The Great War for Civilisation Read Online Free

realised that this was going to be more than a chronology of eyewitness reports.
    My father, the old soldier of 1918, read my account of the Lebanon war but would not live to see this book. Yet he would always look into the past to understand the present. If only the world had not gone to war in 1914; if only we had not been so selfish in concluding the peace. We victors promised independence to the Arabs and support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Promises are meant to be kept. And so those promises—the Jews naturally thought that their homeland would be in all of Palestine—were betrayed, and the millions of Arabs and Jews of the Middle East are now condemned to live with the results.
    In the Middle East, it sometimes feels as if no event in history has a finite end, a crossing point, a moment when we can say: “Stop—enough—this is where we will break free.” I think I understand that time-warp. My father was born in the century before last. I was born in the first half of the last century. Here I am, I tell myself in 1980, watching the Soviet army invade Afghanistan, in 1982 cowering in the Iranian front line opposite Saddam’s legions, in 2003 observing the first American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division cross the great bridge over the Tigris River. And yet the Battle of the Somme opened just thirty years before I was born. Bill Fisk was in the trenches of France three years after the Armenian genocide but only twenty-eight years before my birth. I would be born within six years of the Battle of Britain, just over a year after Hitler’s suicide. I saw the planes returning to Britain from Korea and remember my mother telling me in 1956 that I was lucky, that had I been older I would have been a British conscript invading Suez.
    If I feel this personally, it is because I have witnessed events that, over the years, can only be defined as an arrogance of power. The Iranians used to call the United States the “centre of world arrogance,” and I would laugh at this, but I have begun to understand what it means. After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career—in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad—watching the peoples within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction”—which had long ago been destroyed—but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier. Even as it took place, Bill Fisk’s war was helping to produce the century’s first genocide—that of a million and a half Armenians—and laying the foundations for a second, that of the Jews of Europe.
    This book is also about torture and executions. Perhaps our work as journalists does open the door of the occasional cell. Perhaps we do sometimes save a soul from the hangman’s noose. But over the years there has been a steadily growing deluge of letters—both to myself and to the editor of
The Independent
—in which readers, more thoughtful and more despairing than ever before, plead to know how they can make their voices heard when democratic governments seem no longer inclined to represent those who elected them. How, these readers ask, can they prevent a cruel world from poisoning the lives of their children? “How can I help them?” a British woman living in Germany wrote to me after
The Independent
published a long article of mine about the raped Muslim women of Gacko in Bosnia—women who had received no international medical aid, no psychological help, no kindness two years after their violation.
    I suppose, in the end, we journalists try—or should try—to be the first