2 weeks Ago By Rupert Hawksley
Joe Biden won the presidential election in 2020 promising to stabilise America, restore traditional alliances abroad and make the world a safer place. He would replace the mercurial and dangerous Donald Trump with something less risky and more predictable. Yet four years later, exactly the reverse has happened.
Savage wars rage in Ukraine and the Middle East which show no sign of ending. Regardless of whether it is Kamala Harris or Trump who wins the presidential election next week , they will have to grapple with overlapping crises that make the 2020s feel more like the 1930s. Much, though by no means all, of what has gone wrong can be blamed on the failings of Biden himself and the weak team of senior officials around him.
He once referred to himself as “a gaffe machine”, a self-deprecating reference to his making minor bloopers, like calling on a deceased member of Congress to join him on a political platform or, most recently, calling Trump voters “garbage” . The consequent hand-wringing of the overwhelmingly anti-Trump media focused exclusively on the damage these “gaffes” would do to the Harris campaign. Scarcely mentioned is what ought to be the terrifying revelation that the man making these verbal stumbles, indicating reduced mental capacity, is also the man whose daily decisions may determine who lives or dies in the ruins of Gaza or the suburbs of Beirut.
Money and diplomatic cover Just how deeply the US is actively participating in the war in the Middle East is underappreciated and is no longer a question of supplying Israel with arms, money and diplomatic cover. The Israeli strikes on Iran a week ago would not have occurred without direct American military support. A person familiar with the operation is quoted by the Financial Times as saying that the attack could not have happened without the US’s help, describing it as the first “joint offensive operation” conducted by Israel and the US, though this is strongly denied by Washington.
“There was absolute co-ordination with the US,” said the person. “You can’t go over Syria and Iraq without them, they control that air space.” Half of the US and most of the world will give a sigh of relief if Harris defeats Trump, but this does not necessarily mean that the world will become a less dangerous place next year.
Unprecedented violence Harris is likely by and large to continue with Biden’s policies, just as Biden largely persisted with the policies of the Trump administration in the Middle East. He did not resurrect the nuclear agreement with Iran that was torpedoed by Trump and continued to marginalise the Palestinians, proposing an alliance between Israel and the Arab monarchies. The predictable outcome of the Trump-Biden approach was an explosion of unprecedented violence that is still going on .
Harris, if elected, is unlikely to act very differently from Biden over Gaza. She may be more vociferous in seeking a ceasefire, but not to the point of cutting off Israel’s supply of US arms. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support in Congress and among billionaire Democratic donors will prevent the US from using any real leverage.
Given Biden’s appalling record in failing to bring this horrific war to a halt, could Trump do much worse ? He is often referred to as an “isolationist”, but it would be more accurate to call him a “unilateralist”, suspicious of alliances with foreign states whose interests diverge from those of the US. Most Israelis tell pollsters that they support him and he has criticised Biden for seeking to stop Israel attacking Iranian nuclear facilities. But vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, said on television a few days ago that the Biden-Harris administration was allowing the US to be drawn into a war with Iran that the US does not want.
Brutal realpolitik Trump boasts that he started no wars during his last presidency, which is correct. He may not have much idea of the details of crises in the Middle East, or elsewhere for that matter, but he does have an instinct for spotting a political mess that may hurt his interests. He engages in a sort of brutal realpolitik, respecting powerful players, be they Vladmir Putin in Russia or Kim Jong-un in North Korea, while he is contemptuous of the weak.
Read Next Don't listen to Liz Truss – Trump would not be good for the UK He may allow Israeli settlers to return to Gaza, as surviving Palestinians huddle in their tents and bombed out houses. US press reports allege that the Republicans have told Israeli officials to do what they want in Gaza, but get it done by the time Trump takes office. While Trump may not care what happens to the Palestinians, he is unlikely to stand feebly by, like Biden, while the war goes on.
To do so would damage his Maga image as the leader who will restore American power. Self-serving realism Trump’s policies usually have a core of self-serving realism, even though they are encased in layers of craziness, ignorance and personal abuse against critics. He has an advantage here, because though his institutional enemies in Washington portray themselves as “the only adults in the room”, they are the same members of the US elite who presided over American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A certainty is that any future Trump policy towards the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine or anywhere else in the world will be incoherent. This is a reflection of Trump’s chaotic personality. And with the Maga Republican ambition to seed a second Trump administration with true believers, his policy is likely to be the confused product of never-ending clashes in Washington between supporters and opponents of an aggressive militarised foreign policy.
Fear of Trump has blinded American and European politicians and public to the gross failures of Biden and Harris. As in the past, the Democratic Party leadership has been Trump’s unintentional best friend. Abandoned diplomacy First, it allowed an obviously ailing Biden a free pass to stand for a second term – though polls had long showed that American voters had decided that he was too old for the job.
He was then forced to step down after his mental confusion was disastrously exposed in his television debat e with Trump on 27 June, but the withdrawal of his candidacy may have been too late for Harris to distance herself from the administration of which she had been an undistinguished and near invisible member for three-and-a-half years. The melodrama of the US presidential election – greater this year than at any time since 1968 – has overshadowed the mounting dangers of war. On Ukraine, the Biden administration admits more or less openly that there is not much chance of defeating Russia, but it appears to have abandoned diplomacy as a means of ending the conflict.
As regards to the Gaza war, the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has made no less than 11 fruitless visits to the region, showing the US to be either hopelessly ineffectual or covertly complicit in Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran. Whether Harris or Trump wins , the background noise during the election is the drum beat of wars that will dominate the next administration. Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn, is published by Verso Further Thoughts As the devastation of Gaza and Lebanon continues, I have been thinking about how my late colleague and close friend Robert Fisk, who died on 30 October, 2020, would have regarded these calamitous events.
The greatest of Middle East correspondents, he lived and reported from Beirut for half a century about the progressive destruction of the Middle East. He would be horrified by what is happening today in the region, and the open complicity of the US and its allies in the slaughter, but he would not have been surprised. His last book, which has just been posthumously published, is appropriately titled Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East .
It is a betrayal that is now fully under way. I first met Robert in Belfast in 1972 at the height of the Troubles when he was the correspondent for The Times and I was writing a PhD on Irish history at Queen’s University. I was also taking my first tentative steps as a journalist, while he was rapidly establishing a reputation as a meticulous and highly-informed reporter, one who responded sceptically – and rigorously investigated – the partisan claims of all parties, be they IRA or unionist gunmen, British Army officers or government officials.
Our careers moved in parallel directions because we were interested in the same sort of stories. We both went to Beirut in the mid-1970s to write about the Lebanese civil war and the Israeli invasions. We often reported the same grim events, such as the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians by Israeli-backed Christian militiamen in 1982, but we did not usually travel together because, aside from the fact that Robert liked to work alone, we wrote for competing newspapers.
When we did share a car during the wars, I was impressed by Robert’s willingness to take risks, but to do so without bravado, making sure we had the right driver and petrol that had not been watered down. One reason he had so many journalistic scoops – such as finding out about the massacre of 20,000 people in Hama by Hafez al-Assad’s forces in Syria in 1982 – was that he was an untiring traveller. One friend recalls: “He was the only person I’ll ever know who could, almost effortlessly, make up limericks about the south Lebanese villages, while he was driving through them.
” A deadly serious reason lay behind his visits to these villages. When I was a correspondent in Jerusalem in the 1990s, they were the repeated target for Israeli air strikes, which the Israeli military would declare were solely directed at “terrorists” and, if there were any dead and wounded, they were invariably described as gunmen and not civilians. Almost nobody checked if this was true – except Robert, who would drive again and again to these same shattered villages and report in graphic detail about the dead bodies of men, women and children, and interview the survivors.
When Israel stuck with its denial of responsibility, he would unearth further evidence in the shape of videos and travel to America to show arms manufacturers fragments of their missiles which had torn apart some Lebanese community. Robert was suited to Beirut with its free and somewhat anarchic atmosphere, a place always on edge and with people – Lebanese, Palestinian, exiles of all sorts – who were born survivors, though sometimes the odds against them were too great. He had a natural sympathy for their sufferings and a rage against those who inflicted them.
His sympathy was not confined to present-day victims: for decades he wrote about the Armenian genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. He would publicise long-lost diaries and documents about the mass slaughter of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians, stories which other correspondents felt were far from the conventional news agenda and better left to the historians.
But Robert was more than a journalist cataloguing present-day developments and woes. He was a historian as well as a reporter who wrote, among many other books, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East and now Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East, the foreward to which I wrote and on which this article is largely based. I never finished my PhD in Belfast because the violence became too intense for academic work, but Robert did get his doctorate from Trinity College Dublin for his thesis on Irish neutrality in the Second World War.
He was more than a person who covered “the news”, since his journalism – for all his scoops and revelations – had such depth because he was, in the truest sense, “a historian of the present”. He combined a journalist’s skills as an eyewitness recording and interpreting events with an historian’s ability to place them in a broader context and a longer time frame. His books avoid the failing of many of even the best academic histories, which is that the author largely knows what happened second hand.
The weakness of journalism is the precise opposite: the reporter focuses exclusively on what he or she witnesses in front of them, ignoring or minimising the significance of what they do not see, but which is of equal or greater significance. By its very nature, journalism dilutes the truth not just through proprietorial or editorial bias, though that is important, but because shortage of space and the need to appeal to a wide audience necessitate over-simplification. Yet the real life of peoples and countries is complicated – all the arrows never point conveniently in the same direction – and what appears in the media will, at best, be a well-informed synopsis of the events.
Only through books like the ones Robert wrote can the complex, but invariably fascinating reality, be accessed. The great American journalist Seymour Hersh once told me that “when people ask me how to begin an investigation, I always say to them: ‘read, read, read'”. Robert was a magnificent reporter who bubbled with nervous energy, often shifting his weight from one foot to the other, notebook in his hand, as he questioned eyewitnesses relentlessly and probed in to what had really occurred.
He took nothing for granted and was openly contemptuous of those who did. He did not invent the journalist saying “never believe anything until it is officially denied”, but he fully agreed with its sceptical message. He was suspicious of journalists who cultivated diplomats and “official sources” who could not be named, and whose likely partisan bias was unmentioned, but whose veracity we are invited to take on trust.
Some journalists responded to his criticism with baffled resentment: during the US-led counter-invasion of Kuwait in 1991, one embedded American journalist complained that Robert was unfairly reporting on an event about which information should have been confined to an officially sanctioned “pool” of correspondents. Another American journalist based in London in the early 1980s told me that he considered Robert to be a brilliant writer and the best reporter he had ever known, but he had been struck by the number of his colleagues who grimaced at Robert’s name. “I have thought about this,” he said, “and I think that 80 per cent of the reason for this is pure envy on their part.
” Truly, hell hath no fury like a reporter “scooped” aside from one who has been regularly “scooped”, and Robert did this again and again over half a century, so it was scarcely surprising that rival journalists often nurtured bitter and resentful feelings towards him. He probably won more important journalistic awards in the course of his career than any other British or American reporter, but denunciations of what he had written by hostile critics is perhaps a more distinguished mark of integrity. Who now remembers the long forgotten British government minister who responded to Robert’s sceptical but even-handed coverage of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, by describing Robert as “a dupe of Saddam Hussein’s regime”? Inevitably, anybody reporting honestly on war and conflicts makes enemies – and there is probably something wrong with their work if they do not.
Governments whose armies are trying to kill each other are unlikely to hesitate when telling lies about each other. They detest the journalist who exposes these falsehoods and commonly demonise him or her as unpatriotic or an enemy pawn since all wars are, and have always been, propaganda wars. Nothing much can be done to stop this as it has been an inevitable feature of armed conflict since Egyptian pharaohs were inscribing mendacious hieroglyphs about their non-existent victories on their monuments 4,000 years ago.
But it should be possible to alert the public to the falsity of this propaganda by describing in a convincing manner what is really going on and why it is happening. Robert was well aware of this, writing that “armies at war – like their governments – are best observed with a mighty degree of scepticism, even cynicism. So far as armies and militias are concerned there are no good guys.
” It is not that Robert thought that good people did not exist, but he generally found them among the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence. We saw more of each other after we both joined The Independent , Robert in 1989 and myself in 1990, and we both appeared later in The i Paper. He had decided to leave The Times after the paper jibbed at publishing his story, supported by copious evidence, about how a US cruiser, USS Vincennes , in the Gulf had shot down an Iranian civilian airliner flying between Bandar Abbas and Dubai in 1988, killing all 290 people on board.
I was mostly in Iraq during the First Gulf War and Robert was in Kuwait. After the overthrow of Saddam in 2003, we drove out together from Baghdad overland across the desert to Jordan. I recall that we were stopped for a long time on the Jordanian side of the border because Robert had secured, from the wreckage of some police headquarters in Basra in southern Iraq, a file of laudatory poems written to Saddam’s ferocious police chief in the city by his underlings on the occasion of his birthday.
Some of the Jordanian officials thought that these craven poetic offerings were hilarious, but others found the documents mysterious and kept us waiting for hours at the bleak border post while they waited for official permission from Amman to let us cross. As we grew older, we grew closer. We both had doubts about the beneficial outcome of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, having seen similar optimism about the invasion of Iraq produce a paroxysm of violence.
Neither of us believed that Bashar al-Assad and his regime was going to fall, at a time when this was conventional wisdom among politicians and in the media. To suggest anything to the contrary got one immediately pilloried as a supporter of Assad. The sensible course was to ignore these diatribes, and Robert and I used to counsel each other not to overreact and thereby give legs to some crude distortion of one’s views.
Over the last 15 years of Robert’s life, we talked almost once a week about everything from the state of the world to the state of ourselves, supplementing phone calls with periodic emails. A life spent describing crises and wars made him more philosophical about the coronavirus pandemic than those with less direct experience of calamities. In one of the last emails I received from him shortly before he died in Dublin on 30 October, 2020, he wrote that “Covid-19, unless it suddenly turns into a tiger, will be seen as just another risk to human life – like car crashes, cancer, war, etc.
Humans don’t necessarily fight disease, injustice and sorrow. They just survive and bash on regardless.” He was correct in recognising that war, plague and violent death will always be with us along with official lies about them, as will, hopefully, those who try to explain what is really happening.
The British First World War prime minister David Lloyd George once said of that conflict that “if people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But, of course, they don’t know and can’t know”. Robert was keenly interested in the 1914-18 war because his father, who had fought in it, took him on visits at an early age to the Somme and other battlefields.
In describing conflicts and wars in his own era, he sought in his journalism and books to tell people – contrary to what Lloyd George’s believed could and should be revealed to the public – about the terrible things that happen and identify those responsible for these horrors. Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East by Robert Fisk (HarperCollins, £30) Beneath the Radar The great torrent of media coverage about the career of Kamala Harris since she became the Democratic Party presidential candidate tends to drown out pieces which are genuinely informative about her political background. One of the best of these appears in The Conversation under the title, “ How San Francisco’s Democratic political machine led to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign “, by Lincoln Mitchell of the school of international and public affairs at Columbia University.
Cockburn’s Pick Here is a fascinating piece called “ Wrestling with the ghosts of Manchester town hall ” by Jack Dulhanty in that excellent online journal The Mill about the vastly expensive rebuilding of Manchester town hall. This turns out to have been a voyage of discovery for the builders who constantly discover new things that have gone wrong – or were never right since Victorian times. Dulhanty writes that, for example, “while it was clear the building’s roof slates were shot – all 150,000 needed to be replaced – no one had realised the gutters were about to go through as well.
Indeed, in the last 12 months, detailing around the guttering has been redesigned 41 times at a cost of £351,000”. It all sounds like an allegory abut modern Britain. This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i.
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