After reading this article, I clicked over to see a Slate article written by Ahmad Chalabi's daughter entitled, "I Voted for My Dad in the Iraqi Election." The critical distance that Salon has called for and made happen in the last four years--and that nearly all other media sources have cowered from--could not have been more apparent. Thanks Kamiya and Salon.

Kamiya's review was excellent, capturing Fisk as a person as well as Fisk the reporter and Fisk the analyst.

On a couple of points, Kamiya slips. He asks whether the Iraq occupation could have succeeded given more soldiers. The answer is that better planning would have reduced the loss of life, but that occupation was doomed because the motivations for it were wrong. At best, it might have produced a supine satrapy. But because the US was unwilling to remedy injustices for which it bore some responsibility and insisted on painting Saddam as Hitler rather than a US client gone bad, it created a climate in which hubris flourished. Even had the US gone on with good motives, the danger was high of Iraq fragmenting into an independent Kurdistan, which Turkey and Iran would have regarded as unacceptable and a Shiite south, which Saudi Arabia and Syria would have found unacceptable. Regional war, which is increasingly likely, would have global consequences.

Kamiya also fails to understand why the police approach to Al Qaida was necessary and why the military approach has been disastrous. Ideas can't be killed. They can only be defeated in the court of public opinion. Capture bin Laden and his lieutenants, treat them fairly and convict them of specific murders, and their movement will die. Let them become martyrs who elude the US year after year and you attract followers to their cause. Worse, humiliate, wound or kill innocent people and you have created deadly enemies, a new generation of hate.

People react negatively to the idea of police because they think of police as lightly armed. But that's a conceptual error. Police can be armed as heavily as is required. What differentiates police from troops is the idea that law, evidence, and due process is primary. Troops are trained to kill people and blow things up. As we have learned to our chagrin, many aren't even trained on the Geneva Conventions.

Finally, it's hard to think of an insurgency that doesn't involve sectarian overtones or something similar. Americans were far more popular with Vietnamese Catholics than with Vietnamese Buddhists, for example. Even our own revolution had Tories concentrated in New York and New Jersey and perhaps the most radical elements in New England. There are always demographic subtleties in insurgency.

Still, this was a great review by a great writer. These are mere quibbles.

Robert Fisk is entitled to write a book of his opinions on the Middle East. But anyone who believes they are reading little more than that - a collection of his jeremiads fuming over his two favorite devils - Israel and the US - should really find better reading material. For good reason has “to fisk” indeed has become a verb, but hardly with the idea of tearing apart, more with the idea of bending the facts to trash a straw man.

There is no doubt that Mr. Fisk has been a witness to the terrible events in the Middle East for the last 30 years – and no one should question his courage or his commitment to his ideals. But in an area as complex as the Middle east – where culture, religion, and history color and dictate loyalties stronger than any logic, pretending that everyone dances to the strings of the West, the US, Israel or “fill in your favorite demon” gives a rather narrow view of that region. Worse, the idea that if these “agents” were magically removed from the area that everything would be fine, is equally blind sided.

Have the great powers behaved badly toward the region? Has the US practiced favoritism toward Israel, turned a blind eye toward the worst excesses of other regimes, and then played “let’s you and him fight” between Iran and Iraq? Sure – all true. But has oil corrupted the area? Has there been no shortage of brutal dictators more than willing to bend the area to their whims? And has religion been used to radicalize and control as much as to react to perceived “insults”? All true too. But for Mr. Fisk – this side bad – that side good is about as nuanced as it gets.

Sorry – the region may be a mess, but there are many more villains than Mr. Fisk wants to point out. The last straw for me was his opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan to throw out the Taliban. I remember the piece on his near stoning near the border – and though how ironic that he found himself in that situation. I am certain Mr. Fisk is wearing a black arm band today as Iraq votes – the idea that something good there could happen no doubt blackens his soul. But for his master tome – I hope it is filed on the shelf near the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the fabrication and invective section of the library

Excellent letter, Ironclad.

Gary Kamiya's wrong -- we already have more Robert Fisk's than we'll ever need.

Congratulations to Gary Kamiya for writing such a detailed yet readable review.

Congratulations also to Salon for having the courage to publish the review in a country where accusations of "bias" and "anti-Semitism" (no matter how frivolous) are often powerful enough to exert a self-censoring force on too many American journalists and editors.

Oh yeah, real gutsy to add your voice to the braying majority of activist journalists. You're really gonna run the gauntlet for that one.

So what I take away from this is that Fisk's book is a great book except that his excoriating torrent of hatred for Israel doesn't go far enough. Why am I no longer shocked by Gary Kamiya? Oh well, it IS Salon and autonomic kneejerks are what they are.