Current Affairs: At the age of 12, young Master Fisk watched Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent and was hooked for life. He became a war correspondent, though he thinks "war correspondent" too effete, too romanticised a job description for the work of reporting the sorrows, the sufferings, the pity, that are the consequences of the relations between so many states, writes Bill McSweeney.
At the Menin Gate in Ypres, Fisk watched a young Irishwoman staring in disbelief at the names of all the Irish who had fought for "little Catholic Belgium". "Why in God's name", she asked, "was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?" Approached to sign a British army visitors' book, she wrote "do thiortha beaga", linking the fate of two "little countries" - her own and Belgium - caught up in the struggle between the great powers. It is an allegory of Fisk's own troubled relationship with the great powers, and particularly with their centuries-old involvement in the Middle East, which he ironically entitles "The Great War for Civilisation".
This whopper of a book is part memoir, mostly commentary on the wars of the Middle East which he has observed at first hand for three decades. And running through the book is an argument - one senses it is more a still-unresolved personal dilemma - about the vocation of the journalist and particularly the war correspondent, on whom the responsibility falls not just to count the dead, the maimed, the bereaved, but to ask why they are suffering.
In the summer of 2001, some weeks before the world was divided into good and evil, our side and theirs, the author learned a lesson on the journalist's vocation from the Israeli, Amira Hass. She lives in Palestinian Gaza and writes a daily column for the liberal newspaper, Ha'aretz, seething with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians.
"There is a misconception that journalists can be objective," she cautions Fisk. " . . . being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about - it's to monitor power and the centres of power."
Hass's story is about how she dropped out of the Hebrew University to write about the Palestinian intifada and how this led to her decision to live and work in Gaza while trying to influence Israelis through her writings in Ha'aretz. Her task is not to be impartial. "Israel is obviously the centre of power which dictates Palestinian life. As an Israeli, my task as a journalist is to monitor power."
Robert Fisk has learned the same principles. Like his friend, Amira Hass, he offends and makes enemies. He tells the story of the now-famous occasion near Kandahar when he was beaten up by a crowd of angry men who saw him as representing the foreigners attacking Afghanistan. His glasses shattered, his head pouring with blood from the rocks and fists which assailed it, he remembered the lesson learned in the field in Lebanon. Decide something - anything - don't do nothing. So he decided. "I turned on the man on my right, the one holding the bloody stone in his hand, and I bashed my fist into his mouth . . . I saw the man cough and a tooth fall from his lip and then he fell back on the road . . . I missed another man with a punch, hit more, and ran."
Had he left it at that, filed his copy with his retaliation as conclusion, he would have won the admiration - at last - of the British tabloids. But he shared the sense of vocation related to him by Amira Hass, and he multiplied his enemies. With his bandaged head adorning the British press, Fisk reflected on the event and on his own part in it. "If I were an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdulla", he wrote in his report in the Independent, "I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other westerner I could find".
This attack of bleeding-heart disease was too much for right-wing commentators who like to lump Fisk with Chomsky, Pilger, Naomi Klein in the category of anti-American loonies. Each has been accorded a place in the lexicon of abuse. "Fisking means never having to get it right," wrote David Pryce-Jones in The Spectator. For Robert Fisk, he says, "most Americans are ignorant and arrogant, and their leaders mendacious and cynical power maniacs leading everyone to perdition. Everything wrong with the Middle East is particularly their fault".
Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn just couldn't contain his amusement at Fisk's bandaged head and his distorted conscience. Under the subhead "A self-loathing multiculturalist gets his due", Steyn wrote that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter". The "Fisk doctrine" as he called it, absolves the perpetrators of September 11th and their Taliban supporters of all responsibility and blames the West whom they attacked.
Fisk writes the book with the passion and anger which comes from being anti-war, not anti- American, and which infuriates those in the media who see themselves as detached observers - even when they are embedded guests of the invading military forces. He met most of the Islamic leaders and spent the night on one visit to interview Osama bin Laden in 1993.
The book is, in a sense, an attempt to answer the question raised by many in the West in the immediate aftermath of September 11th: why do they hate us?
At a time when Dublin-born Rory Carroll, Iraq correspondent for the Guardian since January, is recovering from his kidnap ordeal in Baghdad, it offers a sobering - if rather lengthy - meditation on the role and duty of the war correspondent.
They won't understand Fisk's idea of the journalist's vocation in Kandahar or in the White House. But they could read his motto in the visitor's book at the Menin Gate, where the young Irishwoman dedicated her visit "do thiortha beaga". Fisk has written a massive tome devoted "to the small countries". At roughly three cents a page, it's a snip.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. By Robert Fisk, Fourth Estate, 1,366pp. £25