The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings

The columns in which ‘terror’ disappeared were full of different clichés. Challenge, a good constitution (an Iraqi one, of course), a chance to vote, a free society, certain truths (I won’t insult you by telling you where that was snitched from), defending our freedom, flying the flag, great turning points in the story of freedom, prevail (one of Churchill’s favourite words) and no higher call. Put through Chomsky’s machine, Bush’s speech begins by frightening the audience to death with terrorism and finishes triumphantly by rousing them to patriotic confidence in their country’s future victory. It wasn’t actually a speech at all. It was a movie script, a screenplay. The bad guys are really bad but they’re going to get their comeuppance because the good guys are going to win.

Other elements of the Bush speech were, of course, woefully dishonest. It’s a bit much for Bush to claim that ‘terrorists’ want to ‘topple governments’ when the only guys who’ve been doing that – in Afghanistan and Iraq – were, ahem, ahem, the Americans. There are plenty of references to the evil nature of ‘the enemy’ – tyranny and oppression, remnants, the old order – and a weird new version of the Iraqi–11 September lie. Instead of Saddam’s non-existent alliance with al-Qaeda, we now have the claim from Bush that the Iraqi ‘terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens’ on 11 September 2001. Whoops! It’s no longer the Saddam regime that was involved in these attacks, it seems; it’s now the post-Saddam insurgents who are part of the same gang.

It’s strange that for a White House that writes screenplays, the words of Osama bin Laden appear so uninteresting. Whenever bin Laden speaks, no one bothers to read through his speech. The questions are always: Was it him? Is he alive? Where is he? Never: What did he say? There are real perils in this. Bin Laden, who hated Saddam – he told me this himself, in person – made a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’s Iraqi Baathist ‘Socialists’. This was the moment when Iraq’s future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the message that would create the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice. The US ‘experts’ waffled about whether bin Laden was alive – not what he said. For once, Bush got it right – but he was too late. Always, as they say, read the text.

Take George Tenet, the CIA Ernest Borgnine lookalike who sat behind Colin Powell at the UN when the US secretary of state was uttering all those lies about weapons of mass destruction in February of 2003. It now turns out that George is mightily upset with the White House. He didn’t refer to evidence of WMD as a ‘slam dunk’, he says. He was talking about the ability of the US government to persuade the American people to go to war based on these lies. In other words, he wasn’t lying to the American president. He was only lying to the American people.

I was struck by all this last month when I came across one of Tony Blair’s lies in my local Beirut paper. Sandwiched beneath a headline which read ‘Saudi reforms lose momentum’ – surely one of the more extraordinarily unnecessary stories in the Arab press – it quoted our dear prime minister as saying that he was very angry that a review committee had prevented him from deporting two Algerians because their government represented a ‘different political system’. The ‘foregrounded’ element, of course, is the word ‘different’. This is the word that contains the lie. For the reason the committee declined to return these men to their country was not – as Blair well knew – because Algeria possesses a ‘different’ political system but because the Algerian ‘system’ allows it to torture its prisoners. I have myself interviewed Algerian policemen and women who have become perverted by their witness of torture: one policewoman told me how she now loves horror films because they remind her of the repulsive torture she had to watch at the Châteauneuf police station in Algiers – where prisoners had water pumped into their anuses until they died. I still remember the spiteful and abusive letter that the Algerian ambassador to London wrote to The Independent, sneering at Saida Kheroui, whose foot was broken under torture. She was a ‘terrorist’, this man announced. This is the ‘different’ political system that Blair was referring to. Ms Kheroui, by the way, never emerged from prison. She was murdered by her torturers.

Blair knows that the Algerian security forces rape women to death. So how does he dare lie about the ‘different’ political system which allows police officers to rape women? We Europeans now make a habit of lying about this. Take the Belgian government. It deported Bouasria Ben Othman to Algeria on 15 July 1996 on the grounds that he would not be in danger if he was returned to his country. He died in police custody at Moustaganem. A ‘different’ political system indeed.

And now I have before me Blair’s repulsive ‘goodbye’ speech to the British people, uttered at Sedgefield. Putting the country first didn’t mean ‘doing the right thing according to conventional wisdom’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: conventional) or the ‘prevailing consensus’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: prevailing). It meant ‘what you genuinely believe to be right’ (Chomsky foregrounded element: genuinely). Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara wanted to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Britain’s oldest ally, which he assumed to be the United States. (It is actually Portugal, but no matter.) ‘I did so out of belief,’ he told us. Foregrounded element: belief. Am I alone in being repulsed by this? ‘Politics may be the art of the possible [foregrounded element: may] but, at least in life, give the impossible a go.’ What does this mean? Is Blair adopting sainthood as a means to an end? ‘Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.’ Excuse me? Is that Blair’s message to the families of all those dead soldiers – and to the families of all those thousands of dead Iraqis? It has been an ‘honour’ to ‘serve’ Britain, this man tells us. What gall.

Yes, I must acknowledge Northern Ireland. If only Blair had kept to this achievement. If only he had accepted that his role was to end 800 years of the Anglo–Irish conflict. But no. He wanted to be our Saviour – and he allowed George Bush to do such things as Oliver Cromwell would find quite normal. Torture. Murder. Rape.

My dad used to call people like Blair a ‘twerp’ which, I think, meant a pregnant earwig. But Blair is not a twerp. I very much fear he is a vicious little man. And I can only recall Cromwell’s statement to the Rump Parliament in 1653, repeated – with such wisdom – by Leo Amery to Chamberlain in 1940: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’

The Independent, 2 July 2005 and 19 May 2007

After a decade in power, Tony Blair resigned as British prime minister on 27 June 2007 to become ‘peace’ envoy to the Middle East, an irony not lost on Arabs who blame both Blair and George W. Bush for the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the greatest suffering inflicted on Muslims since Saddam Hussein began his own Western-supported eight-year war against Iran in 1980.

The jargon disease

I once received an invitation to lecture at ‘The University of Excellence’. I forget where this particular academy was located – Jordan, I think – but I recall very clearly that the suggested subject of my talk was as incomprehensible to me as it would, no doubt, have been to any audience. Invitation rejected. Only this week I received another request, this time to join ‘ethics practitioners’ to ‘share evidence-based practices on dealing with current ethical practices’ around the world. What on earth does this mean? Why do people write like this?

The word ‘excellence’, of course, has long ago been devalued by the corporate world – its favourite expression has long been ‘Quality and Excellence’, invariably accompanied by a ‘mission statement’, that claim to self-importance dreamed up by Robin Cook when foreign secretary (swiftly ditched when he decided to go on selling jets to Indonesia) and thereafter by every export company and amateur newspaper in the world.

There is something repulsive about this vocabulary, an aggressive language of superiority in which ‘key players’ can ‘interact’ with each other, can ‘impact’ society, ‘outsource’ their business or ‘downsize’ the number of their employees. They need ‘feedback’ and ‘input’. They ‘think outside the box’ or ‘push the envelope’. They have a ‘work space’, not a desk. They need ‘personal space’ – they need to be left alone – and sometimes they need ‘time and space’, a commodity much in demand when marriages are failing. These lies and obfuscations are infuriating. ‘Downsizing’ employees means firing them; ‘outsourcing’ means hiring someone else to do your dirty work. ‘Feedback’ means ‘response’, ‘input’ means ‘advice’. ‘Thinking outside the box’ means, does it not, to be ‘imaginative’?

Being a ‘key player’ is a form of self-aggrandisement – which is why I never agree to be a ‘key speaker’, especially if this means participation in a ‘workshop’. To me a workshop means what it says. When I was at school, the workshop was a carpentry shop wherein generations of teachers vainly tried to teach Fisk how to make a wooden chair or table that did not collapse the moment it was completed. But today, a ‘workshop’ – though we mustn’t say so – is a group of tiresome academics yakking in the secret language of anthropology or talking about ‘cultural sensitivity’ or ‘core issues’ or ‘tropes’. Presumably these are the same folk who invented the UN’s own humanitarian- speak. Of the latter, my favourite is the label awarded to any desperate refugee who is prepared (for a pittance) to persuade their fellow victims to abide by the UN’s wishes – to abandon their tents and return to their dangerous, war-ravaged homes. These luckless advisers are referred to by the UN as ‘social animators’.

It is a disease, this language, caught by one of our own New Labour ministers on the BBC last week when he talked about ‘environmental externalities’. Presumably, this meant ‘the weather’. Similarly, an architect I know warned his client of the effect of the ‘aggressive saline environment’ on a house built near the sea. If this advice seems obscure, we might be ‘conflicted’ about it – who, I ask myself, invented the false transitive verb? – or, worse still, ‘stressed’. In northern Iraq in 1991, I was once ordered by a humanitarian worker from the ‘International Rescue Committee’ to leave the only room I could find in the wrecked town of Zakho because it had been booked for her fellow workers – who were very ‘stressed’. Poor souls, I thought. They were stressed, ‘stressed out’, trying – no doubt – to ‘come to terms’ with their predicament, attempting to ‘cope’.

This is the language of therapy, in which frauds, liars and cheats are always trying to escape. Thus President Clinton’s spokesman claimed after his admission of his affair with Monica Lewinsky that he was ‘seeking closure’. Like so many mendacious politicians, Clinton felt – as Prime Minister Blair will no doubt feel about his bloodbath in Iraq once he leaves No. 10 – the need to ‘move on’. In the same way, our psychobabble masters and mistresses – yes, there is a semantic problem there, too, isn’t there? – announce after wars that it is a time for ‘healing’, the same prescription doled out to families which are ‘dysfunctional’, who live in a ‘dystopian’ world. Yes, dystopian is a perfectly good word – it is the opposite of utopian – but like ‘perceive’ and ‘perception’ (words once much loved by Jonathan Dimbleby), they have become fashionable because they appear enigmatic.

Some newly popular phrases, such as ‘tipping point’ – used about Middle East conflicts when the bad guys are about to lose – or ‘big picture’ – when moralists have to be reminded of the greater good – are merely fashionable. Others are simply odd. I always mixed up ‘bonding’ with ‘bondage’ and ‘quality time’ with a popular assortment of toffees. I used to think that ‘increase’ was a perfectly acceptable word until I discovered that in the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a ‘spike’ of violence until a ‘surge’ of extra troops arrived in Baghdad.

All this is different, of course, from the non-sexual ‘nobrainers’ with which we now have to ‘cope’ – ‘author’ for ‘authoress’, for example, ‘actor’ for ‘actress’ – or the fearful linguistic lengths we must go to in order to avoid offence to Londoners who speak Cockney: as we all know – though only those of us, of course, who come from the Home Counties – these people speak ‘Estuary’ English. It’s like those poor Americans in Detroit who, in fear and trepidation, avoided wishing me a happy Christmas last year. ‘Happy Holiday!’ they chorused until I roared ‘Happy Christmas’ back. In Beirut, by the way, we all wish each other ‘Happy Christmas’ and ‘Happy Eid’, whether our friends are Muslim or Christian. Is this really of ‘majority importance’, as an Irish television producer once asked a colleague of a news event?

I fear it is. For we are not using words any more. We are utilising them, speaking for effect rather than meaning, for escape. We are becoming – as the New Yorker now describes children who don’t care if they watch films on the cinema screen or on their mobile phones – ‘platform agnostic’. What, Polonius asked his lord, was he reading? ‘Words, words, words,’ Hamlet replied. If only…

The Independent, 13 January 2007

Poisonous academics and their claptrap of exclusion

That great anthropological sage Michael Gilsenan – whose Lords of the Lebanese Marshes once almost started a small civil war in northern Lebanon – turned up this week to lecture at that equally great bastion of learning, the American University of Beirut, founded, as it happens, by Quakers during the nineteenth- century Lebanese Christian–Druze conflict. Gilsenan’s subject was abstruse enough: Arab migration to what our Foreign Office still calls ‘the Far East’. Most of these migrants, it transpired, came from Arabia, especially the mountainous Hadramaut district of Yemen. Under British rule, they prospered, bought land, left inheritances and, once established, wealthy Arab women also took their place in this new world, even involving themselves in legal disputes.

All very fascinating. But once questions were invited from the floor, Gilsenan was asked about ‘matrilineal’ issues in colonial Singapore. I closed my eyes. ‘Matrilineal’ doesn’t exist in my dictionary. Nor is it likely to. It is part of the secret language of academe – especially of anthropology – and it is a turn-off. We poor dunces should keep our noses out of this high-falutin’ stuff. That, I think, is the message. I recall a student raging to me about her anthropology professor who constantly used words like ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ – to this day, I have no idea what they mean; readers are invited to reply – in an attempt to mystify her discipline.

Keep Out, these words say to us. This Is Something You Are Not Clever Enough to Understand. A French professor put it to me quite bluntly this week. ‘If we don’t dress up what we want to say in this silly language,’ she announced, ‘we are told we are being journalists.’ Well, well, I can quite see the problem. It’s good against evil, us or them, university scholarship or dirty journalism. It’s a new and dangerous phenomenon I’m talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past twenty years; after all, any non-university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or 30s and – however Hegelian the subject – fully understand its meaning. No longer.

About three years ago, I received a good example of this from Marc Gopin, visiting associate professor of international diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and a visiting scholar in the programme on negotiation at Harvard. I received his latest book for review, a tome called Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East. A promising title, you might think. Well, think again. For within pages, I was being bushwhacked by ‘metaphorical constructs’ and ‘universalist mythic constructs’ and ‘romanticised, amoral constructs of culture’ and ‘fundamental dialogic immediacy’ and ‘prosocial tendencies’. Here is another cracker: ‘The Abrahamic myth of a loving Patriarch and a loving God who care for a special people has created a home and a meaning system for millions of human beings.’ Come again? Meaning system? The author grew up, he says, ‘in a self-consciously exilic spirituality’. He talks about the ‘interplay’ of ‘political and mythic interdependencies’ and the ‘ubiquitous human psychological process of othering’. He wants to ‘problematise’ intervention at ‘elite’ levels. A rabbi – whom I immediately felt sorry for – was ‘awash in paradoxicality’, which apparently proved that ‘cognitive dissonance is good for intractable conflicts’. Well, you could have fooled me. There was more: ‘dialogic injuries’, ‘cultural envelope’, ‘family psychodynamics’, ‘the rich texture of hermeneutic possibility’, ‘porous barriers of spiritual identity’ and, of course, my old favourite, ‘social intercourse’. ‘Dialectic apologetics’ makes an appearance, alongside ‘persecutorial othering’ and lots of other ‘otherings’, including a reference to ‘pious transformation of old cognitive constructs as an end to othering: remythification’.

What is interesting is that when Professor Gopin chose to send a letter to President Clinton, which he prints in his book, he wrote in perfectly comprehensible English – indeed, he even got a reply from the old scallywag. The good professor was suggesting that private meetings between Jewish and Islamic leaders should become public under Clinton’s leadership and produce ‘a powerful new force for pursuing peace’. No ‘constructs’ here, you note. No ‘otherings’ or ‘meaning systems’ or ‘paradoxicalities’. Because Gopin obviously knew that his academic claptrap wouldn’t have got much further than the White House mail room.

So why this preposterous academic language? There’s a clue when Gopin compares ‘dress and behaviour codes in the Pentagon’ to ‘very complex speech and behaviour codes in academia’. Yes, university folk have to be complex, don’t they? They have to speak in a language which others – journalists, perhaps? – simply would not understand. To enter this unique circle of brain-heavy men and women, all must learn its secret language lest interlopers manage to sneak through the door. It may be that all this came about as a protective shield against political interference in academe, an attempt to make teaching so impenetrable that no MP, congressman or senator could ever make accusations of political bias in class – on the grounds that they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what the lecturer was talking about.

But I think it is about snobbishness. I recall a lady professor at George Mason University, complaining that ‘most people’ – she was referring to truck-drivers, Amtrak crews, bellhops and anyone else who didn’t oppose the Iraq war – ‘had so little information’. Well, I wasn’t surprised. University teachers – especially in the States – are great at ‘networking’ each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world, including those who collect their rubbish, deliver their laundry and serve up their hash browns. After lecturing at another university in the States, I was asked by a member of the audience how universities could have more influence in the community. I said that they must stop using what I called ‘the poisonous language of academia’. At which there was an outburst of clapping from the students and total silence from the university staff who were present and who greeted this remark with scowls.

No, I’m not saying all teachers speak like this. There is no secret language in the work of Edward Said or Avi Shlaim or Martin Gilbert or Noam Chomsky. But it’s growing and it’s getting worse, and I suspect only students can now rebel against it. The merest hint of ‘emics’ and ‘constructs’ or ‘hermeneutic possibilities’ and they should walk out of class, shouting Winston Churchill’s famous retort: ‘This is English up with which I will not put.’

The Independent, 14 May 2005

Soft words – hard questions

When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – happily still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this: What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely’. It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with ‘absolutely’. Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite). He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.

So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely. Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.

It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding’. He described it as ‘a technique that produces a near-drowning experience’. Ho ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique’? Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience’? Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.

I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible interrogation’, ‘questionable means’, ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive [sic] context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleading statement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of massive retaliation.’ True – if such people existed. But there simply hasn’t been any suicide terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction – not ever. Like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – which were also, I recall, going to be handed over to suicide terrorists – they don’t exist. What Dershowitz is actually trying to do is change the laws so that we can torture legally when faced by this mythical beast, a creature that is in fact intended to instil fear in us (and thus persuade us to go along with another round of ‘waterboarding’).