I don't tend to agree with Rpbert Fisk on much, but this is really, really 
good..

Jon Cloke
Newcastle University


The Age of Terror

By Robert Fisk

The Independent -- October 8, 2006

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1814843.ece

A few days after Lebanon's latest war came to an end, I
went through many of the reporter's notebooks I have
used in my last 30 years in the Middle East. Some
contained the names of dead colleagues, others the
individual stories of the suffering of Arabs and Kurds
and Christians and Jews. One, dated 1991, is even
splashed with a dark and viscous substance, the oil
that came raining down on us from the skies over the
Kuwaiti desert after Saddam blew up the wells of the
Emirate. It was only after a few minutes that I
realised what I was looking for: some hint, back in the
days of dangerous innocence, of what was going to
happen on 11 September 2001.

And sure enough, in one notebook, part of a transcript
of an interview I gave in Toronto in the late 1990s, I
see myself trying to discourage the Middle East
optimism of my host. "There is an explosion coming in
the Middle East," I tell him. What was this explosion I
was talking about? I find myself writing almost the
same thing a couple of years later in The Independent -
I refer to "the explosion to come" without locating it
in the Middle East at all. What was I talking about?
And then, most disturbingly, I re-run parts of a film
series I made with the late Michael Dutfield for
Channel 4 and Discovery in 1993. Called From Beirut to
Bosnia, it was billed as an attempt to record "Muslims
growing anger towards the West."

In one sequence, I walk into a destroyed mosque in a
Bosnian village called Cela. And I hear my voice on the
soundtrack, saying: "When I see things like this, I
think of the place I work, the Middle East... I wonder
what the Muslim world has in store for us... Maybe I
should end each of my reports with the words: 'Watch
out!' " And when I checked back to my post-production
notes, I find the dates of all our film sequences
listed. I had walked into that Bosnian mosque, watched
by Serb policemen, on 11 September 1993. My warning was
exactly eight years too early.

I don't like journalists who, in middle age, start to
pontificate morbidly about the wickedness of a world
that should be full of love, or who rummage through old
notebooks in search of pessimism. So I own up at once.
Surely we don't have to be weighed down by the baggage
of history, always looking backwards and holding up
billboards with the "The End of the World is Nigh"
written in black for readers too bored to look at the
fine print. Yet when I sit on my seafront balcony
today, I am waiting for the next explosion to come.

Beirut is a good place to reflect on the tragedy
through which the Middle East is now inexorably moving.
After all, the city has suffered so many horrors these
past 31 years, it seems haunted by the mass graves that
lie across the region, from Afghanistan to Iraq to
"Palestine" and to Lebanon itself. And I look across
the waters and see a German warship cruising past my
home, part of Nato's contribution to stop gun-running
into Lebanon under UN Security Council Resolution 1701.
And then, I ask myself what the Germans could possibly
be doing when no guns have ever been run to the
Hizbollah guerrilla army from the sea. The weapons came
through Syria, and Syria has a land frontier with the
country and is to the north and east of Lebanon, not on
the other side of the Mediterranean.

And then when I call on my landlord to discuss this
latest, hopeless demonstration of Western power, he
turns to me in some anger and says, "Yes, why is the
German navy cruising off my home?" And I see his point.
For we Westerners are now spreading ourselves across
the entire Muslim world. In one form or another, "we" -
"us", the West - are now in Khazakstan, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Qatar, Bahrain,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Lebanon. We are now
trapped across this vast area of suffering, fiercely
angry people, militarily far more deeply entrenched and
entrapped than the 12th-century crusaders who faced
defeat at the battle of Hittin, our massive forces
fighting armies of Islamists, suicide bombers,
warlords, drug barons, and militias. And losing. The
latest UN army in Lebanon, with its French and Italian
troops, is moving in ever greater numbers to the south,
young men and women who have already been threatened by
al-Qa'ida and who will, in three of four months, be hit
by al-Qa'ida. Which is one reason why the French have
been pallisading themselves into their barracks in
southern Lebanon. There is no shortage of suicide
bombers here, although it will be the Sunni -- not the
Hizbollah-Shiite variety -- which will strike at the
UN.

When will the bombers arrive? After further massacres
in Iraq? After the Israelis cross the border again?
After Israel - or the US - bombs Iran's nuclear
facilities in the coming months? After someone in the
northern city of Tripoli, perhaps, or in the
Palestinian camps outside Sidon, decides he has seen
too many Western soldiers trampling the lands of
southern Lebanon, too many German warships off the
coast, or heard too many mendacious statements of
optimism from George W Bush or Tony Blair or
Condoleezza Rice. "There will be no 'new' Middle East,
Miss Rice," a new Hizbollah poster says south of Sidon.
And the Hizbollah is right. The entire region is
sinking deeper into bloodshed and all the time, over
and over again, Bush and Blair tell us it is all
getting much better, that we can all be heartened by
the spread of non-existent democracies, that the dawn
is rising on Condi's "new" Middle East. Are they really
hoping that they can distort the mirror of the world's
reality with their words? There is a kind of new dawn
rising in the lands from the old Indian empire to the
tides of the Mediterranean. The only trouble is that it
is blood red.

It is as if the Bushes and Blairs do not live on this
planet any more. As my colleague Patrick Cockburn wrote
recently, the enraging thing about Blair's constant
optimism is that, to prove it all a pack of lies, a
journalist has to have his throat cut amid the anarchy
which Blair says does not exist. The Americans cannot
protect themselves in Iraq, let alone the Iraqis, and
the British have twice nearly been defeated in battles
with the Taliban, and the Israeli army - counting it as
part of the "West" for a moment -- were soundly
thrashed when they crossed the border to fight the
Hizbollah, losing 40 men in 36 hours. Yet still Blair
delayed a ceasefire in Lebanon. And still - be certain
of this - when the fire strikes us again, in London or
New York or wherever, Blair and Bush will say that the
attack has nothing to do with the Middle East, that
Britain's enemies hate "our values" or our "way of
life".

I once mourned the lack of titans in the modern world,
the Roosevelts and the Churchills, blood-drenched
though their century was. Blair and Bush, posing as
wartime leaders, threatening the midget Hitlers around
them, appear to have gone through a kind of "stasis", a
psychological inability to grasp what they do not want
to hear or what they do not want to be true. And they
have lost the thread of history.

In the past, we - the "West" - could have post-war
adventures abroad and feel safe at home. No North
Korean tried to blow himself up on the London Tube in
the 1950s. No Viet Cong ever arrived in Washington to
assault the United States. We fought in Kenya and
Malaya and Palestine and Suez and Yemen, but we felt
safe in Gloucestershire. Perhaps the change came with
the Algerian War of Independence when the bombers
attacked in Paris and Lyons, or perhaps it came later
when the IRA arrived to bomb London.

But it is a fact that "we" cannot take our armies and
warships and tanks and helicopter gunships and para
battalions for foreign wars and expect to be unhurt at
home. This is the inescapable logic of history that
Bush and Blair will not face, will not acknowledge,
will not believe - will not even let us believe. All
across the Middle East, we are locked in battle in our
preposterous "war on terror" because "the world changed
forever" on 11 September, even though I have said many
times that we should not allow 19 murderers to change
our world. So we live in a darker world of phone-taps
and "terror plots" and underground CIA prisoners whose
interrogators set about victims in secret, tearing to
pieces the Geneva Conventions so painfully constructed
after the Second World War.

And in a world betrayed. Remember all those promises we
made to the Arabs about creating a wonderful new
functioning democracy in Iraq whose example would be
followed by other Middle East states? And remember our
promise to honour the fledgling democracy of Lebanon,
the famous "Cedars Revolution" - a title invented by
the US State Department, so the Lebanese should have
been suspicious - which brought the retreat of the
Syrian army. Lebanon was then held up to be a future
model for the Arab world. But once the Hizbollah
crossed the frontier and seized two Israeli soldiers,
killing three others on 12 July, we stood back and
watched the Lebanese suffer. "If there is one thing
this last war has convinced me of," a young Lebanese
woman put it to me this month, "it is that the Lebanese
are on their own. I can never trust a foreign promise
again."

And this is true. For the direct result of the
disastrous Israeli campaign has been to turn the
Hizbollah into heroes of the Arab - indeed the Muslim -
world, to break apart the fragile political stability
established by the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad
Siniora, and to have Hizbollah's leader, Sayed Hassan
Nasrallah, declare a "divine victory" and demand a
"national unity" government which, if it comes about,
will be pro-Syrian. The language now being used in
Lebanon by the country's political leaders is
approaching the incendiary, lethal grammar of pre-civil
war Lebanon.

Samir Geagea, the Christian ex-militia commander,
brought out tens of thousands of supporters to jeer at
Nasrallah. "They demand a strong state but how can a
strong state be built with a statelet in its midst?"
Geagea demanded to know after the Hizbollah suddenly
announced that it has no intention of handing over its
weapons. Indeed, Nasrallah is now boasting that he
still has 20,000 missiles in southern Lebanon, a claim
which led the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, to abuse
Nasrallah as a creature of Syria - there is speculation
over the depth of his relationship with Damascus but
his arms certainly come from Iran - and to say to him:
"Sayed Nasrallah, rest your mind, I will not reach an
agreement with you. When you separate yourself from the
Syrian leadership, I will possibly hold a dialogue with
you." Thus two more paper-thin links - between
Lebanon's Druze community and the Christians and the
larger population of Shiite Muslims - have been broken.
And that is how civil wars start.

Had Bush - indeed Blair -- denounced Israel's claim
that it held the Lebanese government responsible for
the kidnapping and killing of its soldiers, and
demanded an immediate ceasefire, then the disaster that
is destroying Lebanon's democracy would not have
happened. But no, Bush and Blair let the bloodshed go
on and postponed hopes of a ceasefire for the Lebanese
upon whom they had lavished so much praise a year ago.
Just last week, the Lebanese recovered the bodies of
five more children under the rubble of the Sidon
Vocational Training Centre in Tyre. Ali Alawiah
identified his children Aya, Zeinab and Hussein and his
nephews Battoul and Abbas. All would have been alive if
even Blair and Margaret Beckett had demanded a
ceasefire. But they are dead. And Blair and Beckett and
Bush should have this on their conscience.

The fact they don't speaks sorrowfully of our double
standard of morality. Almost all Lebanon's 1,300 dead -
which comes close to half the total of the World Trade
Centre murders - were civilians. But we don't care for
them as we do our own "kith and kin". This is the same
sickness that pervades our policies in Iraq where we
never counted the number of civilians killed, only the
tally of our precious soldiers who died there.

How did we come to be infected by this virus of
negligence and betrayal? Does it really go back to the
Crusades or the ramblings of Spanish Christians of the
15th century - whose portrayals of the Prophet Mohamed
were infinitely more obscene than Denmark's third-rate
cartoonist - or to the vicious anti-Muslim ravings of
long-forgotten Popes who seem to obsess the present
incumbent of the Vatican? I am still uncertain what
Benedict meant by his quotation of the old man of
Byzantium - while I am equally suspicious of his almost
equally insulting remarks at Auschwitz where he blamed
Nazi Germany's cruelty on a mere "gang of criminals".
But then again, this is a Pope - anti-divorce, anti-
homosexual and, once, anti-aircraft - who has signally
failed to follow John Paul II's devotions on the need
for the seed of Abraham to acknowledge the love they
should show to each other.

This failure to see the Other as the same as "us" is
now evident across the Middle East. Some months ago, I
received letters originally written to his family by a
young Marine officer in Iraq who was trying -
eloquently, I have to add - to explain how frustrating
his work with Iraqis had become. "There is something
culturally childish in their understanding of Western
governance and management that will require
immeasurable education and probably several generations
to overcome if they find it of any interest," he wrote.
"Our understanding of their tribal governance and its
relationship to formal civil management is equally
naïve and charges our frustration... The reality is
that they cannot, culturally, comprehend our altruism
or believe our stated intentions... Liberation will
compete with invasion as our legacy but locally we are
ideologically irrelevant... I share the American
fascination with action and it has consistently
betrayed us in our foreign policy."

The reality in Iraq is summed up by the same American
Marine officer's description of the building of the
Ramadi glass factory, a story that shows just how
vacuous all the stories of our "success" there are.
"The Division has poured hundreds of thousands of
dollars into a glass factory. It does not work. It will
take millions of dollars to rehabilitate and modernise.
There are supposed to be 2,500 Iraqis employed there
but they have nothing to do and no more than 100 arrive
on any given day to sit in their offices as new
computers and furniture are delivered with our
compliments... It is like walking through a fictional
business that physically exists. It may be Kafka's
revenge. Most rooms are empty but are still preserved
as they had been under a layer of dust. Some areas hold
a man at a desk in a stark room too large for him. It
is like Pompeii being slowly reoccupied, as if nothing
had happened. I stood on a tall mound of broken glass
outside. Shards of window panes shattered in the
process of manufacturing them. The windows of the city
were poured and cut here once... This glass was made
from sand, desert made invisible until exposed by
reflection. The bright sunlight makes little impression
on the pile due to a dull coating of dust but the
fragments fracture further and slide beneath my feet
with the sound of ruin. Walking on windows and unable
to see the ground." Could there be a more Conradian
description of the failure of the American empire in
Iraq?

And does it not echo a remark that TE Lawrence -
Lawrence of Arabia - made of Iraq in the 1920s: "Do not
try to do too much with your own hands. Better the
Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly...
Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of
Arabia, your practical work may not be as good as,
perhaps, you think."

A different kind of alienation, of course, is reflected
in our dispute with Iran. "We" think that its
government wants to make nuclear weapons - in six
months, according to the Israelis; in 10 years,
according to some nuclear analysts. But no one asks if
"we" didn't help to cause this "nuclear" crisis. For it
was the Shah who commenced Iran's nuclear power
programme in 1973 and Western companies were shoulder-
hopping each other in their desire to sell him nuclear
reactors and enrichment technology. Siemens, for
example, started to build the Bushehr reactor. And the
Shah was regularly interviewed on Western television
stations where he said that he didn't see why Iran
shouldn't have nuclear weapons when America and the
Soviets had them. And we had no objection to the
ambitions of "our" Policeman of the Gulf.

And when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution
engulfed Iran, what did he do? He called the nuclear
programme "the work of the devil" and closed it down.
It was only when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran the
following year and began showering Iran with missiles
and chemical weapons - an invasion supported by "us" -
that the clerical regime decided they may have to use
nuclear weapons against Iraq and reopened the complex.
In other words, it was the West which supported Iran's
original nuclear programme and it was closed by the
chief divine of George Bush's "axis of evil" and then
reopened when the West stood behind Saddam (in the days
when he was "our strongman" rather than our caged
prisoner in a dying state).

The greater irony, of course, is that if we were really
concerned about the spread of nuclear technology among
Muslim states, we would be condemning Pakistan, most of
whose cities are in a state of almost Iraqi anarchy and
whose jolly dictator now says he was threatened with
being "bombed back to the Stone Age" by the Americans
if he didn't sign up to the "war on terror". Now it
happens that Pakistan is infinitely more violent than
Iran and it also happens that it was a close Pakistani
friend of the Pakistani President- General Pervez
Musharraf - a certain scientist called Abdul Qadeer
Khan - who actually gave solid centrifuge components to
Iran. But all that has been taken out of the story. And
so they will remain out of the narrative because
Pakistan already has a bomb and may use it if someone
decided to create a new Stone Age in that former corner
of the British empire.

But all this raises a more complex question. Are we
really going to carry on arguing for years - for
generation after generation of crisis - over who has or
doesn't have nuclear technology or the capacity to
build a bomb? Are "we" forever going to decide who may
have a bomb on the basis of his obedience to us - Mr
Musharraf now being a loyal Pakistani shah - or his
religion or how many turbans are worn by ministers in
the government. Are we still going to be doing this in
2007 or 2107 or 3006?

What I suspect lies behind much of our hypocrisy in the
Middle East is that Muslims have not lost their faith
and we have. It's not just that religion governs their
lives, it is the fact that they have kept the faith -
and that is why we try to hide that we have lost it by
talking about Islam's "difficulty with secularism". We
are the good liberals who wish to bestow the pleasures
of our Enlightenment upon the rest of the world,
although, to the Muslim nations, this sounds more like
our desire to invade them with different cultures and
traditions and - in some cases - different religions.

And Muslims have learnt to remember. I still recall an
Iraqi friend, shaking his head at my naivety when I
asked if there was not any cup of generosity to be
bestowed on the West for ridding Iraqis of Saddam's
presence. "You supported him," he replied. "You
supported him when he invaded Iran and we died in our
tens of thousands. Then, after the invasion of Kuwait,
you imposed sanctions that killed tens of thousands of
our children. And now you reduce Iraq to anarchy. And
you want us to be grateful?"

And I recalled seeing a train load of gassed Iranian
soldiers on the way to Tehran, coughing up mucus and
blood into stained handkerchiefs and coughing up the
gas too because I suddenly smelled a kind of dirty
perfume and walked down the train opening all the
windows. I saw their vast wobbling blisters upon which
ever-smaller blisters would form, one on top of the
other. And where did this filthy stuff come from, this
real weapon of mass destruction Saddam was using?
Components came from Germany and from the US. No wonder
US Lieutenant Rick Francona noted indifferently in a
report to the Pentagon that the Iraqis had drenched Fao
in gas when he visited the battlefield during the war.
So do we expect the Iranians to be grateful that we
eventually toppled Saddam?

Needless to say, the division between Shias and Sunnis
- especially in Iraq - can reach stages of cruelty not
seen since the European Protestant-Catholic wars; nor,
in this context, should we forget the conflict we are
still trying to control in Northern Ireland. Islam as a
society, rather than a religion, does have to face the
"West"; it must find, in the words of that fine former
Iranian president Mohamad Khatami, a "civil society".
And it is outrageous that Muslims have not condemned
the slaughter in Darfur or, indeed, in Iraq and, one
might add, on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war
where one and a half million Muslims killed each other
over almost eight years. Self-criticism is not in great
supply across the Muslim world where, of course, our
spirited Western political conflicts and elections
sometimes look like self-flagellation.

As for our desire to award the Muslim Middle East with
"our" democratic systems, it's not just in Lebanon that
we have proved to be much less enthusiastic about its
existence in the Arab world. The former US ambassador
to Iraq - once he realised the Shiites would join the
Sunni resistance if they did not have elections, for
democracy was originally not going to be America's gift
there - accepted a dominant role for Muslim clerics in
the government, thus ensuring discrimination against
women in marriage, divorce and inheritance.

When Daniel Fried, the US Assistant Secretary of State
for European and Eurasian Affairs visited Paris last
year, he lectured European and Arab diplomats on what
he called "the US-European imperative to support
democratic reform and democratic reformers in the
Middle East" - forgetting, it seems, that just such a
man, Khatami, existed in Iran but had been snubbed by
the US. His failure as a genuinely elected president
produced his somewhat cracked successor. Fried,
however, insisted that bringing democracy to the Middle
East "is not for us a question of political theory, but
of central strategic importance", something that
clearly didn't matter less than a year later in Lebanon
and certainly not when the Palestinians participated in
genuine elections, of which more later.

Fried took the risky step of quoting the French
historian Alexis de Tocqueville to back his claim that
democracy, far from being a fragile flower, was
"robust, and its applicability is potentially
universal". The former French foreign minister, Hubert
Védrine, was invited to reply to respond to Fried's
words and he cynically spoke of "people who have
historical experience, who have seen how past
experiences turned out", the subtext of which was: "You
Americans have no sense of history." Védrine spoke of
meeting with Madeleine Albright when she was the US
Foreign Secretary. "I told her we had no problem
regarding the objective of democracy, but I asked
whether it was a process, or a religious conversion,
like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus." And he quoted
the Mexican writer, Octavio Pas: "Democracy is not like
Nescafé, you don't just add water." For historical
reasons, Védrine told Fried, "Because of colonialism,
the Middle East is the region of the world where
external intervention is most at risk of being
rejected."

And when it is imposed, as America says it would like
to do in Damascus, what will happen? A nice,
flourishing electoral process to put Syrians in power
or another descent into Iraqi-style horrors with a
Sunni-Muslim regime in place in Damascus?

And so to "Palestine" - the inverted commas are more
important than ever today - and its own act of
democracy. Of course, the Palestinians elected the
wrong people, Hamas, and had to suffer for it.
Democratic Israel would not accept the results of
Palestine's democratic elections and the Europeans
joined with America in placing sanctions against the
newly elected government unless it recognised Israel
and all agreements signed with Israel since the Camp
David accords of the 1970s. Even when Ariel Sharon was
staging his withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from Gaza last
year, he was shifting 12,000 more settlers into the
West Bank, and George W Bush had effectively accepted
this illegality by talking of the "realities" of the
Jewish settlements still being enlarged there. And that
was the end of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and
338 upon which the "peace process" was supposed to be
based - Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in
the 1967 Middle East war, in return for the security of
all states in the area.

One of the few honourable American statesmen to grasp
what this portends is ex-President Jimmy Carter, who
wrote after the Palestinian elections in May this year
that "innocent Palestinian people are being treated
like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty
of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who
are members of Hamas, the US government has become the
driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of
depriving the general public of income, access to the
outside world and the necessities of life... The
additional restraints imposed on the new government are
a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens
of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will
yield to the economic pressure." Oh, for the years of
the Carter administration...

And now we have the wall - or the "fence" as too many
journalists gutlessly call it. The Palestinians went to
the International Court in the Hague to have it
declared illegal because much of its course runs
through their land. The court said it was illegal. And
Israel ignored the court's decision and, once more, the
US supported Israel. Here was another lesson for the
Palestinians. They went peacefully - without violence
or "terrorism" - to our Western institutions to get
justice. And we were powerless to help them because
Israel rejected this symbol of Western freedoms.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister whose Lebanese
bombardment was such a catastrophe, still says that the
wall is only temporary, as if it might be shifted back
to the original frontiers of Israel. But if it is only
temporary, it can also be moved forward to take in more
Jewish settlements on Arab land, colonies which, it
must be noted, are illegal under international law.
Olmert says he wants to draw "permanent borders"
unilaterally - which is against the spirit of Camp
David which Hamas is now supposed to abide by.

And how does US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
respond to this? Well, try this for wriggle room. "I
wouldn't on the face of it just say absolutely we don't
think there's any value in what the Israelis are
talking about." And if the US does recognise - which it
will - unilaterally fixed borders of the kind proposed
by Olmert, it will sanction the permanent annexation of
up to 10 per cent of the Arab territory seized in 1967,
contrary to all previous US policy and to the
International Court. All this, of course, is part of
the new flouting of international laws which the US -
and increasingly Israel - now regards as its right
since the world "changed forever" on 11 September,
2001.

Remarkably, however, the US still believes that it is
increasingly loathed in the Arab world not because of
its policies but because its policies are not being
presented fairly. It's not a political problem, it's a
public-relations problem. Curiously, that is what
Israel thought when accused of killing too many
Lebanese during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. What we
do is right. We're just not selling it right. Hence,
the appointment of Karen Hughes as US "Undersecretary
of State for Public Diplomacy". Her line is straight to
the point. "I try to portray the facts in the best
light for our country," she said after her appointment.
"Because I believe we're a wonderful country and that
we are doing things across the world."

The columnist Roger Cohen placed her problem in a
nutshell. The problem are the facts. And they include
the fact that, in the 65-year period between 1941 and
2006, the US has been at war in some form or another
for all but 14 of them. And people around the world
have got tired of this. They got tired of America's
insatiable need for an enemy - and suspicious of all
the talk of democracy, freedom and morality in which
every war was cast. They stopped buying the US
narrative. Hughes says that the vision followed by bin
Laden's followers "is a mission of destruction and
death; ours a message of life and opportunity." Well,
yes. "If only it were that simple," Cohen wrote.

At that Paris meeting with Fried, Védrine won almost
all the arguments, not that Fried realised it. Védrine
pleaded with the Americans to exercise caution in the
Middle East. "We don't know how things are going to
turn out in Afghanistan, Iraq or Egypt," he said
presciently. "This is a high-risk process, like
transporting nitroglycerine. You talk about an
alliance; if there is an alliance, it must not be an
ideological alliance, but an alliance of surgeons, of
professionals, of chemists specialised in explosive
substances. If we set out to do this, it will take 20
or 30 years, far longer than the second Bush
administration."

But the US Marines and the 82 Airborne are not surgeons
or chemists. They are losing control of lands they
thought they had conquered or "liberated". Iraq is
already out of control. So is much of Afghanistan.
Palestine looks set to go the same way and Lebanon is
in danger of freefall. A series of letters in The New
York Times in April this year suggested that ordinary
US citizens grasp the "democratic" argument better than
their leaders. "Democracy cannot be easily imposed on
people who are not prepared to accept it," one wrote.
"Democracy cannot be exported," wrote another.
"Changing a political culture happens only if the
people embrace it. Iraqi society is too traumatised by
the history of Saddam Hussein and the war to do more
than survive both at this point." Spot on.

It may well be that journalists in the "West" should
feel a burden of guilt for much that has happened
because they have, with their gullibility, helped to
sell US actions much more effectively than Karen
Hughes. Their constant references to a "fence" instead
of a wall, to "settlements" or "neighbourhoods" instead
of colonies, their description of the West Bank as
"disputed" rather than occupied, has a bred a kind of
slackness in reporting the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. Just as it did in Iraq when so many reporters
from the great Western newspapers and TV stations used
US ambassador Bremer's laughable description of the
ferocious insurgents as "dead-enders" or "remnants" -
the same phrase still being used by our colleagues in
Kabul in reference to a distinctly resurgent Taliban
which is being helped - despite General Musharraf's
denials - by the Pakistani intelligence service, the
ISI.

Much worse, however, is the failure to enquire into the
real policies of governments. Why, for example, was
there no front-page treatment of this year's Herzliya
conference, Israel's most important policy-making
jamboree? Most of the important figures in the Israeli
government - they had yet to be elected - were in
attendance. The conference was the place where Ehud
Olmert first suggested handing over slices of the West
Bank: "The choice between allowing Jews to live in all
parts of the land of Israel" - the "land of Israel" in
this context included the West Bank - "and living in a
state with a Jewish majority mandate giving up part of
the land of Israel. We cannot continue to control parts
of the territories where most of the Palestinians
live."

However, most speakers agreed that the Palestinians
would be given a state on whatever is left after the
huge settlements had been included behind the wall.
Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested the wall should be
moved deeper into the West Bank. But the implications
were obvious. A Palestinian state will be allowed, but
it will not have a capital in east Jerusalem nor any
connection between Gaza and the bits of the West Bank
that are handed over. So there will be no peace, and
the words "Palestinian" and "terrorist" will, again, be
inextricably linked by Israel and the US.

There were articles in the Israeli press about
Herzliya, including one by Sergio Della Pergola in
which he warned of the "menace" to Israel of
Palestinian birth rates and advised that "if the
demographic tie doesn't come in 2010, it will come in
2020." Earlier conferences have discussed the possible
need for the revoking of the citizenship rights of some
Israeli Arabs. Already this year, Haaretz has reported
an opinion poll in which 68 per cent of Israeli Jews
said they would refuse to live in the same building as
an Arab - 26 per cent would agree to do so - and 46 per
cent of Israeli Jews said they would refuse to allow an
Arab to visit their home. The inclination toward
segregation rose as the income level of the respondents
dropped - as might be expected - and there was no poll
of Palestinian opinion, though the Palestinians might
be able to point out that tens of thousands of Israelis
already do live on their land in the huge colonies
across the West Bank, most of which will remain,
illegally, in Israeli hands.

All these details are available in the Arab press - and
of course, the Israeli press, but are largely absent
from our own. Why? Even when Norman Finkelstein wrote a
damning academic report on the way Israel's High Court
of Justice "proved" the wall - deemed illegal by the
Hague -- was legal, it was virtually ignored in the
West. So, for that matter, was the US academics' report
on the power of the Israeli lobby, until the usual
taunts of "anti-Semitism" forced the American
mainstream to write about it, albeit in a shifty,
frightened way.

There are so many other examples of our fear of Middle
Eastern truth. Our soft handling of Hosni Mubarak's
increasingly autocratic regime in Egypt is typical. So
is reporting of Algeria now that British governments
are prepared to deport refugees home on the grounds
that they no longer face arrest and torture. But arrest
and torture continue in Algeria. Its recent amnesty
poll effectively immunises all members of the security
services involved in torture and makes it a crime to
oppose the amnesty.

Is this really the best that we journalists can do?
Save for the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, there are
still no truly investigative correspondents in the US
press. But challenging authority should not be that
difficult. No one is being asked to end the
straightforward reporting of Arab tyrannies. We are
still invited to ask - and should ask - why the Muslim
world has produced so many dictatorships, most of them
supported by "us". But there are too many dark corners
into which we will not look. Where, for example, are
the CIA's secret torture prisons? I know two reporters
who are aware of the locations. But they are silent, no
doubt in the interests of "national security".

This reluctance to confront unpleasant truths
diminishes the reader or viewer for whom Middle East
reporting in the US media is almost incomprehensible to
anyone who does not know the region. It also has its
trickle-down effects even in theatres, universities and
schools in America. The case of the play about Rachel
Corrie - the young US activist twice run over by an
Israeli bulldozer while trying to prevent the
demolition of Palestinian homes - taken off the New
York stage was one of the more deplorable of these. I
was also surprised in the Bronx to find that Fieldston,
a private school in Riverdale - was forced to cancel a
college meeting with two Palestinian lecturers when
parents objected to the absence of an Israeli on the
panel. The fact that Israeli speakers were to be
invited later made no difference. The school's
principal later announced that the meeting would "not
be appropriate given the sensitivity and complexity of
the issue". Complex problems are supposed to be
explained. But this could not be explained because,
well, it was too complex and - the truth - would upset
the usual Israeli lobbyists.

So there we go again. Freedom of speech is a precious
commodity but just how precious I found out for myself
when I addressed the American University of Beirut
after receiving an honorary degree there this summer. I
made my usual points about the Bush administration and
the growing dangers of the Middle East only to find
that a US diplomat in Beirut was condemning me in front
of Lebanese friends for being allowed to criticise the
Bush administration in a college which receives US
government money.

And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling
the world that things are getting better when they are
getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is
swamped in blood, that freedom is not without "birth
pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby.

It's always been my view that the people of this part
of the Earth would like some of our democracy. They
would like a few packets of human rights off our
supermarket shelves. They want freedom. But they want
another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this we
do not intend to give them. Which is why our Middle
East presence is heading into further darkness. Which
is why I sit on my balcony and wonder where the next
explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen.
Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead.
Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the
bomb. You can arrest all of the world's nuclear
scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden
created al-Qa'ida amid the matchwood of the Middle
East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.

And all around these lands are a legion of young men
preparing to strike again, at us, at our symbols, at
our history. And yes, maybe I should end all my reports
with the words: Watch out!

[Robert Fisk's book 'The Great War for Civilisation' is
published by Fourth Estate at £9.99. His speaking tour
runs until 12 October, visit www.seminars.ie for
details]

(c) 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

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