THE AGE OF
THE WARRIOR

SELECTED WRITINGS

ROBERT FISK

CONTENTS

PREFACE

1 A firestorm coming

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Flirting with the enemy

‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

The pit of desperation

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

‘You are not welcome’

Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action

‘Our guys may kick them around a little…’

The wind from the East

2 Publish and be damned? Or stay silent?

So let me denounce genocide from the dock

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim

Sneaking a book out in silence

‘A conflict of interest’

Bravery, tears and broken dreams

A holocaust denier in the White House

3 Words, words, words…

Hack blasts local rags

We should have listened to Bin Laden

The jargon disease

Poisonous academics and their claptrap of exclusion

Soft words – hard questions

The pen, the telex, the phone and the despised e-mail

The forgotten art of handwriting

‘Believe it or not!’

Murder is murder is murder…

Ah, Mary, you poor diddums

‘A very edgy situation’

‘Abu Henry’: what diplomats can get up to

A lesson from the Holocaust

4 Cinema begins to mirror the world

Applause from the Muslims of Beirut

Saladin’s eyes

My challenge for Steven Spielberg

Da Vinci shit

We’ve all been veiled from the truth

When art is incapable of matching life

A policeman’s lot is not a happy one

Take a beautiful woman to the cinema

A river through time

5 The greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis

A long and honourable tradition of smearing the dead

Tricky stuff, evil

‘Middle East hope!’ – ‘Europe in crisis!’

A poet on the run in Fortress Europe

6 When I was a child… I understood as a child

Another of Arthur’s damned farthings

First mate Edward Fisk

‘Come on, Sutton!’

Cold war nights

‘All this talk of special trains…’

Fear of flying

7 The old mandates

God damn that democracy

Gold-plated taps

The man who will never apologise

The ‘lady’ in seat 1K

Whatever you do, don’t mention the war

‘The best defender on earth of Lebanon’s sovereignty’

Alphonse Bechir’s spectacles

The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast

The torturer who lived near the theatre

The temple of truth

We are all Rifaats now

The ministry of fear

‘We have all made our wills’

‘Duty unto death’ and the United Nations

8 The cult of cruelty

The age of the warrior

Torture’s out – abuse is in

‘The truth, the truth!’

Crusaders of the ‘Green Zone’

Paradise in Hell

‘Bush is a revelatory at bedtime’

The worse it gets, the bigger the lies

Let’s have more martyrs!

The flying carpet

The show must go on

‘He was killed by the enemy’ – but all is well in Iraq

9 We have lost our faith and they have not

God and the devil

The childishness of civilisations

Look in the mirror

Smashing history

So now it’s ‘brown-skinned’

The ‘faith’ question

Hatred on a map

‘If you bomb our cities, we will bomb yours’

The lies of racists

Dreamology

10 ‘A thing invulnerable’

What the Romans would have thought of Iraq

In memoriam

Read Lawrence of Arabia

A peek into the Fascist era

Who now cries for the dead of Waterloo?

Witnesses to genocide: a dark tale from Switzerland

‘You can tell a soldier to burn a village…’

Should journalists testify at war crimes trials?

Where are the great men of today?

11 America, America

Free speech

It’s a draw!

Fear and loathing on an American campus

How Muslim middle America made me feel safer

Will the media boys and girls catch up?

Brazil, America and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

From Cairo to Valdosta

Trying to get into America

12 Unanswered questions

Is the problem weather? Or is it war?

Fear climate change, not our enemies

Just who creates reality?

A letter from Mrs Irvine

Who killed Benazir?

The strange case of Gunner Wills

13 The last enemy

In the Colosseum, thoughts turn to death

Dead heroes and living memories

The ship that stands upright at the bottom of the Sea

‘Thanks, Bruce’

Those who went before us

Farewell, Ane-Karine

They told Andrea that Chris had not suffered

POSTSCRIPT

The dilution of memory

A street named Pétain and the woman he sent to Auschwitz

‘I am the girl of Irène Némirovsky’

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Also by Robert Fisk

Copyright

About The Publisher

PREFACE

Iraq, I suspect, will come to define the world we live in, even for those of us who have never been within a thousand miles of its borders. The war’s colossal loss in human life – primarily Iraqi, of course – and the lies that formed a bodyguard for our invasion troops in 2003 should inform our understanding of conflict for years to come. Weapons of mass destruction. Links to al-Qaeda and the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. We were fooled. Yet I sometimes believe that we wanted to be fooled – that we wish to be led to the slaughter by our masters, to race for the cliff-edge with the desperate enthusiasm of the suicide bomber, our instincts awakened by something that should have been buried at Hastings or Waterloo or Antietam or Berlin or even Da Nang. Do we need war? Do we need it the way we need air and love and children and safety? I wonder.

This is not a war book in the traditional sense. You will find the torn and shredded bodies of the Middle East in my two histories, of Lebanon and of the West’s involvement in the region over the past century, a volume whose witness to suffering and pain caused me – during its writing – much distress; there is another to come, a companion volume that will take the reader down the road to perdition which is already being cut into the sand by our folly in Iraq and in Afghanistan and ‘Palestine’, in Lebanon and in Iran and in the dictatorships of the Muslim world.

The collection of articles in this book, most of them published in The Independent over the past five years, is therefore angry rather than brutal, cynical rather than bloody. They record, I suppose, a foreign correspondent’s thoughts amid war, a corner of the journalist’s brain that usually goes unrecorded; the weekly need to write something at a right-angle to the days gone by, the need to explore one’s own anger as well as the gentler, kinder moments in a life that has been spent – let me speak bluntly – that has been used up and squandered in watching human folly on a massive, unstoppable scale.

Anger is a ferocious creature. Journalists are supposed to avoid this nightmare animal, to observe this beast with ‘objective’ eyes. A reporter’s supposed lack of ‘bias’ – which, I suspect, is now the great sickness of our Western press and television – has become the antidote to personal feeling, the excuse for all of us to avoid the truth. Record the fury of a Palestinian whose land has been taken from him by Israeli settlers – but always refer to Israel’s ‘security needs’ and its ‘war on terror’. If Americans are accused of ‘torture’, call it ‘abuse’. If Israel assassinates a Palestinian, call it a ‘targeted killing’. If Armenians lament their Holocaust of 1,500,000 souls in 1915, remind readers that Turkey denies this all too real and fully documented genocide. If Iraq has become a hell on earth for its people, recall how awful Saddam was. If a dictator is on our side, call him a ‘strongman’. If he’s our enemy, call him a tyrant, or part of the ‘axis of evil’. And above all else, use the word ‘terrorist’. Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Seven days a week.

That’s the kind of anger that journalists are permitted to deploy, the anger of righteousness and fear. It is the language of our masters, the Bushes and Blairs and Browns, the Kinkels and the Sarkozys and, of course, the Mubaraks and the King Husseins and the Arabian kings and emirs and the Musharrafs and, indeed, anyone – even the crazed Muammar Ghadafi of Libya – who signs up to the war of Good against Evil. For journalists, this has nothing to do with justice – which is all the people of the Middle East demand – and everything to do with avoidance. Ask ‘how’ and ‘who’ – but not ‘why’. Source everything to officials: ‘American officials’, ‘intelligence officials’, ‘official sources’, anonymous policemen or army officers. Above all, show respect. For authority, for government, for power. And if those institutions charged with our protection abuse that power, then remind readers and listeners and viewers of the dangerous age in which we now live, the age of terror – which means that we must live in the Age of the Warrior, someone whose business and profession and vocation and mere existence is to destroy our enemies.

As Middle East Correspondent of The Independent of London, I endure a charmed but dangerous life. I travel to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, ‘Palestine’, Israel. I live in Lebanon. I have covered, over thirty-two years in the Middle East, eleven major wars, countless insurgencies and more massacres – more sheer bloody slaughter – than I care to count. And I have a newspaper, The Independent, which also encourages me to tell it how it is, to report not the clichés and blusterings of ‘think tanks’ and ‘experts’, but what I as a reporter see and believe. Each Saturday my editor, Simon Kelner, allows me to let rip in a column in which I can – like a journalist in paradise – swim in any direction in the sacred pool, examine any monster, visit any graveyard, talk to any murderer or friend, examine any document, write about any empire, look back even at the history of my own very ordinary English family in which my dad was a soldier in the First World War, in which his father was first mate on the giant tea clipper Cutty Sark. And I can say what I think.

It is a privilege and it is a trust – especially in a country, Britain, where the system of democracy has been so badly stained (principally by former prime minister Blair) that the press has come to play the role of parliamentary opposition – but it must be used, I think, with vigour and fury and cynicism, yes, and gentleness and, sometimes, with despair. This book therefore reflects my life as a journalist, largely over the past five years, but it also shows the need, I believe, to speak out against the fraud and injustice of a world in which consent has become automatic, in which criticism, however mild, is regarded as subversive. This is not my battle. I have colleagues who try to do what I try to do: to call our masters liars and mock their mendacity and their provable untruths and to bite them – hard – for the way in which they have damaged and soiled our world. I am not sure if history has a special integrity. But we should show an integrity towards the history which we are now creating in the hell–disaster of the Middle East.

I have sometimes strained the patience ofmy readers. Several have complained that they found my constant references to ‘Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’ repetitive or childish. One of our Independent readers complained to the Editor, Simon Kelner, in October of 2007 that Fisk:

should be more careful with his words. One thing I certainly cavil at is his snide reference to our current Prime Minister, whom he delights in calling Lord of Kut al-Amara. Not all his readers will understand his reference, but I do… It was a terrible tragedy when it happened in the Great War, and even worse when the POWs had to march to Turkey. Surely Fisk must have read about it…

Indeed, I had read of it. Kut al-Amara was the greatest British defeat at the hands of a Muslim army – the Ottoman Turks – in the First World War, a humiliating collapse of imperial power after Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris in a vain attempt to reach Baghdad. This comprehensive military disaster – Townshend was surrounded at Kut and watched his captive soldiers set out on a death march to Turkey – seemed to me to sum up both the arrogance with which Tony Blair took his country to war and the swamp in which our army found itself in Iraq. So Blair remains, for the most part, ‘Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’ in these articles.* A columnist must sometimes write with a cartoonist’s strokes.

Books occasionally write themselves. Reading the proofs, it became clear to me that my own journalism over the past five years has concentrated more and more on the sheer hypocrisy of the political–military–journalistic nexus of power which is deployed to fool us, to persuade us to follow policies which are contrary to our national interests and against all morality. Indeed, the use of power to terrorise us – to put more fear in our hearts than any ‘terrorist’ is capable of doing – seems to me to be one of the most frightening and damning characteristics of our age.

The blood of Iraqis flows through these pages, but The Age of the Warrior is neither a story of unrelieved carnage nor of unremitting journalistic rage. I examine the use and misuse of words, the influence of the cinema and of novels on our age, the need to create some form of beauty even amid war. You will meetmy former Latin professor, the old boys ofmy English school, you will walk round the mass grave of the Titanic’s passengers in Canada and read the battle honours in the oldest church in Wellington, New Zealand, and you will sit beside Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellist of his age, as he travels to a Beirut still ravaged by war, his ‘wife’ – his most precious musical instrument – strapped beside him in seat 1K. And you will meet again my soldier father Bill who bravely refused to execute a comrade in the First World War – an Australian who did indeed stand before a firing squad but who died, it now turns out, with an extraordinary secret in his heart.

*By extraordinary irony, Amara was the first city that British troops abandoned to insurgents. Under a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ in 2006, UK forces were permitted a single afternoon patrol through the city in return for handing over power to armed tribal leaders. The British could thus claim they had not retreated, while at the same time giving up all responsibility for the tens of thousands of local inhabitants: a truly Blairite solution.

Collections of this kind are bound to be a patchwork, but in this case I have found a meaning in the compilation. I have deliberately allowed some few repetitions to preserve the integrity of articles as they were originally published. But a journalist’s life – however specialised – revolves around a theme. And in this case, my columns have returned, again and again, to the semantics of politics and war and the need to expose the needless mass suffering that we inflict on our fellow humans. Death, as usual, walks through these pages until, at the end, Denise Epstein – surviving daughter of that wonderful Jewish–French novelist Irène Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz – warns us of the ‘dilution of memory’. It is this dilution, this wilful refusal to see and recognise cruelty, which will push us back into the inferno.

Beirut

February 2008

CHAPTER ONE

A firestorm coming

War is a paradox for journalists. Millions around the world are fascinated by the mass violence of war – from Shakespeare to Hollywood – and are obsessed with its drama, the cruel, simple choice it offers of triumph or defeat. Our Western statesmen – not one of whom has witnessed or participated in a real conflict and whose only experience of war comes from movies or television – are inspired by war and thus often invoke religion, or ‘good and evil’, to justify its brutality. If Shakespeare understood that human conflict was an atrocity, the history of the last century in the Middle East – leading irrevocably to the attacks of 11 September and thus the assault on Afghanistan and the preparations for an even more ambitious subjugation of Iraq – suggests that our politicians and our journalists are able to overcome this scruple. The peoples of the Middle East – though not their leaders – often seem to have a surer grasp of reality than those who make history, a superb irony since ‘we’ usually blame ‘them’ for the violence with which we are now all supposedly threatened.

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war

Poor old Bardolph. The common soldier, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the GI Joe of Agincourt, survives Henry IV, only to end up on the end of a rope after he’s avoided filling up the breach at Harfleur with his corpse. Henry V is his undoing – in every sense of the word – when he robs a French church. He must be executed, hanged, ‘pour encourager les autres’. ‘Bardolph,’ laments his friend Pistol to Fluellen, ‘a soldier firm and sound of heart… hanged must’ a be –

A damned death!

Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free, And let not hemp his wind-pipe suffocate: But Exeter hath given the doom of death… Therefore go speak, the duke will hear thy voice; And let not Bardolph’s vital thread be cut… Speak, captain, for his life…

How many such military executions have been recorded in the past thirty years of Middle East history? For theft, for murder, for desertion, for treachery, for a momentary lapse of discipline. Captain Fluellen pleads the profoundly ugly Bardolph’s cause – not with great enthusiasm, it has to be said – to Henry himself.

… I think the Duke hath lost never a man, but one that is like to be executed for robbing a church, one Bardolph, if your majesty know the man: his face is all bubukles and whelks, and knobs, and flames o’ fire, and his lips blows at his nose…

But the priggish Henry, a friend of Bardolph in his princely, drinking days (shades of another, later Prince Harry), will have none of it:

We would have all such offenders so cut off. And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compell’d from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language…

In France, Eisenhower shot post-D-Day rapists in the US army. The SS hanged their deserters even as Berlin fell.

And I never pass the moment when Shakespeare’s French king asks if Henry’s army ‘hath passed the river Somme’ without drawing in my breath. Did some faint moment of Renaissance prescience touch the dramatist in 1599? But I have still to be convinced that Shakespeare saw war service in the army of Elizabeth. ‘Say’st thou me so?’ Pistol asks of a cringing French prisoner who does not speak English. ‘Come hither, boy, ask me this slave in French/What is his name.’ I heard an almost identical quotation in Baghdad, shorn of its sixteenth-century English, when a US Marine confronted an Iraqi soldier- demonstrator in 2003. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he screamed at the Iraqi. Then he turned to his translator. ‘What the fuck’s he saying?’ At the siege of Harfleur, the soldier Boy wishes he was far from battle – ‘Would I were in an alehouse in London! I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety’ – and Henry’s walk through his camp in disguise on the eve of Agincourt evokes some truly modern reflections on battle. The soldier Bates suggests to him that if the king had come on his own to Agincourt, he would be safely ransomed ‘and a many poor men’s lives saved’.

The equally distressed soldier Williams argues that if the English cause is doubtful, ‘… the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all “We died at such a place” some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left…’

This bloody accounting would be familiar to any combat soldier, but Shakespeare could have heard these stories from the English who had been fighting on the Continent in the sixteenth century. I’ve seen those chopped-off legs and arms and heads on the battlefields of the Middle East, in southern Iraq in 1991 when the eviscerated corpses of Iraqi soldiers and refugee women and children were lying across the desert, their limbs afterwards torn apart by ravenous dogs. And I’ve talked to Serb soldiers who fought Bosnian Muslims in the battle for the Bihac pocket, men who were so short of water that they drank their own urine.

Similarly, Shakespeare’s censorious Caesar Augustus contemplates Antony’s pre-Cleopatran courage:

When thou once

Was beaten from Modena,… at thy heel

Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against,… with patience more

Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink

The stale of horses and the gilded puddle

Which beasts would cough at…

Yet Wilfred Owen’s poetry on the ‘pity of war’ – his description, say, of the gassed soldier coughing his life away, the blood gargling ‘from the froth-corrupted lungs’ – has much greater immediacy. True, death was ever present in the life of any Tudor man or woman; the Plague that sometimes closed down the Globe Theatre, the hecatomb of child mortality, the overflowing, pestilent graveyards, united all mankind in the proximity of death. Understand death and you understand war, which is primarily about the extinction of human life rather than victory or defeat. And despite constant repetition, Hamlet’s soliloquy over poor Yorick’s skull remains a deeply disturbing contemplation of death:

My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning quite chapfall’n?

And here is Omar Khayyam’s contemplation of a king’s skull at Tus – near the modern-day Iranian city of Mashad – written more than 400 years before Shakespeare’s Hamlet stood in the churchyard at Elsinore:

I saw a bird alighted on the city walls of Tus Grasping in its claws Kaika’us’s head: It was saying to that head, ‘Shame! Shame! Where now the sound of the bells and the boom of the drum?’

The swiftness with which disease struck the living in previous centuries was truly murderous. And I have my own testimony of how quickly violent death can approach. Assaulted by a crowd of Afghans in a Pakistani border village in 2001 – their families had just been slaughtered in an American B-52 air raid on Kandahar – an ever-growing crowd of young men were banging stones on to my head, smashing my glasses into my face, cutting my skin open until I could smell my own blood. And, just for a moment, I caught sight of myself in the laminated side of a parked bus. I was crimson with blood, my face was bright red with the stuff and it was slopping down my shirt and on to my bag and my trousers and shoes; I was all gore from head to foot. And I distinctly remember, at that very moment – I suppose it was a subconscious attempt to give meaning to my own self-disgust – the fearful ravings of the insane Lady Macbeth as she contemplates the stabbing of King Duncan: ‘… who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’

Shakespeare would certainly have witnessed pain and suffering in daily London life. Executions were staged in public, not filmed secretly on mobile telephones. But who can contemplate Saddam’s hanging – the old monster showing nobility as his Shi’ite executioners tell him he is going ‘to hell’ – without remembering ‘that most disloyal traitor’, the condemned Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, of whom Malcolm was to remark that ‘… nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it’? Indeed, Saddam’s last response to his tormentors – ‘to the hell that is Iraq?’ – was truly Shakespearean.

How eerily does Saddam’s shade haunt our modern reading of Shakespeare. ‘Hang those that talk of fear!’ must have echoed through many a Saddamite palace, where ‘mouth-honour’ had long ago become the custom, where – as the casualties grew through the long years of his eight-year conflict with Iran – a Ba’athist leader might be excused the Macbethian thought that he was ‘in blood/Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er’. The Iraqi dictator tried to draw loose inspiration from the Epic of Gilgamesh in his own feeble literary endeavours, an infantile novel which – if David Damrosch is right – was the work of an Iraqi writer subsequently murdered by Saddam. Perhaps Auden best captures the nature of the beast:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets…

In an age when we are supposed to believe in the ‘War on Terror’, we may quarry our way through Shakespeare’s folios in search of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush with all the enthusiasm of the mass murderer who prowls through Christian and Islamic scriptures in search of excuses for ethnic cleansing. Indeed, smiting the Hittites, Canaanites and Jebusites is not much different from smiting the Bosnians or the Rwandans or the Arabs or, indeed, the modern-day Israelis. And it’s not difficult to find a parallel with Bush’s disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq – and his apparent desire to erase these defeats with yet a new military adventure in Iran – in Henry IV’s deathbed advice to his son, the future Henry V:

… Therefore, my Harry,

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, May waste the memory of the former days.

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad. Here’s the father, for example, on discovering that he has killed his own child in Henry VI, Part III:

O, pity, God, this miserable age!

What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, Erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, This deadly quarrel daily doth beget!

Our treachery towards the Shi’ites and Kurds of Iraq in 1991 – when we encouraged them to rise up against Saddam and then allowed the butcher of Baghdad to destroy them – was set against the genuine cries for freedom that those doomed people uttered in the days before their betrayal. ‘… waving our red weapons o’er our heads,’ as Brutus cried seconds after Julius Caesar’s murder, ‘Let’s all cry, “Peace, freedom, and liberty”.’

My own experience of war has changed my feelings towards many of Shakespeare’s characters. The good guys in Shakespeare’s plays have become ever less attractive, ever more portentous, ever more sinister as the years go by. Henry V seems more than ever a butcher. ‘Now, herald, are the dead numb’red?’ he asks.

This note doth tell me of ten thousand French

That in the field lie slain; of princes, in this number, And nobles bearing banners, there lie dead One hundred twenty-six; added to these, Of knights, esquires, and gallant gentlemen, Eight thousand and four hundred…

Henry is doing ‘body counts’. When the herald presents another list – this time of the English dead – Henry reads off the names of Edward, Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Kikely, Davy Gam, Esquire:

None else of name; and of all other men

But five and twenty. O God, thy arm was here…Was ever known so great and little loss On one part and on th’other?

This is pure Gulf War Part One, when General Norman Schwarzkopf was gloating at the disparate casualty figures – while claiming, of course, that he was ‘not in the business of body counts’ and while General Peter de la Billière was telling Britons to celebrate victory by ringing their church bells.

Shakespeare can still be used to remind ourselves of an earlier, ‘safer’ (if non-existent) world, a reassurance of our own ultimate survival. It was not by chance that Olivier’s Henry V was filmed during the Second World War. The Bastard’s final promise in King John is simple enough:

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true.

But the true believers – the Osamas and Bushes – probably lie outside the history plays. The mad King Lear – betrayed by two of his daughters just as bin Laden felt he was betrayed by the Saudi royal family when they rejected his offer to free Kuwait from Iraqi occupation without American military assistance – shouts that he will ‘do such things/What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be/The terrors of the earth.’

Lear, of course, was written in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a ‘terrorist’ conspiracy with potential 11 September consequences. Similarly, the saintly Prospero in The Tempest contains both the self-righteousness and ruthlessness of bin Laden and the covert racism of Bush. When he sends Ariel to wreck the usurping King Alonso’s ship on his island, the airy spirit returns with an account of his success which – despite his subsequent saving of lives – is of near Twin Towers dimensions:

Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,

I flam’d amazement. Sometime I’d divide, And burn in many places… Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad, and play’d Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel; Then all afire with me; the King’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring then like reeds, not hair Was the first man that leapt; cried “Hell is empty, And all the devils are here”.

In almost the same year, John Donne was using equally terrifying imagery, of a ‘fired ship’ from which ‘by no way/But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,/Some men leap’d forth…’ Prospero’s cruelty towards Caliban becomes more frightening each time I read of it, not least because The Tempest is one of four Shakespeare plays in which Muslims appear and because Caliban is himself an Arab, born of an Algerian mother.

‘This damn’d witch Sycorax,/For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible/To enter human hearing, from Argier/Thou know’st was banish’d…’ Prospero tells us. ‘This blue-ey’d hag was hither brought with child… /A freckl’d whelp, hag-born not honour’d with/A human shape.’

Caliban is the ‘terrorist’ on the island, first innocently nurtured by Prospero and then condemned to slavery after trying to rape Prospero’s daughter, the colonial slave who turns against the fruits of civilisation that were offered him.

You taught me language, and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!

Yet Caliban must ‘obey’ Prospero because ‘his art is of such power’. Prospero may not have F-18s or bunker-busters, but Caliban is able to play out a familiar Western narrative; he teams up with the bad guys, offering his help to Trinculo – ‘I’ll show you the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;/I’ll fish for thee…’ – making the essential linkage between evil and terror that Bush vainly tried to claim between al-Qaeda and Saddam. Caliban is an animal, unworthy of pity, not honoured with a ‘human shape’. Compare this with an article in the newspaper USA Today, in which a former American military officer, Ralph Peters – arguing that Washington should withdraw from Iraq because its people are no longer worthy of our Western sacrifice – refers to ‘the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organised human endeavor’.* Prospero, of course, prevails and Caliban survives to grovel to his colonial master: ‘How fine my master is! I am afraid/He will chastise me/… I’ll be wise hereafter,/And seek for grace…’ The war of terror has been won!

Shakespeare lived at a time when the largely Muslim Ottoman empire – then at its zenith of power – remained an existential if not a real threat for Europeans. The history plays are replete with these fears, albeit that they are also a product of propaganda on behalf of Elizabeth and, later, James. In Henry IV, Part I, the king is to set out on the Crusades:

As far as to the sepulchre of Christ…

Forthwith a power of English shall we levy, Whose arms were moulded in their mothers’ womb To chase these pagans in those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessed feet.

* USA Today 3 November 2006.

Rhetoric is no one’s prerogative – compare King Henry V’s pre-Agincourt speech with Saddam’s prelude to the ‘Mother of All Battles’ where Prospero-like purity is espoused for the Arab ‘side’. This is Saddam: ‘Standing at one side of this confrontation are peoples and sincere leaders and rulers, and on the other are those who stole the rights of God and the tyrants who were renounced by God after they renounced all that was right, honourable, decent and solemn and strayed from the path of God until… they became obsessed by the devil from head to toe.’

Similar sentiments are espoused by Tamburlaine in Marlowe’s play. Tamburlaine is the archetypal Muslim conqueror, the ‘scourge of God’ who found it passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis.

But Othello remains the most obvious, tragic narrative of our Middle Eastern fears. He is a Muslim in the service of Venice – close neighbour to the Ottoman empire – and is sent to Cyprus to battle the Turkish fleet. He is a mercenary whose self-hatred contaminates the play and eventually leads to his own death. Racially abused by both Iago and Roderigo, he lives in a world where there are men whose heads supposedly grow beneath their shoulders, where he is black – most Arabs are not black, although Olivier faithfully followed this notion – and where, just before killing himself, he compares his terrible stabbing of Desdemona to the work of a ‘base Indian’ who:

… threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes, … Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees … Set you down this:And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him thus.

That, I fear, is the dagger that we now feel in all our hearts.

The Independent Magazine, 30 March 2007

Flirting with the enemy

After the Second World War, Palestine was crumbling. Menachem Begin’s Irgun had blown up British headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British were executing Jewish ‘terrorists’, and the Jews had hanged two kidnapped British army sergeants. The Arabs were determined to destroy the future Jewish state of Israel. The old imperial mandate was in a state of incipient civil war. You have only to open Colonial Office file 537/2643 to understand why, in their moment of agony, the British toyed with the idea of negotiating with an Arab cleric whom they had, only two years earlier, tried to extradite as a war criminal.

Indeed, in 1941 Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had been chatting to Hitler in Berlin, urging the Reich to prevent the departure of European Jews to Palestine; and two years later he had been helping to raise a Muslim SS battalion in Sarajevo to fight on the Russian front. Later on, in 1944 claiming ignorance of the Jewish Holocaust, he told the German foreign minister Ribbentrop that if Jews were to be ‘removed’ from Germany, ‘it would be infinitely preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control [sic], as for example, Poland…’

When he attempted to flee Germany in 1945, the French captured the Grand Mufti, but allowed him to escape to Egypt. In 1947 he turned up in Lebanon as leader of the Palestinian Arabs, a powerful and influential voice that could pacify – or provoke – an Arab uprising against Britain in its last days of rule in Palestine. No wonder, then, that the old Colonial Office file was not released under the usual thirty-year rule, but kept secret for half a century. Its contents – astonishingly, they were overlooked by historians on their release last month – speak not only of hidden contacts between the Grand Mufti and British diplomats in Cairo, but also of imperial despair in Palestine and, most dramatically, of outrage at Jewish ‘reprisals’ against Arab civilians which constituted, according to the British High Commissioner, ‘an offence to civilisation’. Indignation and fury permeate the file. So does defeat.

On 15 December 1947, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham sent a top-secret memorandum to the British colonial secretary Arthur Creech Jones, outlining the civil war in Palestine in fearful detail. ‘Situation now is deteriorating,’ he wrote,

into a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals between Jews and Arabs, in which many innocent lives are being lost, the tempo of which may accelerate… I have been considering what steps could be taken to mitigate this dangerous situation. As far as the Arabs are concerned it is undoubtedly a fact that word from the Mufti in the right quarter is probably now the only chance of inducing them to hold their hand until we have gone.

Haj Amin had arrived in newly independent Lebanon in early October 1947, and the British Legation in Beirut immediately set out to discover how much freedom he would be given. The Grand Mufti’s sudden appearance, the legation noted, had not surprised the Lebanese prime minister, Riad Solh,* but the Lebanese insisted that ‘a member of the Sû reté’ was in constant attendance on Haj Amin, that his activities would be ‘controlled and restricted’ by the Lebanese and that he ‘would not be allowed to indulge in any activities directed against British interests’. As our diplomats in Beirut were well aware, however, the British Middle East Office in Cairo had already made contact with the man whom Britain and the Allied Forces Command in Europe regarded as a war criminal.

* Lebanon’s first post-independence prime minister. He was assassinated in 1951.

On 29 September, our man in Cairo had sent a secret note to the Foreign Office enclosing the report of an interview with the Mufti from ‘an unimpeachable source’. The carefully typed notes – presumably from a British intelligence officer – portray a man who realised that disaster faced the Arabs of Palestine. The Mufti refused to contemplate the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. ‘He was not bargaining with the Zionists about a possession in dispute,’ says the report. ‘Palestine, including Jaffa and the Negev, belonged to the Arabs, and he did not recognise the right of anyone to “offer” them what was theirs as a condition of consent to partition. ‘It was like a robber trying to make conditions on which he would return stolen property.’ Besides, Haj Amin said, ‘no form of partition… would finally satisfy the Zionists. Whatever they got would merely be a springboard from which to leap on more.’

The Grand Mufti, who had supported the Arab revolt against British rule in the Thirties and had subsequently sought refuge in Iraq after a pro-German coup, then lectured his interviewee in words that must have taken the Briton’s breath away. ‘Put yourselves in the Arabs’ place,’ Haj Amin advised. ‘Remember yourselves in 1940. Did you ever think of offering the Germans part of Britain on condition that they let you alone in the rest? Of course not, and you never would.’ The answer to partition or a federal Palestine was ‘NO, categorically NO.’ Jews would have the same rights as Arabs in a Palestinian nation ‘but the Arabs would never agree to any bestowal on the Zionists of political power or privilege that put them above… the Palestinian state government’.

There was no reason why Arabs and the British should not cooperate, Haj Amin said. But common interests ‘should not deceive the British into thinking that any Arab leader would weaken where Palestine was concerned… Palestinian Arab enmity towards the British was purely political – they hated the policy that had founded… the Zionist national home.’ If Britain did not support Zionist claims to Palestine, and rejected partition, ‘she would gain Arab friendship in a moment’. But if the British continued their support, ‘they could never hope for Arab co-operation, for the Arabs would then be co-operating in bringing about their own destruction’.

Then, in words which have an ironic historical resonance, the Grand Mufti talked of the future. ‘He did not fear the Jews, their Stern, Irgun, Haganah [gangs]. The Arabs might lose at first, they would have many losses, but in the end they must win.’ The Zionists ‘will eventually crumble into nothing, and he did not fear the result, unless of course Britain or America… intervened, and even then the Arabs would fight and the Arab world would be perpetually hostile’. When his British visitor suggested that the Arabs might do better to accept part of Palestine rather than risk losing all, Haj Amin replied: ‘Who are we? A handful of exiles. Nothing. But we shall never give in or surrender our principles no matter what bribe is offered.’

Should the British talk directly to Haj Amin? As fighting continued in Palestine, the British Legation in Beirut reported to the Foreign Office on 27 November that Haj Amin ‘no longer regards us as Arab Public Enemy No 1’. But ‘if a decision unfavourable to the Arabs is reached at the United Nations… it is probable that the ex-Mufti [sic] will be exposed to pressure from his extremist followers… Contact even of a most informal sort with British officials might serve as a safety valve.’ The British memorandum, marked ‘Secret’, adds that although Haj Amin’s ‘dubious past renders the prospect of even unofficial contact with him distasteful’, it could not be denied ‘that he enjoys very considerable prestige and influence and he may still play a part in the future government of Palestine’. The Mufti had ‘learnt a lesson through backing the wrong side in the last war,’ and ‘advantage might be taken of his anti-Communist leanings’.

Riad Solh, the Lebanese prime minister, had already offered to arrange a meeting between the Mufti and a Beirut-based British diplomat called Evans, over cups of tea – Evans had been ‘non-committal’ to the idea – but ‘I think it would be all to the good for a member of my staff to see him occasionally,’ the Legation head wrote. It would now pay the British ‘hand over fist’ to exert any influence to avoid a wholesale clash with Palestinian Arabs. Meeting the Mufti as ‘an individual’ would not mean ‘that His Majesty’s Government had abandoned their principles or condoned the Mufti’s misguided [sic] past… if… he has had a change of heart, mild and discreet contacts with the British might give him a chance to prove it. If the leopard is still the same we shall soon find the spots under his henna.’

Beneath this eloquent letter, the British diplomat added in his own hand the damning remark that the US assistant military attaché in Lebanon had already paid a visit to the Mufti. By mid-December, General Cunningham was pleading from Jerusalem for pressure on Haj Amin ‘to get him to dissuade local Arabs from further violence… while we are still here’. But, the High Commissioner noted, ‘it is clear that we cannot approach the Arabs without taking parallel action against the Jews. We are, of course, doing all we can to point out to Jews the unmitigated folly of their actions which can only end in future bitterness which may well in the end mean disaster for their new State.’ Jewish claims that their actions were carried out by ‘dissident groups’ had proved to be untrue and ‘it can be seen that the Jews have inflicted many more casualties on the Arabs than the reverse. Practically all [Jewish] attacks have been against buses or in civilian centres.’ In a remarkable moment of anger, Cunningham concluded that ‘we have never at any time on the slightest excuse escaped vociferous and hysterical accusations by Jews that we were a people who were prone to brutal reprisals. Now they [the Jews] have themselves come out with reprisals of a kind which would not have crossed the mind of any soldier here, and which are an offence to civilisation.’

Cunningham’s plea for discussions with the Mufti was forwarded to the Foreign Office. Within days, however, the Legation in Beirut was ordered to make no contact with Haj Amin. British MPs had long demanded his trial for war crimes, and our ally King Abdullah of Jordan – the late King Hussein’s grandfather – hated the Mufti. The British departed from Palestine in disgrace, leaving Arab and Jew to fight for the land. Three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. The Arabs did not eventually win, as Haj Amin had predicted, and the Israeli state did not end in disaster as Cunningham suggested it might. Israeli spokesmen regularly condemn the Mufti for his flirtation with Nazism, and have sought to demonise the Palestinians with his name. But recent research suggests that he was an Arab nationalist rather than a national socialist – his fairest biographer is a former Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank.*

The Mufti died in Beirut in 1974, ignored and largely forgotten even in Lebanon. Among the mourners at his funeral was Yasser Arafat.

The Independent, 20 February 1999

* Zvi Elpeleg,The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (London, Frank Cass, 1993).

‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’

In August, 1998, following attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam and at the height of the scandal over his affair with intern Monica Lewinski, President Bill Clinton launched a cruise missile attack on Sudan and on a base in Afghanistan at which Osama bin Laden was supposed to be living. In Khartoum, the missiles destroyed a factory which the Americans claimed was producing chemical warfare components. They later admitted that it was manufacturing medicine for Sudan’s deprived population. Several al-Qaeda supporters – including two British citizens – were killed in the Afghan raid. But bin Laden was not there.

If there is one thing that enrages the Arab world about the United States government – apart from its betrayal of the principles of the peace process, its unconditional support for Israel, its enthusiasm for sanctions that are killing thousands of Iraqi civilians and its continued presence in Saudi Arabia – it is the administration’s habit of telling Arabs how much it loves them.

Before every air strike, the President assures his future victims how much he admires them. Ronald Reagan told the Libyan people that America regarded them as friends – then he unleashed his bombers on Tripoli and Benghazi. George Bush waffled on about Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation and America’s friendship for ordinary Iraqis – before bombing every town and city in Iraq. And this week, as his missiles had just left their ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, there was Bill Clinton telling the people of the Middle East that Islam was one of the world’s great religions.

As my Beirut grocer put it to me yesterday – his smile as crooked as his message – ‘it’s good of Mr Clinton to tell me about my religion. It’s always nice to be informed that religion doesn’t condone murder. Thank you, Mr Clinton.’ My grocer was not being polite. Clinton’s admonition from the White House – ‘no religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children’ – came across in the Middle East as patronising as well as insulting, coming as it did from a man who is embroiled in a sex scandal. ‘That filthy man’ is how he was called by an Egyptian over the phone to me yesterday, although the Arabs have not grasped the complexities of Mr Clinton’s adventures with Miss Lewinsky (mercifully, there is no word for ‘oral sex’ in Arabic).

What was immediately grasped in the region yesterday, however, was the ease with which the Americans could once again choose an enemy without disclosing any evidence for his guilt and then turn journalists and television commentators into their cheerleaders. ‘I was so sickened by the constant use of the word “terrorism” that I turned to French radio,’ a Palestinian acquaintance told me at midday. ‘And what happened? All I heard in French was “terroristes, terroristes, terroristes”.’ He was right. Almost all the reporting out of America was based on the accuracy of the ‘compelling evidence’ – so “compelling” that we haven’t been vouchsafed a clue as to what it is – that links Osama bin Laden to the ferocious bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Several times yesterday, I had to interrupt live radio interviews to point out that the journalists in London and Washington were adopting the US government’s claims without question.

The plots in which bin Laden is now supposed to have been involved, according to the Americans, are now taking on Gone with the Wind proportions. Bin Laden, we are told, was behind not only the US embassy bombings, but also the earlier bombing of US troops in Dhahran, anti-government violence in Egypt, the 1993 New York bombing of the World Trade Center, and now – wait for it – an attempt to kill the Pope. Is this really conceivable? The fact that all this was taken at face value by so many reporters probably says as much about the state of journalism as it does about American paranoia.

The use of the word ‘terrorist’ – Arabs who murder the innocent are always ‘terrorists’ but Israeli killers who slaughter twenty-nine Palestinians in a Hebron mosque or assassinate their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, are called ‘extremists’ – is only part of the problem. ‘Terrorist’ is a word that avoids all meaning. The who and the how are of essential importance. But the ‘why’ is something the West usually prefers to avoid. Not once yesterday – not in a single press statement, press conference or interview – did a US leader or diplomat explain why the enemies of America hate America. Why is bin Laden so angry with the United States? Why – not just who and how – but why did anyone commit the terrible atrocities in Africa?

Clearly, someone blew up the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam. They may have been suicide bombers, but they must have known that they were slaughtering the innocent. Their deeds were wicked. But they were not, as one US diplomat called them, mindless. Whether or not bin Laden was involved, there was a reason for these dreadful deeds. And the reason almost certainly lies with US policy – or lack of policy – towards the Middle East. ‘How can America protect its embassies?’ a US radio station asked me last week. When I suggested it could adopt fairer policies in the region, I was admonished for not answering a question about ‘terrorism’.

For what really lies at the root of Arab reaction to the US attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan is that they come when America’s word has never been so low; when the Arab sense of betrayal has never been greater. America’s continued military presence in Saudi Arabia, its refusal to bring Israel to heel as it continues to build Jewish settlements on Arab land in violation of the Oslo agreement, its almost lip-smacking agreement to continue sanctions which are clearly culling the civilian population of Iraq; Arab fury at this catastrophe is one reason why a normally compassionate people responded with so little sympathy to the bombing of the US embassies. After all this, being lectured by Mr Clinton and then bombed by him was like getting a kick in the teeth from a man who has already stabbed you in the back.

Bin Laden or not, it is a fair and fearful bet that the embassy bombings were organised by – or at the least involved – Arabs. And the culprits should be found and brought to justice. But Cruise missiles do not represent due process, as Mr Clinton knows all too well. Talk of a massive ‘international terrorist conspiracy’ is as exotic as the perennial Arab belief in the ‘international Zionist conspiracy’. Bin Laden is protected in Afghanistan by the Taliban. But the Taliban are paid, armed and inspired by Saudi Arabia. And Saudi Arabia is supposed to be America’s best friend in the Gulf, so close an ally that US troops are still stationed there (which is, of course, bin Laden’s grouse). Could it be that powerful people in Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist and undemocratic state if ever there was one, support bin Laden and share his desire for a ‘jihad’ against America? This is one question the Americans should be asking.

Bin Laden himself was obsessed for many months with the massacre of Lebanese civilians by the Israelis at the UN base at Qana in southern Lebanon in April 1996. Why had Clinton not condemned this ‘terrorist act’, he asked. (In fact, Bill Clinton called it a ‘tragedy’, as if it was some form of natural disaster – the Israelis said it was a ‘mistake’ but the UN concluded it wasn’t). Why had the perpetrators not been brought to justice, bin Laden wanted to know? It is odd now to compare bin Laden’s words with those of Bill Clinton just forty-eight hours ago. They talked much the same language. And now their language has grown far more ferocious. ‘The United States wants peace, not conflict,’ Clinton said. He is likely to find little peace in theMiddle East for the rest of his presidency.

The Independent, 22 August 1998

Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for Civilisation

It needed my old Irish journalist colleague Vincent Browne to point out the obvious to me. With a headache as big as Afghanistan, reading through a thousand newspaper reports on the supposed ‘aftermath’ of the Afghan war, I’d become drugged by the lies. Afghan women were free at last, ‘our’ peacekeeping force was on its way, the Taliban were crushed. Anti-American demonstrations in Pakistan had collapsed – we’ll forget my little brush with some real Afghans there a couple of weeks ago. Al-Qaeda was being ‘smoked out’ of its cave. Osama bin Laden was – well, not captured or even dead; but – well, the Americans had a videotape, incomprehensible to every Arab I’ve met, which ‘proves’ that our latest monster planned the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington.

So it needed Vincent, breathing like a steam engine as he always does when he’s angry, to point to the papers in Gemma’s, my favourite Dublin newsagents. ‘What in Christ’s sake is going on, Bob?’ he asked. ‘Have you seen the headlines of all this shite?’ and he pulled Newsweek from the shelf. The headline: ‘After The Evil’. ‘What is this biblical bollocks?’ Vincent asked me. Osama bin Laden’s overgrained, videotaped face stared from the cover of the magazine, a dark, devilish image from Dante’s circles of hell. When he captured Berlin, Stalin announced that his troops had entered ‘the lair of the fascist beast’. But the Second World War has nothing on this.

So let’s do a ‘story-sofar’. After Arab mass-murderers crashed four hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania, a crime against humanity which cost more than 4,000 innocent lives, President Bush announced a crusade for infinite ‘justice’ – later downgraded to infinite freedom – and bombed Afghanistan. Using the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Northern Alliance to destroy the gunmen and murderers of the discredited Taliban, the Americans bombed bin Laden’s cave fortresses and killed hundreds of Afghan and Arab fighters, not including the prisoners executed after the Anglo–US–Northern Alliance suppression of the Mazar prison revolt.

The production of the bin Laden videotape – utterly convincing evidence of his guilt to the international press, largely, if wilfully, ignored by the Muslim world – helped to obscure the fact that Mr Evil seemed to have disappeared. It also helped to airbrush a few other facts away. We could forget that US air strikes, according to statistics compiled by a New Hampshire university professor, have now killed more innocent Afghans than the hijackers killed Westerners and others in the World Trade Center.* We could forget that Mullah Omar, the mysterious leader of the Taliban, has also got away. We could ignore the fact that, save for a few brave female souls, almost all Afghan women continued to wear the burqa. We could certainly close our eyes to the massive preponderance of Northern Alliance killers represented in the new UN-supported, pro- Western government in Kabul. We could clap our hands when a mere fifty Royal Marines arrived in Afghanistan this weekend to support a UN-mandated British-led ‘peace’ force of only a few thousand men who will need the Kabul government’s permission to operate in the city and which, in numbers, will come to about one-third of the complement of the British army destroyed in the Kabul Gorge in 1842. The ‘peace’ force thinks it will have to defend humanitarian aid convoys from robbers and dissident Taliban. In fact, it will have to fight off the Northern Alliance mafia and drug-growers and warlords, as well as the vicious guerrillas sent out to strike them by bin Laden’s survivors. If nothing else, the Taliban made the roads and villages of Afghanistan safe for Afghans and foreigners alike. Now, you can scarcely drive from Kabul to Jalalabad.

* Professor Marc W. Herold, ‘A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting’ (Revised March 2002). (http://www.cursor.org/stories/civiliandeaths. htm)

Presumably, the CIA will let us pay the Alliance mobsters for their war in Afghanistan. One of the untold stories of this conflict is the huge amount of money handed out to militia leaders to persuade them to fight for the US. When Taliban members changed sides for an Alliance payment of $250,000 and then attacked their benefactors, we all dwelt on their treachery. None of us asked how the Alliance – which didn’t have enough money to pay for bullets a few weeks earlier – could throw a quarter of a million bucks at the Taliban in the middle of a fire-fight. Nor how the Pashtun tribal leaders of Kandahar province are now riding around in brand-new four-wheel-drives with thousands of dollars to hand out to their gunmen. I wasn’t surprised to read that a Somali warlord is now offering his cash-for-hire services to the US for the next round of the War for Civilisation.

Fortunately for us, the civilian victims of America’s B-52s will remain unknown in their newly dug graves. Even before the war ended, around 3,700 of them – not counting Mullah Omar’s and bin Laden’s gunmen – had been ripped to pieces in our War for Civilisation. A few scattered signs of discontent – the crowd that assaulted me two weeks ago, for example, outraged at the killing of their families – can be quickly erased from the record.

It is obviously perverse to note that I haven’t met a single ordinary Muslim or, indeed, many Westerners – Pakistani, Afghan, Arab, British, French, American – who actually believe all this guff. Let’s just remember that the new Kabul government is as committed to support ‘Islam, democracy, pluralism [sic] and social justice’ as George W. Bush is to Good and the Destruction of Evil. Roll on next year, and don’t worry about bin Laden – he may be back just in time to participate in Part Two of the War for Civilisation.

The Independent, 22 December 2001

By the autumn of 2007, thousands of Western troops had been fought to a standstill outside Kandahar by a resurgent Taliban. Hamid Karzai’s Afghan ‘government’ controlled little more than its own ministries in Kabul as dozens of suicide bombers assaulted, Iraq-style, his forces and those of his Western allies.

The pit of desperation

A few days ago, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia* called upon the ‘conscience’ of the American people to help the Palestinians. The Emir of Qatar went one step further in sel-fabasement. The Arabs, he said – and he apologised for using the word – had to ‘beg’ the United States to use its influence on the Israelis. Truly, when such words are uttered, it is the very pit of Arab desperation. Beg? Conscience? Washington may still turn down Ariel Sharon’s request to break all relations with Yasser Arafat, but President Bush has long ago forgotten his ‘vision’ of a Palestinian state – produced when he needed Arab acquiescence in the bombardment of Afghanistan but swiftly buried once it had served its purpose – and Arafat’s role now is to remember his job: to protect Israel from his own people.

From his office in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, Arafat fantasises about his derring-do during Israel’s 1982 siege of West Beirut, but it is diffficult to underestimate the degree of shame with which many Palestinians now regard him. Last Christmas, Arafat insisted that he would march to Bethlehem to attend church services. But when the Israelis refused him permission, he merely appeared on Palestinian television and preposterously claimed that Israel’s refusal was a ‘crime’ and an act of ‘terrorism’. Why, the Arabic daily Al Quds al-Arabi asked, was there no explanation for this ‘bizarre and incomprehensible’ performance by Arafat? Why did he not march out of Ramallah with the Christian clerics who had come to give their support until physically stopped by Israeli troops in front of the television cameras? The more he talks about Israel’s ‘terrorism’, the less we examine his own record of corruption, cronyism and brutality.

* Now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, Israel’s own mythmaking goes on apace. In New York, Shimon Peres announces the presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and the arrival of 8,000 long-range missiles for Hizballah; now there hasn’t been an Iranian militiaman in Lebanon for fifteen years, and the ‘new’ missiles don’t exist* – but this nonsense is reported in the US media without the slightest attempt to check the facts. The latest whopper came from Sharon.† He regretted, he said, that he had not ‘liquidated’ Arafat during the 1982 siege of Beirut, but there had been an agreement not to do so. This is rubbish; during the siege, Israeli jets five times bombed the buildings in which Sharon, then Israel’s defence minister, believed Arafat to be hiding, on two occasions destroying whole apartment blocks – along, of course, with all the civilians living in them – only minutes after Arafat had left. Again, Sharon’s untrue version of history was reported in the American press as fact.

Indeed, all the participants in the Middle East conflict are now engaged in a game of self-deception, a massive and fraudulent attempt to avoid any examination of the critical issues that lie behind the tragedy. The Saudis want to appeal to America’s ‘conscience’, not because they are upset at Arafat’s predicament but because fifteen of the 11 September hijackers were themselves Saudis. Sharon’s attempt to join in the ‘war against terror’ – the manufacturing of non-existent Iranian enemies in Lebanon, for example, along with some very real enemies in the West Bank and Gaza – is a blatant attempt to ensure American support for his crushing of the Palestinian intifada and for the continuation of Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land.

* By 2006, however, mythmaking had become reality: the Hizballah then had many more than 8,000 rockets in Lebanon.

† Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke on 4 January 2006 and was still on life support in February 2008.

Similarly, Mr Bush’s messianic claim that he is fighting ‘evil’ – ‘evil’ now apparently being a fully-fledged nation-state – and that America’s al-Qaeda enemies hate America because they are ‘against democracy’ is poppycock. Most of America’s Muslim enemies don’t know what democracy is – they have certainly never enjoyed it – and their deeds, which are indeed wicked, have motives. Mr Bush knows – and certainly his secretary of state, Colin Powell, does – that there is an intimate link between the crimes against humanity of 11 September and the Middle East. After all, the killers were all Arabs, they wrote and spoke Arabic, they came from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon. This much we are allowed to reflect upon.

But the moment anyone takes the next logical step and looks at the Arab world itself, we tread on forbidden territory. For any analysis of the current Middle East will encounter injustice and violence and death, often the result – directly or indirectly – of the policies of the United States and its regional allies (Arab as well as Israeli). At this point, all discussion must cease. Because if America’s own involvement in the region – its unconditional support for Israel, its acquiescence in the Jewish colonisation of Arab land, the sanctions against Iraq that have killed so many tens of thousands of children – and the very lack of that democracy that Bush thinks is under attack suggest that America’s own actions might have something to do with the rage and fury that generated the mass murders of 11 September, then we are on very dangerous territory indeed.

And oddly, the Arab regimes go along with all this. The Arab people do not – they know full well what lies behind the dreadful deeds of 11 September – but the leadership has to pretend ignorance. It supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then asks – begs – America to recognise a difference between ‘terrorism’ and ‘national resistance’. The Saudis wilfully ignore the implications of their own citizens’ involvement, howling instead about a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against Saudi Arabia. Arafat says he supports the ‘war on terrorism’ and then – let us not kid ourselves – permits his acolytes to try a gun-running operation on the Karine A.* And Sharon, hopelessly unable to protect his people from the cruel Palestinian suicide bombers, concentrates on presenting the intifada as ‘world terror’ rather than the nationalist uprising that it represents. After all, if it’s about nationalism, it’s also about Israeli occupation and, like American policy in the region, that is not to be discussed.

At the end of next month, the Arab presidents and princes are to hold a summit in Beirut. They will issue ringing declarations of support for the Palestinians and almost equally earnest support for a war against ‘terrorism’. They cannot criticise US policy, however outrageous they believe it to be, because they are almost all beholden to it. So they will appeal again to America’s conscience. And they will do what the Emir of Qatar did a few days ago. They will beg. And they will get nothing.

The Independent, 14 February 2002

At the March 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, Saudi Arabia offered Israel recognition by the Arab states, including peace agreements and normalisation, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territories occupied in the 1967 war, a ‘just solution’ to the Palestinian refugee problem and recognition of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel rejected the proposal. Washington showed no interest.

* The Karine A , a 4,000-ton freighter, was stopped at sea by the Israeli navy on 3 January 2002. Israel claimed that it was carrying 50 tons of weapons for Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war

In the aftermath of the 9/11 assaults on the US, Israel tried to bind its continuing colonial war with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinians into the same narrative. Israeli diplomats referred to Arafat – transmogrified from ‘superterrorist’ to ‘superstatesman’ under the Oslo agreement – as ‘our bin Laden’ in the hope that Americans would see Israel’s conflict with its colonised Arabs as part of the same battle against ‘terrorism’ that George W. Bush thought he was fighting.

How much longer can Ariel Sharon pretend that he’s fighting in the ‘war against terror’? How much longer are we supposed to believe this nonsense? How much longer can the Americans remain so gutlessly silent in the face of a vicious conflict which is coming close to obscuring the crimes against humanity of 11 September? Terror, terror, terror. Like a punctuation mark, the word infects every Israeli speech, every American speech, almost every newspaper article. When will someone admit the truth: that the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a dirty colonial war which will leave both sides shamed and humiliated?

Just listen to what Sharon has been saying in the past twentyfour hours. ‘Arafat is an enemy. He decided on a strategy of terror and formed a coalition of terror.’ That’s pretty much what President Bush said about Osama bin Laden. But what on earth does it mean? That Arafat is actually sending off the suicide bombers, choosing the target, the amount of explosives? If he was, then surely Sharon would have sent his death squads after the Palestinian leader months ago. After all, Sharon’s killers have managed to murder dozens of Palestinian gunmen already, including occasional women and children who get in the way.

The real problem with Arafat is that he has a lot in common with Sharon: old, ruthless and cynical; both men have come to despise each other. Sharon believes that the Palestinians can be broken by military power. He doesn’t realise what the rest of the world learned during Sharon’s own 1982 siege of Beirut: that the Arabs are no longer afraid. Once a people lose their fear, they cannot be re-inoculated with fear. Once the suicide bomber is loose, the war cannot be won. And Arafat knows this. No, of course he doesn’t send the bombers off on their cruel missions to restaurants and supermarkets. But he does know that every suicide bombing destroys Sharon’s credibility and proves that the Israeli leader’s promises of security are false. Arafat is well aware that the ferocious bombers are serving his purpose – however much he may condemn them in public.

But he – like Sharon – also believes his enemies can be broken by fire. He thinks that the Israelis can be frightened into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem. Ultimately, the Israelis probably will have to give up their occupation. But the Jews of Israel are not going to run or submit to an endless war of attrition. Even if Sharon is voted out of power – a prospect for which many Israelis pray – the next Israeli prime minister is not going to negotiate out of fear of the suicide bomber.

Thus the rhetoric becomes ever more revolting. Hamas calls its Jewish enemies ‘the sons of pigs and monkeys’, while Israeli leaders have variously bestialised their enemies as ‘serpents’, ‘crocodiles’, ‘beasts’ and ‘cockroaches’. Now we have an Israeli officer – according to the Israeli daily Ma’ariv – advising his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. ‘If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even – shocking though this might appear – to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.’

Pardon? What on earth does this mean? Does this account for the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners earlier this month? Does this mean that an Israeli soldier is now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans – which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944?

Yet from Washington comes only silence. And silence, in law, gives consent. Should we be surprised? After all, the US is now making the rules as it goes along. Prisoners can be called ‘illegal combatants’ and brought to Guantanamo Bay with their mouths taped for semi-secret trials. The Afghan war is declared a victory – and then suddenly explodes again. Now we are told there will be other ‘fronts’ in Afghanistan, a spring offensive by ‘terrorists’. Washington has also said that its intelligence agencies – the heroes who failed to discover the 11 September plot – have proof (undisclosed, of course) that Arafat has ‘a new alliance’ with Iran, which brings the Palestinians into the ‘axis of evil’.

Is there no one to challenge this stuff? Just over a week ago, CIA director George Tenet announced that Iraq had links with al-Qaeda. ‘Contacts and linkages’ have been established, he told us. And that’s what the headlines said. But then Tenet continued by saying that the mutual antipathy of al-Qaeda and Iraq towards America and Saudi Arabia ‘suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible’. ‘Suggests?’ ‘Possible?’ Is that what Mr Tenet calls proof?

But now everyone is cashing in on the ‘war against terror’. When Macedonian cops gun down seven Arabs, they announce that they are participating in the global ‘war on terror’. When Russians massacre Chechens, they are now prosecuting the ‘war on terror’. When Israel fires at Arafat’s headquarters, it says it is participating in the ‘war on terror’. Must we all be hijacked into America’s dangerous self-absorption with the crimes of 11 September? Must this vile war between Palestinians and Israelis be distorted in so dishonest a way?

The Independent, 30 March 2002

George Tenet resigned as CIA director on 3 June 2004, to be replaced by former Soviet analyst Robert Gates, who had joined the intelligence organisation while still a student at Indiana University.

‘You are not welcome’

President George W. Bush addressed the German Bundestag on 23 May 2002.

So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Hussein is Hitler. And George Bush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in Berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, ‘Hitler’ being the pathetic Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But the fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on Thursday – and, for the most part, in respectful silence – was extraordinary. Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living, diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? ‘He’s a dictator who gassed his own people,’ Bush reminded us of Saddam Hussein for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time, was on Saddam’s side.

But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Russians to lean on the northern bit of the ‘axis of evil’, the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. More and more, indeed, Bush’s rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of bin Laden. And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet again, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West’s enemies hated ‘justice and democracy’, even though most of America’s Muslim enemies wouldn’t know what democracy was.

In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America’s ever weirder ‘war on terror’ – and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous ‘national security adviser’, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you’ll find they’ve issued more threats against Americans than bin Laden. But let’s get to the point. The growing evidence that Israel’s policies are America’s policies in the Middle East – or, more accurately, vice versa – is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizballah – the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel’s demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 – is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network ‘revealing’ that Hizballah, Hamas and al-Qaeda have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.

American journalists insist on quoting ‘sources’ but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the ‘Syrian Accountability Act’ that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel’s friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘operate freely’ on the southern Lebanese border. And I repeat: there haven’t been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon – let alone the south of the country – for fifteen years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?

Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat – its ‘terrorism’ status has been heightened by the State Department – and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister held personally responsible by Israel’s own inquiry for the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, is – according to Mr Bush – ‘a man of peace’. How much further can this go? A long way, I fear. The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don’t come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US consul Roberto Powers out of her husband’s downtown restaurant on 7 April. ‘I went over to him,’ she said, ‘and told him, “Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome – please get out”.’ Across the Arab world, boycotts of American goods have begun in earnest.

How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistani president Musharraf for his support in the ‘war on terror’, but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial ‘referendum’ to keep him in power. America’s enemies, remember, hate the US for its ‘democracy’. So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan’s importance in the famous ‘war on terror’ – or ‘war for civilisation’ as, we should remember, it was originally called – is far more important. If Pakistan and India go to war, I’ll wager a lot that Washington will come down for undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.

Now here’s pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no one would have believed them. ‘We would have charged that this was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and Muslims,’ he wrote. And rightly so. But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs greatly fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want: to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East.

Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beirut with a feeling of great foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival; indeed, we are provoking it.

The Independent, 25 May 2002

Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to go into action

I have always been a sucker for wide-screen epics. Ever since my dad took me to see Quo Vadis – which ends with centurion Robert Taylor heading off to his execution with his bride on his arm – I’ve been on the movie roller-coaster. My dad didn’t make a great distinction between the big pictures and B-movies; he managed to squeeze Hercules Unchained in between Ben Hur and Spartacus. But the extraordinary suspension of disbelief provided by the cinema carried me right through to Titanic, Pearl Harbor and Gladiator. Awful they may be. Spectacular they are.

Yet the important thing, as my dad used to tell me, was to remember that the cinema did not really imitate reality. Newly converted Christian centurions did not go so blithely to their deaths, nor did love reign supreme on the Titanic. The fighter pilots of Pearl Harbor did not perform so heroically, nor did wicked Roman emperors die so young. From John Wayne’s The Green Berets, war films have lied to us about life and death. After the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington last September, I suppose it was inevitable that the Pentagon and the CIA would call on Hollywood for ideas – yes, the movie boys actually did go to Washington to do a little synergy with the local princes of darkness. But when Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld turned up together for the premiere of Black Hawk Down, I began to get worried.

After all, if the Bush administration is so keen on war, it better work out the difference between Hollywood and the real thing. Yet what we’ve been getting is a movie version of reality, a work of fiction to justify the prospect of ‘war without end’. It started, of course, with all the drivel about ‘crusades’ and ‘war against terror’ and ‘war against evil’, the now famous ‘they hate us because we are a democracy’, the ‘axis of evil’ and most recently – it would be outlandishly funny if this trash hadn’t come from the Rand Corporation – the ‘kernel of evil’. The latter, by the way, is supposed to be Saudi Arabia, but it might just as well have been Iran, Iraq, Syria or anywhere west of the Pecos. Along with this tosh, history is being falsified. Even a crime movie supplies a motive for the crime, but after 11 September Bush Productions would allow no motives to be discussed. The identity and religion of the perpetrators was permissible information: they were Arabs, Muslims. But the moment any of us suggested glancing towards the area from which these Arabs came – an area rich in injustice, oppression, occupation and UN-sanctioned child death – we were subjected to a campaign of calumny.

As Bush’s regional enemies grew in number to include not just al-Qaeda but Iraq and Iran and their allies, a fabric of stories began to be woven. Last June, for example, we had Donald Rumsfeld spinning tales about Iran. At a press conference in Qatar – these lies can be spun, please note, just as well in the Arab world as in the West – Rumsfeld told us that Iranians ‘are engaging in terrorist activities and transporting people down through Damascus and into the Bekaa Valley. They have harboured al-Qaeda and served as a facilitator for the movement of al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan down through Iran.’ Now the implication of all this is that al-Qaeda men were being funnelled into Lebanon with the help of Iran and Syria. Yet we know that Iran, far from ‘transporting’ al-Qaeda men to Syria, has been packing them off to Saudi Arabia for imprisonment and possible death. We know that the Syrians have locked up an important al-Qaeda official. The Americans have since acknowledged all this. And, save for ten Lebanese men hiding in a Palestinian camp – who may have no contact with al-Qaeda – there isn’t a single Osama bin Laden follower in Lebanon.*

So Hizballah had to be lined up for attack. The Washington Post did the trick with the following last month: ‘The Lebanonbased Hezbollah organisation, one of the world’s most formidable terrorist groups, is increasingly teaming up with al-Qa’ida on logistics and training for terrorist operations, according to US and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts.’ This tomfoolery was abetted by Steven Simon, who once worked for the US National Security Council and who announced that ‘there’s a convergence of objectives. There’s something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now.’ Except, of course – zeitgeist notwithstanding – it is simply untrue. The Washington Post had already lined up the Palestinians as America’s enemies – again, ‘terrorism experts’ were the source of this story – by telling its readers in May that ‘the sheer number of suicide belt-bombers attacking Israel this spring has increased fear among terrorism experts that the tactic will be exported to the United States.’

A similar theme was originally used to set up Saddam Hussein as an al-Qaeda ally. Back in March, George Tenet, the CIA director, stated that Baghdad ‘has also had contacts with al-Qaeda’, although he somewhat diluted this bald statement by adding that ‘the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible.’ Note the discrepancy here between ‘has also had contacts’ and ‘is possible’. On the West Bank, Rumsfeld has already talked about the ‘so-called occupied’ territories, a step down from William Safire’s outrageous column in the New York Times last March in which he admonished us not to call the occupied territories occupied. ‘To call them “occupied” reveals a prejudice against Israel’s right to what were supposed to be “secure and defensible” borders,’ he wrote. Now we have Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, telling us that ‘Arafat is somebody who failed to lead when he had a chance. Ehud Barak gave him a terrific opportunity to lead. And what did they get in return? Arafat started the second intifada instead and rejected that offered hand of friendship.’

* Five years later, there would be: the al-Qaeda-inspired ‘Fatah al-Islam’ group opened an offensive on 20 May 2007 from the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon against Lebanese government troops. It took the national army three months to crush the insurgents – who included Saudis, Yemenis and Syrians – at a cost of 300 dead, 158 of them soldiers. Forty civilians also died in the fighting.

Now it’s true that Ms Rice’s knowledge of the Middle East gets dimmer by the week, but this palpable falsification is now the Washington ‘line’. No mention, you’ll note, that Arafat was supposed to ‘lead’ by accepting Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, no mention of a ‘right of return’ for a single refugee, of the settlements built illegally outside east Jerusalem, of the ten-mile-wide Israeli buffer zone round ‘Palestine’, of scarcely 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine under negotiation to be given to Palestinians.

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on. It’s not just al-Qaeda who are the ‘enemy’. It’s Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia. Bush Productions are setting up the Arab world. We are being prepared for a wide-screen epic, a spectacle supported by Hollywood fiction and a plot of lies. Alas, my dad is no longer with us to remind them all that cinema does not imitate reality, that war films lie about life and death.

The Independent, 17 August 2002

‘Our guys may kick them around a little…’

I think I’m getting the picture. North Korea breaks all its nuclear agreements with the United States, throws out UN inspectors and sets off to make a bomb a year, and President Bush says it’s ‘a diplomatic issue’. Iraq hands over a 12,000- page account of its weapons production and allows UN inspectors to roam all over the country, and – after they’ve found not a jam-jar of dangerous chemicals in 230 raids – President Bush announces that Iraq is a threat to America, has not disarmed and may have to be invaded. So that’s it, then.

How, readers keep asking me in the most eloquent of letters, does he get away with it? Indeed, how does Tony Blair get away with it? Not long ago in the House of Commons, our dear prime minister was announcing in his usual schoolmasterly tones – the ones used on particularly inattentive or dim boys in class – that Saddam’s factories of mass destruction were ‘up [pause] and running [pause] now’. But the Dear Leader in Pyongyang does have factories that are up [pause] and running [pause] now. And Tony Blair is silent.

Why do we tolerate this? Why do Americans? Over the past few days there has been just the smallest of hints that the American media – the biggest and most culpable backer of the White House’s campaign of mendacity – has been, ever so timidly, asking a few questions. Months after The Independent first began to draw its readers’ attention to Donald Rumsfeld’s chummy personal visits to Saddam in Baghdad at the height of Iraq’s use of poison gas against Iran in 1983, the Washington Post has at last decided to tell its own readers a bit of what was going on. Reporter Michael Dobbs included the usual weasel clauses (‘opinions differ among Middle East experts… whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction’), but the thrust is there: we created the monster and Mr Rumsfeld played his part in doing so.

But no American – or British – newspaper has dared to investigate another, almost equally dangerous, relationship that the present US administration is forging behind our backs: with the military-supported regime in Algeria. For ten years now, one of the world’s dirtiest wars has been fought out in this country, supposedly between ‘Islamists’ and ‘security forces’, in which almost 200,000 people – mostly civilians – have been killed. But over the past five years there has been growing evidence that elements of those same security forces were involved in some of the bloodiest massacres, including the throat-cutting of babies. The Independent has published the most detailed reports of Algerian police torture and of the extrajudicial executions of women as well as men. Yet the US, as part of its obscene ‘war on terror’, has cosied up to the Algerian regime. It is helping to rearmAlgeria’s army and promised more assistance. William Burns, the US assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, announced that Washington ‘has much to learn from Algeria on ways to fight terrorism’.

And he’s right. The Algerian security forces can instruct the Americans on how to make a male or female prisoner believe that they are going to suffocate. The method – US personnel can find the experts in this particular torture technique working in the basement of the Châteauneuf police station in central Algiers – is to cover the trussed-up victim’s mouth with a rag and then soak it with cleaning fluid.* The prisoner slowly suffocates. There’s also the usual nail-pulling and the usual wires attached to penises and vaginas and – I’ll always remember the eyewitness description – the rape of an old woman in a police station, from which she emerged, covered in blood, urging other prisoners to resist.

Some of the witnesses to these abominations were Algerian police officers who had sought sanctuary in London. But rest assured, Mr Burns is right, America has much to learn from the Algerians. Already, for example – don’t ask why this never reached the newspapers – the Algerian army chief of staff has been warmly welcomed at Nato’s southern command headquarters at Naples. And the Americans are learning. A national security official attached to the CIA divulged last month that when it came to prisoners, ‘Our guys may kick them around a little in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath’. Another US ‘national security’ official announced that ‘pain control in wounded patients is a very subjective thing’. But let’s be fair. The Americans may have learned this wickedness from the Algerians. They could just as well have learned it from the Taliban.

Meanwhile, inside the US, the profiling of Muslims goes on apace. On 17 November, thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Afghans, Bahrainis, Eritreans, Lebanese, Moroccans, Omanis, Qataris, Somalis, Tunisians, Yemenis and Emiratis turned up at federal offices to be fingerprinted. The New York Times – the most chicken of all the American papers in covering the post-9/11 story – revealed (only in paragraph 5 of its report, of course) that ‘over the past week, agency officials… have handcuffed and detained hundreds of men who showed up to be finger-printed. In some cases the men had expired student or work visas; in other cases, the men could not provide adequate documentation of their immigration status.’ In Los Angeles, the cops ran out of plastic handcuffs as they herded men off to the lockup. Of the 1,000 men arrested without trial or charges after 11 September, many were nativeborn Americans.

* The Americans, of course, did subsequently adopt – and use – a suffocation torture technique called ‘waterboarding’, during which the (usually Arab Muslim) prisoner is almost drowned before being ‘saved’ from death by his captors.

Indeed, many Americans don’t even know what the chilling acronym of the ‘US Patriot Act’ even stands for. ‘Patriot’ is not a reference to patriotism. The name stands for the ‘United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act’. America’s $200 m ‘Total Awareness Program’ will permit the US government to monitor citizens’ e-mail and internet activity and collect data on the movement of all Americans. And although we have not been told about this by our journalists, the US administration is now pestering European governments for the contents of their own citizens’ data files. The most recent – and most preposterous – of these claims came in a US demand for access to the computer records of the French national airline, Air France, so that it could ‘profile’ thousands of its passengers. All this is beyond the wildest dreams of Saddam and the Dear Leader Kim.

The new rules even worm their way into academia. Take the friendly little university of Purdue in Indiana, where I lectured a few weeks ago. With federal funds, it’s now setting up an ‘Institute for Homeland Security’, whose eighteen ‘experts’ will include executives from Boeing and Hewlett-Packard and US Defense and State Department officials, to organise ‘research programmes’ around ‘critical mission areas’. What, I wonder, are these areas to be? Surely nothing to do with injustice in the Middle East, the Arab–Israeli conflict or the presence of thousands of US troops on Muslim lands. After all, it was Richard Perle, the most sinister of George Bush’s pro-Israeli advisers, who stated last year that ‘terrorism must be decontextualised’.

Meanwhile, we are – on that very basis – ploughing on to war in Iraq, which has oil, but avoiding war in Korea, which does not have oil. And our leaders are getting away with it. In doing so, we are threatening the innocent, torturing our prisoners and ‘learning’ from men who should be in the dock for war crimes. This, then, is our true memorial to the men and women so cruelly murdered in the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001.

The Independent, 4 January 2003

The wind from the East

I was sitting on the floor of an old concrete house in the suburbs of Amman this week, stuffing into my mouth vast heaps of lamb and boiled rice soaked in melted butter. The elderly, bearded, robed men from Maan – the most Islamist and disobedient city in Jordan – sat around me, plunging their hands into the meat and soaked rice, urging me to eat more and more of the great pile until I felt constrained to point out that we Brits had eaten so much of the Middle East these past hundred years that we were no longer hungry. There was a muttering of prayers until an old man replied. ‘The Americans eat us now,’ he said.

Through the open door, where rain splashed on the paving stones, a sharp wind howled in from the east, from the Jordanian and Iraqi deserts. Every man in the room believed President Bush wanted Iraqi oil. Indeed, every Arab I’ve met in the past six months believes that this – and this alone – explains his enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Many Israelis think the same. So do I. Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world’s total reserves. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week, ‘US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many other non-Opec fields are beginning to run dry. The bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region.’ No wonder the whole Bush energy policy is based on the increasing consumption of oil. Some 70 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve to oil production – the number of years that reserves of oil will last at current production rates – compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1. In Kuwait, it’s 116:1. But in Iraq it’s 526:1. And this forthcoming war isn’t about oil?

Even if Donald Rumsfeld’s hearty handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983 didn’t show how little the present master of the Pentagon cares about human rights or crimes against humanity, along comes Joost Hilterman’s analysis of what was really going on in the Pentagon back in the late 1980s. Hilterman, who is preparing a book on the US and Iraq, has dug through piles of declassified US government documents, only to discover that after Saddam gassed 6,800 Kurdish Iraqis at Halabja (that’s well over twice the total of the World Trade Center dead of 11 September 2001) the Pentagon set out to defend Saddam by partially blaming Iran for the atrocity. A newly declassified State Department document proves that the idea was dreamed up by the Pentagon – who had all along backed Saddam – and states that US diplomats received instructions to push the line of Iran’s culpability, but not to discuss details. No details, of course, because the story was a lie. This, remember, followed five years after US National Security Decision Directive 114 – concluded in 1983, the same year as Rumsfeld’s friendly visit to Baghdad – gave formal sanction to billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Baghdad. And this forthcoming war is about human rights?

Back in 1997, in the years of the Clinton administration, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a bunch of other right-wing men – most involved in the oil business – created the Project for the New American Century, a lobby group demanding ‘regime change’ in Iraq. In a 1998 letter to President Clinton, they called for the removal of Saddam from power. In a letter to Newt Gingrich, who was then Speaker of the House, they wrote that ‘we should establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf – and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power’. The signatories of one or both letters included Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s Pentagon deputy, John Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control, and Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s under-secretary at the State Department – who called last year for America to take up its ‘blood debt’ with the Lebanese Hizballah. They also included Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defence, currently chairman of the defence science board, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the former Unocal Corporation oil industry consultant who became US special envoy to Afghanistan – where Unocal once tried to cut a deal with the Taliban for a gas pipeline across Afghan territory – and who now, miracle of miracles, has been appointed a special Bush official for Iraq.

The signatories also included our old friend Elliott Abrams, one of the most pro-Sharon of pro-Israeli US officials, who was convicted for his part in the Iran–Contra scandal. Abrams it was who compared Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to Winston Churchill. So this forthcoming war – the whole shooting match, along with that concern for ‘vital interests’ (i.e. oil) in the Gulf – was concocted five years ago, by men like Cheney and Khalilzad who were oil men to their manicured fingertips.

In fact, I’m getting heartily sick of hearing the Second World War being dug up yet again to justify another killing field. It’s not long ago that Bush was happy to be portrayed as Churchill standing up to the appeasement of the no-war-in-Iraq brigade. In fact, Bush’s whole strategy with the odious and Stalinist-style Korean regime – the ‘excellent’ talks which US diplomats insist they are having with the Dear Leader’s Korea which very definitely does have weapons of mass destruction – reeks of the worst kind of Chamberlain-like appeasement. Even though Saddam and Bush deserve each other, Saddam is not Hitler. And Bush is certainly no Churchill. But now we are told that the UN inspectors have found what might be the vital evidence to go to war: eleven empty chemical warheads that just may be twenty years old.

The world went to war eighty-eight years ago because an archduke was assassinated in Sarajevo. The world went to war sixty-three years ago because a Nazi dictator invaded Poland. But for eleven empty warheads? Give me oil any day. Even the old men sitting around the feast of mutton and rice would agree with that.

The Independent, 18 January 2003

CHAPTER TWO

Publish and be damned? Or stay silent?

The Armenian genocide of 1915 – the systematic murder of one and a half million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War – was one of the most terrible atrocities visited upon humanity in the twentieth century. Yet modern-day Turkey is permitted by its Western allies – who fully acknowledged these crimes against humanity at the time – to deny that this Holocaust ever took place. To our peril – and our shame – we refuse to condemn the Ottoman Turks for what proved to be the testing ground for Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry in the Second World War. Little did I realise, when I first researched the Armenian genocide, that my own writing would become entangled in Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge history.

So let me denounce genocide from the dock

This has been a bad week for Holocaust deniers. I’m talking about those who wilfully lie about the 1915 genocide of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks. On Thursday, France’s lower house of parliament approved a bill making it a crime to deny that Armenians suffered genocide. And within an hour, Turkey’s most celebrated writer, Orhan Pamuk – only recently cleared by a Turkish court of insulting ‘Turkishness’ by telling a Swiss newspaper that nobody in Turkey dared mention the Armenian massacres – won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the mass graves below the deserts of Syria and beneath the soil of southern Turkey, a few souls may have been comforted.

While Turkey continues to blather on about its innocence – the systematic killing of hundreds of thousands of male Armenians and of their gang-raped women is supposed to be the sad result of ‘civil war’ – Armenian historians such as Vahakn Dadrian continue to unearth new evidence of the premeditated Holocaust (and, yes, it will deserve its capital H, since it was the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust, some of whose Nazi architects were in Turkey in 1915) with all the energy of a gravedigger.

Armenian victims were killed with daggers, swords, hammers and axes to save ammunition. Massive drowning operations were carried out in the Black Sea and the Euphrates river – mostly of women and children, so many that the Euphrates became clogged with corpses and changed its course for up to half a mile. But Dadrian, who speaks and reads Turkish fluently, has now discovered that tens of thousands of Armenians were also burned alive in haylofts. He has produced an affidavit presented to the Turkish court martial that briefly pursued the Turkish mass murderers after the First World War, a document written by General Mehmet Vehip Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army. He testified that when he visited the Armenian village of Chourig (it means ‘little water’ in Armenian) he found all the houses packed with burned human skeletons, so tightly packed that all were standing upright. ‘In all the history of Islam,’ General Vehip wrote, ‘it is not possible to find any parallel to such savagery.’

The Armenian Holocaust, now so ‘unmentionable’ in Turkey, was no secret to the country’s population in 1918. Millions of Muslim Turks had witnessed the mass deportation of Armenians three years earlier – a few, with infinite courage, protected Armenian neighbours and friends at the risk of the lives of their own Muslim families – and on 19 October 1918 Ahmed Riza, the elected president of the Turkish senate and a former supporter of the Young Turk leaders who committed the genocide, stated in his inaugural speech: ‘Let’s face it, we Turks savagely [vahshiane in Turkish] killed off the Armenians.’ Dadrian has detailed how two parallel sets of orders were issued, Nazi-style, by Turkish interior minister Talat Pasha. One set solicitously ordered the provision of bread, olives and protection for Armenian deportees; but a parallel set instructed Turkish officials to ‘proceed with your mission’ as soon as the deportee convoys were far enough away from population centres for there to be few witnesses to murder. As Turkish senator Reshid Akif Pasha testified on 19 November 1918: ‘The “mission” in the circular was: to attack the convoys and massacre the population… I am ashamed as a Muslim, I am ashamed as an Ottoman statesman. What a stain on the reputation of the Ottoman Empire, these criminal people…’

How extraordinary that Turkish dignitaries could speak such truths in 1918, could fully admit in their own parliament to the genocide of the Armenians and could read editorials in Turkish newspapers of the great crimes committed against this Christian people. Yet how much more extraordinary that their successors today maintain that all of this is a myth, that anyone who says in present-day Istanbul what the men of 1918 admitted can find themselves facing prosecution under the notorious Law 301 for ‘defaming’ Turkey.

I’m not sure that Holocaust deniers – of the anti-Armenian or anti-Semitic variety – should be taken to court for their rantings. David Irving is a particularly unpleasant ‘martyr’ for freedom of speech and I am not at all certain that Bernard Lewis’s one-franc fine by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article did anything more than give publicity to an elderly historian whose work deteriorates with the years.

But it’s gratifying to find that French president Jacques Chirac and his interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy have both announced that Turkey will have to recognise the Armenian deaths as genocide before it is allowed to join the European Union. True, France has a powerful half-million-strong Armenian community. And, typically, no such courage has been demonstrated by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, nor by the EU itself, which gutlessly and childishly commented that the new French bill, if passed by the senate in Paris, will ‘prohibit dialogue’ which is necessary for reconciliation between Turkey and modern-day Armenia. What is the subtext of this, I wonder? No more talk of the Jewish Holocaust lest we hinder ‘reconciliation’ between Germany and the Jews of Europe?

But, suddenly, last week, those Armenian mass graves opened up before my own eyes. Next month my Turkish publishers are producing my book, The Great War for Civilisation, in the Turkish language, complete with its long chapter on the Armenian genocide entitled ‘The First Holocaust’. On Thursday, I received a fax from Agora Books in Istanbul. Their lawyers, it said, believed it ‘very likely that they will be sued under Law 301’ – which forbids the defaming of Turkey and which right-wing lawyers tried to use against Pamuk – but that, as a foreigner, I would be ‘out of reach’. However, if I wished, I could apply to the court to be included in any Turkish trial. Personally, I doubt if the Holocaust deniers of Turkey will dare to touch us. But, if they try, it will be an honour to stand in the dock with my Turkish publishers, to denounce a genocide which even Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, condemned.

The Independent, 14 October 2006

You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador

A letter from the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James arrived for me a few days ago, one of those missives that send a shudder through the human soul. ‘You allege that an Armenian “genocide” took place in Eastern Anatolia in 1915,’ His Excellency Mr Akin Alptuna told me. ‘I believe you have some misconceptions about those events…’

Oh indeedydoody, I have. I am under the totally mistaken conception that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were cruelly and deliberately done to death by their Turkish Ottoman masters in 1915, that the men were shot and knifed while their womenfolk were raped and eviscerated and cremated and starved on death marches and their children butchered. I have met a few of the survivors – liars to a man and woman, if the Turkish ambassador to Britain is to be believed – and I have seen the photographs taken of the victims by a brave German photographer called Armen Wegner whose pictures must now, I suppose, be consigned to the waste bins. So must the archives of all those diplomats who courageously catalogued the mass murders inflicted upon Turkey’s Christian population on the orders of the gang of nationalists who ran the Ottoman government in 1915.

What would have been our reaction if the ambassador of Germany had written a note to the same effect? ‘You allege that a “Jewish genocide” took place in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945… I believe you have some misconceptions about those events…’ Of course, the moment such a letter became public, the ambassador of Germany would be condemned by the Foreign Office, our man in Berlin would – even the pusillanimous Blair might rise to the occasion – be withdrawn for consultations and the European Union would debate whether sanctions should be placed upon Germany.

But Mr Alptuna need have no such worries. His country is not a member of the European Union – it merely wishes to be – and it was Mr Blair’s craven administration that for many months tried to prevent Armenian participation in Britain’s Holocaust Day. Amid this chicanery, there are a few shining bright lights and I should say at once that Mr Alptuna’s letter is a grotesque representation of the views of a growing number of Turkish citizens, a few of whom I have the honour to know, who are convinced that the story of the great evil visited upon the Armenians must be told in their country. So why, oh why, I ask myself, are Mr Alptuna and his colleagues in Paris and Beirut and other cities still peddling this nonsense?

In Lebanon, for example, the Turkish embassy has sent a ‘communiqué’ to the local French-language L’Orient-Le Jour newspaper, referring to the ‘soi-disant [so-called] Armenian genocide’ and asking why the modern state of Armenia will not respond to the Turkish call for a joint historical study to ‘examine the events’ of 1915. In fact, the Armenian president, Robert Kotcharian, will not respond to such an invitation for the same reason that the world’s Jewish community would not respond to the call for a similar examination of the Jewish Holocaust from the Iranian president – because an unprecedented international crime was committed, the mere questioning of which would be an insult to the millions of victims who perished.

But the Turkish appeals are artfully concocted. In Beirut, they recall the Allied catastrophe at Gallipoli in 1915 when British, French, Australian and New Zealand troops suffered massive casualties at the hands of the Turkish army. In all – including Turkish soldiers – up to a quarter of a million men perished in the Dardanelles. The Turkish embassy in Beirut rightly states that the belligerent nations of Gallipoli have transformed these hostilities into gestures of reconciliation, friendship and mutual respect. A good try. But the bloodbath of Gallipoli did not involve the planned murder of hundreds of thousands of British, French, Australian, New Zealand – and Turkish – women and children.

But now for the bright lights. A group of ‘righteous Turks’ are challenging their government’s dishonest account of the 1915 genocide: Ahmet Insel, Baskin Oran, Halil Berktay, Hrant Dink,* Ragip Zarakolu and others claim that the ‘democratic process’ in Turkey will ‘chip away at the darkness’ and they seek help from Armenians in doing so. Yet even they will refer only to the 1915 ‘disaster’, the ‘tragedy’ and the ‘agony’ of the Armenians. Dr Fatma Goçek of the university of Michigan is among the bravest of those Turkish-born academics who are fighting to confront the Ottoman Empire’s terror against the Armenians. Yet she, too, objects to the use of the word genocide – though she acknowledges its accuracy – on the grounds that it has become ‘politicised’ and thus hinders research.

I have some sympathy with this argument. Why make the job of honest Turks more difficult when these good men and women are taking on the might of Turkish nationalism? The problem is that other, more disreputable folk are demanding the same deletion. Mr Alptuna writes to me – with awesome disingenuousness – that Armenians ‘have failed to submit any irrefutable evidence to support their allegations of genocide’. And he goes on to say that ‘genocide, as you are well aware, has a quite specific legal definition’ in the UN’s 1948 Convention. But Mr Alptuna is himself well aware – though he does not say so, of course – that the definition of genocide was set out by Raphael Lemkin, a Jew, in specific reference to the wholesale mass slaughter of the Armenians.

* Hrant Dink’s fate is recorded in the next pages.

And all the while, new diplomatic archives are opening in the West which reveal the smell of death – Armenian death – in their pages. I quote here, for example, from the newly discovered account of Denmark’s minister in Turkey during the First World War. ‘The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,’ Carl Wandel wrote on 3 July 1915. The bishop of Karput was ordered to leave Aleppo within forty-eight hours ‘and it has later been learned that this Bishop and all the clergy that accompanied him have been killed between Diyarbekir and Urfa at a place where approximately 1,700 Armenian families have suffered the same fate… In Angora… approximately 6,000 men… have been shot on the road. Even here in Constantinople [Istanbul], Armenians are being abducted and sent to Asia…’

There is much, much more. Yet now here is Mr Alptuna in his letter to me: ‘In fact, the Armenians living outside Eastern Armenia including Istanbul… were excluded from deportation.’ Somebody here is not telling the truth. The late Mr Wandel of Copenhagen? Or the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St James?

The Independent, 20 May 2006

Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim

Hrant Dink became the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide yesterday. An educated and generous journalist and academic – editor of the weekly Turkish–Armenian newspaper Agos – he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the twentieth century’s first Holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon. It was not only a frightful blow to Turkey’s surviving Armenian community but a shattering reversal to Turkey’s hope of joining the European Union, a visionary proposal already endangered by the country’s broken relations with Cyprus and its refusal to acknowledge the genocide for what it was: the deliberate mass killing of an entire race of Christian people by the country’s Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. Winston Churchill was among the first to call it a holocaust, but to this day the Turkish authorities deny such a definition, ignoring documents which Turkey’s own historians have unearthed to prove the government’s genocidal intent.

The 53-year-old journalist, who had two children, was murdered at the door of his newspaper. Just over a year ago, he was convicted under Turkey’s notorious Law 301 of ‘anti- Turkishness’, a charge he strenuously denied even after he received a six-month suspended sentence from an Istanbul court. The EU has demanded that Turkey repeal the law under which the country also tried to imprison Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk. At the time of his trial, Dink appeared on Turkish television in tears. ‘I’m living together with Turks in this country,’ he said then. ‘And I’m in complete solidarity with them. I don’t think I could live with an identity of having insulted them in this country.’

It is a stunning irony that Dink, in one of his articles, had accused his fellow Armenians of allowing their enmity towards the Turks for the genocide to develop to the point where it had a ‘poisoning effect on your blood’ – and that the court took the article out of context and claimed he was referring to Turkish blood as poisonous. Dink told news agency reporters in 2005 that his case had arisen from a question on what he felt when, at primary school, he had to take a traditional Turkish oath: ‘I am a Turk, I am honest, I am hard-working.’ In his defence, Dink said: ‘I said that I was a Turkish citizen but an Armenian and that even though I was honest and hard-working, I was not a Turk, I was an Armenian.’ He did not like a line in the Turkish national anthem that refers to ‘my heroic race’. He did not like singing that line, he said, ‘because I was against using the word “race”, which leads to discrimination’.

Pamuk had earlier faced a court for talking about the 1915 genocide in a Swiss magazine. Leading Turkish publishers say that there is now an incendiary atmosphere in Turkey towards all writers who want to tell the truth about the genocide, when vast areas of Turkish Armenia were ‘cleansed’ of their Christian populations.

The Independent, 20 January 2007

Sneaking a book out in silence

Stand by for a quotation to take your breath away. It’s from a letter from my Istanbul publishers, who are chickening out of publishing the Turkish-language edition of my book The Great War for Civilisation. The reason is a chapter entitled ‘The First Holocaust’, which records the Armenian genocide. It is, I hasten to add, only one chapter in my book about the Middle East, but the fears of my Turkish friends were being expressed even before the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was so cruelly murdered outside his Istanbul office in January. And when you read the following, fromtheir message tomy London publishers HarperCollins, remember it is written by a citizen of a country that seriously wishes to enter the European Union. Since I do not speak Turkish, I am in no position to criticise the occasional lapses in Mr Osman’s otherwise excellent English.

We would like to denote that the political situation in Turkey concerning several issues such as Armenian and Kurdish Problems, Cyprus issue, European Union etc do not improve, conversely getting worser and worser due to the escalating nationalist upheaval that has reached its apex with the Nobel Prize of Orhan Pamuk and the political disagreements with the EU. Most probably, this political atmosphere will be effective until the coming presidency elections of April 2007… Therefore we would like to undertake the publication quietly, which

means there will be no press campaign for Mr Fisk’s book. Thus, our request from [for] Mr Fisk is to show his support to us if any trial [is]… held against his book. We hope that Mr Fisk and HarperCollins can understand our reservations.

I can. Here is a publisher in a country negotiating for EU membership for whom Armenian history, the Kurds, Cyprus (unmentioned in my book) – even Turkey’s bid to join the EU – is reason enough to sneak my book out in silence. When in the history of bookselling, I ask myself, has any publisher tried to avoid publicity for his book? Well, I can give you an example. When Taner Akçam’s magnificent A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility was first published in Turkish – it uses Ottoman Turkish state documents and contemporary Turkish statements to prove that the genocide was a terrifying historical fact – the Turkish historian experienced an almost identical reaction. His work was published ‘quietly’ in Turkey – and without a single book review.

Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic with my Turkish publishers. It is one thing for me to rage and roar about their pusillanimity. But I live in Beirut, not in Istanbul. And after Hrant Dink’s foul murder, I’m in no position to lecture my colleagues in Turkey to stand up to the racism that killed Dink. While I’m sipping my morning coffee on the Beirut Corniche, Mr Osman could be assaulted in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire. But there’s a problem nonetheless. My Turkish publishers want to bring my book out like illicit pornography – but still have me standing with them in the dock if right-wing lawyers bring charges under Law 301!

I understand, as they write in their own letter, that they do not want to be forced to take political sides in the ‘nonsensical collision between nationalists and neo-liberals’, but I fear that the roots of this problem go deeper. The sinister photograph of the Turkish police guards standing proudly next to Dink’s alleged murderer after his arrest shows just what we are up against here. Yet still our own Western reporters won’t come clean about the Ottoman Empire’s foul actions in 1915. When, for example, Reuters sent a reporter, Gareth Jones, off to the Turkish city of Trabzon – where Dink’s supposed killer lived – he quoted the city’s governor as saying that Dink’s murder was related to ‘social problems linked to fast urbanisation’. A ‘strong gun culture and the fiery character of the people’ might be to blame.

I wonder why Reuters didn’t mention a much more direct and terrible link between Trabzon and the Armenians. For in 1915, the Turkish authorities of the city herded thousands of Armenian women and children on to boats and set off into the Black Sea – the details are contained in an original Ottoman document unearthed by Akçam – where they were ‘thrown off to drown’. Historians may like to know that the man in charge of these murder boats was called Niyazi Effendi. No doubt he had a ‘fiery character’.

Yet still this denial goes on. The Associated Press this week ran a story from Ankara in which its reporter, Selçan Hacaoglu, repeated the same old mantra about there being a ‘bitter dispute’ between Armenia and Turkey over the 1915 slaughter, in which Turkey ‘vehemently denies that the killings were genocide’. When will the Associated Press wake up and cut this cowardly nonsense from its reports? Would the AP insert in all its references to the equally real and horrific murder of 6 million European Jews that right-wing Holocaust negationists ‘vehemently deny’ that there was a genocide?

But real history will win. Last October, according to local newspaper reports, villagers of Kuru in eastern Turkey were digging a grave for one of their relatives when they came across a cave containing the skulls and bones of around forty people – almost certainly the remains of 150 Armenians from the town of Oguz who were murdered in Kuru on 14 June 1915. The local Turkish gendarmerie turned up to examine the cave last year, sealed its entrance and ordered villagers not to speak of what they found. But there are hundreds of other Kurus in Turkey and their bones, too, will return to haunt us all. Publishing books ‘quietly’ will not save us.

The Independent, 17 March 2007

‘A conflict of interest’

I despise the internet. It’s irresponsible, and often a net of hate. And I don’t have time for Blogopops. But here’s a tale of two gutless newspapers which explains why more and more people are Googling rather than turning pages.

First the Los Angeles Times. Last year, reporter Mark Arax was assigned a routine story on the Armenian genocide. His report focused on divisions within the local Jewish community over whether to call the genocide a genocide. The Israeli government and its new Nobel Prize-winning president, Shimon Peres – anxious to keep cosy relations with modern Turkey – have adopted Istanbul’s mendacious version of events. However, many Jews, both inside and outside Israel, have bravely insisted that they do constitute a genocide, indeed the very precursor to the later Nazi Holocaust of 6 million Jews.

Yet Arax’s genocide report was killed on the orders of managing editor Douglas Frantz because the reporter had a ‘position on the issue’ and ‘a conflict of interest’. Readers will already have guessed that Arax is an Armenian-American. His sin, it seems, was that way back in 2005 he and five other writers wrote a formal memo to LA Times editors reminding them that the paper’s style rules meant that the Armenian genocide was to be called just that – not ‘alleged genocide’. Frantz, however, described the old memo as a ‘petition’ and apparently accused Arax of landing the assignment by dealing with a Washington editor who was also an Armenian.

The story was reassigned to Washington reporter Rich Simon, who concentrated on Turkey’s attempt to block Congress from recognising the Armenian slaughter – and whose story ran under the headline ‘Genocide Resolution Still Far From Certain’. LA Times executives then went all coy, declining interviews, although Frantz admitted in a blog (of course) that he had ‘put a hold’ on Arax’s story because of concerns that the reporter ‘had expressed personal views about the topic in a public manner…’ Ho ho.

Truth can be dangerous for the LA Times. Even more so, it seems, when the managing editor himself – Frantz, no less – once worked for the New York Times, where he referred to the Armenian massacres as, yes, an ‘alleged’ genocide. Frantz, it turns out, joined the LA Times as its Istanbul correspondent. Well, Arax has since left the LA Times after a settlement which forestalled a lawsuit against the paper for defamation and discrimination. His employers heaped praise upon his work while Frantz has just left the paper to become Middle East correspondent of the Wall Street Journal based in – of course, you guessed it – Istanbul.

But now let’s go north of the border, to the Toronto Globe and Mail, which assigned columnist Jan Wong to investigate a college murder in Montreal last September. Wong is not a greatly loved reporter. A third-generation Canadian, she moved to China during Mao’s ‘cultural revolution’ and, in her own words, ‘snitched on class enemies and did my best to be a good little Maoist’. She later wrote a ‘Lunch With’ series for the Globe in which she acted all sympathetic to interviewee guests to catch them out. ‘When they relax, that’s when their guard is down,’ she told a college newspaper. ‘It’s a trick, but it’s legit.’ Yuk!

Wong’s take on the Montreal Dawson College shooting, however, was more serious. She compared the killer to a half- Algerian Muslim who murdered fourteen women in another Montreal college shooting in 1989 and to a Russian immigrant who killed four university colleagues in Montreal in 1992. ‘In all three cases,’ she wrote, ‘the perpetrator was not “pure laine”, the argot for a “pure” francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial purity is repugnant. Not in Quebec.’ Painfully true, I’m afraid. Parisians, who speak real French, would never use such an expression – pure laine translates literally as ‘pure wool’ but means ‘authentic’ – but some Montrealers do. Wong, however, had touched a red-hot electric wire in ‘multicultural’ Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper complained. ‘Grossly irresponsible,’ said the man who enthusiastically continued the policy of sending Canadian troops on their suicidal mission to Afghanistan.

The French-Canadian newspaper Le Devoir – can you imagine a British paper selling a single copy if it called itself ‘Duty’? – published a cartoon of Wong with exaggerated Chinese slanted eyes. Definitely not pure laine for Le Devoir. The hate mail was even more to the point. Some contained excrement. But then the Globe and Mail ran for cover. Its editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon, wrote a cowardly column in which he claimed that the offending paragraphs ‘should have been removed’ from Wong’s story. ‘We regret that we allowed these words to get into a reported [sic] article,’ he sniffled. There had been a breakdown in what he hilariously called ‘the editorial quality control process’.

Now I happen to know a bit about the Globe’s ‘quality control process’. Some time ago I discovered that the paper had reprinted an article of mine from The Independent about the Armenian genocide. But they had tampered with it, altering my word ‘genocide’ to read ‘tragedy’. The Independent’s subscribers promise to make no changes to our reports. But when our syndication folk contacted the Globe, they discovered that the Canadian paper had simply stolen the article. They were made to pay a penalty fee. But as for the censorship of the word ‘genocide’, a female executive explained to The Independent that nothing could be done because the editor responsible had ‘since left the Globe and Mail’.

It’s the same old story, isn’t it? Censor then whinge, then cut and run. No wonder the bloggers are winning.

The Independent, 21 July 2007

This column provoked a blizzard of mail from Québécois (French- Canadians), accusing me of calling them racists, misunderstanding their minority status, demeaning their French-language paper Le Devoir (whose Middle East coverage I had praised in earlier articles) and abusing them for not speaking ‘proper’ French. The fact that the purpose of ‘Conflict of Interest’ was to condemn the gutlessness of English-language newspapers somehow got lost along the way.

Bravery, tears and broken dreams

There is nothing so infinitely sad – so pitiful and yet so courageous – as a people who yearn to return to a land forever denied them; the Poles to Brest Litovsk, the Germans to Silesia, the Palestinians to that part of Palestine that is now Israel. When a people claim to have settled again in their ancestral lands – the Israelis, for example, at the cost of ‘cleansing’ 750,000 Arabs who had perfectly legitimate rights to their homes – the world becomes misty-eyed. But could any nation be more miserably bereft than one which sees, each day, the towering symbol of its own land in the hands of another?

Mount Ararat will never return to Armenia – not to the rump state which the Soviets created in 1920 after the genocide – and its presence to the west of the capital, Yerevan, is a desperate, awful, permanent reminder of wrongs unrighted, atrocities unacknowledged, dreams never to be fulfilled. I watched Ararat all last week, cloud-shuffled in the morning, blue-hazed through the afternoon, ominous, oppressive, inspiring, magnificent, ludicrous in a way – for the freedom which it encourages can never be used to snatch it back from the Turks – capable of inspiring the loftiest verse and the most execrable commercialism.

There is a long-established Ararat cognac factory in Yerevan, Ararat gift shops – largely tatty affairs of ghastly local art and far too many models of Armenian churches – and even the Marriott Ararat Hotel, which is more than a rung up from the old Armenia Two Hotel where I stayed fifteen years ago, an ex-Soviet Intourist joint whose chief properties included the all-night rustling of cockroach armies between the plaster and the wallpaper beside my pillow.

Back in the Stalinist 1930s, the architect Aleksander Tamanian built an almost fascistic triumphal arch at one side of Republic Square through which the heights of Ararat, bathed in eternal snow, would forever be framed to remind Armenians of their mountain of tears. But the individualism of the descendants of Tigran the Great, whose empire stretched from the Caspian to Beirut, resisted even Stalin’s oppression. Yeghishe Charents, one of the nation’s favourite poets – a famous philanderer who apparently sought the Kremlin’s favours – produced a now famous poem called ‘The Message’. Its praise of Uncle Joe might grind the average set of teeth down to the gum; it included the following: ‘A new light shone on the world./Who brought this sun?/… It is only this sunlight/ Which for centuries will stay alive.’ And more of the same.

Undiscovered by the Kremlin’s censors for many months, however, Charents had used the first letter of each line to frame a quite different ‘message’, which read: ‘O Armenian people, your only salvation is in the power of your unity.’ Like the distant Mount Ararat, it was a brave, hopeless symbol, as doomed as it was impressive. Charents was ‘disappeared’ by the NKVD in 1937 after being denounced by Tamanian – now hard at work building Yerevan’s new Stalinist opera house – the moment Charents’s schoolboy prank was spotted. Then Tamanian fell from the roof of his still unfinished opera house, and even today Armenians – with their Arab-like desire to believe in ‘the plot’ – ask the obvious questions. Did the architect throw himself to his death in remorse? Or was he pushed?

Plots live on in the country that enjoyed only two years of post-genocide independence until its 1991 ‘freedom’ from the decaying Soviet Union. Its drearily re-elected prime minister, Serzh Sargsian, permits ‘neutral’ opposition but no real political debate – serious opponents would have their parties and newspapers closed down – and he recently told the local press that ‘the economy is more important than democracy’. Not surprising, I suppose, when the corrupt first president of free Armenia, Ter-Petrosian, is rumoured to be plotting a comeback. Sargsian even tried to throw the American Radio Liberty/ Free Europe station out of Armenia – though I suppose that’s not necessarily an undemocratic gesture.

Nonetheless, interviewed by Vartan Makarian on an Armenian TV show this week, I found it a bit hard to take when Vartan suggested that my Turkish publisher’s fear of bringing out my book on the Middle East was a symbol of Turkey’s ‘lack of democratisation’. What about Armenia’s pliant press, I asked? And why was it that present-day Armenia seemed to protest much less about the twentieth century’s first Holocaust than the millions of Armenians in the diaspora, in the US, Canada, France, Britain, even Turkish intellectuals in Turkey itself? The TV production crew burst into laughter behind their glass screen. Guests on Armenian television are supposed to answer questions, not ask them. Long live the Soviet Union.

But you have to hand it to the journalists of Yerevan. Each August they all go on holiday. At the same time. Yup. Every editor, reporter, book reviewer, columnist and printer packs up for the month and heads off to Lake Sevan or Karabakh for what is still called, Soviet-style, a ‘rest’. ‘We wish all our readers a happy rest-time and we’ll be back on August 17th,’ the newspaper Margin announced this week. And that was that. No poet may die, no Patriotic War hero expire, no minister may speak, no man may be imprisoned, lest his passing or his words or incarceration disappear from written history. I encourage the management of The Independent to consider this idea; if only we had operated such a system during the rule of the late Tony Blair… But no doubt a civil servant would have e-mailed him that this was a ‘good time’ to announce bad news.

In any event, a gloomy portrait of the poet–martyr Charents now adorns Armenia’s 1,000-dram note and Tamanian’s massive arch still dominates Republic Square. But the dying Soviet Union constructed high-rise buildings beyond the arch and so today, Ararat – like Charents – has been ‘disappeared’, obliterated behind the grey walls of post-Stalinist construction, the final indignity to such cloud-topped, vain hopes of return. Better by far to sip an Ararat cognac at the Marriott Ararat Hotel from which, at least, Noah’s old monster can still be seen.

The Independent, 4 August 2007

A holocaust denier in the White House

How are the mighty fallen! President George W. Bush, the Crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only ‘them or us’, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against ‘world terror’ on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a diminutive little creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. Am I going too far? I think not.

The ‘story so far’ is familiar enough. There are photographs, diplomatic reports, original Ottoman documentation, the process of an entire post-First World War Ottoman trial, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George and a massive report by the British Foreign Office in 1915 and 1916 to prove that it is all true. Even movie film is now emerging – real archive footage taken by Western military cameramen in the First World War – to show that the first Holocaust of the twentieth century, perpetrated in front of German officers who would later perfect its methods in their extermination of 6 million Jews, was as real as its pitifully few Armenian survivors still claim.

But the Turks won’t let us say this. They have blackmailed the Western powers – including our own British government, and now even the United States – to kowtow to their shameless denials. These (and I weary that we must repeat them, because every news agency and government does just that through fear of Ankara’s fury) include the canard that the Armenians died in a ‘civil war’, that they were anyway collaborating with Turkey’s Russian enemies, that fewer Armenians were killed than have been claimed, that as many Turkish Muslims were murdered as Armenians. And now President Bush and the United States Congress have gone along with these lies. There was, briefly, a historic moment for Bush to walk tall after the US House Foreign Relations Committee voted last month to condemn the mass slaughter of Armenians as an act of genocide. Ancient Armenian-American survivors gathered at a House panel to listen to the debate. But as soon as Turkey’s fossilised generals started to threaten Bush, I knew he would give in.

Listen, first, to General Yasar Buyukanit, chief of the Turkish armed forces, in an interview with the newspaper Milliyet. The passage of the House resolution, he whinged, was ‘sad and sorrowful’ in view of the ‘strong links’ Turkey maintained with its NATO partners. And if this resolution was passed by the full House of Representatives, then ‘our military relations with the US would never be as they were in the past… The US, in that respect, has shot itself in the foot.’

Now listen to Mr Bush as he snaps to attention before the Turkish general staff. ‘We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people… But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings. Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.’ I loved the last bit about the ‘global war on terror’. Nobody – save for the Jews of Europe – has suffered ‘terror’ more than the benighted Armenians of Turkey in 1915. But that NATO should matter more than the integrity of history – that NATO might one day prove to be so important that the Bushes of this world might have to equivocate over the Jewish Holocaust to placate a militarily resurgent Germany – beggars belief.

Among those men who should hold their heads in shame are those who claim they are winning the war in Iraq. They include the increasingly disoriented General David Petraeus, US commander in Iraq, and the increasingly delusionary US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, both of whom warned that full passage of the Armenian genocide bill would ‘harm the war effort in Iraq’. And make no mistake, there are big bucks behind this disgusting piece of Holocaust denial. Former Representative Robert L. Livingston, a Louisiana Republican, has already picked up $12 million from the Turks for his company, the Livingston Group, for two previously successful attempts to pervert the cause of moral justice and smother genocide congressional resolutions. He personally escorted Turkish officials to Capitol Hill to threaten US congressmen. They got the point. If the resolution went ahead, Turkey would bar US access to the Incirlik air base through which passed much of the 70 per cent of American air supplies to Iraq which transit Turkey. In the real world, this is called blackmail – which was why Bush was bound to cave in. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was even more craven – although he obviously cared nothing for the details of history. Petraeus and Crocker, he said, ‘believe clearly that access to the airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes…’

How terrible an irony did Gates utter. For it is these very ‘roads and so on’ down which walked the hundreds of thousands of Armenians on their 1915 death marches. Many were forced aboard cattle trains which took them to their deaths. One of the railway lines on which they travelled ran due east of Adana – a great collection point for the doomed Christians of western Armenia – and the first station on the line was called Incirlik, the very same Incirlik which now houses the huge air base which Mr Bush is so frightened of losing. Had the genocide which Bush refuses to acknowledge not taken place – as the Turks claim – the Americans would be asking the Armenians for permission to use Incirlik. There is still alive – in Sussex if anyone cares to see her – an ageing Armenian survivor from that region who recalls the Ottoman Turkish gendarmes setting fire to a pile of living Armenian babies on the road close to Adana. These are the same ‘roads and so on’ which so concern the gutless Mr Gates.

But fear not. If Turkey has frightened the boots off Bush, he’s still ready to rattle the cage of the all-powerful Persians. People should be interested in preventing Iran from acquiring the knowledge to make nuclear weapons if they’re ‘interested in preventing World War Three’, he has warned us. What piffle. Bush can’t even summon up the courage to tell the truth about World War One. Who would have thought that the leader of the Western world – he who would protect us against ‘world terror’ – would turn out to be the David Irving of the White House?

The Independent, 10 November 2007

CHAPTER THREE

Words, words, words…

The misuse and manipulation of language – the worthless semantics of journalists and politicians and even academics – is becoming ever more frequent and ever more dangerous. It’s not just the clichés we are taught to use when we are cub reporters, nor the banal language of our pseudo-statesmen nor the secretive language of anthropologists; nor the politically ‘correct’ message of advertisers, company executives and diplomats. In the Middle East, our weasel words can be lethal, especially when they are subtly intended to define the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’, to undermine the humanity of one race of people at the expense of another. Our journalism is already biased – the initial response of French writers and intellectuals to the 1967 Middle East war is proof enough of this – without resorting to subterranean words that ‘key in’ our prejudice. Perhaps we now ‘experience’ language rather than listen to it. Over the years, I have more and more studied the Babel of lies that we produce, and the few – the pitifully few – writers who believe, like Victor Klemperer, in ‘the truth of language’.

Hack blasts local rags

I was seventeen when I first arrived in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was a city of heavy, black, nineteenth-century buildings, a spider’s web of iron bridges and smouldering steam locomotives, the air thick with coal smoke and red haze from the steel works at Consett. The news editor of the Evening Chronicle, John Brownlee, did his best to cheer me up. ‘You’ll be in our Blyth office, Bob, a bustling little coal town on the coast with plenty of life and lots of news.’ Brownlee was in estate-agent mode. Blyth was a down-at-heel collier harbour, smothered in the dust of doomed mines and a thousand coal fires. The slagheaps glowed red at night, the dying shipyards were bankrupt, pools of vomit lay splashed over the pavements outside the Blyth and Tyne and two dozen other pubs and clubs every Sunday morning. Even in summer, a kind of North Sea mildew settled over the town, a damp, cold cloth mixed with coal smoke that smothered all who lived there.

I was homesick and lonely and I was paid £17.50 a week, a third of which I handed over to Mrs Hamilton, my landlady at 82 Middleton Street, where I slept in a room 7 ft in length and just 5 ft wide with a single tiny gas fire. When I came home one day I found the Gas Board asking my landlady why there was no money in the meter; I had to explain that I didn’t earn enough to pay for the heating. So I spent all evening in front of the fire in the rotting old back-to-back Chronicle office in Seaforth Street, then walked home through the smoke at midnight and cowered under my blankets for warmth. I used to read history books on Sunday afternoons, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, sitting in the overgrown Victorian beach garden near the port.

But there were stories. I shared my digs with the gloriously named Captain Fortune, deputy harbour-master of Blyth, whose moment of glory arrived when a Cold War Polish fishing- fleet put into port during a storm. And stayed. And stayed. When Fortune boarded the first trawler to demand its immediate departure, the Polish captain slapped him round the face with a massive, sharp-finned fish. I warned readers that the Victorian wooden staithes from which freight trains would unload coal into the colliers were in danger of collapse. I staggered through feet of water deep under the Tyne to watch two teams of miners hack their way through to each other in the first stage of what was to be Newcastle’s first under-river motorway. I catalogued the massive overspending on Blyth’s spanking new power station. I recorded the classical learning of the Blyth town clerk as he used quotations from mythology to defeat motorway extension objectors. The Golden Fleece was on his tongue. When the council failed, its plans were – of course – ‘put on ice’.

And I covered the courts. Some cases were truly pathetic. There was the mother whose son, a Morpeth male nurse, died hanging from the back of his hospital bedroom door; she wailed outside the court as officials gently explained to her that her son had stood on a pile of books with a noose round his neck to ‘stimulate sexual glands’. The books had slid apart and the boy had been left choking to death on the door. Then there was the teenager arrested for stealing a toaster from his grandparents. They wanted him imprisoned. His real ‘crime’, it quickly turned out, was that he was homosexual – ‘indecency with a male’ was our journalistic cliché – and he was swiftly remanded. On his way out, he made a pass at the most senior policeman in all Blyth.

And we wrote in clichés. Always clichés. When the police were seeking a hit-and-run driver, they either ‘spread their net’ or ‘narrowed their search’ or ‘stepped up their hunt’. Company directors were ‘bosses’, scientists were invariably ‘boffins’, officials were always ‘chiefs’, storm-battered ships inevitably ‘limped’ into port. Suicides were always tragic, brides always beautiful, angry councillors were ‘hopping mad’ and protesting villagers would always ‘take to the streets’. Those who discovered bodies were ‘horror-struck’ or ‘mystified’; the latter applied to the construction gang building a new Blyth bypass who excavated dozens of corpses – all in their Victorian Sunday best – and thought they’d discovered a mass murder before realising they were digging up an old cemetery. Needless to say, Tory election candidates always ‘lashed out’ at the sitting Labour MP, Eddie Blythe.

They actually taught us to write like this. There was a whole Thomson Newspapers school of journalism in Newcastle which I and my fellow ‘cub’ reporters from other Chronicle district offices were ordered to attend once a week – much to the disgust of my senior reporter in Blyth, Jim Harland, a Sean Connery lookalike with a reservoir of immense kindness and – for really stupid reporters – volcanic anger. ‘You learn journalism on the job, not listening to that bunch of wankers,’ Harland once told me. But sure enough, every Thursday morning, I’d arrive in Newcastle on a pre-war double-decker bus from Blyth – the interior filled with a suffocating fog of blue cigarette smoke – wolf down an egg sandwich at the aptly named Rumbling Tum café and endure hours of shorthand, legal advice and clichés.

The best stories could be told in 400 words, we were told. All the facts in the first para, plenty of punchy lines, equal time to all parties in a dispute and a good ‘kicker’. No anger, no passion, no suggestion that there was right or wrong. I was reminded of Joe Friday in Dragnet. ‘Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,’ he’d yell at the broads. We were given ‘story-lines’. Write the intro to the following: a retired soldier – who once took part in the Normandy landings – was blaming the local council because his wife had disappeared after seeing a ghost in her council-supplied house. Answer: ‘A mystified D-Day vet lashed out at council chiefs last night after his terrified wife fled “phantoms” in their council home.’ Anything that moved away from this rubric, that suggested a more subtle, nuanced approach – perhaps the old soldier was suffering from shellshock or his wife was mentally ill or perhaps the ghosts were real – was wiped out. Our Thomson ‘trainers’ quickly decided that a reporter called Simon Winchester would never make the grade. He was too imaginative, too thoughtful, too critical in his approach. Simon, of course, went on to become the best Guardian correspondent in Belfast. We were supposed to write stories the readers would easily ‘understand’. Readers were in a hurry, tired, often not well educated, we were taught. Having talked for hours to miners and part-time shipyard workers and firemen and cops and landladies, I didn’t think our readers were that dumb. I thought they might like something more than our clichés. But not according to the journalism teachers. We had to have ‘key’ words. Lash out. Bosses. Phantoms. Chiefs. Terrified.

Yes, we had to be ‘trained’. I still remember the guffaws of our ‘Stop Press’ printer in the Blyth office when he read my report of a launching in the local shipyard by the wife of the chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board. ‘Mrs Smith smashed the Champagne against the hull of the vessel,’ I had written, ‘and the workers cheered as she slid down the slipway.’ Then there was the Tory election candidate who, in my interview, ‘smiled as he spoke of his many and varied pastimes’. Harland collapsed. ‘You’re a fucking innocent, Bob,’ he screamed. ‘What do you think our readers will make of “many and varied pastimes”?’

But I also remember what the Chronicle didn’t say. My reference to the weeping mother outside the Morpeth coroner’s inquest was cut from the story. The tale of Captain Fortune’s fish never made it – the paper needed a quote from the longdeparted Polish trawler captain to ‘balance’ the story. My report on the dangerous state of Blyth staithes was followed by a formal apology to the National Coal Board – inserted by Chronicle editors without any reference to me – to the effect that the wooden pier met all safety standards. A wolfish smile crossed my face weeks later when a roar of splintering wood and exploding steam shook the Blyth office. A tank engine – its driver mercifully unhurt – had crashed down through the flimsy old pit-props and settled precariously on the edge of the dock. We reported it straight – no reference to my previous story, nor to the grovelling apology we had carried only weeks earlier.

I had nothing against the Chron. When Liverpool University offered me a place to read English, the editors cheerfully accepted my resignation and wished me luck in my studies. When Liverpool then unforgivably decided that – without O-level maths – they couldn’t after all give me the promised place, John Brownlee equally cheerfully offered me my job back. Then when Lancaster University gave me a real undergraduate place, Brownlee sent me off again with his best wishes. He later wrote me a stunning reference for the Sunday Express which impressed its late, irascible editor, John Junor. Harland overrode my desire to stay on the paper. ‘Don’t be a fucking eejit,’ the coal miner’s son solemnly told me. ‘Go do your studies, Bob, and get a degree.’

Which is what I did. Within months, I was studying linguistics and reading Noam Chomsky and learning, thanks to David Craig’s English lectures on Dickens, of the social devastation which the Industrial Revolution had spread across northern England, indeed across the very area where I had been a cub reporter. The decaying mines, the growing unemployment, the doomed shipyards – even the rotten wood of the Blyth staithes – suddenly made sense. But I had to go to university to understand this. Journalism was about history. But not in the Chron.

And in the end, it was this thought – the idea that language and history shape our lives – that lured me back this month to the north-east of England. I had a suspicion that the language we were forced to write as trainee reporters all those years ago had somehow imprisoned us, that we had been schooled to mould the world and ourselves in clichés, that for the most part this would define our lives, destroy our anger and imagination, make us loyal to our betters, to governments, to authority. For some reason, I had become possessed of the belief that the blame for our failure as journalists to report the Middle East with any sense of moral passion or indignation lay in the way that we as journalists were trained.

When I returned, a cold, heavy rain was falling across Blyth. The old harbour was a dark, mud-sided, empty lagoon. There were no more shipyards. The mines had closed – all but one pit up the coast – and the power station, glowering through the murk on the other side of the river, had been decommissioned. At the end of Middleton Street, the newsagent – grills on the windows, damp stains covering the ceiling – told me Blyth was still dying. ‘Fourteen per cent unemployment, thirty-four drug deaths in four years,’ he said. ‘No future.’ I bought the Chronicle. The wooden staithes had disappeared. So had the railway. The beach garden where I used to read was still there, its curved stone balustrade broken and collapsing into the sand.

I knocked on the door of number 82. My landlady, Mrs Hamilton, was long gone. The couple who now lived there allowed me to climb the stairs, turn right at the top and push open the little cubby-hole where I slept almost forty years ago. Seven-by-five. I hadn’t got the measurements wrong. There were bookshelves in the room now, newly painted, centrally heated, the old gas-pipe concealed within the wall. The room where I had eaten my bacon breakfasts – Mrs Hamilton provided full board – contained a magnificent marble fireplace which I could not remember. The new owners of number 82 were – they were the first to proclaim the fact and I saw the proof on the living room table – Independent readers. They never bought the Chronicle. Was there, I wondered, a message here?

In the car, the rain guttering down the windscreen, the same old grey streets shimmering through the glass, I opened the Chronicle. Nothing had changed. All that follows came from one single issue. ‘Bosses leading a management buyout of stricken shipyard Cammell Laird say a £2 m damages claim from former workers could scupper the bid.’ Key words: Bosses. Stricken. Scupper. Bid. ‘A pair of high-flyers will be winging their way to France for the most gruelling cycle race in the world.’ Key words: High-flyers. Gruelling. ‘A mum of three who lured a teenage girl babysitter into a seedy sex session with a stranger she met through an internet chatroom has failed in her bid to cut her jail term.’ Lured. Seedy. Bid. ‘Jetaway MPs have been condemned for heading off on foreign jaunts rather than holidaying in the North-east to help the region’s ailing tourist industry.’ Sympathetic though I was to the MPs as I glanced at the weather grizzling down outside my car, I got the message: Jet-away. Jaunts. Ailing. ‘Police hunting the murderer of Sara Cameron have spread their net abroad.’ Yes, almost forty years since I’d been writing this crap, the cops were still ‘spreading their net’ and – I had little doubt – would soon be ‘narrowing their search’ or ‘stepping up’ their hunt for Sara’s killer. It was left to the successor of the old weekly Blyth News – now a free-sheet with the immortal title of the News Post Leader – to tell me that ‘plans to build a housing estate on scrubland in Blyth Valley have been put on ice…’

I drove to Morpeth to see the old magistrates court, and Gateshead, and back and forth over the Tyne bridges where I once had my picture taken in a waistcoat, and I found that the Rumbling Tum was now part of an underground bus station, that the slag-heaps had been largely ‘greened’, that the smoke had gone. Yes, that great, greasy, wet smoke that I breathed day and night – even in my unheated bedroom – had vanished. Perhaps smokeless coal and gas has its advantages. Or, as I grimly thought, perhaps there’s nothing left to burn.

Jim Harland was leaning over his front wall when I drove up. Plumper, a little jowled, eyes sharp as coals, Sean Connery features still in evidence, along with his tongue. ‘You’re the man who missed the story in Blyth port on your day off,’ he growled. The sun had come out. He had set up the annual town fair and today – deus ex machina – was town fair day. There was a fire engine and pin-bowling and pop-singing and dancing by a team of overweight cuties in old US army uniforms – I’m still puzzling the meaning of that one – and a ball-in-the-tub throwing session (which Fisk lost) and an awful lot of very tough-looking mums and dads with sallow faces and sad smiles and, I thought, a life of great hardship behind them. Blyth, Harland told me, was becoming a great dormitory town for Newcastle. Pity they’d torn up the railway. But the sleeping bit I could well understand.

Harland is a big man, ‘Big Jim Harland’ we used to call him – he went on in later years to work for the Mirror, then the BBC – and he propelled me towards the Federation Club where pints moved like quicksilver around a room where huge ex-miners and ex-shipyard men kept winning all kinds of bingo games. I had never seen so many £5 notes. Life had been good to Harland and his wife Rosemary and we walked back to his home – just across from my old ‘digs’ – for lunch. ‘Space was the problem for us in journalism, Bob,’ he said. ‘I was taught at sixteen that you had to economise on space. We couldn’t write “Mrs S, who was 23 years old”, I had to write “23-yearold Mrs S”. But if we said what we thought, well, we’d have called that bias. We could say “this is what I saw” but not “this is what I feel I saw”. The journalists who trained us were regional journalists – and they taught us what they knew, the way they had been trained.’

But slowly, as Rosemary made the lunch in the kitchen, Harland revealed more about Blyth. He thought Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill had done most harm to the town. But he knew much that I had not known when I worked there. The town clerk who had been such a classical scholar – he had lived near my digs but was now long dead – had been on the make. The police chief – the man who was the target of the gay man in the court but now also dead – had been in the habit of ringing up landlords in the early hours of the morning for a drink, forcing them to open their pubs at 6 a.m. for the local, newly off-duty, cops. ‘No, we didn’t write this,’ Harland said. ‘These people fed us. They’d help us. The policeman who’d want an early morning drink would also tip us off on stories. We had to talk to everyone, the town clerk, the police, the fire brigade… Then there was child abuse. There was a lot of it here. A terrible thing. But the social services wouldn’t talk to us. They said all their enquiries were confidential, that we didn’t have the right to know what they had learnt. And so child abuse went on. I only realised the state of things when a cricketer I knew made a comment about his daughters and I realised it was a common thing. But we accept the “privacy” of the social services. And in court, we reported “indecency with a minor”. Those were the words we used.’

I asked about the Middle East. Did Harland think that perhaps our ‘training’ had caused us to fail when we journalists were faced not with local government disputes or coroners’ courts but with a great historical tragedy? ‘I’ve never covered a story that was a great tragedy like the Middle East,’ he said. ‘I can see the problem, yes. How do you make the journalism here stretch to the journalism there?’ He had made the point precisely.

For out in the Middle East, more and more journalists, each with their local reporting experience, their ‘training’, their journalism schools – the American version even more banal than the English ones – are using clichés and tired adjectives to obscure reality. Turn on your television tonight or read tomorrow’s agency reports and we are told of the ‘cycle of violence’ – no side taken there – of ‘clashes’ (in which the identities of victim and killer are obscured) or of ‘the fears of Israeli security chiefs’. Note how the word ‘security’ is always linked to the word ‘Israel’. And how ‘chiefs’ has made the grade from Blyth to Palestine. And just as the police chief in Blyth would tip us off on a story, so Israelis – to a much lesser extent Palestinians – tip us off on stories. No one wants to rock the boat, to be controversial. Why write about the Blyth staithes if we’re going to carry a Coal Board denial? Why write about the outrageous nature of Israel’s killing of stone-throwing children if we’re going to get outraged letters to the editor?

Much better to stick to clichés. Arab ‘terrorists’ threaten Israel. Israeli ‘security chiefs’ warn Arafat. Can Arafat ‘control’ his own people, we asked when the Israelis asked the same question. Yet when a Jewish settlers’ group killed two Palestinian civilian men and a baby, we did not ask if Sharon could control his own people. Since the Palestinians had not asked that question, we did not ask it. We were silent that time round. Over five days in the North-east and on the long drive back to London, I listened to the radio news. Two Israelis had been killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber at Binyamina. The Israelis ‘struck back’ at the Palestinians, killing four guerrillas in a ‘targeted’ killing. ‘Targeted’ was Israel’s word. In other words, death squads. But that wasn’t what the BBC said. When the Israeli settlers murdered the three Palestinians – including the baby – the Israeli police were reported as ‘narrowing their search’ for the killers.

Never the why. Only the what. We reported the closure of Blyth’s mines. But we rarely asked why the mines had to die. We watched Blyth decay. We reported its death. In my cub reporter days, we watched its last moments as a coal-and-ship city. But we didn’t scratch the black, caked soot off the walls of Newcastle and ask why Britain’s prime ministers allowed the centre of the Industrial Revolution to go to the grave. Harland agreed that there was a culture of ‘accepting’ authority. We didn’t challenge the police or the council – or the social services. They may not have been our friends. But we needed them. We respected them, in an odd sort of way. They were the ‘chiefs’, the ‘bosses’. And now we rarely challenge friendly governments. We can (and should) attack Arafat’s corrupt dictatorship in Palestine. But Israeli wrongdoing has to be ‘balanced’ with quotations from Israel’s ‘security chiefs’. The off-the-record briefing from the council clerk or the police chief has become the off-the-record briefing from the Foreign Office. Look how we responded to Nato’s wartime Kosovo briefings. How we accepted. How we parroted the words.

I’m glad the Chron exists. It was good to me. So was Big Jim Harland. He made me understand the need for accuracy. ‘Say what you like later,’ he once told me. ‘But for Christ’s sake, get it right.’ But our conversation this month left me with much to think about. What was it he said to me before lunch? ‘If we’d said what we thought, well, we’d have called that bias.’ And no doubt one day, we’ll find those reporters who so blithely accepted Nato’s briefings and Israel’s line on the Palestinians ‘revealing’ the truth. Like the rotten borough and the crooked cop and the sinister abuse of children in Blyth, they’ll all one day be ready to tell us what they really knew. Only it will be a bit late to make any difference.

The Independent Magazine, 4 August 2001

We should have listened to Bin Laden

I belong to that generation of undergraduates who cut their teeth on linguistics. Lancaster University in its second year of existence – Class of ’67, if I’m not mistaken – was as innovative as it was a bit odd. ‘Digs’ were on the Morecambe seafront, lectures in a converted chapel, and tutorials in an old linen factory. But the books we studied invariably included the immensely boring Zelig Harris and the stunningly brilliant Noam Chomsky.

Less famous then than now, he it was who introduced me to the ‘foregrounded element’. ‘Foregrounded’ is when someone places words in such an order that a new meaning is attached to them or deliberately leaves out a word that we might expect. The big bad man emphasises the meanness of the man. But the bad big man makes us think of size. ‘Big’ has been ‘foregrounded’. Real linguists won’t like the above definition but journalists, I fear, sometimes have to distort in order to make plain. Presidents too, it seems. Because I did a little linguistic analysis on George W. Bush’s Fort Bragg address to Americans on 28 June – and came up with some pretty strange results. First, of course, was his use of the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’ thirty-three times. More interesting was the way in which he deployed these massed ranks of terrorists. If you divided his speech up into eight parts, ‘terrorists’ or ‘terror’ popped up eight times in the first, eight times in the second, three times in the third, nine in the fourth, two in the fifth, none at all in the sixth, a measly three in the seventh and again none at all in the eighth.

The columns in which ‘terror’ disappeared were full of different clichés. Challenge, a good constitution (an Iraqi one, of course), a chance to vote, a free society, certain truths (I won’t insult you by telling you where that was snitched from), defending our freedom, flying the flag, great turning points in the story of freedom, prevail (one of Churchill’s favourite words) and no higher call. Put through Chomsky’s machine, Bush’s speech begins by frightening the audience to death with terrorism and finishes triumphantly by rousing them to patriotic confidence in their country’s future victory. It wasn’t actually a speech at all. It was a movie script, a screenplay. The bad guys are really bad but they’re going to get their comeuppance because the good guys are going to win.

Other elements of the Bush speech were, of course, woefully dishonest. It’s a bit much for Bush to claim that ‘terrorists’ want to ‘topple governments’ when the only guys who’ve been doing that – in Afghanistan and Iraq – were, ahem, ahem, the Americans. There are plenty of references to the evil nature of ‘the enemy’ – tyranny and oppression, remnants, the old order – and a weird new version of the Iraqi–11 September lie. Instead of Saddam’s non-existent alliance with al-Qaeda, we now have the claim from Bush that the Iraqi ‘terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens’ on 11 September 2001. Whoops! It’s no longer the Saddam regime that was involved in these attacks, it seems; it’s now the post-Saddam insurgents who are part of the same gang.

It’s strange that for a White House that writes screenplays, the words of Osama bin Laden appear so uninteresting. Whenever bin Laden speaks, no one bothers to read through his speech. The questions are always: Was it him? Is he alive? Where is he? Never: What did he say? There are real perils in this. Bin Laden, who hated Saddam – he told me this himself, in person – made a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’s Iraqi Baathist ‘Socialists’. This was the moment when Iraq’s future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the message that would create the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice. The US ‘experts’ waffled about whether bin Laden was alive – not what he said. For once, Bush got it right – but he was too late. Always, as they say, read the text.

Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell at the UN when the US secretary of state was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn’t refer to evidence of WMD as a ‘slam dunk’, he says. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn’t lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Tony Blair’s lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read ‘Saudi reforms lose momentum’ – surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press – it quoted our dear prime minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians because their government represented a ‘different political system’. The ‘foregrounded’ element, of course, is the word ‘different’. This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason the committee declined to return these men to their country was not – as Blair well knew – because Algeria possesses a ‘different’ political system but because the Algerian ‘system’ allows it to torture its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Châteauneuf police station in Algiers – where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui, whose foot was broken under torture. She was a ‘terrorist’, this man announced. This is the ‘different’ political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. So how does he dare lie about the ‘different’ political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A ‘different’ political system indeed.

And now I have before me Blair’s repulsive ‘goodbye’ speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn’t mean ‘doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the ‘prevailing consensus’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant ‘what you genuinely believe to be right’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Britain’s oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) ‘I did so out of belief,’ he told us. Foregrounded element: belief. Am I alone in being repulsed by this? ‘Politics may be the art of the possible [foregrounded element: may] but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.’ What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? ‘Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.’ Excuse me? Is that Blair’s message to the families of all those dead soldiers – and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an ‘honour’ to ‘serve’ Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo–Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour – and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

My dad used to call people like Blair a ‘twerp’ which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell’s statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated – with such wisdom – by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’

The Independent, 2 July 2005 and 19 May 2007

After a decade in power, Tony Blair resigned as British prime minister on 27 June 2007 to become ‘peace’ envoy to the Middle East, an irony not lost on Arabs who blame both Blair and George W. Bush for the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the greatest suffering inflicted on Muslims since Saddam Hussein began his own Western-supported eight-year war against Iran in 1980.

The jargon disease

I once received an invitation to lecture at ‘The University of Excellence’. I forget where this particular academy was located – Jordan, I think – but I recall very clearly that the suggested subject of my talk was as incomprehensible to me as it would, no doubt, have been to any audience. Invitation rejected. Only this week I received another request, this time to join ‘ethics practitioners’ to ‘share evidence-based practices on dealing with current ethical practices’ around the world. What on earth does this mean? Why do people write like this?

The word ‘excellence’, of course, has long ago been devalued by the corporate world – its favourite expression has long been ‘Quality and Excellence’, invariably accompanied by a ‘mission statement’, that claim to self-importance dreamed up by Robin Cook when foreign secretary (swiftly ditched when he decided to go on selling jets to Indonesia) and thereafter by every export company and amateur newspaper in the world.

There is something repulsive about this vocabulary, an aggressive language of superiority in which ‘key players’ can ‘interact’ with each other, can ‘impact’ society, ‘outsource’ their business or ‘downsize’ the number of their employees. They need ‘feedback’ and ‘input’. They ‘think outside the box’ or ‘push the envelope’. They have a ‘work space’, not a desk. They need ‘personal space’ – they need to be left alone – and sometimes they need ‘time and space’, a commodity much in demand when marriages are failing. These lies and obfuscations are infuriating. ‘Downsizing’ employees means firing them; ‘outsourcing’ means hiring someone else to do your dirty work. ‘Feedback’ means ‘response’, ‘input’ means ‘advice’. ‘Thinking outside the box’ means, does it not, to be ‘imaginative’?

Being a ‘key player’ is a form of self-aggrandisement – which is why I never agree to be a ‘key speaker’, especially if this means participation in a ‘workshop’. To me a workshop means what it says. When I was at school, the workshop was a carpentry shop wherein generations of teachers vainly tried to teach Fisk how to make a wooden chair or table that did not collapse the moment it was completed. But today, a ‘workshop’ – though we mustn’t say so – is a group of tiresome academics yakking in the secret language of anthropology or talking about ‘cultural sensitivity’ or ‘core issues’ or ‘tropes’. Presumably these are the same folk who invented the UN’s own humanitarian- speak. Of the latter, my favourite is the label awarded to any desperate refugee who is prepared (for a pittance) to persuade their fellow victims to abide by the UN’s wishes – to abandon their tents and return to their dangerous, war-ravaged homes. These luckless advisers are referred to by the UN as ‘social animators’.

It is a disease, this language, caught by one of our own New Labour ministers on the BBC last week when he talked about ‘environmental externalities’. Presumably, this meant ‘the weather’. Similarly, an architect I know warned his client of the effect of the ‘aggressive saline environment’ on a house built near the sea. If this advice seems obscure, we might be ‘conflicted’ about it – who, I ask myself, invented the false transitive verb? – or, worse still, ‘stressed’. In northern Iraq in 1991, I was once ordered by a humanitarian worker from the ‘International Rescue Committee’ to leave the only room I could find in the wrecked town of Zakho because it had been booked for her fellow workers – who were very ‘stressed’. Poor souls, I thought. They were stressed, ‘stressed out’, trying – no doubt – to ‘come to terms’ with their predicament, attempting to ‘cope’.

This is the language of therapy, in which frauds, liars and cheats are always trying to escape. Thus President Clinton’s spokesman claimed after his admission of his affair with Monica Lewinsky that he was ‘seeking closure’. Like so many mendacious politicians, Clinton felt – as Prime Minister Blair will no doubt feel about his bloodbath in Iraq once he leaves No. 10 – the need to ‘move on’. In the same way, our psychobabble masters and mistresses – yes, there is a semantic problem there, too, isn’t there? – announce after wars that it is a time for ‘healing’, the same prescription doled out to families which are ‘dysfunctional’, who live in a ‘dystopian’ world. Yes, dystopian is a perfectly good word – it is the opposite of utopian – but like ‘perceive’ and ‘perception’ (words once much loved by Jonathan Dimbleby), they have become fashionable because they appear enigmatic.

Some newly popular phrases, such as ‘tipping point’ – used about Middle East conflicts when the bad guys are about to lose – or ‘big picture’ – when moralists have to be reminded of the greater good – are merely fashionable. Others are simply odd. I always mixed up ‘bonding’ with ‘bondage’ and ‘quality time’ with a popular assortment of toffees. I used to think that ‘increase’ was a perfectly acceptable word until I discovered that in the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a ‘spike’ of violence until a ‘surge’ of extra troops arrived in Baghdad.

All this is different, of course, from the non-sexual ‘nobrainers’ with which we now have to ‘cope’ – ‘author’ for ‘authoress’, for example, ‘actor’ for ‘actress’ – or the fearful linguistic lengths we must go to in order to avoid offence to Londoners who speak Cockney: as we all know – though only those of us, of course, who come from the Home Counties – these people speak ‘Estuary’ English. It’s like those poor Americans in Detroit who, in fear and trepidation, avoided wishing me a happy Christmas last year. ‘Happy Holiday!’ they chorused until I roared ‘Happy Christmas’ back. In Beirut, by the way, we all wish each other ‘Happy Christmas’ and ‘Happy Eid’, whether our friends are Muslim or Christian. Is this really of ‘majority importance’, as an Irish television producer once asked a colleague of a news event?

I fear it is. For we are not using words any more. We are utilising them, speaking for effect rather than meaning, for escape. We are becoming – as the New Yorker now describes children who don’t care if they watch films on the cinema screen or on their mobile phones – ‘platform agnostic’. What, Polonius asked his lord, was he reading? ‘Words, words, words,’ Hamlet replied. If only…

The Independent, 13 January 2007

Poisonous academics and their claptrap of exclusion

That great anthropological sage Michael Gilsenan – whose Lords of the Lebanese Marshes once almost started a small civil war in northern Lebanon – turned up this week to lecture at that equally great bastion of learning, the American University of Beirut, founded, as it happens, by Quakers during the nineteenth- century Lebanese Christian–Druze conflict. Gilsenan’s subject was abstruse enough: Arab migration to what our Foreign Office still calls ‘the Far East’. Most of these migrants, it transpired, came from Arabia, especially the mountainous Hadramaut district of Yemen. Under British rule, they prospered, bought land, left inheritances and, once established, wealthy Arab women also took their place in this new world, even involving themselves in legal disputes.

All very fascinating. But once questions were invited from the floor, Gilsenan was asked about ‘matrilineal’ issues in colonial Singapore. I closed my eyes. ‘Matrilineal’ doesn’t exist in my dictionary. Nor is it likely to. It is part of the secret language of academe – especially of anthropology – and it is a turn-off. We poor dunces should keep our noses out of this high-falutin’ stuff. That, I think, is the message. I recall a student raging to me about her anthropology professor who constantly used words like ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ – to this day, I have no idea what they mean; readers are invited to reply – in an attempt to mystify her discipline.

Keep Out, these words say to us. This Is Something You Are Not Clever Enough to Understand. A French professor put it to me quite bluntly this week. ‘If we don’t dress up what we want to say in this silly language,’ she announced, ‘we are told we are being journalists.’ Well, well, I can quite see the problem. It’s good against evil, us or them, university scholarship or dirty journalism. It’s a new and dangerous phenomenon I’m talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past twenty years; after all, any non-university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or 30s and – however Hegelian the subject – fully understand its meaning. No longer.

About three years ago, I received a good example of this from Marc Gopin, visiting associate professor of international diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and a visiting scholar in the programme on negotiation at Harvard. I received his latest book for review, a tome called Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East. A promising title, you might think. Well, think again. For within pages, I was being bushwhacked by ‘metaphorical constructs’ and ‘universalist mythic constructs’ and ‘romanticised, amoral constructs of culture’ and ‘fundamental dialogic immediacy’ and ‘prosocial tendencies’. Here is another cracker: ‘The Abrahamic myth of a loving Patriarch and a loving God who care for a special people has created a home and a meaning system for millions of human beings.’ Come again? Meaning system? The author grew up, he says, ‘in a self-consciously exilic spirituality’. He talks about the ‘interplay’ of ‘political and mythic interdependencies’ and the ‘ubiquitous human psychological process of othering’. He wants to ‘problematise’ intervention at ‘elite’ levels. A rabbi – whom I immediately felt sorry for – was ‘awash in paradoxicality’, which apparently proved that ‘cognitive dissonance is good for intractable conflicts’. Well, you could have fooled me. There was more: ‘dialogic injuries’, ‘cultural envelope’, ‘family psychodynamics’, ‘the rich texture of hermeneutic possibility’, ‘porous barriers of spiritual identity’ and, of course, my old favourite, ‘social intercourse’. ‘Dialectic apologetics’ makes an appearance, alongside ‘persecutorial othering’ and lots of other ‘otherings’, including a reference to ‘pious transformation of old cognitive constructs as an end to othering: remythification’.

What is interesting is that when Professor Gopin chose to send a letter to President Clinton, which he prints in his book, he wrote in perfectly comprehensible English – indeed, he even got a reply from the old scallywag. The good professor was suggesting that private meetings between Jewish and Islamic leaders should become public under Clinton’s leadership and produce ‘a powerful new force for pursuing peace’. No ‘constructs’ here, you note. No ‘otherings’ or ‘meaning systems’ or ‘paradoxicalities’. Because Gopin obviously knew that his academic claptrap wouldn’t have got much further than the White House mail room.

So why this preposterous academic language? There’s a clue when Gopin compares ‘dress and behaviour codes in the Pentagon’ to ‘very complex speech and behaviour codes in academia’. Yes, university folk have to be complex, don’t they? They have to speak in a language which others – journalists, perhaps? – simply would not understand. To enter this unique circle of brain-heavy men and women, all must learn its secret language lest interlopers manage to sneak through the door. It may be that all this came about as a protective shield against political interference in academe, an attempt to make teaching so impenetrable that no MP, congressman or senator could ever make accusations of political bias in class – on the grounds that they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what the lecturer was talking about.

But I think it is about snobbishness. I recall a lady professor at George Mason University, complaining that ‘most people’ – she was referring to truck-drivers, Amtrak crews, bellhops and anyone else who didn’t oppose the Iraq war – ‘had so little information’. Well, I wasn’t surprised. University teachers – especially in the States – are great at ‘networking’ each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world, including those who collect their rubbish, deliver their laundry and serve up their hash browns. After lecturing at another university in the States, I was asked by a member of the audience how universities could have more influence in the community. I said that they must stop using what I called ‘the poisonous language of academia’. At which there was an outburst of clapping from the students and total silence from the university staff who were present and who greeted this remark with scowls.

No, I’m not saying all teachers speak like this. There is no secret language in the work of Edward Said or Avi Shlaim or Martin Gilbert or Noam Chomsky. But it’s growing and it’s getting worse, and I suspect only students can now rebel against it. The merest hint of ‘emics’ and ‘constructs’ or ‘hermeneutic possibilities’ and they should walk out of class, shouting Winston Churchill’s famous retort: ‘This is English up with which I will not put.’

The Independent, 14 May 2005

Soft words – hard questions

When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – happily still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this: What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely’. It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with ‘absolutely’. Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite). He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.

So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely. Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.

It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding’. He described it as ‘a technique that produces a near-drowning experience’. Ho ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique’? Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience’? Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.

I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible interrogation’, ‘questionable means’, ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive [sic] context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleading statement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of massive retaliation.’ True – if such people existed. But there simply hasn’t been any suicide terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction – not ever. Like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – which were also, I recall, going to be handed over to suicide terrorists – they don’t exist. What Dershowitz is actually trying to do is change the laws so that we can torture legally when faced by this mythical beast, a creature that is in fact intended to instil fear in us (and thus persuade us to go along with another round of ‘waterboarding’).

The whole torture fandango gathers weasel words like moss. Take a reference in the Wall Street Journal last month to torture as ‘aggressive interrogation techniques’. ‘Technique’ again, please note. I suppose that’s what you can claim the US soldier was applying when he last year stuffed an Iraqi general upside down inside a sleeping bag, sat on his chest and killed him. Take Agim Ç eku, the brutal KLA leader who has popped up as Kosovo’s prime minister, but who is still wanted for war crimes by Belgrade. The Financial Times did a wonderful portrait of him just over a week ago in which he was described as ‘slim and youthful… Mr Ç eku, 44, exudes an effortless authority born of long experience as a military commander’. Ho ho. You bet he does.

Chris Hitchens got in on the act last month when he tried to explain why the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqi civilians at Haditha didn’t mean a return to the days of My Lai massacres. So here we go. ‘Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that on November 19th, 2005, US Marines of Kilo company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha…’ Get it? Their comrade had just been killed by insurgents. So the Americans may have ‘cracked up’ and ‘cut loose’. Later, Hitchens describes the massacre at Haditha as ‘a white-hot few minutes’, and later still he talks of a ‘coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip’. A few seconds later and he is going on about the ‘alleged rampage’. Rampage! Ho ho. The point, of course, is that it takes much more than a ‘clip’ of ammunition to kill twenty-four civilians. And it takes a long time – not a ‘few’ minutes – to go from room to room, amid the shrieking children who are being slaughtered and the women trying to protect themselves from murder, to blast that many people to death. Some ‘rampage’.

So what does it take to run the earth these days? Effortless authority, I suppose. A little bit of ‘excess’, plenty of ‘technique’ and a mere clip of ammunition. Completely and absolutely.

The Independent, 8 July 2006

The pen, the telex, the phone and the despised e-mail

The laptop has done bad things to us. I’ve spent the past year writing a history of the Middle East which has proved to me – quite apart from the folly of man – that the computer has not necessarily helped our writing or our research into the sins of our fathers. As a journalist who still refuses to use e-mail – forcing people to write real letters cuts down the amount of ungrammatical and often abusive messages we receive – I would say that, wouldn’t I? But, along with a researcher, I’ve ploughed through 328,000 documents in my library for my book – my reporter’s notebooks, newspapers, magazines, clippings, government statements, letters, photocopies of First World War archives and photographs – and I cannot escape the fact that the laptop has helped to destroy my files, my memories and, indeed, my handwriting. My notebooks of the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s are written in a graceful easy-to-read script, a pale blue fountain pen moving in a stately way across the page. My notes of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq are illegible – except to myself – because I cannot keep pace with the speed of the laptop. I no longer write words, I have discovered. I represent them – that is to say I draw their likeness, which I cannot read but which I must construe when transcribing them. I should add at once that this very article is being handwritten on an Air France jet from Beirut and even now, as I write, I find I am skipping letters, words, and expressions because I know what I want to say – but it is no longer there on the page.

What a relief to go back to my reports on the 1979–80 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They were punched out on telex machines – those wonderful clunkers that perforated tapes – even though, today, the wafer-thin paper falls to pieces in my hands. I remember a Kabul post office official using a welding iron to cement the H back on to his machine – Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times is my witness – but I have every memorandum and every report I sent to my then employers at The Times.

Today, we use telephones – or e-mails, which are easy to delete – but my telexed messages to London in those terrible years of war, just as in the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq conflict, tell their own tale. When I was filing reports from Cairo or Riyadh, a foreign desk ‘blooper’ – a last paragraph cut, an inelegantly phrased headline – was easy for a foreign correspondent to forgive. But emerging from Iran’s front lines at Fao – guns, shellfire and corpses – I found it difficult to see a dropped comma as anything but an act of treachery by The Times. Pity the poor foreign desk. And the correspondent. Of course, there are ridiculous moments in this historical ‘search for truth’. My researcher, after only three days of work, could not understand why she constantly felt hungry at mid-morning – until we realised that between 1976 and 1990, the only way I catalogued my flights around the Middle East was by noting the destination and date on my airline lunch menus. Three days of foie gras, caviar and champagne was too much for my brave friend to read. For my part, I did not, for many weeks, understand the deep depression in which I would go to bed – or wake – after hours of writing.

The answer was simple: the written notebooks and telex tapes – taken together – became an archive of humanity’s suffering, of torture and despair. As a journalist, you can catalogue this daily, go back to your hotel and forget and start again next day. But when I put the telex tape and the notebooks together, they became a dreadful, utterly convincing testimony of inhumanity. Telexed copy dies out in my files in the late 1980s and computer records suddenly arrive. But they don’t work. While I always kept a ‘hard copy’ of my reports for The

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