The Great War for Civilisation (170 page)

As we flew back to Belgium in the dusk, I asked myself if we could really—at this early stage—name the guilty party, however strong our suspicions. I knew that with so awesome a crime, there would be those who would argue that the ordinary rules of journalism must be suspended. That we should all be “onside.” That if we stopped for a moment to ask the question “Why,” we would count as supporters of “world terror.” The Israelis had already perfected this outrageous logic. Merely to be called “pro-Palestinian” was to associate you with suicide bombing and “world terror.” You were with us or against us. George Bush Junior would use just that simplistic, dishonest argument—an argument much favoured, of course, by bin Laden himself—to shut us up, to keep us silent, to close down any debate about the Middle East or America's role there or—an even more taboo subject—America's relationship with Israel.

I wrote a second article on the plane that night. “Is the world's favourite hate figure to blame?” the headline on this story would read in next day's
Independent
. “If bin Laden was really guilty of all the things for which he has been blamed, he would need an army of 10,000,” I wrote:

And there is something deeply disturbing about the world's habit of turning to the latest hate figure whenever blood is shed. But when events of this momentous scale take place, there is a new legitimacy in casting one's eyes at those who have constantly threatened America . . . If . . . the shadow of the Middle East falls over yesterday's destruction, then who else could produce such meticulously timed assaults? The rag-tag and corrupt Palestinian groups that used to favour hijacking are unlikely to be able to produce a single suicide bomber . . . The bombing of the U.S. Marines in 1983 needed precision, timing and infinite planning. But Iran, which supported these groups, is more involved in its internal struggles. Iraq lies broken, its agents more intent on torturing their own people than striking at the the U.S. So the mountains of Afghanistan will be photographed from satellite and high-altitude aircraft in the coming days, bin Laden's old training camps . . . highlighted on the overhead projectors in the Pentagon. But to what end? . . . For if this is a war between the Saudi millionaire and President Bush's America, it cannot be fought like other wars. Indeed, can it be fought at all without some costly military adventure overseas? Or is that what bin Laden seeks above all else?

The moment my Airbus touched down in Brussels, my mobile began to ring like a grasshopper. The office, radio stations in America, Britain, Ireland, France. I was in the taxi to my hotel when Karsten Tveit came on the line. “Robert, have you seen the pictures?” No, I said. “You must see the pictures. They are in-cred-ible.” Karsten, I said, I'm still in the taxi. I can't watch television in a bloody taxi. “Look at the pictures!” he said again. “You've got to see the pictures. The moment you reach your room, look at the pictures—then you'll understand.” When I reached my room, I turned on the television. The Twin Towers were smoking, incandescent. Figures floated like feathers, fast, upside down, with a terrible grace. The United passenger jet slid into the side of the south tower again and again, as if some scientific achievement was being demonstrated, as if this airliner was supposed to knife so effortlessly into the thin skin of the tower. And then there was the golden spray of fire. CNN put the edited sequences together so that the United plane crashed into the building while its burning fuel splashed out the other side, the second tape spliced in a millisecond after the collision. Hollywood could not compete with this—because it
was
Hollywood. The disaster movie of September 11th would never be made. It has already
been
made. Al-Qaeda productions got there first. This was “shock and awe” before America invented the expression for its invasion of Iraq.

All the dreams and nightmares of tinsel-town—all the racist movies depicting venal, murderous Muslims—had finally reached the screen
en vérité
. “Never before in the history of motion pictures . . .” If we have come to model ourselves on our film heroes, to mimic their language, their simplistic ideas, their robust, ultimately savage morality, now at last we could believe in those heroes and villains. Instead of reality turned into fiction, fiction had become reality. Still the United plane went on sliding into the tower, obsessively, obscenely, its passage so well known that one looked elsewhere on the screen. Did the tower shake, just a little, with the impact? Was that a bird that flicked across the screen just before the plane hit the building, innocence fleeing the darkness to come? And when the French crew produced their unique film of the aircraft that hit the other tower, that man on the sidewalk who looked up at the sound of the ramped-up jet engines—at what point exactly did he realise what he was watching? Or was he too seduced by the neatness, the ease with which an airplane could fly into a building?

On the Airbus, I had been connected via Irish radio to Conor O'Clery, the Irish
Times
's man in New York, who had reported the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with me almost a quarter of a century earlier. His office was next to the World Trade Center. He had described with his usual devastating clarity how he had seen the second plane come in, how he saw the aircraft flaps moving up and down at speed as the hijacker at the controls fought desperately to bring the aircraft into the centre of the tower. The pilot's act of mass murder was to be as perfect as possible. In Brussels I called Chibli Mallat, the young Lebanese lawyer who was trying to arraign Ariel Sharon in a Belgian court for his role in Sabra and Chatila. Only a few hours earlier, I had assured him that my report on the new massacre evidence would be published next day. No more. “Of course, Robert, this changes everything,” he said. “I think that legally and morally we must regard what happened today as an international crime against humanity.”

The calls kept coming. Italian radio, CBS, BBC World, BBC Cardiff, BBC Belfast, Pacifica, NPR, Radio France International. They all wanted to know what no one could yet know. Who did it? How did they do it? No one—but no one— wanted to know
why
“they” might have wanted to do it, for this was the forbidden question. Eamon Dunphy put me on his show out of Dublin with Alan Dershowitz, the leftist, pro-Israeli academic at Harvard. I tried to explain that there must have been reasons for this atrocity, that crimes are not committed just because men are bad and don't like democracy. Dershowitz was—I tried to think of the right word as I listened to his uncontrollable, hysterical anger—frenzied. Fisk was a bad man, a patronising man, a dangerous man; Fisk was anti-American and “anti-Americanism is the same as anti-Semitism . . .” Dershowitz shouted at me and shouted at Dunphy who eventually switched him off the air. But I got the message. Only one line was going to be allowed after these massacres in America. Any opposition to U.S. policy—especially in the Middle East—was criminal and “pro-terrorist.” Anyone who criticised America now was an anti-Semite. Anti-Semites are Nazis, fascists. So America was sacrosanct—so was Israel, of course—and those of us who asked the question “Why” were the supporters of “terrorism.” We had to shut up. On the night of September 11th, the BBC's 24-hour news channel, reviewing the next morning's British newspapers, produced a pro-Israeli American commentator who remarked of my article that “Robert Fisk has won the prize for bad taste.”

I sat on my hotel bed, flicking channels, watching the towers burn and their biblical descent in dust and ash. Our New York correspondent, David Usborne, had been called by the office with the story of the light aircraft hitting one of the towers and took the subway downtown, only to find the south tower falling at his feet. Again and again, the towers fell. Then the planes came in again. Only ash and smoke were taped at the Pentagon, and in that pit in the Pennsylvania field, but New York remained the iconic image that would now justify the “war on terror.” September 11th, I suspected, was to become a law, a piece of legislation that would be used to close down any conversation, lock up any suspect, invade any country. Opposition? Why, just show those bodies hurtling once more towards the streets of Manhattan.

I lay on my pillow, watching them again on the television at the foot of my bed. They moved at such speed, they had a kind of symmetry to them until you realised that their legs were kicking, that this was the moment of awfulness, the moment I had tried to understand when I looked into those monstrous, carbonised faces of the dead at Mutla Ridge. Those figures cascaded out of the sky and they fell, over and over at the bottom of my bed, plummeting into the blankets.

And then I realised what Karsten had meant when he urged me to concentrate on the pictures. The message was the act. Even if the casualties had not been so appalling, this wickedness so awesome, the attacks themselves so professional, this was not a routine act of “terror.” There would be no claims of responsibility, I was sure of that. There would be no statements from bin Laden or al-Qaeda, no explanations. The message—the statement—was the act itself. The claim was contained in the pictures. Our own television cameras were the claim of responsibility. I remembered again what bin Laden had said to me about his wishes for America. And looking at those pictures of the thunderous, concrete-thick clouds that surrounded Manhattan, I had to admit that New York was now “a shadow of itself.”

But why? I was right about the reaction to this question. Next morning, a blizzard of emails began to descend on
The Independent
, mostly in support of my article, many demanding my resignation. The attacks on America were caused by “hate itself, of precisely the obsessive and dehumanising kind that Fisk and bin Laden have been spreading,” said one. According to the same message from Judea Pearl of UCLA, I was “drooling venom” and a professional “hate peddler.” Another missive, signed Ellen Popper, announced that I was “in cahoots with the archterrorist” bin Laden. Mark Guon labelled me “a total nut-case.” I was “psychotic,” according to Lilly and Barry Weiss. Brandon Heller of San Diego informed me that “you are actually supporting evil itself . . .” How quickly the pattern formed. Merely to suggest that Washington's policies in the Middle East, its unconditional support for Israel, its support for Arab dictators, its approval of UN sanctions that cost the lives of so many Iraqi children, might lie behind the venomous attacks of September 11th was an act of evil.

This harsh and unrelenting shower of emails came in by the thousand, many of them—as the days went by—using identical phrases and, in some cases, identical sentences. Clearly this was turning into an orchestrated campaign—the kind that is taken far too seriously by American papers but treated with the scorn it deserves in Britain—and when a “reader” in San Antonio announced that he would “no longer take your magazine” because of my article, it was clear that something was amiss.
The Independent
does not (alas) circulate in Texas—and it definitely isn't a magazine.

But reporters continued to avoid the “whys.” We could examine the “hows”— the hijackers had learned to fly, taken business class seats, used box-cutters—and the “whos.” The fact that the hijackers proved to be all Arabs—and that most of them came from Saudi Arabia—posed no problem to reporters or readers. This fell into the “where-and-what” slot. “Arab terrorists” are, after all, familiar characters. The sin was to connect the Arabs with the problems of the lands they came from, to ask the “why” question. All of the mass murderers came from the Middle East. Was there a problem out there? In articles and lectures in the United States, I was to raise this issue repeatedly. If a crime is committed in Los Angeles or London, the first thing the cops do is look for a motive. But when an international crime against humanity in the United States was committed on this unprecedented scale, the one thing we were
not
allowed to do was seek a motive.

George Bush Junior now talked about a “crusade” against evil. The “why” question was quickly disposed of by the U.S. administration—and left unvisited by American journalists—with a one-liner: “They hate our democracy.” You were with us or against us. “We are good people.” And in the national grief that clutched every American town and city, the latter made sense. The idea that the United States somehow “deserved” such an assault—that more than three thousand innocents should pay some kind of death-price for America's sins abroad—was immoral. But without any serious examination of what had caused these acts of mass murder—political, historical reasons—then the United States and the world might set themselves on a warpath without end, a “war on terror” which, by its very nature, had no finite aim, no foreseeable conclusion, no direction except further war and fire and blood. The credo now set up by the United States and obsequiously embraced by the world's statesmen and media—that September 11th, 2001, “changed the world for ever”—was a lie. Countless massacres of far greater dimensions had occurred in the Middle East over previous decades without anyone suggesting that the world would never be the same again. The million and a half dead of the Iran–Iraq War—a bloodbath set in train by Saddam, with our active military support—elicited no such Manichaean observation.

Nineteen years earlier, the greatest act of terrorism—using Israel's own definition of that much misused word—in modern Middle Eastern history began. Typically, on 16 September 2001, no one remembered the anniversary in the West. I took a risk and wrote in the
Independent
that no other British newspaper— certainly no American newspaper—would recall the fact that on that date in 1982, Israel's Phalangist militia allies started their three-day orgy of rape and knifing and murder in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. It followed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon—designed to drive the PLO out of the country and given the green light by the then U.S. secretary of state, Alexander Haig—which cost the lives of 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians, almost all of them civilians. That was more than five times the death toll in the September 11th, 2001, attacks. Yet I could not remember any vigils or memorial services or candle-lighting in America or the West for the innocent dead of Lebanon—no stirring speeches about democracy or liberty or “evil.” In fact, the United States spent most of the bloody months of July and August 1982 calling for “restraint.”