The brutality of the occupation—its mass jailings, constant raids, devastating sieges of cities like Fallujah—drives Iraqis together in opposition to the invader. In Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad, Shadid hears of support for the Sunni resistance fighters in Fallujah, many of whom are anti-Shia fundamentalists or Baathist officers. “They’re no different,” twenty-year-old Alaa Sarraji says to Shadid. “We’re one Iraq.” Then Baathists from Adhamiya march in support of Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which is being cut down in hopeless clashes with the US Army’s 1st Cavalry. But this enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend logic goes only so far. There is no simple and coherent Iraqi nationalism. For every event that drives Iraqis together against the Americans, another causes violent social fragmentation. The Shiites might support the Sunni but then, out of nowhere, the Shiites start to fight among themselves. Or, Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq suddenly start firing at each other in the streets.

Shadid emerges from this harrowing kaleidoscope with a rhetorical question from an Iraqi: “They came to overthrow Saddam.... Why are they fighting his victims?” Shadid never offers a direct answer to that question. Nonetheless, his intimate focus on Iraqi suffering and humanity is so compelling that Night Draws Near is, in the end, a very powerful argument against illegal wars of choice. Whatever the real interests behind this war are, Shadid makes it clear that they are not altruistic, and that cultural divisions stubbornly persist.

The scope and coherence of Robert Fisk’s colossal tome, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, are truly awesome. Fifteen years in the making, the book is the result of “more than 350,000 documents and notebooks and files,” and is based on half a lifetime of immense exertion and risk. There are few significant events in recent Middle Eastern history that Fisk has not witnessed first-hand: the Lebanese civil war, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the forensic discovery that helped prove the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the Iran–Iraq war, the civil war in Algeria, the 1991 Gulf War. Fisk interviewed Osama bin Laden no fewer than three times. He saw the fall of the Taliban first-hand, was almost beaten to death by a mob, and finally ended up in occupied Iraq.

Afghanistan, 1980, is where Fisk’s story really begins, and he carries with him into that theatre the memory of a book called Tom Graham, V.C., A Tale of the Afghan War—the volume had been presented by Fisk’s grandmother to Fisk’s father before World War I. Travelling the same route Tom Graham must have taken—through the Khyber Pass and the villages around Jalalabad—Fisk meets the Russians and their foes, the mujahedeen. His account of this poorly covered jihad past is illuminating, and we read it knowing that Americans will end up patrolling these same mountains, using some of the same tactics, two decades later. The Russians of the 1980s come off as frustrated occupiers, but do not seem as brutal as the Reagan-era US press portrayed them. We learn, for example, that Islam in Kabul was a class-conscious religion and that the Afghan communists were also Muslims—or at least quoted the Quran in public speeches.

Meanwhile, the US- and Saudi-supported mujahedeen, who today make up the warlord government of Afghanistan, turn out to be retrograde thugs. By 1980, near Jalalabad, they had “burneddown most of the schools in the surrounding villages on the grounds that they were centres of atheism and communism. They had murdered the school-teachers, and several villagers in Jalalabad told me that children were accidentally killed by the same bullets that ended the lives of their teachers. The mujahedin were thus not universally loved and their habit of ambushing civilian traffic...had not added much glory to their name.”

Fisk has an unparalleled talent for skewering the West for its appalling and vicious hypocrisy. One particularly important settling of scores arrives early on in The Great War for Civilisation. Fisk takes some time to compare his own record on Saddam with that of Donald Rumsfeld. While Fisk was exposing Saddam’s systematic use of torture, rape, and execution, Rumsfeld was helping rehabilitate the dictator. In December 1983, the future secretary of defence, then an emissary of the Reagan Administration, was shaking Saddam’s hand. Not long after, the US was extending credits and providing material for the production of biological weapons. In 1990, Saddam executed a British journalist named Farzad Bazoft; as a little joke he forced a British diplomat to inform the prisoner of his fate.

Fisk wrote damning stories about Saddam again and again, causing the Iraqi embassy in London to complain about his biased journalism. Ironically, when Fisk opposed the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was accused by pro-war pundits of one-sidedness and wild, unfounded allegations—the very same language Saddam’s regime had used to dismiss Fisk’s hard-hitting reportage in the 1980s.

The crescendo of The Great War for Civilisation occurs with a return to Afghanistan, and Fisk reminding us that more than 3,000 civilians were killed during the coalition bombardments of 2001. As that occupation unfolds, Fisk watches the ominous signs of history repeating itself. America bombs a wedding party by mistake, guerrilla activity picks up, and an Australian special-forces operative tells Fisk: “This is a secret war.... And this is a dirty war. You don’t know what’s happening.” The special-ops man then goes on to lament the quality of the American occupation, saying, “Even their interrogations went wrong.”

The chapters on the Iraq debacle hardly need to be quoted; the disaster moves in fast-forward toward the void. Given the 1,100 or so pages of context that precede, it is numbingly awful to watch with Fisk as Iraq is bombed, looted, burned, and then as it spins out of control. By the elections of 2005, Fisk is exhausted, and his prose collapses into the scolding and moralizing style that is his Achilles heel. But the concluding message is arresting, yet almost subtle enough to miss: one last time, Fisk invokes the memory of his father and his father’s comrades when he compares the growing instability in the Middle East to 2nd Lt Bill Fisk marching through France on Armistice Day in 1918.

In modern-day Baghdad, the carnage takes a different, less organized form, but the state of affairs is truly apocalyptic. The few Western journalists left in Baghdad these days have armed cars to follow them to intervene in case of kidnapping attempts. The violence is so intense that it is impossible for Westerners to walk the streets—regular Iraqis are afraid to have them in their shops or be seen talking with them in public. I do not plan on returning to Iraq, partly because I have found it impossible to do much real reporting in such an atmosphere of corrosive fear. Meanwhile, Iraqis live with all of this and worse every day. Journalists who have left and maintain contact from the outside by phone watch their former colleagues come unhinged as each day brings more suicide bombings and their less well-publicized corollary: US air raids. A low-level civil war is already under way between the Sunni and Shiites. Where is it all headed?