The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk

Author:Robert Fisk
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428714
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Planet Damnation

. . . war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts . . . incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

CURLED UP IN THE EXTRA CREW SEAT, snug in the womb-like flight deck of the 707, lights down, the night a pageant of stars, the air-conditioning hushing through the vents, I look down onto the hot, darkened desert of Saudi Arabia as the fireflies zip past us. White, yellow, streaking gold, they flick around us at almost a thousand miles an hour—their maximum speed and ours in opposite directions—or they glide below us, mimicking our own progress east. The voices in my cans are bored, tired, sometimes irritated men with the accents of Texas, of Cairo, Gloucestershire and the Hejaz.

“Mike two zero zero five.” A Midwest voice from out of the great black globe, desperately seeking guidance from a Saudi ground controller. “Requesting higher level to technical area.” Hushhhhhhhh, the air conditioner breathes. The Middle East Airlines pilot turns and grins at me. “He wants to climb en route to the Dhahran air base—I bet the Saudis turn him down.” Hushhhhhhhh. “No higher level available.” A Saudi voice, heavy accent bringing up the “b” in “available,” turning information into an order. Hushhhhhhhh. The 707 crew burst into laughter. “What did you expect?” The American: “Say again? Say again?” More laughter. The stewardess, her gold MEA uniform turned to hospital white in the dim cockpit light, hands me a glass of champagne. “Thought you might need it, Robert,” the Lebanese pilot says. “You’re going to be here for a long time, I think.”

I sip from the cold glass. Champagne. France. Paris. Boulevards. And I look to the north, up into the darkness to where—as they say—“civilisation” began, to where the ancient Euphrates and Tigris join and curdle their way to the Gulf, and towards that preposterously rich little emirate into which the descendants of all those Sumerians and Umayyads and Seljuks and Abbasids and—yes, I suppose— the Mongols had just arrived with their T-72 tanks, their ZSU-23 tracked, mobile, radar-guided anti-aircraft guns, their Scuds and 155s and their Kalashnikovs and their claim that Kuwait was and still is the nineteenth province of Iraq. Five hundred kilometres south of the Kuwaiti border, the fireflies grow thicker.

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