The war of words and the new iron curtain

“Wartime governments, and our media, which sounds increasingly like our governments, like to define our popular narrative about war,” said the upright British man behind the microphone, his unblinking eyes locked on his audience. “Territories are taken, battles are won, advances are made… But war isn’t about winning or losing,” he said. “It’s about death.”

Then, an hour and a half before Sarah Palin and Joe Biden were set to start debating, Robert Fisk, the best foreign correspondent of our time, paused before adding, “And it represents the total failure of the human spirit.”

For someone who has spent thirty years covering war, for someone who’s seen dead babies and children and mothers, he seems to have kept his belief in the human spirit marvelously alive.

In The Great War for Civilisation, his 1300 page epic on war in the Middle East, he describes being on the front lines as the Iranian army shells Iraqi lines of defense in the Iraq/Iran war. Bullets fly by him as he walks between unexploded bomb shells towards firing Iraqi artillery. He asks his guide if he and his fellow journalists can leave the battle scene.

“‘Why?’ (The guide) roared. Because we are cowards,” Fisk writes. “Go on, say it, Fisk. Because I am shaking with fear and want to survive and live and write my story and fly back to Tehran and go back to Beirut and invite a young woman to drink fine red wine on my balcony.”

But in New York that night he wasn’t talking about wine. He was talking about the “iron curtain” running down the Atlantic that separates us from the realities of war in the Middle East.

He described watching an Al Jazeera TV crew try to send footage through to a British AP “executive.” The footage was of from inside a Basra hospital as the Americans shelled the city prior to sending ground troops in. Fisk described a child trying to put its severed fingers back on its hand, a woman screaming as she holds her intestines in with her hands. “We can’t air this,” the executive said, “People are eating dinner.”

“Look at it like this,” he’d said earlier that day on a Democracy Now radio broadcast, “first of all, we went to Afghanistan, we won the war. Then we rushed off to Iraq and won the war. Then we lost the war in Iraq, or maybe we won it again. And then we’re going back to Afghanistan, where we seem to have lost the war, to win it all over again. And in due course, perhaps we’ll have to go back to Iraq…. I mean, has nobody actually stood back and said, ‘What on earth are we doing out there…. It looks like we’re on a brainwashing trip, and we’ve all bought the narrative.”

“The only future in the Middle East,” he went on “is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.”

And watching the Vice Presidential debates later that night, I couldn’t help but think of Fisk, his righteous anger and his conviction and his humanity on display. I though of Fisk, a short man, but standing strait after thirty years of war, saying “Be equal and unbiased on the side of people who are suffering.”

And I thought of him as Sarah Palin said “we're getting closer and closer to victory. And it would be a travesty if we quit now in Iraq.”

And I thought of him as Joe Biden promised to cross the Pakistan border if they thought they had “actionable intelligence” on Bin Laden.

And as the debate went on, and the candidates spud their gold, he slipped farther and farther from my mind, and I had to fight to keep him there.