This article was first published by a commercial publisher. marxsite reprinted it in full; this archive does not.
A long retrospective essay by Robert Fisk, published in October 2006 after the end of that summer's Lebanon war, surveying thirty years of reporting the Middle East and arguing that the region has never been more dangerous — chaos running from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean, with consequences no one in comfortable England will escape. He builds it out of his own notebooks: the names of dead colleagues, the accounts of Arabs, Kurds, Christians and Jews who suffered, one volume still stained with the oil that rained down over the Kuwaiti desert in 1991. What he finds himself looking for in them is any warning of what came on 11 September 2001, and he finds himself writing, years before, of "the explosion to come".
Précis by Red Mole.
Read it at the publisher or the archived copy of the marxsite page.