{"product_id":"the-great-war-for-civilisation-isbn-9781400075171","title":"The Great War for Civilisation","description":"\u003cp\u003eA sweeping and dramatic history of the last half century of conflict in the Middle  East from an award-winning journalist who has covered the region for over forty years, \u003ci\u003eThe Great War for Civilisation \u003c\/i\u003eunflinchingly chronicles the tragedy of the  region from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution; from the American hostage  crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War; from the 1991 Gulf War to the American invasion  of Iraq in 2003. A book of searing drama as well as lucid, incisive analysis, \u003ci\u003eThe  Great War for Civilisation \u003c\/i\u003eis a work of major importance for today's world.\u003c\/p\u003e\"A magisterial report from the shifting front lines of the Middle East. It deserves to be read by all those concerned with what is happening in Iraq today.\" —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e“A stimulating and absorbing book, by a man who . . . has met the leading players, from bin Laden to Ahmad Chalabi. . . . A formidable production.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Vivid, graphic, intense. . . . A book of unquestionable importance. . . . [Fisk’s] experience of war is unmatched, [as is] his capacity to convey that experience in concrete, passionate language.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e“Fisk’s magnum opus. . . . Seals [his] place as a venerable, indispensable contributor to informed debate in and about the Middle East.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e“Powerful . . . Mr. Fisk is a gifted writer and an accomplished storyteller . . . his love affair with the region and the glamorous profession of being a foreign correspondent finds expression on every page.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eBestselling author and journalist Robert Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. Fisk is currently the Middle East correspondent of \u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Arab world for more than 40 years, covering Lebanon, five Israeli invasions, the Iran-Iraq war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Algerian civil war, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the 2011 Arab revolutions. He has been awarded the British International Journalist of the Year Award seven times and has also received the Amnesty International UK Press Award twice. Robert Fisk received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Trinity College, Dublin and was \u003ci\u003eThe Times\u003c\/i\u003e's (London) Belfast correspondent from 1971-1975 and its Middle East correspondent from 1976-1987. He is also the author of \u003ci\u003ePity the Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, a history of the Lebanese war, and \u003ci\u003eThe Age of the Warrior\u003c\/i\u003e, an anthology of his ‘Comment’ pieces from the \u003ci\u003eIndependent\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eCHAPTER ONE“One of Our Brothers Had a Dream . . . ”\u003c\/b\u003e\"They combine a mad love of country with an equally mad indifference to life, their own as well as others. They are cunning, unscrupulous,   and inspired.\"—“Stephen Fisher” in Alfred Hitchcock’s \u003ci\u003eForeign Correspondent\u003c\/i\u003e (1940)I knew it would be like this. On 19 March 1997, outside the Spinghar   Hotel in Jalalabad with its manicured lawns and pink roses, an Afghan   holding a Kalashnikov rifle invited me to travel in a car out of town.   The highway to Kabul that evening was no longer a road but a mass of   rocks and crevasses above the roaring waters of a great river. A vast   mountain chain towered above us. The Afghan smiled at me occasionally   but did not talk. I knew what his smile was supposed to say. Trust me.   But I didn’t. I smiled back the rictus of false friendship. Unless I   saw a man I recognised—an Arab rather than an Afghan—I would watch this   road for traps, checkpoints, gunmen who were there to no apparent   purpose. Even inside the car, I could hear the river as it sloshed   through gulleys and across wide shoals of grey stones and poured over   the edge of cliffs. Trust Me steered the car carefully around the   boulders and I admired the way his bare left foot eased the clutch of   the vehicle up and down as a man might gently urge a horse to clamber   over a rock.A benevolent white dust covered the windscreen, and when the wipers   cleared it the desolation took on a hard, unforgiving, dun-coloured   uniformity. The track must have looked like this, I thought to myself,   when Major-General William Elphinstone led his British army to disaster   more than 150 years ago. The Afghans had annihilated one of the   greatest armies of the British empire on this very stretch of road, and   high above me were villages where old men still remembered the stories   of great-grandfathers who had seen the English die in their thousands.   The stones of Gandamak, they claim, were made black by the blood of the   English dead. The year 1842 marked one of the greatest defeats of   British arms. No wonder we preferred to forget the First Afghan War.   But Afghans don’t forget. “\u003ci\u003eFarangiano\u003c\/i\u003e,” the driver shouted and pointed   down into the gorge and grinned at me. “Foreigners.” “\u003ci\u003eAngrezi\u003c\/i\u003e.”   “English.” “\u003ci\u003eJang\u003c\/i\u003e.” “War.” Yes, I got the point. “\u003ci\u003eIrlanda\u003c\/i\u003e,” I replied in   Arabic. “\u003ci\u003eAna min Irlanda\u003c\/i\u003e.” I am from Ireland. Even if he understood me,   it was a lie. Educated in Ireland I was, but in my pocket was a small   black British passport in which His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of   State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs required in the name of Her   Majesty that I should be allowed “to pass freely without let or   hindrance” on this perilous journey. A teenage Taliban had looked at my   passport at Jalalabad airport two days earlier, a boy soldier of maybe   fourteen who held the document upside down, stared at it and clucked   his tongue and shook his head in disapproval.It had grown dark and we were climbing, overtaking trucks and rows of   camels, the beasts turning their heads towards our lights in the gloom.   We careered past them and I could see the condensation of their breath   floating over the road. Their huge feet were picking out the rocks with   infinite care and their eyes, when they caught the light, looked like   dolls’ eyes. Two hours later, we stopped on a stony hillside and, after   a few minutes, a pick-up truck came bouncing down the rough shale of   the mountain.An Arab in Afghan clothes came towards the car. I recognised him at   once from our last meeting in a ruined village. “I am sorry, Mr.   Robert, but I must give you the first search,” he said, prowling   through my camera bag and newspapers. And so we set off up the track   that Osama bin Laden built during his jihad against the Russian army in   the early 1980s, a terrifying, slithering, two-hour odyssey along   fearful ravines in rain and sleet, the windscreen misting as we climbed   the cold mountain. “When you believe in jihad, it is easy,” he said,   fighting with the steering wheel as stones scuttered from the tyres,   tumbling down the precipice into the clouds below. From time to time,   lights winked at us from far away in the darkness. “Our brothers are   letting us know they see us,” he said.After an hour, two armed Arabs—one with his face covered in a kuffiah   scarf, eyes peering at us through spectacles, holding an anti-tank   rocket-launcher over his right shoulder—came screaming from behind two   rocks. “Stop! Stop!” As the brakes were jammed on, I almost hit my head   on the windscreen. “Sorry, sorry,” the bespectacled man said, putting   down his rocket-launcher. He pulled a metal detector from the pocket of   his combat jacket, the red light flicking over my body in another   search. The road grew worse as we continued, the jeep skidding   backwards towards sheer cliffs, the headlights playing across the   chasms on either side. “Toyota is good for jihad,” my driver said. I   could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota   company would probably forgo.There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the   ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights   shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools. Osama bin Laden   knew how to build his wartime roads; many an ammunition truck and tank   had ground its way up here during the titanic struggle against the   Russian army. Now the man who led those guerrillas—the first Arab   fighter in the battle against Moscow—was back again in the mountains he   knew. There were more Arab checkpoints, more shrieked orders to halt.   One very tall man in combat uniform and wearing shades carefully patted   my shoulders, body, legs and looked into my face. \u003ci\u003eSalaam aleikum\u003c\/i\u003e, I   said. Peace be upon you. Every Arab I had ever met replied \u003ci\u003eAleikum   salaam\u003c\/i\u003e to this greeting. But not this one. There was something cold   about this man. Osama bin Laden had invited me to meet him in   Afghanistan, but this was a warrior without the minimum courtesy. He   was a machine, checking out another machine.It had not always been this way. Indeed, the first time I met Osama bin   Laden, the way could not have been easier. Back in December 1993, I had   been covering an Islamic summit in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum   when a Saudi journalist friend of mine, Jamal Kashoggi, walked up to me   in the lobby of my hotel. Kashoggi, a tall, slightly portly man in a   long white \u003ci\u003edishdash\u003c\/i\u003e robe, led me by the shoulder outside the hotel.   “There is someone I think you should meet,” he said. Kashoggi is a   sincere believer—woe betide anyone who regards his round spectacles and   roguish sense of humour as a sign of spiritual laxity—and I guessed at   once to whom he was referring. Kashoggi had visited bin Laden in   Afghanistan during his war against the Russian army. “He has never met   a Western reporter before,” he announced. “This will be interesting.”   Kashoggi was indulging in a little applied psychology. He wanted to   know how bin Laden would respond to an infidel. So did I.Bin Laden’s story was as instructive as it was epic. When the Soviet   army invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi royal family—encouraged by   the CIA—sought to provide the Afghans with an Arab legion, preferably   led by a Saudi prince, who would lead a guerrilla force against the   Russians. Not only would he disprove the popularly held and all too   accurate belief that the Saudi leadership was effete and corrupt, he   could re-establish the honourable tradition of the Gulf Arab warrior,   heedless of his own life in defending the \u003ci\u003eumma\u003c\/i\u003e, the community of Islam.   True to form, the Saudi princes declined this noble mission. Bin Laden,   infuriated at both their cowardice and the humiliation of the Afghan   Muslims at the hands of the Soviets, took their place and, with money   and machinery from his own construction company, set off on his own   personal jihad.A billionaire businessman and himself a Saudi, albeit of humbler Yemeni   descent, in the coming years he would be idolised by both Saudis and   millions of other Arabs, the stuff of Arab schoolboy legend from the   Gulf to the Mediterranean. Not since the British glorified Lawrence of   Arabia had an adventurer been portrayed in so heroic, so influential a   role. Egyptians, Saudis, Yemenis, Kuwaitis, Algerians, Syrians and   Palestinians made their way to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to   fight alongside bin Laden. But when the Afghan mujahedin guerrillas and   bin Laden’s Arab legion had driven the Soviets from Afghanistan, the   Afghans turned upon each other with wolflike and tribal venom. Sickened   by this perversion of Islam—original dissension within the \u003ci\u003eumma\u003c\/i\u003e led to   the division of Sunni and Shia Muslims—bin Laden returned to Saudi   Arabia.But his journey of spiritual bitterness was not over. When Saddam   Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden once more offered his   services to the Saudi royal family. They did not need to invite the   United States to protect the place of the two holiest shrines of Islam,   he argued. Mecca and Medina, the cities in which the Prophet Mohamed   received and recited God’s message, should be defended only by Muslims.   Bin Laden would lead his “Afghans,” his Arab mujahedin, against the   Iraqi army inside Kuwait and drive them from the emirate. King Fahd of   Saudi Arabia preferred to put his trust in the Americans. So as the   U.S. 82nd Airborne Division arrived in the north-eastern Saudi city of   Dhahran and deployed in the desert roughly 500 miles from the city of   Medina—the place of the Prophet’s refuge and of the first Islamic   society—bin Laden abandoned the corruption of the House of Saud to   bestow his generosity on another “Islamic Republic”: Sudan.Our journey north from Khartoum lay though a landscape of white desert   and ancient, unexplored pyramids, dark, squat Pharaonic tombs smaller   than those of Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus at Giza. Though it was   December, a sharp, superheated breeze moved across the desert, and when   Kashoggi tired of the air conditioning and opened his window, it   snapped at his Arab headdress. “The people like bin Laden here,” he   said, in much the way that one might comment approvingly of a dinner   host. “He’s got his business here and his construction company and the   government likes him. He helps the poor.” I could understand all this.   The Prophet Mohamed, orphaned at an early age, had been obsessed by the   poor in seventh-century Arabia, and generosity to those who lived in   poverty was one of the most attractive characteristics of Islam. Bin   Laden’s progress from “holy” warrior to public benefactor might allow   him to walk in the Prophet’s footsteps. He had just completed building   a new road from the Khartoum–Port Sudan highway to the tiny desert   village of Almatig in northern Sudan, using the same bulldozers he had   employed to construct the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan; many of his   labourers were the same fighters who had been his comrades in the   battle against the Soviet Union. The U.S. State Department took a   predictably less charitable view of bin Laden’s beneficence. It accused   Sudan of being a “sponsor of international terrorism” and bin Laden   himself of operating “terrorist training camps” in the Sudanese desert.But when Kashoggi and I arrived in Almatig, there was Osama bin Laden   in his gold-fringed robe, sitting beneath the canopy of a tent before a   crowd of admiring villagers and guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who   fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, silent figures—unarmed,   but never more than a few yards from the man who recruited them,   trained them and then dispatched them to destroy the Soviet army—they   watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers lined up to thank the Saudi   businessman who was about to complete the road linking their slums to   Khartoum for the first time in history.My first impression was of a shy man. With his high cheekbones, narrow   eyes and long brown robe, he would avert his eyes when the village   leaders addressed him. He seemed ill-at-ease with gratitude, incapable   of responding with a full smile when children in miniature chadors   danced in front of him and preachers admired his wisdom. “We have been   waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,” a bearded   sheikh announced. “We waited until we had given up on everybody—and   then Osama bin Laden came along.” I noticed how bin Laden, head still   bowed, peered up at the old man, acknowledging his age but unhappy that   he should be sitting at ease in front of him, a young man relaxing   before his elders. He was even more unhappy at the sight of a Westerner   standing a few feet away from him, and from time to time he would turn   his head to look at me, not with malevolence but with grave suspicion.Kashoggi put his arms around him. Bin Laden kissed him on both cheeks,   one Muslim to another, both acknowledging the common danger they had   endured together in Afghanistan. Jamal Kashoggi must have brought the   foreigner for a reason. That is what bin Laden was thinking. For as   Kashoggi spoke, bin Laden looked over his shoulder at me, occasionally   nodding. “Robert, I want to introduce you to Sheikh Osama,” Kashoggi   half-shouted through children’s songs. Bin Laden was a tall man and he   realised that this was an advantage when he shook hands with the   English reporter. \u003ci\u003eSalaam aleikum\u003c\/i\u003e. His hands were firm, not strong, but,   yes, he looked like a mountain man. The eyes searched your face. He was   lean and had long fingers and a smile which—while it could never be   described as kind—did not suggest villainy. He said we might talk, at   the back of the tent where we could avoid the shouting of the children.Looking back now, knowing what we know, understanding the monstrous   beast-figure he would become in the collective imagination of the   world, I search for some clue, the tiniest piece of evidence, that this   man could inspire an act that would change the world for ever—or, more   to the point, allow an American president to persuade his people that   the world was changed for ever. Certainly his formal denial of   “terrorism” gave no hint. The Egyptian press was claiming that bin   Laden had brought hundreds of his Arab fighters with him to Sudan,   while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum was suggesting that some   of the Arab “Afghans” whom this Saudi entrepreneur had flown to Sudan   were now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and   Egypt. Bin Laden was well aware of this. “The rubbish of the media and   embassies,” he called it. “I am a construction engineer and an   agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t   possibly do this job.”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304169066725,"sku":"NP9781400075171","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075171.jpg?v=1767739655","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-great-war-for-civilisation-isbn-9781400075171","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}