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Indicting imperialism
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Harper, 2006, £9-99
Reviewed by
Per-Ake Westerlund
WHO CARRIES the responsibility for the catastrophe
in the Middle East? In this book, the journalist Robert Fisk attempts to
account for what has taken place in the region over the last 30 years.
Fisk has experienced more than most movie heroes.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Ladin are two of the many people
he has interviewed as a correspondent, first for The Times and later for
The Independent. He was in Iran during and after the revolution in 1979.
He made several visits to the front lines on both sides during the war
between Iraq and Iran, from 1980-88. He travelled with Russian troops in
the 1980s in Afghanistan, and was beaten up there by an angry crowd
following the US bombings in 2001. He came to Baghdad on the last plane
in just before Bush fired the first missiles in March 2003.
Fisk is willing to take risks in order to get his
own opinion of what’s going on. He has increasingly challenged the media
majority, with his critique of the Iraq war and Israel’s oppression of
the Palestinians. What he writes is therefore always worth reading, not
least this book, over 1,000 pages of recent Middle East history. The
point of departure is his own experiences, but the theme is the
responsibility of the Western powers for war, suffering and
dictatorships in this part of the world. "Historically, there has been
no Western involvement in the Arab world without betrayal", is one of
his conclusions.
Fisk writes that September 11 was not the reason for
this book, but it is an attempt to explain the background to that event.
How could Osama bin Laden win popularity contests? Where did he
originate from? The answer is about history. During the 20th
century the Western powers have repeatedly started wars, occupied
countries, and overthrown regimes in the Middle East. Fisk says that a
sensible Arab would agree that September 11 was a crime, but would also
ask why the same word is not used when 17,500 civilians were killed by
Israel’s invasion in Lebanon in 1982? While the regimes in the Middle
East are close friends of the US – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the
present Palestinian president, Abbas – bin Laden and other Islamists
have reminded the masses of the wars conducted by the US and Israel
against Muslims. When the Stalinist communist parties and the social
democratic labour movement internationally completely failed to give a
way forward for the struggle, religion has appeared as a political
factor. This has also been used by the regimes – not least Saddam
Hussein in his last years – portraying themselves as real Muslims.
Following 9/11, George W Bush, with the support of
all ‘world leaders’, decided to bomb the already devastated Afghanistan.
When that country was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1980 it was the
start of 16 years of war, with over one million being killed and six
million refugees. The declining Stalinist regime in Moscow was forced to
retreat in 1988 after a long war against the mujahedin ‘holy warriors’,
hailed by the US president Reagan as ‘freedom fighters’. Among them was
a Saudi contingent, led by the billionaire bin Laden, financed and
supported by the CIA, the Saudi monarchy, and Pakistan. From 1988
followed years of civil war between different mujahedin troops, before
the Taliban took power in 1996. The Taliban were the children of poor
Afghan refugees, grew up in right-wing Islamist schools in Pakistan, and
were armed by the Pakistani secret service. The Taliban quickly took
control over the country and established a strongly reactionary Islamist
regime, notorious for its oppression of women, bans on music etc. Osama
bin Ladin, in conflict with the Saudis and the US after the first Iraq
war in 1991, was a guest of honour in Taliban Afghanistan.
Despite the character of the Taliban, Fisk warned
what Bush’s bombing would lead to. The Northern Alliance, Bush’s allied
ground troops, were also Islamist right-wing killers – just in
opposition to the Taliban. The new president, Hamid Karzai, was a former
employee of Unocal, the US oil company that attempted to get a deal with
the Taliban over a pipeline from Central Asia to Pakistan. The warnings
were confirmed in a short time, and today the civilian population is
caught in a war between the re-emerging Taliban and US-led troops.
Fisk also provides a background account of
developments in Iran, going back to 1953 when Iran’s elected prime
minister, Muhammed Mosaddeq, was overthrown after he had nationalised
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum). In the 1980s
Fisk interviewed one of the British agents who, together with the CIA,
conducted the coup and installed the Shah’s regime, including his
vicious secret police, the SAVAK. The Shah became a reliable ally of US
imperialism, as an oil supplier and militarily. From below, however,
Iranian nationalism and a hatred against the US was strengthened.
This eventually exploded in the revolution in 1979.
Fisk quotes his reporter friend, Edward Mortimer, who described the
revolution as "the most genuine since 1917 anywhere in the world".
Fisk’s main weakness is that he does not understand the role of the
working class, although he stresses that the "urban poor" were the main
force of the revolution. The slogans, and the hopes, of workers and some
left-wing organisations for a ‘people’s democracy’ soon collided with
the intentions of the Islamists and the mullahs. The working class in
northern Iran confiscated capitalist property, while Khomeini’s regime,
based on wealthier layers in the cities, was against all kind of
confiscation. For a long time, the left could rally strong support. Fisk
describes how half a million students demonstrated with the illegal
Fedayin in November 1979. Khomeini had to act gradually to smash the
left and the organisations of the working class. He exploited the
conflict with US imperialism to a maximum, leading the pro-Moscow
communist party, the Tudeh party, to support Khomeini until the party
was crushed in 1983. Even then, the regime in Russia had no problem in
continuing to sell arms to Tehran. Mass purges were also conducted
during the war against Iraq, sometimes on the basis of ‘anti-communist’
information supplied from the West. During 1983, 60 people a day were
executed, many of them youth.
When Saddam’s military machine attacked Iran in 1980
the mood among ‘experts’ and in the media was that Iraq would achieve a
rapid victory. But the troops got stuck soon after passing the border,
and the Iraqi army started using missiles against Iranian cities,
including chemical weapons. Fisk gives detailed and moving reports from
the front lines, describes the horrors and interviews Iranian child
soldiers, on the front to become martyrs.
The Western powers never wavered in their support
for Saddam – it was in 1983 that Donald Rumsfeld, then the US defence
secretary as in 2003, made his notorious visit to Saddam – even if some
of them sold arms to both the belligerent countries during the
eight-year-long conflict that cost more than one million lives. More
than 60 US officers acted as ‘military advisors’ to Saddam, who also
received satellite intelligence from Washington. Saudi Arabia paid more
than $25 billion towards Baghdad’s war costs. Kuwait and Egypt were
other sponsors.
Not even during Anfal, Saddam’s deadly war against
the Kurds in northern Iraq, did the West protest. In Halabja alone,
5,000 Kurds were killed by chemical weapons on 17-18 March 1988.
The US navy was mobilised to the Persian Gulf, as a
threat against Iran. A US missile shot down a civilian Iranian aircraft
with civilian passengers. The US hypocrisy, however, was exposed in the
Iran-Contra affair in 1986. The US had secretly sold 200 missiles to
Iran in hope of getting US hostages released by Iranian-linked groups in
Lebanon. The money from the arms deal was then sent to the reactionary
Contra troops in Nicaragua.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 he had
got the impression from the US ambassador in Baghdad that Washington
would not react. He was still the West’s man. As late as June 1990 the
British government had approved sales of new chemical equipment to Iraq.
Kuwait had been part of the same Ottoman province as Iraq until 1899,
and had come close to being part of Iraq again in 1958, only stopped
then by British troops.
But at stake this time was oil, and the interests of
other US allies. The Saudi regime invited US troops into the most
important country of Islam, with wide repercussions later. The build-up
to war took place under the illusion of an alliance with a UN flag, but
in practice this was the biggest US war since the humiliating retreat
from Vietnam. This time, the war started with massive air bombing, 40
days and 40 nights with 80,000 tons of explosives, more than in the
second world war. Bridges, power stations and hospitals were among the
targets. Saddam’s troops lived off starvation rations and fled in panic
before the ground attack took place. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis
were massacred by the attacking US air force, tanks and troops.
George Bush senior than appealed for an uprising
against Saddam, but allowed the Kurdish and Shia insurrections to be
crushed in blood. "Rather the Saddam we know" than any other, insecure,
regime, Fisk quotes an US official as saying. More people died in the
quelling of the uprisings than in the war itself and two million Kurds
became refugees.
The same Arab states that had paid for Saddam’s war
against Iran a few years earlier took the bill this time as well, $84
billion. And in the two years that followed, the US sold armaments worth
$28 billion to countries in the region.
Against an Iraq with a smashed infrastructure and
impoverished population the UN now implemented sanctions. As a result
"4,500 children die every month" said Dennis Halliday, representing
Unicef, in October 1996. Robert Fisk reported about the Iraqi cancer
children, victims of ammunition with depleted uranium, something that
also affected many US soldiers. In the middle of the humanitarian
crises, the US and Britain conducted new bombing raids, particularly in
the New Year 1999.
After 9/11 and the attacks on Afghanistan it was
clear that Bush, Rumsfeld and their neo-conservative advisers were
aiming at Iraq. Fisk goes over all their invented arguments for war,
from ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to al-Qaida ‘connections’. In
addition, George W Bush promised ‘democracy for the entire Muslim
world’, something he had hardly consulted his friends about in the
regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan. The propaganda apparatus now
demanded that the West’s support for Saddam should be forgotten. ‘War
against terror’ at this stage also meant support to Israel and to
Russia’s war in Chechnya. Fisk’s criticism meant that he was pointed out
as a supporter of Saddam’s regime.
This war, which Fisk followed from Baghdad, meant
even heavier bombing than 12 years earlier. Fisk contrasts the
computer-guided missiles to the visits he made to suffering civilians in
hospitals with no computers. The US now also used cluster bombs against
civilians, something Israel has done twice in Lebanon.
Fisk remained in Baghdad after the ‘liberation’ of 9
April 2003, when the mass looting started. The US troops only protected
the oil and home office ministry buildings. In Baghdad thousands-year
old documents were destroyed while US generals moved into Saddam’s
palaces. The US acted as all occupants do, Fisk writes. Demonstrators
were shot down; Bremer, the US consul during the first year, banned Shia
leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s newspaper; scared US soldiers searched houses.
With the Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, the US also copied Saddam’s
methods of torture, including using the same prison head doctor as
Saddam. The US "will leave the country. But they can’t leave the
country…", is Fisk’s summary of the crises of US imperialism in Iraq, a
description that still holds today.
Robert Fisk’s book contains a lot of action, but
also a lot of interesting subjects for analysis. He writes about the
Armenian genocide of April 1915; the liberation war and the civil war of
the 1990s in Algeria; and the Suez crises of 1956. He traces the
producers of a Hellfire missile used by an Israeli Apache helicopter
which killed civilians in an ambulance in Lebanon. He says that the cost
of one year’s research about Parkinson’s disease (of which his mother
died) is equivalent to five minutes global arms spending. He analyses
Jordan and Syria; he writes about his father, who was a solider in world
war one. His massive and well-founded criticism, however, never becomes
a critique of the system, of capitalism and imperialism. He still says
‘we’ when describing British and US military attacks.
Workers and socialists in the Middle East and
internationally must draw the necessary conclusions from the region’s
history and current events. The working class, allied with the urban
poor and peasants, need a socialist and revolutionary party, able to
unite the class in struggle over religious and ethnic differences,
against capitalism, imperialism and dictatorship.
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