Night of Power, page 1
Copyright
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2024
Copyright © Robert Fisk 2024
Foreword © Patrick Cockburn 2024
Postscript © Nelofer Pazira-Fisk 2024
Cover image © Shutterstock
Robert Fisk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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Source ISBN: 9780007255481
Ebook Edition © July 2024 ISBN: 9780007357192
Version: 2024-06-02
Dedication
For Nelofer
Epigraph
We sent it down in the Night of Power!
But how can you know what is the Night of Power?
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months.
In it, the angels and the Spirit are sent swarming down,
By their Lord’s leave, attending to every command.
Peace is that Night, till the break of dawn.
The Qur’an: A New Translation by Tarif Khalidi, sura 97:1–5
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Foreword by Patrick Cockburn
Preface
1 Legacy
2 The Age of the Dictator
3 Walking on Windows
4 Painting Othello Black
5 ‘You Have Your Mission – And I Have Mine’
6 ‘The Gloves Are Coming Off, Gentlemen …’
7 The Dog in the Manger
8 The Israeli Empire
9 ‘Going Wild’
10 How Brave Our Warships Looked That Dawn
11 The Awakening
12 The Wounded Tiger
13 ‘Dear Moussa …’
14 The Men in White Socks
15 The Surgeon with the Bloodstained Hands
Postscript by Nelofer Pazira-Fisk
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Also by Robert Fisk
About the Authors
About the Publisher
Maps
Foreword
by Patrick Cockburn
I first met Robert Fisk in Belfast in 1972 at the height of the Troubles when he was the correspondent for The Times and I was writing a PhD on Irish history at Queen’s University.
I was also taking my first tentative steps as a journalist, while he was rapidly establishing a reputation as a meticulous and highly informed reporter, one who responded sceptically to – and rigorously investigated – the partisan claims of all parties, be they IRA or Unionist gunmen, British Army officers or government officials.
Our careers moved in parallel directions because we were interested in the same sort of stories. We both went to Beirut in the mid-1970s to write about the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli invasions. We often reported the same grim events, such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen in 1982, but we did not usually travel together because, aside from the fact that Robert liked to work alone, we wrote for competing newspapers.
When we did share a car during the wars, I was impressed by Robert’s willingness to take risks, yet to do so without bravado, making sure we had the right driver and petrol that had not been watered down. One reason he had so many journalistic scoops – such as finding out about the massacre of 20,000 people in Hama by Hafez al-Assad’s forces in Syria in 1982 – was that he was an untiring traveller. One friend recalls: ‘He was the only person I’ll ever know who could, almost effortlessly, make up limericks about the south Lebanese villages, while he was driving through them.’
A deadly serious reason lay behind his visits to these villages. When I was a correspondent in Jerusalem in the 1990s, they were the target of repeated Israeli airstrikes, which the Israeli military would declare were solely directed at ‘terrorists’, and, if there were any dead or wounded, they were invariably described as gunmen not civilians. Almost nobody checked if this was true – except Robert, who would drive again and again to these same shattered villages and report in graphic detail about the dead bodies of men, women and children, and interview survivors. When Israel stuck with its denial of responsibility, he would unearth further evidence in the shape of videos and travel to America to show arms manufacturers fragments of their missiles that had torn apart some Lebanese community.
Robert was suited to Beirut with its free and somewhat anarchic atmosphere, a place always on edge, and its people – Lebanese, Palestinian, exiles of all sorts – born survivors, though sometimes the odds against them proved too great. He had a natural sympathy for their sufferings and a rage against those who inflicted them. His sympathy was not confined to present-day victims: for decades he wrote about the Armenian genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. He would publicise long-lost diaries and documents about the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, stories other correspondents felt were far from the conventional news agenda and better left to historians.
But Robert was more than a journalist cataloguing present-day developments and woes. He was a historian as well as a reporter, who wrote, among many other books, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East and now The Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East. I never finished my PhD in Belfast because the violence became too intense for academic work, but Robert did get his doctorate from Trinity College Dublin for his thesis on Irish neutrality in the Second World War. He was more than a person who covered ‘the news’, since his journalism – for all his scoops and revelations – had such depth. He was, in the truest sense, ‘a historian of the present’.
Robert combined a journalist’s skills as an eyewitness recording and interpreting events with a historian’s ability to place them in a broader context and longer time frame. His books avoid the failing of many of even the best academic histories, which is that the author largely knows what happened second-hand. The weakness of journalism is the precise opposite: the reporter focuses exclusively on what he or she witnesses in front of them, ignoring or minimising the significance of what they do not see, but which is of equal or greater significance. By its very nature, journalism dilutes the truth not just through proprietorial or editorial bias, though that is important, but because shortage of space and the need to appeal to a wide audience necessitate oversimplification. Yet the real life of peoples and countries is complicated – all the arrows never point conveniently in the same direction – and what appears in the media will, at best, be a well-informed synopsis of events. Only through books such as this can the complex but invariably fascinating reality be accessed. The great American journalist Seymour Hersh once told me: ‘When people ask me how to begin an investigation, I always say to them: “Read, read, read.”’
Robert was a magnificent reporter who bubbled with nervous energy, often shifting his weight from one foot to the other, notebook in hand, as he questioned eyewitnesses relentlessly and probed into what had really occurred. He took nothing for granted and was openly contemptuous of those who did. He did not invent the old journalistic saying ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied’, but he fully agreed with its sceptical message. He was suspicious of reporters who cultivated diplomats and ‘official sources’ that could not be named, and whose likely partisan bias was unmentioned but whose veracity we were invited to take on trust.
Some journalists responded to Robert’s criticism with baffled resentment: during the US-led counter-invasion of Kuwait in 1991, one embedded American journalist complained that Robert was unfairly reporting on events about which information should have been confined to an officially sanctioned ‘pool’ of correspondents. Another US journalist based in London in the early 1980s told me that he considered Robert to be a brilliant writer and the best reporter he had ever known, but he had been struck by the number of his colleagues who grimaced at Robert’s name. ‘I have thought about this,’ he said, ‘and I think that 80 per cent of the reason for this is pure envy on their part.’ Truly, hell hath no fury like a reporter ‘scooped’, let alone one who has been regularly ‘scooped’. Robert did this again and again over half a century, so it was scarcely surprising that rival journalists often nurtured bitter and resentful feelings towards him.
He probably won more important journalistic awards in the course of his career than any other British or American
Inevitably, anybody reporting honestly on war and conflict will make enemies – and there is probably something wrong with their work if they do not. Governments whose armies are trying to kill each other are unlikely to hesitate when telling lies about each other. They detest the journalist who exposes these falsehoods and commonly demonise him as unpatriotic or an enemy pawn, since all wars are, and have always been, propaganda wars. Nothing much can be done to stop this, which has been an inevitable feature of armed conflict since Egyptian pharaohs were inscribing mendacious hieroglyphs about their non-existent victories on monuments 4,000 years ago. But it should be possible to alert the public to the falsity of this propaganda by describing, in a convincing manner, what is really going on and why it is happening. Robert was well aware of this, writing that ‘armies at war – like their governments – are best observed with a mighty degree of scepticism, even cynicism. So far as armies and militias are concerned there are no good guys.’ It is not that Robert thought good people did not exist, but he generally found them among the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence.
We saw more of each other after we both joined the Independent, Robert in 1989 and myself in 1990. He had decided to leave The Times after the paper jibbed at publishing his story, supported by copious evidence, about how a US cruiser, USS Vincennes, in the Gulf had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner flying between Bandar Abbas and Dubai in 1988, killing all 290 people on board. I was mostly in Iraq during the First Gulf War and Robert was in Kuwait. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, we drove out together from Baghdad across the desert to Jordan. I recall that we were stopped for a long time on the Jordanian side of the border because Robert had secured, from the wreckage of some police headquarters in Basra in southern Iraq, a file of laudatory poems written to Saddam’s ferocious police chief in the city by his underlings on the occasion of his birthday. Some of the Jordanian officials thought these craven poetic offerings were hilarious, but others found the documents mysterious and kept us waiting for hours at the bleak border post while they obtained official permission from Amman to let us cross.
As we grew older, we grew closer. We both had doubts about the beneficial outcome of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, having seen similar optimism over the invasion of Iraq produce a paroxysm of violence. Neither of us believed that Bashar al-Assad and his regime was going to fall, at a time when this was conventional wisdom among politicians and in the media. To suggest anything to the contrary got one immediately pilloried as a supporter of Assad. The sensible course was to ignore these diatribes and Robert and I used to counsel each other not to overreact and thereby give legs to some crude distortion of one’s views.
Over the last 15 years of his life, we talked almost once a week about everything from the state of the world to the state of ourselves, supplementing phone calls with periodic emails. A life spent describing crises and wars made Robert more philosophical about the coronavirus pandemic than those with less direct experience of calamities. In one of the last emails I received from him shortly before he died in Dublin on 30 October 2020, he wrote that ‘Covid-19, unless it suddenly turns into a tiger, will be seen as just another risk to human life – like car crashes, cancer, war, etc. Humans don’t necessarily fight disease, injustice and sorrow. They just survive and bash on regardless.’
He was correct in recognising that war, plague and violent death will always be with us, along with official lies about them, as will, hopefully, those who try to explain what is really happening. The British First World War prime minister David Lloyd George once said of that conflict that ‘if people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But, of course, they don’t know and can’t know.’ Robert was keenly interested in the 1914–18 war because his father, who had fought in it, took him on visits to the Somme and other battlefields from an early age. In describing the conflicts and wars of his own era, Robert sought in his journalism and books to tell people – contrary to what Lloyd George believed could and should be revealed to the public – about the terrible things that happen and to identify those responsible for these horrors.
Canterbury, September 2023
Preface
He who writes a book should write it only if he keeps constantly in view that everyone is his enemy, that everyone is an expert in his field, that everyone has nothing on his mind but his subject, and that everyone is ready and willing to challenge him. Nor must an author be satisfied with this. He should lay his book aside, and not be content with half-baked views, for a book, once composed, is wonderfully seductive …
Jahiz (died 868), al-Hayawan (1:88) (translated by Tarif Khalidi)
A few days after I arrived in the Middle East as a correspondent in 1976, I fell ferociously ill with a form of dysentery. I lay sick in my Cairo hotel bed, reflecting on the wisdom of my new assignment. One midday, I forced myself to climb out of bed, wash, dress and walk into the vast square behind my hotel. It was a pit of traffic, the people clinging to the sides of old red and cream buses, a mass of Egyptians pushing their way across narrow overpasses and through a fetid bus station of broken concrete seats amid clouds of dust and fumes.
I collapsed onto one of these seats, semi-conscious, having vomited all over the road, as people passed by with indifference. I loathed this place, this square, this city. I knew – beyond any shadow of doubt – that I must resign this new posting for The Times of London. The job of Middle East Correspondent was not for me. This very midan, this third circle of cement hell, surrounded by fading apartment blocks that mocked the elegance of French boulevards, overwhelmed by a giant Stalinist office block, was a place of utter hopelessness. Its very name, for me, was a dictator’s joke, synonymous with a closed society which could never emerge from the grey dictatorship in which it was wrapped. It was called Freedom Square. Tahrir Square.
Just under thirty-five years later, I stood in that same square and thanked God that I had, through danger and fear and loneliness and excitement and adventure and fury and incendiary anger, stayed in the Middle East. The old concrete bus station seats had gone and the hotel was a shell, but the monstrosity of the Mugamma building, the fading French-style apartment blocks and the pink-stone Egyptian museum were still there. It was the same place. But now a million Egyptians fought for it, conquered it and altered the course of Arab history.
Thank God, I’d always said to myself, that I worked for a paper which printed every word of my reports, that I was for much of the time working for an editor who treated the Middle East’s dictators and Israel’s and America’s lobbyists with the contempt they deserved. Our own cowardice, the manufacture of deceit, the safe, formulaic expressions used to mask the reality of this tragic place, have turned us journalists into blood-soaked brothers of the politicians who go to war. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. In Pakistan. In Yemen. By proxy in Lebanon. In Libya and Syria. And of course, in ‘Palestine’.
When Barack Obama was elected US president, it was not easy to point out that governments are not about ‘good’ and ‘bad guys’, but about power; and that Israeli power in Washington was far too embedded to allow a young and idealistic leader to break the dangerous, uncritical support of America for its closest Middle East ally. In 2009, I went to Cairo to hear Obama deliver his reach-out speech to the Muslim world. I liked him, but I was worried about the self-confidence of his speech, its headmaster’s morality, its careful history lessons, harsh on Israel and sympathetic to the Muslim world when it came to precedent, but low on detail. The West loved it and the Arab elites liked it, but the people of the Middle East remained suspicious. Obama’s address was duly eviscerated by Israel’s determination to continue its colonisation of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
