TIMES BOOK FAVES AND A BIG NON-FAVE

When it comes to the 100 Notable Books of the Year chosen for 2005 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review, it helps to be an author who happens to be a Times staffer or former staffer. We counted seven of this year's 61 notable non-fiction books by Times-connected writers (two columnists, one critic, three reporters, and one former executive editor). That's 11.5 percent, compared with 6.8 percent of last year's picks (four of 58). (CJR Daily counts six this year, plus 4 regular contributors to the Book Review.) None of the lucky seven made the 10 Best Books list, however, which restores a tad of credibility to the Book Review's picks. For a minute there, we thought we'd have to come up with an exposé.

Even so, counting all journalists whose books made the notable non-fiction list -- a total of 16 titles, for a whopping 26.2 percent -- we couldn't help noticing one really conspicuous omission: "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," by British foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, below. It's a massive, enlightening, beautifully written book, which, as we've said before, is unbeatable at connecting past and present, and which the Book Review hasn't deigned to review so far. This gives the Book Review editors a technical rather than critical reason to keep it from even being considered for the list.

But we think there's another, defensive reason, evidenced by Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner's condescending review in the daily paper, which was clearly payback for the accusations that Fisk makes against The Times and some of its reporters, names included. We realize, of course, that it's hard not to be defensive when key aspects of your paper's Middle East coverage over the years are called "gutless," "cowardly" and "servile" -- not once, but several times, and not focussed on Judy Miller -- by a knowledgeable journalist whose own Middle East reporting for several decades has earned, according to his publisher, more honors than any other living foreign correspondent.

Fisk doesn't win any friends at The Times with his description (on page 210) of the newspaper's reluctance in the early 1980s to report Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran between 1981 and 1984 on a scale "not seen since the gas attacks of the 1914-1918 war." He adds insult to injury by lumping The Times with the Arab press, which "never printed" the "first reports of Saddam's use of gas." Fisk writes, "so great was fear and loathing of Iran, so total the loyalty to Saddam Hussein, so absolute their support for him in preventing the spread of Khomeni's revolution, that they were silent." In both Europe and the United States, he points out, Iranian accounts "were regarded as little more" than propaganda.

It was 1985 before The New York Times reported that "United States intelligence analysts have concluded that Iraq used chemical weapons in repelling Iran's latest offensive." True to that paper's gutless style, even this report had to be attributed to those favourite sources of all American reporters -- "Administration officials."

Preliminary evidence suggested that the Iraqis had been using bis-(2-chloroethyl} sulfide, a blistering agent that damages all human tissues. The New York Times report continued in the same cowardly fashion: "Iran flew purported [sic] victims of the attacks to Austria and West Germany, where some doctors were quoted as having said [sic] that the wounded showed signs of having been under attack by mustard gas."

Fisk does not exempt his own newspaper from complicity -- The Times of London, for which he was then reporting -- noting that it "was still able to carry a photograph in March 1985 of an Iranian soldier in a London hospital covered in terrible skin blisters, with a caption saying only that he was suffering from 'burns which Iran says [sic] were caused by chemical weapons.'" Nor does he heap blanket scorn on The New York Times. He offers high praise (on page 326) for the paper's historical reportage of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government during World War I. "From the start," he writes, "The New York Times distinguished itself with near daily coverage of the slaughter, rape, dispossession and extermination of the Armenians." And he details that coverage at length, giving it much credit for bringing the genocide to the world's attention.

By page 340, however, he's back on the case, accusing everyone from the Associated Press ("disgraceful") to the BBC ("contemptible standards") of caving in to "Turkey's powerful lobby groups," which "attack any journalist or academic who suggests that the Armenian genocide is fact."

Most outrageous of all, however, had been The New York Times, which so bravely recorded the truth -- and scooped the world -- with its coverage of the Armenian genocide in 1915. Its bravery has now turned to cowardice.

Fisk then goes on to a scrupulous analysis of the facts, tone, style and general tenor of a 1998 report, which he damns for reducing the genocide to, as the reporter described it, "a burst of what is now called 'ethnic cleansing.'" This gives the impression of a "sudden, spontaneous act rather than a premeditated mass killing," Fisk writes. And then he turns bitterly sarcastic, pointing out "how very fair" of The Times to note that the issue of the Armenian genocide is still being "hotly debated" so as "to remind us that a campaign exists to deny the truth of this genocide without actually saying so, a lie every bit as evil as that most wicked claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened.

But Fisk doesn't end there. "Another of [the reporter's] articles was headlined 'Armenia Never Forgets -- Maybe It Should,'" he writes, adding that he has "suspicions about all of this."

I think The New York Times's reporter produced this nonsense so as to avoid offending the present Turkish government. He didn't want his feature to be called "controversial." He didn't want to stir things up. So he softened the truth -- and the Turks must have been delighted. Now let's supply a simple test. Let us turn to that later and numerically more terrible Holocaust of the Jews of Europe. Would [the reporter] have written in the same way about that mass slaughter? Would he have told us that German-Jewish relations were merely "deeply scarred" by the Nazi slaughter? Would he have suggested -- even for a moment -- that the details are "hotly debated"? Would he have compared the massacre of the Jews to the Bosnian war? No, he would not have dared to do so. He should not have dared to do so. So why was he prepared to cast doubt on the Armenian genocide?

We'll leave the answer to the book, except to say that Fisk, who now reports for The (London) Independent, makes the answer wholly relevant to contemporary issues -- whether Turkey will be admitted to the European Union, for instance, or how Kurdish nationalism will be treated by Turkey and Iraq.

Ironically, the very reporter who comes in for Fisk's scathing criticism (and whose name we've chosen not to mention) has a story in today's Times, headlined "Courting Europe, Turkey Tries Some Soul-Cleansing," about Turkish willingness to take responsibility (or not) for the Armenian genocide. The paper would seem to be making amends, especially by running a horrific 1915 photo of the slaughter, above, with the caption: "Last Taboo Amid democratic reforms, Turks have been confronting their past, including the 1915 massacres of Armenians."

But some of the story's tone and phrasing, to which Fisk objected in the same reporter's 1998 story, is still present, i.e.: "old taboos, like admitting the possibility that the Christian Armenians were the victims of genocide, are falling." The possibility? Rather than the fact? Or, a group of mostly Turkish historians and academics "met in Istanbul to challenge the taboo on suggesting that the Ottoman regime committed brutal crimes, perhaps even genocide, in 1915." Perhaps? Even?

We wouldn't count on Fisk receiving a positive notice from the Book Review, if it does eventually get around to his book. For all we know, a forthcoming review is in the works. The Guardian in London, where one would expect a positive review, has called the book "flawed but fascinating." Enumerating the flaws, the reviewer points to "a deplorable number of mistakes."

Christ was born in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem. Napoleon's army did not burn Moscow, the Russians did. French: meurt means dies, not blooms. Russian: goodbye is do svidanya, not dos vidanya. Farsi: laleh means tulip, not rose. Arabic: catastrophe is nakba not nakhba (which means elite) ... Muhammad's nephew Ali was murdered in the 7th century, not the 8th century. Baghdad was never an Ummayad city. The Hashemites are not a Gulf tribe but a Hijaz tribe, as far as you can get from the Gulf and still be in Arabia. The US forward base for the Kuwait war, Dhahran, is not "scarcely 400 miles" from Medina and the Muslim holy places, it is about 700 miles. Britain during the Palestine mandate did not support a Jewish state. The 1939 white paper on Palestine did not "abandon Balfour's promise" (and he was not "Lord Balfour" when he made it). The Iraq revolution of 1958 was not Baathist. Britain did not pour military hardware into Saddam's Iraq for 15 years, or call for an uprising against Saddam in 1991. These last two "mistakes" occasion lengthy Philippics against British policy; others may deserve them, we do not.

Such errors, regrettable as they may be, seem relatively minor in a densely packed book of 1107 pages. Far more significant, and much more likely to create trouble for the book's reception, are Fisk's political views, particularly his polemical condemnation of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. Let's see what happens.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: This is what happened.