For a long time Robert Fisk has filed Middle East stories for The Independent you wouldn’t find in any mainstream American paper. This summer as he documented the Israeli destruction of Lebanon better than most, he reiterated the line that Hizbullah started the war. Not surprising to read in a newspaper, where it’s most often history that gets cut during copy. But Fisk went farther, as Jonathan Cook points out in this critique:
The problem is in his constantly aired statement that “Hizbollah provoked this war by capturing two Israeli soldiers and killing three others on 12 July” (16 Aug 2006). Left as a simple statement of fact, it could be allowed to pass without comment. But Fisk repeatedly adds a series of further insinuations: that Hizbullah wanted Israel to attack, that it planned the war (not just that it planned for the war), that it knew precisely the scale of destruction Israel would unleash, that it was following Syria’s orders, and that by implication Syria — and possibly Hizbullah — wanted Lebanon’s destruction.
I haven’t been watching Fox News here in Cairo. I do at home now and then, mostly with my sister, when we want to reevaluate our Boston isolation, or more often just laugh depressingly at the slick deception of Rupert Murdoch’s programs. I don’t know if O’Reilly’s been quoting Fox correspondents saying similar things. Maybe.
But Fisk’s reporting usually stands out from the glut of articles written with a State Department glossary and a copy of Muslim Rage. What’s going on?
Surely, after the apparent inconsistencies in Fisk’s own commentaries over more than a month of reporting, his readers deserve a profounder summation of his views than this. How and why did two hostile sides — Syria, and Israel and the US — both plan a war, much at the same time, whose outcome was the certain destruction of Lebanon?
We can speculate about Israel’s interests in doing this. It may have hoped to provoke a civil war in Lebanon, much as it is trying to do in Gaza, to weaken its neighbor. It may have believed that by terrifying the general Lebanese population from the south, it could permanently reoccupy the area. It may also have hoped that, if it were winning such a war, it could drag in Syria and Iran.
But why would Syria want Lebanon destroyed? A fit of pique at being expelled from Lebanon last year according to US designs for a Cedar Revolution? Is that Fisk’s conclusion?
Read the rest of Cook here.
