Night of Power: Robert Fisk's war stories spotlight victims, perpetrators

NIGHT OF POWER: The Betrayal of the Middle East

Author: Robert Fisk

Publisher: Fourth Estate

Pages: 644

Price: $40

 

Robert Fisk was the best-known British war correspondent of his generation, thanks in part to sheer persistence. He spent more than four decades running from one Middle Eastern death zone to the next, cataloguing the horrors he saw in gruesome detail and railing against the West’s complicity in them. He was something of a cult figure on the British left, where his anti-imperial and anti-Zionist convictions were widely shared. 

Few could match Fisk’s record of being there. He was among the only journalists to witness the Syrian military’s destruction of the city of Hama in 1982, and reported on the Iran-Iraq war from both countries. He saw every phase of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, and chronicled it all in a widely praised book, Pity the Nation. He was beaten bloody by a mob of Afghan refugees in Pakistan in late 2001, and said afterward, “If I had been them, I would have attacked me.” 

 

Night of Power appears four years after Fisk’s death at the age of 74. Like his earlier books, it is a long, rambling mash-up of his dispatches, this one running from the US invasion of Iraq to the Arab spring and its aftermath. Fisk knew he was writing in the twilight of his career, and the action is interspersed with self-assessments, some bitter, some haughty. 

It isn’t clear what Fisk thought his reporting would achieve. Much of what he has to say — about Iraq especially — is now grindingly familiar to an audience that has grown numb after a quarter-century of lurid Middle Eastern violence. His vitriolic chapters on Israel are more about fist shaking than reportage. 

Fisk had a grudging respect for the bravery and panache of Osama Bin Laden, whom he interviewed at least three times in the 1990s. Curiously, the feeling appears to have been mutual. The letters in the Abbottabad archive, recovered after Bin Laden’s assassination in 2011, make clear that the Qaeda leader followed Fisk’s work, and even wanted to send him audio and visual material for a documentary to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — a collaboration, more or less. My guess is that Bin Laden sensed an ideological affinity with Fisk, who believed that “the West’s oppression of the Muslim world,” as he puts it here, is at the root of the region’s troubles. 

One of Fisk’s meetings with Bin Laden yields Night of Power’s most poignant passage. Fisk asked Bin Laden’s son Omar — then 15 years old — if he was happy. The boy, clearly unprepared for the question, said yes. But years later, as Fisk notes, Omar wrote his own book describing the encounter, which he remembered vividly: “My tongue ached to take back those words — to confide the truth, that I was the most miserable boy alive, and that I hated the hatred and violence my father was promoting.” 

Despite the hours Fisk spent with Osama Bin Laden, his reporting includes some strangely deluded moments. In 2002, Fisk writes, he received a message that Bin Laden, then in hiding after the 9/11 attacks, wanted to read Fisk’s book  The Great War for Civilization. Fisk writes that he travelled to Islamabad, where a Qaeda courier came to his bed-and-breakfast and picked up an Arabic translation of the book. Fisk then wrote down 12 questions for the courier to bring to Bin Laden, which he later answered, in order, in one of the audio recordings he regularly released to Arab news outlets, but without mentioning Fisk. 

This story isn’t just false; it’s preposterous. Fisk may have met someone who claimed to be a Qaeda courier in 2002, but if so he should have known by the time he wrote the sentence that the man was a liar. Bin Laden cut off all communication with his associates for about three years after his escape from Afghanistan, according to Nelly Lahoud’s authoritative study The Bin Laden Papers. Then there is the fact that The Great War for Civilization wasn’t published until 2005 — three years after the encounter he describes. 

How does an experienced reporter produce such a self-aggrandizing fantasy? The charitable view would be that this passage resulted from a slip by editors who were struggling to shape an author’s posthumous manuscript into a book. But Fisk’s previous work is also peppered with factual and historical errors that suggest a shocking carelessness. And he has been accused for decades of juicing his dispatches with exaggerated or even fabricated details. 

My sense is that Fisk fell in love with his own legend. He felt he had a higher mission than reporting facts: He was waging a war of his own against the colonial arrogance of the West, a little like Bin Laden’s. But the anger rarely relents, and often, reading him is like being lectured by an irritable old man. 

Fisk’s didactic fury may have kept him going, but it tainted his fidelity as a witness and narrowed his vision. His writings scarcely register the richness or colour of the Middle Eastern landscape he lived in for 44 years. He has almost nothing to say about the region’s music or art, the atmosphere of its markets and squares. Its people rarely appear as anything more than perpetrators or — more often — victims, whether of guns and bombs or of the schemes of European colonialists. 

 

In a sense, Fisk was himself a casualty, permanently scarred by the wars he deplored, condemned to return again and again to the scene of his trauma. 

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The reviewer is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. ©2024 The New York Times News Service