Το τελευταίο βιβλίο του Robert Fisk έχει τίτλο "The great war for Civilisation". Γράφτηκε πολύ πρίν ξεσπάσει ο πόλεμος στον Λίβανο. Και εξηγεί με απλά λόγια τα κίνητρα για τα όσα συμβαίνουν. Όχι τα προσχήματα ή τις αφορμές αλλά τα πραγματικά κίνητρα. Από μία τουλάχιστον πειστική και λογική επιχειρηματολογία. Στην κριτική του για το βιβλίο ο Augustus Richard Norton, καθηγητής Ανθρωπολογίας και Διεθνών σχέσεων στο παν/μιο της Βοστώνης αναφέρει:
"Στη Μέση Ανατολή ο Fisk παρατηρεί ότι οι άνθρωποι ζουν επανειλημμένως την προηγούμενη ιστορία τους, που τους τελευταίους δύο αιώνες διαμορφώνεται κατά ένα μεγάλο ποσοστό από τις ξένες δυνάμεις: ειδικότερα την Γαλλία και την Μεγάλη Βρεττανία, την επεκτατική Σοβιετική Ένωση και τον τελευταίο μισό αιώνα τις ΗΠΑ. Βέβαια, αυτό δεν έγινε για το μοίρασμα των συνόρων που καθορίστηκαν από συγκεκριμένα έγγραφα και συμφωνίες όπως αυτή του 1916, ή την διακύρηξη του Μπαλφούρ το 1917, σχέδιο του Λόρδου Mountbatten για το μοίρασμα της Βρεττανικής Ινδίας, περιοχή που όπως ξέρουμε ίσα που θα υπήρχε".
Και λίγο πιο κάτω υπάρχει το εξής διαφωτιστικό απόσπασμα:" Οι γάλλοι στρατηγοί, οι βρεττανοί διπλωμάτες και οι αμερικανοί "ιεραπόστολοι" έχουν ένα συγκεκριμένο σχέδιο: να επιβάλλουν τον δυτικό πολιτισμό στους λαούς της Μέσης Ανατολής και οι προσπάθειές τους είναι μέρος ενός συνεχόμενου "Μεγάλου πολέμου για τον πολιτισμό" που έχει ως στόχο του την κατάκτηση της περιοχής".
Ακολουθεί το πλήρες κείμενο που περιέχει και άλλα ενδιαφέροντα σημεία.

"In the Middle East, Fisk observes, "the people live their past history, again and again, every day," and for two centuries that history has largely been shaped by outside powers, especially imperial France and Britain, the expansionist Soviet Union and for more than half a century the United States. Certainly, were it not for the etching of borders associated with seminal documents--the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Lord Mountbatten's plan for the partition of British India--the region as we know it would scarcely exist. Yet even to conjure the region absent these decisive great-power intrusions is such a complex exercise in recursion that it serves to demonstrate how deeply implicated others have been in engraving the history of the region. Long after the echoes of Napoleon's cannons firing on the port of Alexandria in 1798 quieted, the profound changes that the invasion launched in Egypt and the wider Arab world reverberated. The deadly effects of "great wars" on the field of battle are clear enough, whether in the mud and slaughter of the Somme or on the hills of Maysaloun, where in 1920 the French vanquished the Arab struggle for an independent Syria. But it was what followed those episodes of mayhem that gave decisive shape to the modern Middle East: the drawing of boundaries, co-optation of local elites, economic subordination and the maneuvering of pieces on geopolitical chessboards. French generals, British diplomats and American missionaries were people with a plan. Their hubris, in Fisk's view, was to impose Western civilization on the people of the Middle East, and their efforts were part of a continuing "great war for civilisation" that has as its goal the conquest of the region.

Fisk sees no good coming from these ceaseless interventions. Indeed, he argues that campaigns in the "war for civilisation" may begin with optimism but typically end in catastrophe--America's invasion of Iraq in March 2003 being a case in point. The invasion was informed not only by a willful contempt for history and an extravagant display of ethnocentrism but also by a framework of best-case scenarios and fantasies untouched by empirical knowledge of Iraq, as the case of the Iraqi Shiites illustrates. If a new Iraq emerges from the current violent stalemate, it will look very little like the exemplary democratic state that Bush or his chorus of war-boosters envisaged. In fact, it is likely to be closer to the Iranian model of "Islamic democracy," provided it does not descend further into civil war. Fisk's cynicism about Anglo-American policy in Iraq is richly borne out by the legacy of deprivation, death and disorder that the invasion, and the preceding decade of sanctions and nibbling attacks by the United States and Britain, have yielded.

In the area around Basra in southern Iraq, to take one of many examples in Fisk's book, there has been a phenomenal epidemic of leukemia, breast and stomach cancer presumably connected to the introduction of an estimated 340 tons of radioactive material into the environment during the 1991 Gulf War. The source of the radioactivity? The profligate use of depleted uranium ammunition by the US military. In areas where the ammunition was fired in great quantities, cancer rates in children are as high as 71.8 per 100,000 compared with a regional average of 3.9 per 100,000. An Iraqi doctor reviewing his patient files tells Fisk, "Of fifteen cancer patients from one area, I have only two left. I am receiving children with cancer of the bone--this is incredible.... My God, I have performed mastectomies on two girls with cancer of the breast--one of them was only fourteen years old." Fisk calls this the product of "a policy of bomb now, die later."

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