Journalist Robert Fisk has lived a life that has frequently been frustrating, frustrating because of the failure of the US and Europe to act in response to the self-evident realities of the Middle East, realities that he has encountered over the course of his long career as a correspondent. In a column published in The Independent, Fisk warns us yet again of the probable consequences of US policy:

And so on we go with the Middle East tragedy, telling the world that things are getting better when they are getting worse, that democracy is flourishing when it is swamped in blood, that freedom is not without "birth pangs" when the midwife is killing the baby.

It's always been my view that the people of this part of the Earth would like some of our democracy. They would like a few packets of human rights off our supermarket shelves. They want freedom. But they want another kind of freedom - freedom from us. And this we do not intend to give them. Which is why our Middle East presence is heading into further darkness. Which is why I sit on my balcony and wonder where the next explosion is going to be. For, be sure, it will happen. Bin Laden doesn't matter any more, alive or dead. Because, like nuclear scientists, he has invented the bomb. You can arrest all of the world's nuclear scientists but the bomb has been made. Bin Laden created al-Qa'ida amid the matchwood of the Middle East. It exists. His presence is no longer necessary.

Of course, as usual with Fisk, it is the interweaving of personal experience with analysis that makes the conclusion, one that, standing alone, is rather banal, so frightening. Just one example:

This failure to see the Other as the same as "us" is now evident across the Middle East. Some months ago, I received letters originally written to his family by a young Marine officer in Iraq who was trying - eloquently, I have to add - to explain how frustrating his work with Iraqis had become. "There is something culturally childish in their understanding of Western governance and management that will require immeasurable education and probably several generations to overcome if they find it of any interest," he wrote. "Our understanding of their tribal governance and its relationship to formal civil management is equally naïve and charges our frustration... The reality is that they cannot, culturally, comprehend our altruism or believe our stated intentions... Liberation will compete with invasion as our legacy but locally we are ideologically irrelevant... I share the American fascination with action and it has consistently betrayed us in our foreign policy."

Within this statement of seemingly innocuous frustration, one hears echoes of Kurtz's infamous exhortation, Exterminate the brutes!, as people across the Middle East, with a much more acute sense of sight and sound than Americans recall the past like a black and white super 8 and hear the sound of the future on a scratchy old 78.

Yes, Neil Young and Robert Fisk are on the same page, as Young's lyrics from the film Greendale, are more appropriately construed as a harbinger of things to come instead of a backhanded reference to 9/11:

meanwhile across the ocean
living in the internet
is the cause of an explosion
no one has heard yet

but there's no need to worry
there's no reason to fuss
just go on about your work now
and leave the driving to us

and we'll be watching you
no matter what you do
and you can do your part
by watching others too

The distance between the journalist and the artist can be measured by the fact that Fisk took approximately 7000 words to say about the same thing that Young said in 58, and each is, in his own way, equally compelling.

Labels: American Culture, American Empire, Robert Fisk