The Great War for Civilisation Read Free Page B

“good” in journalistic terms, however, they would also prove to be horrific, the travel dizzying, the “sunshine” as cruel as a sword. And we journalists did not have the protection—or the claims to perfection—of kings. But now I could be one of “the little army of historians who are writing history from beside the cannon’s mouth.” How innocent, how naive I was. Yet innocence, if we can keep it, protects a journalist’s integrity. You have to fight to believe in it.
    Unlike my father, I went to war as a witness rather than a combatant, an ever more infuriated bystander to be true, but at least I was not one of the impassioned, angry, sometimes demented men who made war. I worshipped the older reporters who had covered the Second World War and its aftermath: Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.
    Being a Middle East correspondent is a slightly obscene profession to follow in such circumstances. If the soldiers I watched decided to leave the battlefield, they would—many of them—be shot for desertion, at least court-martialled. The civilians among whom I was to live and work were forced to stay on under bombardments, their families decimated by shellfire and air raids. As citizens of pariah countries, there would be no visas for them. But if I wanted to quit, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could pack my bag and fly home business class, a glass of champagne in my hand, always supposing—unlike too many of my colleagues— that I hadn’t been killed. Which is why I cringe each time someone wants to psycho-babble about the “trauma” of covering wars, the need to obtain “counselling” for us well-paid scribes that we may be able to “come to terms” with what we have seen. No counselling for the poor and huddled masses that were left to Iraq’s gas, Iran’s rockets, the cruelty of Serbia’s militias, the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the computerised death suffered by Iraqis during America’s 2003 invasion of their country.
    I don’t like the definition “war correspondent.” It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think “war correspondent” smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism; it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire. Yet war is, paradoxically, a very powerful, unique experience for a journalist, an opportunity to indulge in the only vicarious excitement still free of charge. If you’ve seen the movies, why not experience the real thing? I fear that some of my colleagues have died this way, heading to war on the assumption that it’s still Hollywood, that the heroes don’t die, that you can’t get killed like the others, that they’ll all be Huntley Haverstocks with a scoop and the best girl. But you
can
get killed. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died. There is a little Somme waiting for all innocent journalists.
    When I first set out to write this book, I intended it to be a reporter’s chronicle of the Middle East over almost three decades. That is how I wrote my previous book
Pity the Nation
, a first-person account of Lebanon’s civil war and two Israeli invasions. 1 But as I prowled through the shelves of papers in my library, more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files, some written under fire in my own hand, some punched onto telegram paper by tired Arab telecommunications operators, many pounded out on the clacking telex machines we used before the Internet was invented, I