Robert Fisk has amassed a massive and devoted global readership with his eloquent and far-ranging articles on international politics. Now, for the first time, his brave and incisive essays have been collected in a single volume that ranges in scope from the recent war in Lebanon to the rise of Hamas; from the invasion of Kuwait to the looting of Baghdad; from America’s imperial ambitions to the inescapable influence of the Treaty of Versailles. Taken together, these articles form an unparalleled account of our war-torn recent history.

In parts very readable, but in other areas very repetitive, this is not as good as Fisk' previous books. I for one do not like the approach of re-publishing selected writings from newspaper columns in a book format. I would have preferred to read another original publication from Fisk. His books “Pity the Nation”, “The Great War for Civilization” and “In Time of War” are in a higher league in my view. ( )

Fisk's opinion writing is everything that the vast majority of mainstream American journalism fails to be. He has a strong, consistent, erudite and unapologetic voice grounded in personal experience.

He is also famously critical of American and British foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, where he has lived for so many years. Frankly, however, his criticisms seem to me like common sense, pointing out again and again that the emperor has no clothes, without devolving into knee-jerk support for local states and movements.

Quite the contrary, Fisk is as critical of Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian or Saudi violence as he is of Israeli, British, French and American. He has no soft spot for Iranian revolutionaries or Palestinian gangsters, while writing with great sympathy for the people of the Middle East. He stands against the degradation of language, and through it thinking, and through that, inevitably, the lives of people.

In his essay "Murder is murder is murder" (originally published 18 Aug 2001), for example, he writes:

"George Orwell would have loved a Reuters dispatch from the west Bank city of Hebron last Wednesday. 'Undercover Israeli soldiers,' the world's most famous news agency reported, 'shot dead a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction yesterday in what Palestinians called an assassination.' The key phrase, of course, was 'what Palestinians called an assassination.' Any sane reader would conclude immediately that Imad Abu Sneiheh, who was shot in the head, chest, stomach and legs by ten bullets fired by Israeli 'agents', had been murdered, let alone assassinated. But no. Reuters, like all the big agencies and television companies reporting the tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no longer calls murder by its name" (p.125).

Now there are certainly writers willing to call Israeli "targeted killings" murders, but many of them would be unwilling to call Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians murder--typically by avoiding the subject. Fisk calls us to use the right words to describe the world, without compromise--and without the American journalist dodge of distance and quotation--the typical construction of of reporting on war and criminal activity as if it were a sporting event, with "sides" that have to be equally represented, instead of "sides" that the journalist should investigate and report a reasoned judgment about.

Fisk writes: "I'm all for truth about both sides. I'm all for using the word 'terrorism' providing it's used about both sides' terrorists'; I'm sick of hearing Palestinians talking about men who blow kids to bits as 'martyrs'. Murder is murder is murder. But where the lives of men and women are concerned, must we be treated by television and agency reporters to a commentary on the level of a football match?" (p. 128).

Nicely said Mr. Fisk.

Reading these essays one after the other is a heavy task, but profitable, for they remind the reader--they reminded me--of the almost unutterable folly of the past 7 years. A folly in response to an act of evil, the Bush-Blair "War on Terror" has caused agony throughout the Middle East and has in the end, at great cost in lives, in treasure, and our own humanity, and made the world more dangerous than ever. ( )