KEY POINTS:
The most remarkable achievement of Robert Fisk may be that he gives journalism a good name. By which I mean, with nods of respect to the profession's other admirable practitioners locally or internationally, that he is brave and balanced, cutting and compassionate, intemperate and intelligent. He writes literately,
eloquently, succinctly.
You wish they would clone the guy. Fisk has worked in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Algeria. He speaks Arabic fluently. He has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times. He has been Middle East correspondent for The Independent - for more than 30 years.
The Age of the Warrior comprises 100-plus pieces from the past half-decade, including "the gentler, kinder moments in a life that has been ... squandered in watching human folly on a massive, unstoppable scale". Yes, he can posture, all right. You could quibble at his definition of "gentler, kinder".
It includes being beaten at school for reading a book during a football match. Football, incidentally, is "intimately linked" with violence - read his charges that British soldiers gave Iraqi prisoners the names of world-famous players, then began kicking and punching them.
In other lighter moments, Fisk lies on his back in the Colosseum and thinks about capital punishment (he loathes it), and recalls how having his head bashed in by angry Afghan refugees made him think of Shakespeare on violent death - as one does. But the mass of this fairly massive book is concerned with the Middle East.
If anyone can make sense of that theatre of death and farce, it's Fisk, though he would no doubt challenge the word "sense". He describes Britain's first "disgrace": its post-World War II abandonment of Palestine. His much-loved Lebanon is a mess. Israel, thanks to George W. Bush and - of course - the media, gets away with almost everything.
To get out of Iraq without leaving absolute anarchy behind, the United States will need the help of Iran and Syria. The American presence? He is un-sparing: "The mass murders in Iraq would not have happened if we hadn't invaded. There are now about 22 times more Western soldiers in Muslim lands than there were at the time of the Crusades." He rants and he repeats himself.
You can hardly blame him; his accounts of the massacres of Algerian civilians, Islamist rebels in Syria, Palestinians in Beirut camps and refugee columns in Israeli "territories" seem to have been sanitised or ignored in our news. He body-slams opponent after opponent. Bush is "the David Irving of the White House". Blair is "this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar".
Holocaust denier President Ahmadinejad of Iran spouts "childish nonsense". Colonel Gaddafi is a "crazed dictator". As for Bill Clinton - "mercifully, there is no word for oral sex in Arabic". When it comes to political language, the body-slamming is replaced by clinical dissection.
Civilians killed by Israeli gunfire are nearly always "caught in crossfire". Now that the United States knows it can't win in Iraq, it's going to "prevail". And most reverberantly, "Terrorist is a word that avoids all meaning". Fisk's writing is vigorous, open, and unabashedly angry.
He sees the media mantra of objectivity and lack of bias as "the great sickness of our Western press and television, the excuse for all of us to avoid the truth". It's not all brimstone. He tells us about his father, who fought in World War I and refused to take part in the execution of a mysterious deserter.
He visits the Titanic cemetery in Halifax, and debunks the myth of the band playing Nearer My God to Thee. He eulogises colleagues. He loves the movies, except for The Da Vinci Code ("God, it's awful!"), and grumps about how pap succeeds but great art struggles.
And he comes to Wellington, where many houses are built of "lavatory brick" (eh?), where he looks at battle honours in Old St Paul's and the compassionate words of the Ataturk Memorial.
Even here, however, the "shadow" of anti-Muslim feeling falls across him. You may disagree with his views. In the United States and Britain, thousands do; there are websites dedicated to discrediting him.
But anyone who so staunchly confronts "the political-military-journalistic nexus of power deployed to fool us" is uncomfortable, upsetting and, ultimately, beyond price.
The Age of the Warrior
By Robert Fisk (Fourth Estate $29.99)
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
