Robert Fisk's last war stories

Robert Fisk was the best-known British war correspondent of his generation, thanks in part to sheer persistence. He spent more than four decades running from one Middle Eastern death zone to the next, cataloguing the horrors he saw in gruesome detail and railing against the West's complicity in them. He was something of a cult figure on the British left, where his anti-imperial and anti-Zionist convictions were widely shared.

- ROBERT F WORTH

Few could match Fisk's record of being there. He was among the only journalists to witness the Syrian military's destruction of the city of Hama in 1982, and reported on the Iran-Iraq war from both countries. He saw every phase of Lebanon's 15-year civil war, and chronicled it all in a widely praised book, Pity the Nation. He was beaten bloody by a mob of Afghan refugees in Pakistan in late 2001, and said afterward, "If I had been them, I would have attacked me."

Night of Power appears four years after Fisk's death at the age of 74. Like his earlier books, it is a long, rambling mash-up of his dispatches, this one running from the US invasion of Iraq to the Arab spring and its aftermath. Fisk knew he was writing in the twilight of his career, and the action is interspersed with self-assessments, some bitter, some haughty.

It isn't clear what Fisk thought his reporting would achieve. Much of what he has to say—about Iraq especially—is now grindingly familiar to an audience that has grown numb after a quarter-century of lurid Middle Eastern violence. His vitriolic chapters on Israel are more about fist-shaking than reportage.