Under the Skin

I know that Robert Fisk can drive many pro-war supporters livid with rage. They find him graphic at an almost pornographic level, and claim his words are fatally skewed by his political perspective. I rarely see that; I find him sometimes prone to bluntly unsubtle writing, but it seems to come from a deep well of passion and anger from the things he sees that channels into his writing. He often writes as few others do, able to deeply sketch out the personal and the tragic from a situation. He is, at heart, a humanist; a perspective which in this age of military jargon and staid political analysis is so desperately needed. You don’t read Fisk to understand the geo-political details - but to feel the deep pain that such policies lead to in fellow human beings. This is something we got plenty of for the victims of September 11th, personal details that tore at the heart strings, but never got for the victims in Afghanistan and rarely get now for Iraqis killed by US-UK forces. Here is Fisk detailing the market bombing in Baghdad:

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.
Two missiles from an American jet killed them all - by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning.
It’s a dirt-poor neighbourhood, of mostly Shia Muslims, the same people whom Messrs Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against President Saddam Hussein, a place of oil- sodden car-repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafes. Everyone I spoke to heard the plane. One man, so shocked by the headless corpses he had just seen, could say only two words. “Roar, flash,” he kept saying and then closed his eyes so tight that the muscles rippled between them…

See also Jo Wilding here. Both articles are about the same piece of news, but Fisk’s writing elevates his personal description over the Guardian piece.

Posted by Ian at March 28, 2003 05:55 PM | TrackBack §