but no God's actually
given it to me. That's the end of conversation, isn't it? From there on,
you can spin out to all sorts of historical allegories, and ways of
reporting, and ways of reporting history, and it doesn't go anywhere.
Each time we're told we have to start again, we have to start the clock
>From now and we have to forget the past. You can't forget the past
anymore than you can in Iraq or you can in Europe or America.
The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and
Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. Well, you can't constantly go
back to WW2 and call Saddam the Hitler of Baghdad, and then on the other
hand say we aren't going to go back to history to other parts of the
Middle East, because that's inconvenient, so we're just going to start
>From here. We always hear people say, `Let's move forward.' (Laughs.)
The psychobabble language of marriage guidance counselors, you know,
only look to the future let's not look at the past even though so much
sorrow has happened. I'm afraid you have to.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim, or
wish to at least, that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised
Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just
mean the left hand bit that became Israel. Many Israelis now and would
be Israelis they could claim that Palestine meant everything up to the
Jordan River. It was Chaim Weizmann's hope that Jewish settlements would
be allowed East of the Jordan River after the Cairo conference held in
1921. You have two groups of people who were made conflicting promises
by the British. One for Arab independence and promises that Jewish
immigration would not in any way make the indigenous Arabs dispossessed
or suffer in any way. And the other which was a promise by Britain for
support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those things are as
impossible to integrate then as they are today.
We keep going around the Middle East and setting up our various
dictators, whether they be the Kings of Arabia, or whether they be King
Farooq in Egypt, or King Idris in Libya. Then, when people didn't want
the various kings, we brought in the various generals. General Sadat and
Colonel Kaddafi. King Abdullah was a soldier, King Hussein was a
solider. So, we get surprised when people say, `Enough is enough!' But,
in the end of the day, when you say, `Who is right and who is wrong?'
It's history that is wrong. It's the mistakes we've made and the
injustices we've committed in that region. You can start it off with the
Ottoman Empire, you can start it off in post WW1, and you can start it
off with the Americans. And as you look back in history, the papers get
more thin and fragile, don't they?
ALI: You've been in the Middle East for decades. You've seen both
Republican and Democratic foreign policy -
FISK: What's the difference? There's no difference. Where's the
difference between Clinton and Bush? It's like people saying Labor
government is going to come in Israel and be different than Likud, and
it turns out not to be different at all.
ALI: Well, Obama as you know before his run as President, was more
partial towards Palestinian rights. But, last month along with Clinton,
he wrote a letter strongly condemning Palestinian violence. Many wonder,
if he or even Clinton wins, is there going to be any change in policy?
FISK: Here's the thing that's going to be different in policy regarding
the Middle East in the United States whoever wins the election: it's
utterly irrelevant.
ALI: Lebanon seems to be a forgotten story. In 2006, it had a struggle
with Israel which devastated a large part of that society -
FISK: Hezbollah did. I don't know if Lebanon did at all, but Hezbollah did.
ALI: Has the Lebanese society been able to recover in the past 2 years,
or has it only strengthened Hezbollah?
FISK: Well, it certainly strengthened Hezbollah, but their political
performance since then has been so ambiguous in that whatever it gained
militarily in terms of prestige it has substantially lost politically
inside Lebanon itself. Look, the only good news in Lebanon is that civil
war hasn't restarted. Lot of people thought it would, and I thought it
would, but it hasn't. This could mean that they have realized the folly
of war: that you don't win. It's all about death; it's not about
victory. It also means that an awful lot Lebanese who were sent away as
children to be educated during the civil war - you know to Paris,
London, Geneva, and Boston wherever - have returned to Lebanon and said,
`I don't want this sectarian nonsense, and I want to live in an ordinary
country without any more war.' To that extent, Lebanon - the fact it has
not disintegrated like Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq despite the wish of
the Americans and Iranians to use it as battleground - which was what
2006 was about - is quite a tribute to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Whether
they appreciate their good fortune is quite a different matter.
ALI: You have experience in Kosovo and Serbia, and you know Kosovo
declared independence and sovereignty from Serbia on Feb 17. Do you
believe there is complicity of Western agents in its prolonged
suffering? Is this a new chapter signaling hope? And could it have come
earlier?
FISK: I have a book coming out in two and a half years time which is
going to involve quite a lot of things about Kosovo and Bosnia and
particularly Islam. It's going to be called `Night of Power' which you
don't need me to explain. They are very different places, of course. The
Serb actions in Bosnia were not driven by the same political motives as
the Serb actions in Kosovo, which Serbs believe is part of Serbia, and
you can argue that until the cows home. I don't know about `Agents'
being complicit in anything. On one hand I never totally dismiss the
`plot' unquote because we know, for example, the CIA and the British
were involved in overthrowing Mossadegh [Democratically elected leader
of Iran overthrown by the CIA] and bringing in the Shah in 50's Iran.
That's all true. But the idea you can manipulate states into
independence is probably pie in the sky.
The treatment of the Kosovars was such that Europe was bound to extend
its support for independence in one form or the other. Now, we know in
the Balkans, as always, regional European powers have their fingers in
it. Just as the Germans supported the Croation independence, and we know
why historically. We know historically many Albanians entered Kosovo
during and before the Tito Period and changed its ethnic makeup. But,
then again, how far do you go back in history when it was the other way
around?
I think this is really an Ottoman story and the breakup of the Ottoman
Empire, which began the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire began
to fray inside Europe, and I'm talking about Bulgaria as well as Serbia,
it didn't do so in a neat way. It did so with massacres and horrific
killings, which if you read the contemporary accounts seems to be what
we were writing about Bosnia in the 1990's. There was a considerable
historical heritage left over, unfortunately blood that most dealt with
in an imperfect and unjust way. I think that Kosovo contains the seeds
of further hostilities because of course I can't imagine any Serbian
leader denouncing Serbia's right to regard Kosova as part of the
historic homeland of Serbia. And I don't think Bosnia has been solved
for that matter. It's just an independent state in one federal illusion,
isn't it? Everyone is illusory in the Ottoman empire of what it was. You
have to go back to the Ottomans to work all this out.
There's this very interesting book that came out called Jerusalem 1912
and it argues quite persuasively that fundamental issues of land
ownership and Jewish immigration became major issues before the First
World War, before the British and Turks were at war, before the Ottoman
Empire disintegrated. And I think you have to see the problems in the
Balkans, although they don't involve Arabs or Jews, in a similar light.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our
grandfathers did. I wrote the book Great War of Civilization, and my
father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current
Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in
what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
One of the problems that current leadership has is that in the past they
had time to reflect and discuss what they were going to do and how best
to deal with a particular situation. Their decisions might have been
grotesquely unjust or wrong, but at least they took them based on
considered reflections, whether they be in London clubs or Downing
Street or while reading Shelley in bed, but at least they had an
opportunity to reflect on what they were doing. Today, we live by Press
conferences, TV prime time, News at 10, CBS news, ABC, CNN exclusives
whatever it might be. We get pumped up by Presidential elections,
Primary elections, so policies are made on the move - in the backs of
cars, on mobile phones, over drinks before a hurried dinner when you
have another press conference afterwards. This is why you have this cult
of - and I don't like this phrase - `spin doctors,' a man who comes up
with an easy phrase. So, instead of having reflective decision making
which takes into consideration what will happen tomorrow and the day
after tomorrow and the year after next, the decision making is taken on
the basis on how to respond to some criticism one minute ago based on a
Press conference. For this reason, you don't have any long term planning.
That's why we didn't have any plan for post war Iraq, because we were
too busy going on CNN announcing victory, so we hadn't thought about
that. There is an excellent academic pamphlet by Corelli Barnett, who is
a prominent British historian, which goes step by step from archive
documents in the British Public Record Office and National Archives from
the Cabinet papers of 1941. And Churchill in 1941, when Britain still
expected invasion by Nazi Germany, and before Hitler invaded Russia,
before America was in the war after two long and profitable years of
neutrality, Churchill appointed a Cabinet committee in London under Nazi
bombardment to plan the post War government of Occupied Germany. Now,
there's forward thinking!
There's a sign of how governments used to behave. Four years before the
end of the War, when it looked as if the Germans were going to win,
Churchill and the British, alone without any American involvement in the
War, he was planning post War Germany. And as British troops moved under
fire into the German city of Cologne in 1945, British Civil Servants in
flak jackets went with them to take over the Town Hall, because they
wanted civil administration to resume immediately. To get the fuel
running, get rationing, get the people fed. It worked, and people didn't
die. I mean the Germans were poor and hungry, but they didn't die.
There's a classic example of how before the age of instant television,
news press conferences, spin doctors, etc., people planned for the
future and generally it tended to work; by and large, it was successful.
That was four years before the end of WW2. Four days before the
Americans occupied the center of Baghdad, they didn't have a coherent
plan. They had an odd committee set up in the State Department, but no
one listened to it and it had 20 people. So, you're carried along on
this instant decision making: `So, whaddya' gonna' do, Mr. Bush? How do
you respond to this?' And Bush has had 5 minutes before hand to bone up
on what he is going to say.
We have a program in Britain called Desert Island Discs on the BBC,
where basically you are allowed to choose 8 records that you play on a
desert island if you were marooned. One of my records I chose was
Winston Churchill's speech to the British on June 18, 1940 when Dunkirk
was finished, and the British were alone in the War against Nazi Europe.
And I played it, because Bush and Blair keep claiming they are
Churchill, but here was the real thing. And Churchill's voice immensely
tired and maybe he had a few glasses before he spoke, and you have this
extraordinary feeling of power and a man who is using his knowledge of
history and imbuing it into other people. What knowledge of history does
Bush have? He confused Cambodia with Vietnam. He talks about Vietnam but
he managed to avoid going there, as we know Cheney did.
You know another problem we have at the moment is that I don't think
there's a single senior Western statesmen, which might change if McCain
becomes President, who has ever been in a war. All of the Middle Eastern
leaders have been in wars, I promise you. But none of the Western
leaders have been in war. You see, their knowledge of wars, The Bushes
and the Blairs, are from TV, Hollywood Movies. When Churchill committed
people to war, he had been in the trenches in WW1. Theodore Roosevelt
had direct experience. Eisenhower certainly did, I mean he was Supreme
Allied Commander of WW2. So, you had in the post war years, you had
Western leadership that knew what war was about: it was about death and
screaming and loss and sorrow. Now, for people like Blair whose shadow
lingers over the dull and boring Gordon Brown in London, war was a
policy option: something you did if you couldn't get in with the United
Nations. `Do we need a second revolution or not?' That wasn't the way
people used to go to war. (Laughs.)
One of the things that is lacking today is common sense. Anybody with
common sense, anybody who sat down would've said, `Don't - Attack -
Iraq.' Bush actually did start talking about democracy in Iraq before he
invaded, despite what the lefty commentators say, he didn't say we want
democracy but he said, `We want democracy in the Middle East.' I
remember I wrote a piece in November 2002 asking, `He wants a democracy
in the Middle East, and he wants to start in Iraq?!?' which is not
common sense. I think a lot of the problems we have in the moment is a
failure to have a long-term view of anything.
Even if you take the Israeli government who says, `We are going to root
out the evil weed of terror, terror, terror,' I mean they've been saying
that since 1948. How many air raids have there been over Lebanon since
1948? Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they've achieved
nothing, because still we're told we have to root out the evil weed of
terror. Because it gets repeated ad nauseam on television it has become
normal. Nobody says, `Hang on a minute, there's a problem here. If
Israel's still at war 60 years after it came in existence, there is a
problem there.'
ALI: You have this quote, `There's this misconception that journalists
can be objective.' You also say, `What journalism is really about -
FISK: I think what I said is `impartial.' We should be partial on the
side of justice. One of the problems we have in the Middle East in the
moment, partly because of the pressure put on journalists particularly
in the United States by lobby groups. I'm including the Israeli Lobby,
and there is an Arab Lobby, as we know. Partly because of this awful
trend of American journalism where you have to give 50% of your time to
each side, you end up producing a sort of matrix, a mathematical formula
which is bland, lacking in any kind of passion or realism, and is a bit
like reading a mathematics problem. Much of the Middle East is reported
like a football match: this side did this, they kicked a goal, they
replied back, the ball went through the goal post, etc. Giving equal
space in your report to two antagonists is ridiculous! I mean if you
were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century you wouldn't give
equal time to the slave ship captain, you'd give time to the slaves. If
you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you
don't give equal time to SS spokesman, you go and talk to the survivors
and talk about the victims.
If you were present as I was in 2001 in West Jerusalem when an Israeli
pizzeria was blown up and most of the victims were school children. I
was just down the street. I reported about the Israeli woman who had a
chair leg through her, and an Israeli child who had his eyes blown out.
I said in my piece, `What did this child ever do to the Palestinians?'
And do you think I gave equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesman? No, I
did not. Nor when I was in Sabra Shatilla [Massacre of Palestinian
Refugees in Lebanon overseen by Ariel Sharon] did I give time to Israeli
spokesman? If we walk as ordinary human beings out of our house and we
see an atrocity, we are angry. Well, we journalists should be angry too
if we feel that way about it. Not say, `Well, on the other hand, we just
balance this by X,Y,Z.'
ALI: Can't someone say that we readily dismiss FOX News as being biased
and right wing, then can't we just as readily dismiss you since you're
not an objective, unbiased voyeur?
FISK: The thing about FOX news is that they have a predetermined
version. They aren't interested in justice; they are interested in the
`right,' aren't they? They're interested in the right wing of the
Republican side, unless a Democrat happens to be right wing enough for
them. They have a political slant. I'm not left wing. I've never voted
in an election in my life. If I'm in the Israeli part of Jerusalem, I
write with great passion and you can look up the story in my book The
Great War for Civilization about the bombing of the Israeli pizzeria. I
was in Bosnia and wrote passionately against the murderous Serbs, I mean
those Serbs who were murdering. But if you report on Serbia during the
NATO bombing I report with great feeling about the Serb civilians who
were done to death by NATO and knowingly done so. NATO knew they were
killing civilians in Serbia during the Kosovo war. And I also reported
what was being done to Kosovo Albanians. That's not what FOX News does.
FOX News has a certain agenda.
ALI: Many of your critics, specifically some Zionist critics, say that
you've lived in the Middle East for so long that you've become partial
and succumbed to `their' narrative.
FISK: Same old, tiresome, boring old thing, you know. This always comes
up. If you arrive at a place, and you don't write satisfactory one week
after arriving, they say you can't see the woods for the trees. And if
you do understand enough after two weeks, they say you've gone native. I
haven't risked my life in the most dangerous parts of the world to
become a partial reporter politically. I'd be out of my mind if I did
that. By the way, you keep talking about my critics and what the
Zionists say. I don't read blogs, because I don't use the Internet
because I think it's crap. But I know there are two or three writers in
the UK and I know there are three or four in America who regularly
attack me, but that's about it. I mean if you see my mailbag which comes
in at 250 letters a week, maybe two or three are very critical, and the
rest are either nice or helping or suggesting stories. What I'm saying
is that one of the problems I have is the people will exaggerate the
numbers and say, `Well, your critics say...' which makes it seem there is
an army out there of 600 people constantly writing articles and
commentary. And, it's not true. There aren't. I come to the States that
averages every three and half weeks for lectures, and I don't come
across these people. The last one who was really obnoxious was in Texas
for an interview, and the second cameraman came over to me after the
program and said he wanted to hit me. (Laughs.) I said turn back the
cameras, and we'll do this live, but be careful when you do. Most people
don't care a damn about the Middle East, I'm sorry to say.
ALI: In America or the world?
FISK: Pretty much everywhere, particularly in America I'm sorry to say.
And also in Europe, I mean how much of my daily paper is on the Middle
East? And this idea that there is an army of critics or an army of
supporters is simply untrue. By and large, people read you and they move
on to read something else. What percentage of people read The
Independent either online or on paper? I have no idea. I probably get
more mail from America than I do from Britain, which is interesting. I'm
read in the Arab world as well as in Israel. I think I've had two
anonymous phone calls in my life in 32 years both from Turkey objecting
to what I've written about the Armenian genocide. One of them was
objecting to criticism of the Turkish Army, and one of them was
objecting to my coverage of the Armenian Genocide, which obviously
occurred a few years before I was born to put it mildly.
There are campaigns occasionally for accuracy, some outfit that operates
somewhere in Boston, and you get city postcards from people writing to
the editors, `I will never buy you magazine again' signed so and so from
Houston, Texas. Firstly, we are not a magazine. Secondly, alas, we do
not circulate in Houston, Texas, so this person hasn't been buying it
anywhere, but he's just been encouraged to write this silly postcard
which goes in the bin. But when you have a campaign organized by a lobby
group, you tend to take it seriously in America, we don't. We put it in
the rubbish bin. We are interested in individual, serious letters by
people. So am I. I encourage them in the paper. If the letters,
especially if they are critical or have a certain mischief about them, I
insist we run them, and I think it's good. I think it makes people think
and stirs up their idea of questioning about what's going on in the
Middle East.
The honest truth is I don't use the internet, so I don't see all the
blogs or Googles or whatever they are. I can tell by, obviously,
traveling and people coming up to me in airplanes, but I don't pay any
attention to it. I'm a journalist and a reporter and one of the great
advantages I have on the paper is that my editor likes me to write
opinion columns and also wants me to be a street reporter. So, when
there's a bombing explosion in Beirut or a war in Iraq, I'm there. Which
is in a unique position to be in, because most reporters might be on a
story but they don't have an opinion column. And most of the people who
write columns don't go out on the beat.
ALI: You call them `hotel journalists,' correct?
FISK: No, that's not true. What I said was that journalists, who worked
in Baghdad and who, for perfectly good reasons, were unable to leave
their hotels, i.e. security concerns, insurance companies hired by the
papers to insure their lives, all their special security detail like the
ex-military people who guard them. They find themselves effectively
using their mobile phone from their hotel room, a guarded hotel, right?
The problem is they don't tell their readers, their listeners, their
viewers that they're reporting from the hotel. They give the impression
when they give a `Baghdad Dateline' that they're driving around the
streets. You find articles written by someone who is sitting in an
office with sandbags around the walls and aren't let out. The much more
serious side is that readers are entitled to believe, if they see it,
`Dateline: Badghad' or Basra or whatever - that the reporter has
movement. That he can go around and check out stories. But in fact if
you read it, it's just a police source that says, `American military
says...American government says' and end of story. And it becomes echo
chamber for what anyone in the Green Zone says. I mean I can live in the
West of Ireland with a mobile phone and ring the Green Zone and produce
the same report. (Laughs.)
ALI: They're touted as experts in the American media.
FISK: I don't know. Look, I have American colleagues, one of them in the
New York Times, who goes out and gets good stories. So, I'm not pasting
my criticism on all journalists. There's lots of people trying to do
what I'm trying to do. But, I do object to reporters who do not leave
their hotels, but do not tell their readers that they do not leave their
hotels. That's what I call `hotel journalism.' I'm not talking about any
reporter on the beat anywhere as being a hotel journalist.
What's happening now as stories get more dangerous in the Middle East -
and The Middle East is getting more lethal for reporting - as stories
get more dangerous, more and more the Western correspondents are sending
the local people out to do the story. In other words, Iraqis are on the
streets in Baghdad reporting back to the New York Times reporter what
they see. I noticed last year you will remember there was an Al Qaeda
type organization that started an uprising in the northern Lebanese city
of Tripoli and took over apartment blocks. And I jumped in a car, and
they had taken over an apartment block in Tripoli and were shooting at
the Army, and I raced up to Tripoli. I know Lebanon very well, I mean
I've been living there for almost 32 years. And I got into center
Tripoli, which is very Sunni Muslim city, very pro Saddam I might add
with [his] pictures outside the window. And there were bullets whizzing
around the streets, and there were dead bodies, the armies were about to
storm inside this building.
By pure good luck or bad luck, depending on your point of view, I knew
the Lebanese Colonel who was going to take the army unit into this
apartment block and storm into it and take it back. I'd been to his
wedding, actually, which means I'm his friend. (Laughs.) `Robert, do you
want to come with us?' I didn't use a flak jacket because it is too
bloody hot. So, I suddenly found the ridiculous Robert Fisk storming
into this building with these soldiers, and I never carry a weapon or
flak jacket or anything, and seeing the most incredible things.
Afterwards, I was out there in the street with all these dead bodies on
the street. What astounded me was that I was the only Western reporter
there. Most of the other reporters were either from Lebanese newspapers
or Lebanese working for Western news organizations. I was the only blue
eyed, Anglo Saxon guy there. My Western colleagues were there and they
were in the hotel, and I'm not criticizing them. What was interesting is
that on the very first, critical day of the Al Qaeda take over, I looked
around the street and I didn't see another Westerner. There were lots of
Lebanese soldiers, policeman, people standing by, other journalists,
camera crew, they were all Lebanese. Now, twenty years ago that wouldn't
be the case.
ALI: You just gave a really good microcosm example of how you're on `the
scene.' You're one of the very few people who is `lucky' - well, I don't
think that is the proper word, I don't even what the proper word is - to
meet Osama Bin Laden and have an interview with him.
FISK: It's definitely not lucky. (Laughs.) No, it's not. I'll tell you
this guy will follow me for the rest of my life. It's more and more
unlucky I'll let you know.
ALI: You interviewed him three times in total, and he made some very
interesting comments about you. I don't know how you feel about that,
but he was quite reverential. In America, we see Osama as the horned
devil himself, and in certain parts of the Muslim world -
FISK: He sees Mr. Bush pretty much the same way, of course.
ALI: Well, certain parts see him as a halo-wearing messiah. Steve Coll
has a new book out on Bin Laden, and in my interview with him he told me
one of the main reasons for his charismatic leadership is his ability to
be multicultural, to understand the ability to look beyond ethnicity and
race in his global jihad.
FISK: No, that's not - that's a very trendy explanation. It's very
simple why Bin Laden is popular in the Arab world; it's because he says
things that local presidents and kings won't say.
ALI: What does he say?
FISK: He speaks about the injustice to Muslim people in a way that
Mubarak or King Abdullah would never say. Because of course they're
basically run by us, aren't they? He presents what millions of Arabs
think. I'm not implying a million of Egyptians and Gulfies want to
actually fly airplanes into tall buildings - they don't. But when he
describes the collapse of the Caliphate, which was the Ottoman Empire,
when he talks about the immorality of the Gulf princes and kings, when
he talks of the political or military or psychological occupation of the
Muslim world by the West, he's saying things which millions and millions
of Muslims agree with. But they don't hear their own leadership: the
Khaddafis, the Mubaraks, or the King Abdullahs, or the Assads saying.
This doesn't mean Bin Laden is particularly intuitively brilliant. I
mean Ahmadinejad says a lot of things which are absolutely bullshit, but
they probably catch somebody's eye. I mean Ahmadinejad is outrageous, I
mean he's a crackpot. When he starts questioning the Jewish Holocaust,
it's similar to the Turks questioning the Armenian Holocaust, or the
Israelis saying that they never drove the Palestinians out of Palestine,
they left on their own accord because they were going to wait until the
Jews were driven to the sea and they obeyed all the radio instructions.
You know the story.
But, you know, Bin Laden has a voice, because the leadership of the Arab
world doesn't have a voice. Or if it does, it's a weak one supporting
the United States in general. I mean, the Mubaraks and the Abdullahs are
allowed to say, ` If the war continues in Gaza, there will be an
explosion in the Middle East.' That's all right, that's part of the
course. They said it 70 times and it doesn't even get reported very
often. But the moment they start to talks seriously about the fact that
people feel they are under the thumb of theWest, which they do, then
they are in trouble. I mean the fact we only express our criticism of
Mubarak is when the police lock up the wrong person who has a PhD from
Boston or Harvard or whatever.
By and large, you see there is no Arab representative. Nor has there
been for decades. It's very interesting after the First World War, the
Egyptians kept wanting democracy, and they kept saying they wanted the
King out. So, the British locked them up. And the same thing happened in
Iraq in the 1920's, you the know the British arrived after they invaded
in 1917 and the Iraqis said, `You encouraged us to want independence,
and when we say we want independence, you put us in prison!' Which is
true of course.
Naturally, if you go back to the 20's and 30's, where I think a lot of
the history also beings, anyone who wanted a real freedom was
imprisoned. So, the only way the Arabs learned you can have a change was
through a revolution. Which meant no democracy of course. Meant you did
everything in secret, whether you did it in office or clubs or a
basement of a mosque is irrelevant. So, the failure of the Arab world to
have a democracy is partially our fault.
You have to remember before the First World War, Egyptian academics and
thinkers and philosophers were returning from France with the most
extraordinary sort of Republican - which I'm using in the French
Republic sense - views of liberation, freedom and equality. This is the
decade where women didn't want to wear the scarf in Cairo and other
cities in Egypt. Where they had willingly embraced the West. You have to
go back to the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest, industrial construction
in the world was the Suez Canal. It was built by the French but under
the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans imported state of the art steam
locomotives from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Constantinople, the pashas
were learning to paint and play the piano - they wanted to be like us.
So we destroyed them. You see? We like it the way it is now. We don't
have to have too many occupation armies, but they all do what they're
told, and if they don't, then we bomb them.
ALI: If Bin Laden's grievances against the U.S. and the West are
removed, and maybe you can tell us his major grievances since you've met
him, then -
FISK: The world doesn't work like this. Bin Laden justifies his actions
on certain grounds. Whether it be the corruption of the Saudi Royal
Family, the `Crusaders' to use his phrase, he says `Western forces' in
the Muslim World. And remember, one of his achievements is that he's
brought Western forces into two more Muslim countries that they weren't
in before - Afghanistan and Iraq. And I used the word `achievement'
ironically when I said that.
His raison d'etre will change, like we all do. To suggest that Bin Laden
is out there as a negotiable figure is ridiculous. He doesn't want to
negotiate. One of the main problems with Al Qaeda is that there is no
negotiation. We still haven't learned that Bin Laden isn't important
anymore. He's created Al Qaeda. That's it. It's over. It doesn't matter
if he dies of kidney failure, or whether he's bombed or dies of old age
or gets bored or gets assassinated or anything else, it's over. Al Qaeda
exists. And unless we deal with the injustice in the Middle East, there
will always be an Al Qaeda. It might not be called Al Qaeda, it could be
called `Al Qaeda Al Ummah,' `Al Qaeda Saudia,' `Al Qaeda in Iraq.' The
very word is intrinsically rather boring, its foundation doesn't set me
off on a romantic thought. But, I always use the phrase `Al Qaeda-like',
which is inspirational but not card membership type connections.
Still we think, `If we capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, then we'll be
ok.' And it's not true. There was a very fine French historian of the
First World War, and he did a very good interview in Le Pointe some
months ago, and he said you know we haven't realized the world has
changed militarily. But in the past, after the first and second World
Wars, we thought we could have foreign adventures and be free. We could
go to Vietnam. No North Vietnamese ever blew themselves up in front of
the White House. We went and fought in Korea, but no North Korean
soldier came and blew himself up in the London Underground. But today we
can't do this anymore, if we send our soldiers into Iraq, we are not
saving Gloucester or Denver. That's not going to change. We're not going
to back to nice, friendly left wing nationalists who wouldn't dream of
setting off bombs in our cities anymore. That's gone.
Whether you regard this as increasing immorality of our opponents that
is entirely up to you. But factually, we're not safe at home anymore.
ALI: So, this is the future? We have to face the future and this is how
it's going to be?
FISK: Well, you've got to think of the years to come, not just about the
next press conference. We're going back to the same point I made to you
earlier.
ALI: I had an interview with Seymour Hersh and asked him about Iran's
activity in the Middle East. He said Iran is doing what it's always been
doing in supporting the Shias. That's what it's doing in Lebanon and in
Iraq. Now, you mention Ahmadinejad as being a `Crackpot' and -
FISK: I think he's a crackpot, yeah.
ALI: People say Iran has its fingers in the cookie jar in helping
Hezbollah and helping the Iraqi insurgents. Is Iran completely innocent?
Should it be attacked? And what would -
FISK: You're doing what CNN and FOX do. You're producing a sustained
government narrative and then asking a question about it. Yes, they do
support Hezbollah financially, militarily, and in training, we know
that. Do they support the Iraqi insurgency? Morally perhaps. I mean,
mentally they might, but they don't need to teach the insurgents how to
blow up vehicles. I mean Iraqi insurgents, many of them in the Army,
fought Iranians for 8 years. They know how to blow up vehicles and put
bombs together. They don't need help from the Iranians. So, from the
start you have to disentangle this conventional wisdom on how Iran is
this big, dark nation that is manipulating the Shias through out the
Middle East. I don't think the Shias of Iraq need military help from
Iran. I don't think they need money actually. And besides when you have
a situation when most of the Iraqi government is beholden to Iran, what
the hell are you worried about the insurgents for? When Ahmedinejad took
the car from the airport like any normal human being, instead of being
flown in armored helicopter, which was quite impressive, the American
press didn't make a lot of it, but it's there.
You have to go back again. When the Shah was in power, the West wanted
Iran to be nuclear power. He was our policeman in the Gulf, wasn't he?
The Shah went to New York and gave an interview saying he wanted Iran to
have nuclear weapons, because after all Russia and America had them. And
there wasn't a complaint from the White House. In fact, shortly after he
met Carter in the White House. And we in Europe, in particular, climbed
over each other's shoulders to supply the nuclear hardware to produce
nuclear power stations.
When Khomeini came to power and the Islamic Revolution, before the
Iran-Iraq War, and I actually was present as he said this in Tehran. He
said nuclear weapons are gifts of the devil and we will close them down.
And all nuclear instillations, and they weren't nuclear weapon
instillations, they were just nuclear instillations for power
generation, were closed down under Khomeini's orders. At the height of
the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, when Saddam was supported by Britain and the
United States, and was using gas, a weapons of mass destruction, against
the Iranians, the Iranian High Command came to the conclusion that he
was using these weapons, then Khomeini reluctantly reopened the nuclear
establishment in Iran as a direct result of our friend Saddam using gas
and chemicals. Which in some cases were supplied by companies on the
East Coast of the United States. That's what put the Iranians in the
nuclear game.
Now, when you see it from this historical perspective, they're getting a
bit of the raw deal, aren't they? All the mullahs want their hands on
weapons (Laughs.) That wasn't the case originally. I don't see any
particular reason why the Iranians want to make nuclear weapons at the
moment. Because if they fire a weapon at Tel Aviv, they know Tehran will
be destroyed. On the other hand, if you look at North Korea, quite
clearly you will not be invaded if you have a nuclear weapon. Then
again, you have to stand back and look at the long term and ask, are we,
or our children or our grandchildren, our future generations always
going to around saying, `Well, he can have nuclear weapons, because he
is nice and is on our side on the War on Terror and his name is
Musharaff. And they can't have nuclear weapons because they have turbans
on.'
I mean are we going to do this A-B-C joke every year deciding who may or
may not have these things. If we deal with a world that deals about
justice, and this can apply to Eastern Europe, the Far East, Latin
America, or the Middle East, the whole institute of worrying about
nuclear weapons begins to diminish. After the rising of 1798 in Ireland,
where I am now, every Irishman who was found even to have a pitchfork
that could be used as a weapon was hanged. But, in pubs you can see them
on the walls. Because it's become irrelevant. There's this peace here.
If you go to England, you can find swords from the English Civil War.
Well, if in the aftermath of that war and we're talking about the 17th
century, if you had been found with that sword, you would've been
executed. But now it's in a pub on the wall of a bar.
You know, I'm not trying to be naïve when I say this, but with the whole
issue of nuclear weapons, once the purpose of the weapon has
disappeared, the weapon is pointless. If Iran didn't feel itself
surrounded by the Americans, which it is because the Americans are in
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, I mean I
don't think they'd worry so much about defending Iran. Although, of
course, you realize getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam, both enemies
of Iran, means Iran basically won the American war in Iraq. You've got
to start your questions not with a narrative: `Are they supporting the
Iraqi insurgency?' Probably not. `Are they supporting Hezbollah?'
Definitely. But, then again who is supporting the Israelis? The Americans.
There's no doubt that the missile which the Hezbollah fired at that
Israeli gunboat in the 2006 war, which almost sank it by the way, was
>From Iran. But don't tell me that the bombs dropped on Hezbollah weren't
>From the United States, they were of course. With all these questions
you're asking me, and I'm not trying to be critical of you, you need to
go three steps back where you start asking the questions.
As the interview ends, Fisk complains, `And there's nothing worse than
the immortal phrase, `I never said that.' Because people say, `Ah,
that's what he says now.' And you'll be surprised at the number of
people, who might be quite sympathetic to what you're saying, who manage
to blunder into one single quote which they [an interviewer] slightly
touch up or forget something quite innocently, and I am fighting off the
problems that creates for the next 6 months long after you've forgotten
ever talking to me. So, please, please be careful and make sure you're
very accurate in what I say, and it's balanced out.'
`I'll keep it very fair. I'll quote you, and I won't delete a word,' I
promise.
`Fine. That's all I need to hear.'
And with that, the class ends and the student finally exhales.
Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor
a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law,
whose work, "The Domestic Crusaders," (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the
first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America.
His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at
[email protected]
Weekend Edition
April 26 /27, 2008
An Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk
Fisk Fighting
By WAJAHAT ALI
"One thing I'm going to say to you now, please make sure - and I hope
you're tape recording this - but please make sure you're quoting me
accurately. Don't even for the basis of shortening something make me say
something I haven't said,' orders celebrated journalist Robert Fisk.
I reply, `You won't be misquoted, and if you want I'll -'
`Because the biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or
misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.'
I assuage him, `I've taped every single word, and I've got what you've
said down, and so far no interview has -'
`And when you're putting it together, because you're not going to use it
all, try to make sure my counteracting points are there. So, if I call
Ahmedinjad a `crackpot' keep it in, but make sure I'm also talking about
Iran in general. Where I'm criticizing the Israelis, make sure I also
criticize the Arabs.'
Throughout the interview I kept thinking the world's most decorated
foreign correspondent would have an equally brilliant career as a
headmaster or drill sergeant.
It took nearly a week of phone tag to secure interview time with Robert
Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who has lived in
the region for nearly three decades. Each time I called him, he seemed
to give me multiple numbers, one land line in Ireland and another cell
line in Lebanon, and ever changing appointments due to his frenetic
travel schedule. He finally agreed to a fifteen-minute interview that
quickly ballooned into a lengthy, hour plus conversation and an
enlightening and entertaining Middle East history lesson by the
celebrated reporter.
Allow me to state that rumors of Fisk's passionate, opinionated
garrulousness are indeed fact. Some detractors claim his personality
infects his writing with a biased bombastic flair reflecting arrogance,
while his supporters, who are many, highlight his impassioned voice as
authentic and refreshing. The seasoned veteran couldn't resist giving
this ingénue unsolicited pointers and tips, both concerning journalism
and Middle Eastern history.
This is an exclusive and candid conversation with one of the few
journalistic authorities on the Middle East.
ALI: A recent British report said Gaza is in its worst condition since
the last 30 years. Just last week, a seminary was targeted and several
civilians were killed. Americans see this and think `Arabs vs. Jews,
they're just always killing each other.' What's the ground scene reality
regarding the current volatility? Is one side to be blamed more than the
other for the recent conflagration?
FISK: Oh, God! Sounds like a CNN question! You know, this is about
history, this is about the way our societies develop and what we're told
and what we're not told. You've got the same situation in The West Bank,
Gaza, Israel or `Palestine' as you had after the end of the First World
War. Two groups of people want to live on the same piece of real estate
and they have conflicting claims, one of which is based largely on deed
which goes right back to the Ottoman period and the British period. And
the case of settlements seems to be based on the idea of what God has
promised. And those two things don't work out. You can't say on the one
hand, well, I have got the deeds to the land, but no God's actually
given it to me. That's the end of conversation, isn't it? From there on,
you can spin out to all sorts of historical allegories, and ways of
reporting, and ways of reporting history, and it doesn't go anywhere.
Each time we're told we have to start again, we have to start the clock
>From now and we have to forget the past. You can't forget the past
anymore than you can in Iraq or you can in Europe or America.
The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and
Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq. Well, you can't constantly go
back to WW2 and call Saddam the Hitler of Baghdad, and then on the other
hand say we aren't going to go back to history to other parts of the
Middle East, because that's inconvenient, so we're just going to start
>From here. We always hear people say, `Let's move forward.' (Laughs.)
The psychobabble language of marriage guidance counselors, you know,
only look to the future let's not look at the past even though so much
sorrow has happened. I'm afraid you have to.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim, or
wish to at least, that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised
Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just
mean the left hand bit that became Israel. Many Israelis now and would
be Israelis they could claim that Palestine meant everything up to the
Jordan River. It was Chaim Weizmann's hope that Jewish settlements would
be allowed East of the Jordan River after the Cairo conference held in
1921. You have two groups of people who were made conflicting promises
by the British. One for Arab independence and promises that Jewish
immigration would not in any way make the indigenous Arabs dispossessed
or suffer in any way. And the other which was a promise by Britain for
support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those things are as
impossible to integrate then as they are today.
We keep going around the Middle East and setting up our various
dictators, whether they be the Kings of Arabia, or whether they be King
Farooq in Egypt, or King Idris in Libya. Then, when people didn't want
the various kings, we brought in the various generals. General Sadat and
Colonel Kaddafi. King Abdullah was a soldier, King Hussein was a
solider. So, we get surprised when people say, `Enough is enough!' But,
in the end of the day, when you say, `Who is right and who is wrong?'
It's history that is wrong. It's the mistakes we've made and the
injustices we've committed in that region. You can start it off with the
Ottoman Empire, you can start it off in post WW1, and you can start it
off with the Americans. And as you look back in history, the papers get
more thin and fragile, don't they?
ALI: You've been in the Middle East for decades. You've seen both
Republican and Democratic foreign policy -
FISK: What's the difference? There's no difference. Where's the
difference between Clinton and Bush? It's like people saying Labor
government is going to come in Israel and be different than Likud, and
it turns out not to be different at all.
ALI: Well, Obama as you know before his run as President, was more
partial towards Palestinian rights. But, last month along with Clinton,
he wrote a letter strongly condemning Palestinian violence. Many wonder,
if he or even Clinton wins, is there going to be any change in policy?
FISK: Here's the thing that's going to be different in policy regarding
the Middle East in the United States whoever wins the election: it's
utterly irrelevant.
ALI: Lebanon seems to be a forgotten story. In 2006, it had a struggle
with Israel which devastated a large part of that society -
FISK: Hezbollah did. I don't know if Lebanon did at all, but Hezbollah did.
ALI: Has the Lebanese society been able to recover in the past 2 years,
or has it only strengthened Hezbollah?
FISK: Well, it certainly strengthened Hezbollah, but their political
performance since then has been so ambiguous in that whatever it gained
militarily in terms of prestige it has substantially lost politically
inside Lebanon itself. Look, the only good news in Lebanon is that civil
war hasn't restarted. Lot of people thought it would, and I thought it
would, but it hasn't. This could mean that they have realized the folly
of war: that you don't win. It's all about death; it's not about
victory. It also means that an awful lot Lebanese who were sent away as
children to be educated during the civil war - you know to Paris,
London, Geneva, and Boston wherever - have returned to Lebanon and said,
`I don't want this sectarian nonsense, and I want to live in an ordinary
country without any more war.' To that extent, Lebanon - the fact it has
not disintegrated like Gaza or Afghanistan or Iraq despite the wish of
the Americans and Iranians to use it as battleground - which was what
2006 was about - is quite a tribute to Lebanon and the Lebanese. Whether
they appreciate their good fortune is quite a different matter.
ALI: You have experience in Kosovo and Serbia, and you know Kosovo
declared independence and sovereignty from Serbia on Feb 17. Do you
believe there is complicity of Western agents in its prolonged
suffering? Is this a new chapter signaling hope? And could it have come
earlier?
FISK: I have a book coming out in two and a half years time which is
going to involve quite a lot of things about Kosovo and Bosnia and
particularly Islam. It's going to be called `Night of Power' which you
don't need me to explain. They are very different places, of course. The
Serb actions in Bosnia were not driven by the same political motives as
the Serb actions in Kosovo, which Serbs believe is part of Serbia, and
you can argue that until the cows home. I don't know about `Agents'
being complicit in anything. On one hand I never totally dismiss the
`plot' unquote because we know, for example, the CIA and the British
were involved in overthrowing Mossadegh [Democratically elected leader
of Iran overthrown by the CIA] and bringing in the Shah in 50's Iran.
That's all true. But the idea you can manipulate states into
independence is probably pie in the sky.
The treatment of the Kosovars was such that Europe was bound to extend
its support for independence in one form or the other. Now, we know in
the Balkans, as always, regional European powers have their fingers in
it. Just as the Germans supported the Croation independence, and we know
why historically. We know historically many Albanians entered Kosovo
during and before the Tito Period and changed its ethnic makeup. But,
then again, how far do you go back in history when it was the other way
around?
I think this is really an Ottoman story and the breakup of the Ottoman
Empire, which began the First World War. When the Ottoman Empire began
to fray inside Europe, and I'm talking about Bulgaria as well as Serbia,
it didn't do so in a neat way. It did so with massacres and horrific
killings, which if you read the contemporary accounts seems to be what
we were writing about Bosnia in the 1990's. There was a considerable
historical heritage left over, unfortunately blood that most dealt with
in an imperfect and unjust way. I think that Kosovo contains the seeds
of further hostilities because of course I can't imagine any Serbian
leader denouncing Serbia's right to regard Kosova as part of the
historic homeland of Serbia. And I don't think Bosnia has been solved
for that matter. It's just an independent state in one federal illusion,
isn't it? Everyone is illusory in the Ottoman empire of what it was. You
have to go back to the Ottomans to work all this out.
There's this very interesting book that came out called Jerusalem 1912
and it argues quite persuasively that fundamental issues of land
ownership and Jewish immigration became major issues before the First
World War, before the British and Turks were at war, before the Ottoman
Empire disintegrated. And I think you have to see the problems in the
Balkans, although they don't involve Arabs or Jews, in a similar light.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our
grandfathers did. I wrote the book Great War of Civilization, and my
father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current
Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in
what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
One of the problems that current leadership has is that in the past they
had time to reflect and discuss what they were going to do and how best
to deal with a particular situation. Their decisions might have been
grotesquely unjust or wrong, but at least they took them based on
considered reflections, whether they be in London clubs or Downing
Street or while reading Shelley in bed, but at least they had an
opportunity to reflect on what they were doing. Today, we live by Press
conferences, TV prime time, News at 10, CBS news, ABC, CNN exclusives
whatever it might be. We get pumped up by Presidential elections,
Primary elections, so policies are made on the move - in the backs of
cars, on mobile phones, over drinks before a hurried dinner when you
have another press conference afterwards. This is why you have this cult
of - and I don't like this phrase - `spin doctors,' a man who comes up
with an easy phrase. So, instead of having reflective decision making
which takes into consideration what will happen tomorrow and the day
after tomorrow and the year after next, the decision making is taken on
the basis on how to respond to some criticism one minute ago based on a
Press conference. For this reason, you don't have any long term planning.
That's why we didn't have any plan for post war Iraq, because we were
too busy going on CNN announcing victory, so we hadn't thought about
that. There is an excellent academic pamphlet by Corelli Barnett, who is
a prominent British historian, which goes step by step from archive
documents in the British Public Record Office and National Archives from
the Cabinet papers of 1941. And Churchill in 1941, when Britain still
expected invasion by Nazi Germany, and before Hitler invaded Russia,
before America was in the war after two long and profitable years of
neutrality, Churchill appointed a Cabinet committee in London under Nazi
bombardment to plan the post War government of Occupied Germany. Now,
there's forward thinking!
There's a sign of how governments used to behave. Four years before the
end of the War, when it looked as if the Germans were going to win,
Churchill and the British, alone without any American involvement in the
War, he was planning post War Germany. And as British troops moved under
fire into the German city of Cologne in 1945, British Civil Servants in
flak jackets went with them to take over the Town Hall, because they
wanted civil administration to resume immediately. To get the fuel
running, get rationing, get the people fed. It worked, and people didn't
die. I mean the Germans were poor and hungry, but they didn't die.
There's a classic example of how before the age of instant television,
news press conferences, spin doctors, etc., people planned for the
future and generally it tended to work; by and large, it was successful.
That was four years before the end of WW2. Four days before the
Americans occupied the center of Baghdad, they didn't have a coherent
plan. They had an odd committee set up in the State Department, but no
one listened to it and it had 20 people. So, you're carried along on
this instant decision making: `So, whaddya' gonna' do, Mr. Bush? How do
you respond to this?' And Bush has had 5 minutes before hand to bone up
on what he is going to say.
We have a program in Britain called Desert Island Discs on the BBC,
where basically you are allowed to choose 8 records that you play on a
desert island if you were marooned. One of my records I chose was
Winston Churchill's speech to the British on June 18, 1940 when Dunkirk
was finished, and the British were alone in the War against Nazi Europe.
And I played it, because Bush and Blair keep claiming they are
Churchill, but here was the real thing. And Churchill's voice immensely
tired and maybe he had a few glasses before he spoke, and you have this
extraordinary feeling of power and a man who is using his knowledge of
history and imbuing it into other people. What knowledge of history does
Bush have? He confused Cambodia with Vietnam. He talks about Vietnam but
he managed to avoid going there, as we know Cheney did.
You know another problem we have at the moment is that I don't think
there's a single senior Western statesmen, which might change if McCain
becomes President, who has ever been in a war. All of the Middle Eastern
leaders have been in wars, I promise you. But none of the Western
leaders have been in war. You see, their knowledge of wars, The Bushes
and the Blairs, are from TV, Hollywood Movies. When Churchill committed
people to war, he had been in the trenches in WW1. Theodore Roosevelt
had direct experience. Eisenhower certainly did, I mean he was Supreme
Allied Commander of WW2. So, you had in the post war years, you had
Western leadership that knew what war was about: it was about death and
screaming and loss and sorrow. Now, for people like Blair whose shadow
lingers over the dull and boring Gordon Brown in London, war was a
policy option: something you did if you couldn't get in with the United
Nations. `Do we need a second revolution or not?' That wasn't the way
people used to go to war. (Laughs.)
One of the things that is lacking today is common sense. Anybody with
common sense, anybody who sat down would've said, `Don't - Attack -
Iraq.' Bush actually did start talking about democracy in Iraq before he
invaded, despite what the lefty commentators say, he didn't say we want
democracy but he said, `We want democracy in the Middle East.' I
remember I wrote a piece in November 2002 asking, `He wants a democracy
in the Middle East, and he wants to start in Iraq?!?' which is not
common sense. I think a lot of the problems we have in the moment is a
failure to have a long-term view of anything.
Even if you take the Israeli government who says, `We are going to root
out the evil weed of terror, terror, terror,' I mean they've been saying
that since 1948. How many air raids have there been over Lebanon since
1948? Thousands and thousands and thousands. And they've achieved
nothing, because still we're told we have to root out the evil weed of
terror. Because it gets repeated ad nauseam on television it has become
normal. Nobody says, `Hang on a minute, there's a problem here. If
Israel's still at war 60 years after it came in existence, there is a
problem there.'
ALI: You have this quote, `There's this misconception that journalists
can be objective.' You also say, `What journalism is really about -
FISK: I think what I said is `impartial.' We should be partial on the
side of justice. One of the problems we have in the Middle East in the
moment, partly because of the pressure put on journalists particularly
in the United States by lobby groups. I'm including the Israeli Lobby,
and there is an Arab Lobby, as we know. Partly because of this awful
trend of American journalism where you have to give 50% of your time to
each side, you end up producing a sort of matrix, a mathematical formula
which is bland, lacking in any kind of passion or realism, and is a bit
like reading a mathematics problem. Much of the Middle East is reported
like a football match: this side did this, they kicked a goal, they
replied back, the ball went through the goal post, etc. Giving equal
space in your report to two antagonists is ridiculous! I mean if you
were reporting the slave trade in the 18th century you wouldn't give
equal time to the slave ship captain, you'd give time to the slaves. If
you were present at the liberation of a Nazi extermination camp, you
don't give equal time to SS spokesman, you go and talk to the survivors
and talk about the victims.
If you were present as I was in 2001 in West Jerusalem when an Israeli
pizzeria was blown up and most of the victims were school children. I
was just down the street. I reported about the Israeli woman who had a
chair leg through her, and an Israeli child who had his eyes blown out.
I said in my piece, `What did this child ever do to the Palestinians?'
And do you think I gave equal time to the Islamic Jihad spokesman? No, I
did not. Nor when I was in Sabra Shatilla [Massacre of Palestinian
Refugees in Lebanon overseen by Ariel Sharon] did I give time to Israeli
spokesman? If we walk as ordinary human beings out of our house and we
see an atrocity, we are angry. Well, we journalists should be angry too
if we feel that way about it. Not say, `Well, on the other hand, we just
balance this by X,Y,Z.'
ALI: Can't someone say that we readily dismiss FOX News as being biased
and right wing, then can't we just as readily dismiss you since you're
not an objective, unbiased voyeur?
FISK: The thing about FOX news is that they have a predetermined
version. They aren't interested in justice; they are interested in the
`right,' aren't they? They're interested in the right wing of the
Republican side, unless a Democrat happens to be right wing enough for
them. They have a political slant. I'm not left wing. I've never voted
in an election in my life. If I'm in the Israeli part of Jerusalem, I
write with great passion and you can look up the story in my book The
Great War for Civilization about the bombing of the Israeli pizzeria. I
was in Bosnia and wrote passionately against the murderous Serbs, I mean
those Serbs who were murdering. But if you report on Serbia during the
NATO bombing I report with great feeling about the Serb civilians who
were done to death by NATO and knowingly done so. NATO knew they were
killing civilians in Serbia during the Kosovo war. And I also reported
what was being done to Kosovo Albanians. That's not what FOX News does.
FOX News has a certain agenda.
ALI: Many of your critics, specifically some Zionist critics, say that
you've lived in the Middle East for so long that you've become partial
and succumbed to `their' narrative.
FISK: Same old, tiresome, boring old thing, you know. This always comes
up. If you arrive at a place, and you don't write satisfactory one week
after arriving, they say you can't see the woods for the trees. And if
you do understand enough after two weeks, they say you've gone native. I
haven't risked my life in the most dangerous parts of the world to
become a partial reporter politically. I'd be out of my mind if I did
that. By the way, you keep talking about my critics and what the
Zionists say. I don't read blogs, because I don't use the Internet
because I think it's crap. But I know there are two or three writers in
the UK and I know there are three or four in America who regularly
attack me, but that's about it. I mean if you see my mailbag which comes
in at 250 letters a week, maybe two or three are very critical, and the
rest are either nice or helping or suggesting stories. What I'm saying
is that one of the problems I have is the people will exaggerate the
numbers and say, `Well, your critics say...' which makes it seem there is
an army out there of 600 people constantly writing articles and
commentary. And, it's not true. There aren't. I come to the States that
averages every three and half weeks for lectures, and I don't come
across these people. The last one who was really obnoxious was in Texas
for an interview, and the second cameraman came over to me after the
program and said he wanted to hit me. (Laughs.) I said turn back the
cameras, and we'll do this live, but be careful when you do. Most people
don't care a damn about the Middle East, I'm sorry to say.
ALI: In America or the world?
FISK: Pretty much everywhere, particularly in America I'm sorry to say.
And also in Europe, I mean how much of my daily paper is on the Middle
East? And this idea that there is an army of critics or an army of
supporters is simply untrue. By and large, people read you and they move
on to read something else. What percentage of people read The
Independent either online or on paper? I have no idea. I probably get
more mail from America than I do from Britain, which is interesting. I'm
read in the Arab world as well as in Israel. I think I've had two
anonymous phone calls in my life in 32 years both from Turkey objecting
to what I've written about the Armenian genocide. One of them was
objecting to criticism of the Turkish Army, and one of them was
objecting to my coverage of the Armenian Genocide, which obviously
occurred a few years before I was born to put it mildly.
There are campaigns occasionally for accuracy, some outfit that operates
somewhere in Boston, and you get city postcards from people writing to
the editors, `I will never buy you magazine again' signed so and so from
Houston, Texas. Firstly, we are not a magazine. Secondly, alas, we do
not circulate in Houston, Texas, so this person hasn't been buying it
anywhere, but he's just been encouraged to write this silly postcard
which goes in the bin. But when you have a campaign organized by a lobby
group, you tend to take it seriously in America, we don't. We put it in
the rubbish bin. We are interested in individual, serious letters by
people. So am I. I encourage them in the paper. If the letters,
especially if they are critical or have a certain mischief about them, I
insist we run them, and I think it's good. I think it makes people think
and stirs up their idea of questioning about what's going on in the
Middle East.
The honest truth is I don't use the internet, so I don't see all the
blogs or Googles or whatever they are. I can tell by, obviously,
traveling and people coming up to me in airplanes, but I don't pay any
attention to it. I'm a journalist and a reporter and one of the great
advantages I have on the paper is that my editor likes me to write
opinion columns and also wants me to be a street reporter. So, when
there's a bombing explosion in Beirut or a war in Iraq, I'm there. Which
is in a unique position to be in, because most reporters might be on a
story but they don't have an opinion column. And most of the people who
write columns don't go out on the beat.
ALI: You call them `hotel journalists,' correct?
FISK: No, that's not true. What I said was that journalists, who worked
in Baghdad and who, for perfectly good reasons, were unable to leave
their hotels, i.e. security concerns, insurance companies hired by the
papers to insure their lives, all their special security detail like the
ex-military people who guard them. They find themselves effectively
using their mobile phone from their hotel room, a guarded hotel, right?
The problem is they don't tell their readers, their listeners, their
viewers that they're reporting from the hotel. They give the impression
when they give a `Baghdad Dateline' that they're driving around the
streets. You find articles written by someone who is sitting in an
office with sandbags around the walls and aren't let out. The much more
serious side is that readers are entitled to believe, if they see it,
`Dateline: Badghad' or Basra or whatever - that the reporter has
movement. That he can go around and check out stories. But in fact if
you read it, it's just a police source that says, `American military
says...American government says' and end of story. And it becomes echo
chamber for what anyone in the Green Zone says. I mean I can live in the
West of Ireland with a mobile phone and ring the Green Zone and produce
the same report. (Laughs.)
ALI: They're touted as experts in the American media.
FISK: I don't know. Look, I have American colleagues, one of them in the
New York Times, who goes out and gets good stories. So, I'm not pasting
my criticism on all journalists. There's lots of people trying to do
what I'm trying to do. But, I do object to reporters who do not leave
their hotels, but do not tell their readers that they do not leave their
hotels. That's what I call `hotel journalism.' I'm not talking about any
reporter on the beat anywhere as being a hotel journalist.
What's happening now as stories get more dangerous in the Middle East -
and The Middle East is getting more lethal for reporting - as stories
get more dangerous, more and more the Western correspondents are sending
the local people out to do the story. In other words, Iraqis are on the
streets in Baghdad reporting back to the New York Times reporter what
they see. I noticed last year you will remember there was an Al Qaeda
type organization that started an uprising in the northern Lebanese city
of Tripoli and took over apartment blocks. And I jumped in a car, and
they had taken over an apartment block in Tripoli and were shooting at
the Army, and I raced up to Tripoli. I know Lebanon very well, I mean
I've been living there for almost 32 years. And I got into center
Tripoli, which is very Sunni Muslim city, very pro Saddam I might add
with [his] pictures outside the window. And there were bullets whizzing
around the streets, and there were dead bodies, the armies were about to
storm inside this building.
By pure good luck or bad luck, depending on your point of view, I knew
the Lebanese Colonel who was going to take the army unit into this
apartment block and storm into it and take it back. I'd been to his
wedding, actually, which means I'm his friend. (Laughs.) `Robert, do you
want to come with us?' I didn't use a flak jacket because it is too
bloody hot. So, I suddenly found the ridiculous Robert Fisk storming
into this building with these soldiers, and I never carry a weapon or
flak jacket or anything, and seeing the most incredible things.
Afterwards, I was out there in the street with all these dead bodies on
the street. What astounded me was that I was the only Western reporter
there. Most of the other reporters were either from Lebanese newspapers
or Lebanese working for Western news organizations. I was the only blue
eyed, Anglo Saxon guy there. My Western colleagues were there and they
were in the hotel, and I'm not criticizing them. What was interesting is
that on the very first, critical day of the Al Qaeda take over, I looked
around the street and I didn't see another Westerner. There were lots of
Lebanese soldiers, policeman, people standing by, other journalists,
camera crew, they were all Lebanese. Now, twenty years ago that wouldn't
be the case.
ALI: You just gave a really good microcosm example of how you're on `the
scene.' You're one of the very few people who is `lucky' - well, I don't
think that is the proper word, I don't even what the proper word is - to
meet Osama Bin Laden and have an interview with him.
FISK: It's definitely not lucky. (Laughs.) No, it's not. I'll tell you
this guy will follow me for the rest of my life. It's more and more
unlucky I'll let you know.
ALI: You interviewed him three times in total, and he made some very
interesting comments about you. I don't know how you feel about that,
but he was quite reverential. In America, we see Osama as the horned
devil himself, and in certain parts of the Muslim world -
FISK: He sees Mr. Bush pretty much the same way, of course.
ALI: Well, certain parts see him as a halo-wearing messiah. Steve Coll
has a new book out on Bin Laden, and in my interview with him he told me
one of the main reasons for his charismatic leadership is his ability to
be multicultural, to understand the ability to look beyond ethnicity and
race in his global jihad.
FISK: No, that's not - that's a very trendy explanation. It's very
simple why Bin Laden is popular in the Arab world; it's because he says
things that local presidents and kings won't say.
ALI: What does he say?
FISK: He speaks about the injustice to Muslim people in a way that
Mubarak or King Abdullah would never say. Because of course they're
basically run by us, aren't they? He presents what millions of Arabs
think. I'm not implying a million of Egyptians and Gulfies want to
actually fly airplanes into tall buildings - they don't. But when he
describes the collapse of the Caliphate, which was the Ottoman Empire,
when he talks about the immorality of the Gulf princes and kings, when
he talks of the political or military or psychological occupation of the
Muslim world by the West, he's saying things which millions and millions
of Muslims agree with. But they don't hear their own leadership: the
Khaddafis, the Mubaraks, or the King Abdullahs, or the Assads saying.
This doesn't mean Bin Laden is particularly intuitively brilliant. I
mean Ahmadinejad says a lot of things which are absolutely bullshit, but
they probably catch somebody's eye. I mean Ahmadinejad is outrageous, I
mean he's a crackpot. When he starts questioning the Jewish Holocaust,
it's similar to the Turks questioning the Armenian Holocaust, or the
Israelis saying that they never drove the Palestinians out of Palestine,
they left on their own accord because they were going to wait until the
Jews were driven to the sea and they obeyed all the radio instructions.
You know the story.
But, you know, Bin Laden has a voice, because the leadership of the Arab
world doesn't have a voice. Or if it does, it's a weak one supporting
the United States in general. I mean, the Mubaraks and the Abdullahs are
allowed to say, ` If the war continues in Gaza, there will be an
explosion in the Middle East.' That's all right, that's part of the
course. They said it 70 times and it doesn't even get reported very
often. But the moment they start to talks seriously about the fact that
people feel they are under the thumb of theWest, which they do, then
they are in trouble. I mean the fact we only express our criticism of
Mubarak is when the police lock up the wrong person who has a PhD from
Boston or Harvard or whatever.
By and large, you see there is no Arab representative. Nor has there
been for decades. It's very interesting after the First World War, the
Egyptians kept wanting democracy, and they kept saying they wanted the
King out. So, the British locked them up. And the same thing happened in
Iraq in the 1920's, you the know the British arrived after they invaded
in 1917 and the Iraqis said, `You encouraged us to want independence,
and when we say we want independence, you put us in prison!' Which is
true of course.
Naturally, if you go back to the 20's and 30's, where I think a lot of
the history also beings, anyone who wanted a real freedom was
imprisoned. So, the only way the Arabs learned you can have a change was
through a revolution. Which meant no democracy of course. Meant you did
everything in secret, whether you did it in office or clubs or a
basement of a mosque is irrelevant. So, the failure of the Arab world to
have a democracy is partially our fault.
You have to remember before the First World War, Egyptian academics and
thinkers and philosophers were returning from France with the most
extraordinary sort of Republican - which I'm using in the French
Republic sense - views of liberation, freedom and equality. This is the
decade where women didn't want to wear the scarf in Cairo and other
cities in Egypt. Where they had willingly embraced the West. You have to
go back to the Ottoman Empire, and the biggest, industrial construction
in the world was the Suez Canal. It was built by the French but under
the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans imported state of the art steam
locomotives from Switzerland to Lebanon. In Constantinople, the pashas
were learning to paint and play the piano - they wanted to be like us.
So we destroyed them. You see? We like it the way it is now. We don't
have to have too many occupation armies, but they all do what they're
told, and if they don't, then we bomb them.
ALI: If Bin Laden's grievances against the U.S. and the West are
removed, and maybe you can tell us his major grievances since you've met
him, then -
FISK: The world doesn't work like this. Bin Laden justifies his actions
on certain grounds. Whether it be the corruption of the Saudi Royal
Family, the `Crusaders' to use his phrase, he says `Western forces' in
the Muslim World. And remember, one of his achievements is that he's
brought Western forces into two more Muslim countries that they weren't
in before - Afghanistan and Iraq. And I used the word `achievement'
ironically when I said that.
His raison d'etre will change, like we all do. To suggest that Bin Laden
is out there as a negotiable figure is ridiculous. He doesn't want to
negotiate. One of the main problems with Al Qaeda is that there is no
negotiation. We still haven't learned that Bin Laden isn't important
anymore. He's created Al Qaeda. That's it. It's over. It doesn't matter
if he dies of kidney failure, or whether he's bombed or dies of old age
or gets bored or gets assassinated or anything else, it's over. Al Qaeda
exists. And unless we deal with the injustice in the Middle East, there
will always be an Al Qaeda. It might not be called Al Qaeda, it could be
called `Al Qaeda Al Ummah,' `Al Qaeda Saudia,' `Al Qaeda in Iraq.' The
very word is intrinsically rather boring, its foundation doesn't set me
off on a romantic thought. But, I always use the phrase `Al Qaeda-like',
which is inspirational but not card membership type connections.
Still we think, `If we capture Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, then we'll be
ok.' And it's not true. There was a very fine French historian of the
First World War, and he did a very good interview in Le Pointe some
months ago, and he said you know we haven't realized the world has
changed militarily. But in the past, after the first and second World
Wars, we thought we could have foreign adventures and be free. We could
go to Vietnam. No North Vietnamese ever blew themselves up in front of
the White House. We went and fought in Korea, but no North Korean
soldier came and blew himself up in the London Underground. But today we
can't do this anymore, if we send our soldiers into Iraq, we are not
saving Gloucester or Denver. That's not going to change. We're not going
to back to nice, friendly left wing nationalists who wouldn't dream of
setting off bombs in our cities anymore. That's gone.
Whether you regard this as increasing immorality of our opponents that
is entirely up to you. But factually, we're not safe at home anymore.
ALI: So, this is the future? We have to face the future and this is how
it's going to be?
FISK: Well, you've got to think of the years to come, not just about the
next press conference. We're going back to the same point I made to you
earlier.
ALI: I had an interview with Seymour Hersh and asked him about Iran's
activity in the Middle East. He said Iran is doing what it's always been
doing in supporting the Shias. That's what it's doing in Lebanon and in
Iraq. Now, you mention Ahmadinejad as being a `Crackpot' and -
FISK: I think he's a crackpot, yeah.
ALI: People say Iran has its fingers in the cookie jar in helping
Hezbollah and helping the Iraqi insurgents. Is Iran completely innocent?
Should it be attacked? And what would -
FISK: You're doing what CNN and FOX do. You're producing a sustained
government narrative and then asking a question about it. Yes, they do
support Hezbollah financially, militarily, and in training, we know
that. Do they support the Iraqi insurgency? Morally perhaps. I mean,
mentally they might, but they don't need to teach the insurgents how to
blow up vehicles. I mean Iraqi insurgents, many of them in the Army,
fought Iranians for 8 years. They know how to blow up vehicles and put
bombs together. They don't need help from the Iranians. So, from the
start you have to disentangle this conventional wisdom on how Iran is
this big, dark nation that is manipulating the Shias through out the
Middle East. I don't think the Shias of Iraq need military help from
Iran. I don't think they need money actually. And besides when you have
a situation when most of the Iraqi government is beholden to Iran, what
the hell are you worried about the insurgents for? When Ahmedinejad took
the car from the airport like any normal human being, instead of being
flown in armored helicopter, which was quite impressive, the American
press didn't make a lot of it, but it's there.
You have to go back again. When the Shah was in power, the West wanted
Iran to be nuclear power. He was our policeman in the Gulf, wasn't he?
The Shah went to New York and gave an interview saying he wanted Iran to
have nuclear weapons, because after all Russia and America had them. And
there wasn't a complaint from the White House. In fact, shortly after he
met Carter in the White House. And we in Europe, in particular, climbed
over each other's shoulders to supply the nuclear hardware to produce
nuclear power stations.
When Khomeini came to power and the Islamic Revolution, before the
Iran-Iraq War, and I actually was present as he said this in Tehran. He
said nuclear weapons are gifts of the devil and we will close them down.
And all nuclear instillations, and they weren't nuclear weapon
instillations, they were just nuclear instillations for power
generation, were closed down under Khomeini's orders. At the height of
the Iran-Iraq War in 1986, when Saddam was supported by Britain and the
United States, and was using gas, a weapons of mass destruction, against
the Iranians, the Iranian High Command came to the conclusion that he
was using these weapons, then Khomeini reluctantly reopened the nuclear
establishment in Iran as a direct result of our friend Saddam using gas
and chemicals. Which in some cases were supplied by companies on the
East Coast of the United States. That's what put the Iranians in the
nuclear game.
Now, when you see it from this historical perspective, they're getting a
bit of the raw deal, aren't they? All the mullahs want their hands on
weapons (Laughs.) That wasn't the case originally. I don't see any
particular reason why the Iranians want to make nuclear weapons at the
moment. Because if they fire a weapon at Tel Aviv, they know Tehran will
be destroyed. On the other hand, if you look at North Korea, quite
clearly you will not be invaded if you have a nuclear weapon. Then
again, you have to stand back and look at the long term and ask, are we,
or our children or our grandchildren, our future generations always
going to around saying, `Well, he can have nuclear weapons, because he
is nice and is on our side on the War on Terror and his name is
Musharaff. And they can't have nuclear weapons because they have turbans
on.'
I mean are we going to do this A-B-C joke every year deciding who may or
may not have these things. If we deal with a world that deals about
justice, and this can apply to Eastern Europe, the Far East, Latin
America, or the Middle East, the whole institute of worrying about
nuclear weapons begins to diminish. After the rising of 1798 in Ireland,
where I am now, every Irishman who was found even to have a pitchfork
that could be used as a weapon was hanged. But, in pubs you can see them
on the walls. Because it's become irrelevant. There's this peace here.
If you go to England, you can find swords from the English Civil War.
Well, if in the aftermath of that war and we're talking about the 17th
century, if you had been found with that sword, you would've been
executed. But now it's in a pub on the wall of a bar.
You know, I'm not trying to be naïve when I say this, but with the whole
issue of nuclear weapons, once the purpose of the weapon has
disappeared, the weapon is pointless. If Iran didn't feel itself
surrounded by the Americans, which it is because the Americans are in
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, I mean I
don't think they'd worry so much about defending Iran. Although, of
course, you realize getting rid of the Taliban and Saddam, both enemies
of Iran, means Iran basically won the American war in Iraq. You've got
to start your questions not with a narrative: `Are they supporting the
Iraqi insurgency?' Probably not. `Are they supporting Hezbollah?'
Definitely. But, then again who is supporting the Israelis? The Americans.
There's no doubt that the missile which the Hezbollah fired at that
Israeli gunboat in the 2006 war, which almost sank it by the way, was
>From Iran. But don't tell me that the bombs dropped on Hezbollah weren't
>From the United States, they were of course. With all these questions
you're asking me, and I'm not trying to be critical of you, you need to
go three steps back where you start asking the questions.
As the interview ends, Fisk complains, `And there's nothing worse than
the immortal phrase, `I never said that.' Because people say, `Ah,
that's what he says now.' And you'll be surprised at the number of
people, who might be quite sympathetic to what you're saying, who manage
to blunder into one single quote which they [an interviewer] slightly
touch up or forget something quite innocently, and I am fighting off the
problems that creates for the next 6 months long after you've forgotten
ever talking to me. So, please, please be careful and make sure you're
very accurate in what I say, and it's balanced out.'
`I'll keep it very fair. I'll quote you, and I won't delete a word,' I
promise.
`Fine. That's all I need to hear.'
And with that, the class ends and the student finally exhales.
Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor
a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law,
whose work, "The Domestic Crusaders," (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the
first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America.
His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at
[email protected]