The veteran Middle East reporter and author Robert Fisk has died in Dublin at the age of 74 after a suspected stroke. Fisk spent decades writing for the British newspaper The Independent, where he covered the Iranian revolution; civil wars in Algeria, the Balkans, Lebanon and Syria; U.S. sanctions against Iraq and the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Fisk wrote extensively about the Soviet and U.S. invasions of Afghanistan, and interviewed Osama bin Laden three times in the 1990s — one of the few Western journalists to do so. This is Robert Fisk speaking on Democracy Now! in 2008, just one month ahead of the presidential election.

Robert Fisk: “And we start talking, using phrases like 'victory.' We should be talking about phrases like 'justice for the people of the Middle East.' If you have justice, you can build democracy on it, and then we can withdraw all these soldiers. We’re always going — promising people in the Middle East democracy and packages of human rights off our supermarket shelves, and we’re always arriving with our horses and our Humvees and our swords and our Apache helicopters and our M1A1 tanks. The only future in the Middle East is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.”