Robert Fisk, the revered foreign correspondent for The Independent, his knowledge and insight of the Middle East is perhaps unrivalled among contemporary commentators. Fisk, who has met Osama bin Laden three times, talks about his experience of covering conflict throughout the region, the Middle East's history and the possibilities for its future. Here is part of a talk I recorded at the Institute of Education at the book launch of Fisk's Wars for Civilization, London 13 October 2005. He was a vigorous opponent of the new-fangled concept of “embedded journalism”. Latterly, however, his own embedded reports on the continuing civil war in Syria, which tended to absolve the Assad regime of some of the worst crimes credited to it, provoked a backlash, even among his anti-imperialist acolytes. Obituary
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51