War & Peace Quote by Robert Fisk

Fisk’s phrasing is doing two provocative things at once: granting the emotional legitimacy of vengeance while refusing the intellectual laziness that usually rides in on its coat-tails. “More than permissible” is an odd permission slip to hand out after mass murder, and that’s the point. He’s acknowledging the post-atrocity mood - the appetite for certainty, for a target - but he frames it as a conscious choice, not an instinctive truth. Even grief becomes a political instrument; Fisk is telling you to watch whose hands are on the lever.

The clause “so awesome in scale and death” is deliberately unsettling. “Awesome” here isn’t admiration; it’s the older, darker sense of awe: the kind that freezes thought and invites mythmaking. Fisk warns against that mythmaking even as he steps into it. The rhetorical question - “who recently has been declaring war on the United States?” - narrows the field to actors who have publicly authored hostility, not vague civilizational enemies. It’s a rebuke to the drift from perpetrator to proxy: from Al Qaeda to “the Arab world,” from a network to an entire faith.

Then he delivers the line people wanted to hear: “the compass points straight to bin Laden.” Fisk isn’t resisting attribution; he’s resisting the way attribution gets used to launder broader agendas. In the post-9/11 context, when “you’re either with us or against us” became a governing logic, Fisk’s intent is to separate culpability from opportunism. Name the attacker clearly, he suggests, so the naming can’t be exploited to justify everything else.