You can almost see his fingers absently peck across the keyboard, each finger going to a familiar place, in familiar order. The most believable reporter in the Middle East is typing what his eyes are seeing … and have seen, time and time and time and time again.
“There is something obscene about watching the siege of Nahr el-Bared,” Robert Fisk writes in an article in CommonDreams.org entitled, ‘A Front-Row Seat For This Lebanese Tragedy,’ so I hesitate: if HE finds what he is seeing obscene how am I to understand?
Even after hearing him pronounce that his 1300 page tome The Great War for Civilization, the Conquest of the Middle East is unremittingly bad news I picked it up. He was right. For two hours every morning (I could never bare to read longer), I waded through his work marvelling at once at the complexity of the region, the horrific scale of the conflicts and his cool dispassionate prose.
When I finally finished it I thought of the author and how his often first-hand account of the unimaginable horrors would have affected him, particularly given that what he was writiing was so at odds with the conventional wisdom of the main-stream media.
And I still wonder. In CommonDreams, Fisk’s piece reads like a surreal monologue from the theatre of the absurd:
‘And then comes the crackle-crackle of rifle fire and a shoal of bullets drifts out of the camp. A Lebanese army tank fires a shell in return and we feel the faint shock wave from the camp. How many are dead? We don’t know. How many are wounded? The Red Cross cannot yet enter to find out. We are back at another of those tragic Lebanese stage shows: the siege of Palestinians.’
Another day, another notebook but still the Middle East.
Perhaps Luttwak is right. Maybe the Middle East really doesn’t matter.
