Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk
Robert Fiskis an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. He has been Middle East correspondent intermittently since 1976 for various media; since 1989 he is correspondent for The Independent, primarily based in Beirut. Fisk holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent and has been voted British International Journalist of the Year seven times. He has published a number of books and reported on several wars and armed conflicts...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 July 1946
To look for bin Laden now is as useful as detaining nuclear scientists after the creation of the atomic bomb.
Bin Laden always wanted to get rid of Mubarek and Ben Ali and Gaddafi and so on, claiming that they were all infidels working for America, and in fact, it was millions of ordinary people who peacefully, more or less - certainly in the case of Tunisia and Egypt - got rid of them.
Bin Laden is not well read and he's not sophisticated, but he will have worked out very coldly what America would do.
I don't know what happens if they get bin Laden. I'm much more interested in what happens if they don't get bin Laden.
William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don't have a desire for it. I'm appalled and infuriated by it.
The Americans must leave, the Americans will leave and the terrible tragedy is the Americans can't leave because that is the equation that will turn sand into blood.
The Middle East is a land of great injustice. The Israelis can claim - or wish to, at least - that Lord Balfour's Declaration of 1917 promised Britain support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which didn't just mean the left-hand bit that became Israel.
The biggest problem I have in journalism is being quoted or misquoted and then being asked to defend something I haven't said.
When I visited Syrian special forces along the front lines, I was given extraordinary amounts of detail. They gave me the code numbers for the various positions they've got, told me where the rebels were - about 800 meters away in a forest. I met soldiers who had been wounded but were still serving.
I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'
U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.
The Second World War is and was constantly being drudged up by Blair and Bush to rationalize the invasion of Iraq.
One of the reasons why I think people have gone from reading mainstream newspapers to the Internet is because they realize they're being lied to.
American power in the Middle East is collapsing. It doesn't need much more than a shove, and it will - and that's not going to be a good thing.