Blood and sand

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
By Robert Fisk
Knopf, 1,107 pp., $40

Robert Fisk, correspondent for the British daily The Independent, is a harsh critic of the way the mainstream press in Britain and America covers the Middle East. The average Western reporter, to extrapolate from Fisk's account, is usually ignorant of the place and its peoples, prone to display greater knowledge of the amenities at the local Sheraton than Hezbollah's role in Lebanese politics. Moreover, he or she is perpetually embedded in Western imperial projects to remake the region, uncritically accepting words and ideas such as ''democracy" and ''terror" while covering a part of the world that is unusually complex and varied.

If this is an exaggeration, it is based on a telling contrast between Fisk's career and that of itinerant Western correspondents. Fisk has lived in Beirut for 30 years, arriving there at the age of 29. In that time, he has reported on every major conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia: the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the two Gulf wars. He speaks and reads Arabic, has suffered hearing loss in one ear (from shelling during the Iran-Iraq War) and severe injuries from an assault by distraught Afghans (during the US bombing of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan), and can claim to have interviewed Osama Bin Laden well before the Al Qaeda leader became a household name in the United States.

It's hard to improve on that for commitment, for the accumulation of experience that inevitably means a glut of material. Although Fisk must have heavily culled the more than 350,000 documents, notebooks, and tapes in his Beirut apartment to write this book, it is nevertheless encyclopedic in form, a monumental 1,100-page narrative that tries to encompass every major war, revolution, and genocide shaping the Middle East in the past century or so. The ambition is impressive; not many Westerners are likely to be interested in the intricate details of the subject, nor are the events uplifting in any obvious way. As a reporter, Fisk is equal to the challenge. Although his style does not possess the jagged idiosyncrasy of the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski (whose ''The Shah of Shahs" and ''The Emperor" are classics of modern reporting), it is fluent and precise when describing events, allowing the unrelentingly grim stories to speak for themselves.

Writing on the Iran-Iraq War, a subject that takes up four chapters and probably composes the finest section in the book, Fisk presents an unforgettable picture of an Iranian military train:

''It is cold and the windows are shut against the night breeze off the desert but there is a strange, faint smell. At first I think it must be a deodorant, something to ameliorate the . . . stench of the blocked toilets at the end of each car. Then I pull open the connecting door of the next carriage and they are sitting in there by the dozen, the young soldiers and Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic, coughing softly into tissues and gauze cloths. Some are in open carriages, others crammed into compartments, all slowly dribbling blood and mucus from their mouths and noses."

Fisk's eye for detail is unsparing, giving us the bloody gauze on the mouths of the soldiers, the bright Korans in their hands, and -- in a characteristic touch that brings his own reactions into the story -- his panic-stricken rush to open windows as he realizes the nature of the ''deodorant." The Iranians are returning from the front lines after being gassed by the forces of Saddam Hussein, a Saddam who is very much an ally of Britain and the United States at this point.

There are many other excellent sections in this book, including the interviews with Bin Laden, an account of the Palestinian second intifada, and quick-fire sketches on the still-unfolding conflagration in Iraq. This is a considerable achievement, but Fisk's terrific reporting is interspersed with other modes of writing that are less successful. A strand of personal memoir about his father's role as a soldier in World War I -- the original ''great war for civilization" -- sits uneasily with the rest of the book. In the extended reflection on his father, Fisk is trying to explain his fascination with war journalism, which seems reasonable, but he is also attempting to make a connection between the savagery of European nations and subsequent events in the Middle East.

It is indisputable that such a connection exists, but Fisk's interpretation doesn't go beyond a loose coupling together of the arrogance of Western statesmen in both cases. For all his awareness of the past, he is an untidy thinker who seems to attribute colonialism to no more than the bad intentions of a few key players. Economics, culture, politics, ideas, or technology plays no role in explaining why the Western world should have suddenly become so interested in establishing colonial mandates over the sands of Arabia. He is also heavy-handed when it comes to historical parallels, cranking up the volume when alert readers could be trusted to hear the echoes. After telling us about British attempts to pacify Iraq in 1920, he writes, ''For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004."

This kind of polemics is perhaps just a foreign correspondent's style, shaped by the short fuse of daily journalism. But what is more bothersome is that in spite of Fisk's empathy and his ability to give recognizably human shapes to those Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians, and Afghans so frequently demonized in the Western press, he often operates within a Lawrence of Arabia colonial paradigm. Bluff, well intentioned, and convinced of his ability to understand the alien other, he is surprised when Iranians tell him that they look back at the war with pride. ''We mourn lost youth and sacrifice, the destruction of young lives," Fisk writes. ''The Iranians of the eight-year Gulf War claimed to love it, not only as a proof of faith but also as the completion of a revolution." But what else would they tell a foreign correspondent, no matter how well versed in their culture and politics? A healthy dose of self-questioning and some engagement with other accounts of colonialism would have made this critique of the West even sharper, but this is the book we have. Although there is something in it to annoy everyone, it remains a magisterial report from the shifting front lines of the Middle East. It deserves to be read by all those concerned with what is happening in Iraq today.

Siddhartha Deb is the author of the novels ''The Point of Return" and ''An Outline of the Republic."