26 July 2004Some articles of interestMy friend Jason Vest, who writes for The American Prospect and The Nation, among other periodicals, has produced two interesting articles lately. One, "Waiting to happen: why some military reformers weren't shocked by Abu Ghraib", is relevant to the first piece I wrote in this blog. The other, "The secret history of 'Anonymous'", is his unmasking of the CIA agent and author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, who has been doing the media rounds, including speaking as "Anonymous" on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme last weekend. A head rollsYes, someone's got his come-uppance for the British "intelligence failure" concerning WMD in Iraq: ... one of the officials who exposed the political pressure Downing Street was exerting -- and evidently still is -- on the intelligence services (from The Sunday Times, London)! CorrigendumThanks to a friend from Baltimore, Ken Anderson, author of "The bonehead compendium", for pointing out my error in concerning the initial censorship of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" (reviewed below). The parent company Disney, run by Michael Eisner, caused the furore by refusing to distribute the film. It eventually sold the distribution rights to its subsidiary Miramax, controlled by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, with which it has been having a long-standing argument about splitting up. Miramax then found distribution partners in Lions Gate, a Canadian company, and the Weinsteins scored some political points by attacking Disney's cowardice. Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org 21 July 2004ACEPHALE.ORG REVIEW OF MICHAEL MOORE'S "FAHRENHEIT 9/11" AND OF CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS'S "THE LIES OF MICHAEL MOORE": AN ESSAY ON THE STATE OF THE LEFT IN AMERICAMichael Moore's recently released exposé of the Bush administration's "war or on terror" and invasion of Iraq -- "Fahrenheit 9/11" (no apologies to Ray Bradbury) -- is controversial in the best and broadest sense of the word. With a few important reservations, I think this prevalent quality is the film's greatest strength. I am not speaking of how its scheduled American distributor Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, suddenly dropped it and picked it up again after it unexpectedly won the Palm D'Or in Cannes, only to see it declared blasphemy by right-wing pundits, some of whom did not even see fit to watch it. I mean rather that this film provokes productive political discussion. If I had to identify a single overarching theme in the film, it is the contrast between the life of the unassuming people Moore interviews and that of George Bush; and if had to identify the single most important propagandistic effect of the film, it would be how it informs the audience that other people, with whom it may identify, share misgivings about the Bush administration's policies, which previously these people kept fairly private. However, it is Moore's casual approach to which of perhaps several audiences he is addressing and his informal conversational style that are bound both to win him many supporters and land him in much trouble. For making assumptions about the interests of the "common" person can prove patronising, and being a good conversationalist and humorist does not necessarily make one the most disciplined and rigorous interviewer for a work that is advertised as a "documentary". There is politically constructive criticism that can be levelled against Moore's barely contained anti-Bush tirade and rallying cry for other opponents of the regime. Nevertheless, I think one has to be pretty pedantic, not to mention a little detached, to think that the flaws of this film thoroughly poison its substance or vitiate its purpose. Moore's baseball-cap-and-Budweiser populist attitude has slightly annoyed me on past occasions for being a simplistic assessment of the virtues of "the people" and the demerits of latté-drinking cosmopolitan leftist intellectuals. This has involved his ill-advised endorsement of home-grown hero types like one-time presidential candidate General Wesley Clarke, which has put Moore in league with such sober political analysts as Madonna -- not a far cry from Britney Spears's unqualified support for George Bush, which Moore shows in "F 9/11". It has also involved railing against Nation-reading liberals, whom he accuses of concentrating too much on causes celèbres, like ending sanctions against Cuba and saving death row inmate and former Black Panther Mumia Abu Jamal. There may be some truth in the latter, since few groups are more obsessed with their political credentials than middle-class liberals, the sort that would only be seen with a copy of The Guardian in the UK, even if they only ever read the reviews and obits. However, Moore comes perilously close here, as in "F 9/11", to stereotyping both his "people" and the self-styled "Left" -- not doing justice to the diversity of the former, particularly -- and yet conveniently (if not consciously) playing both sides. As it happens, a former commentator for The Nation, Christopher Hitchens, has written one of the most troubling critiques of Moore's film, arguing in large measure that Moore's appeal to common sense is dangerously "dishonest and demagogic". After laying out my own commentary on "F 9/11", I consider the points Hitchens attacks in his review "Unfairenheit 9/11: the lies of Michael Moore". I then attempt to frame some question for the left, broadly speaking, in terms of both Moore's and Hitchens's arguments and presuppositions. This exercise it meant partly to satisfy my concern for the reactionary and elitist tendency Hitchens seems to have taken since the murderous acts on that infamous day; for he used to write profoundly and with great passion about so many political issues -- not just of the great and the good, but also of the small and the humble. Between Flint and a bad placeThe title sequence is defining: Moore presents a series of video out-takes of Bush and members of his cabinet being groomed and made up for television appearances, all of them, especially Bush, evidently conscious of their own bodily comportment. A haggard-faced Attorney General John Ashcroft tells the make-up crew to "make me look young". Moore thereby sets up the contrast between the utter pretence of America's political elite and the soldiers, parents of soldiers, school kids, pensioners and protesters he interviews throughout the film. The skilfully manufactured public image certainly withers before the raw and effusive testimony of most of the interviewed. (Needless to say, no one in the Bush administration consented to be interviewed for "F 9/11".) One would have to have the emotional sensibility of a mushroom not to be moved to pity and righteous indignation by some of the soul bearing presented in the film, such as Lila Lipscombe's reading her son's final letter home before the helicopter in which he was travelling was shot down over Karbalah. Such a glaring distinction between the exploitative dishonesty of the political leaders and the grieved, often beseeching honesty of their subjects supplies its own argument, as much as anything does. Unfortunately, Moore expects the audience to make a good many further, more or less probable inferences.
While Michael Moore may simply have been taking cheap shots in quoting Bush's terrible diction and malapropisms, in the context that he weaves, they take on a grim significance that even he does not intend. Returning to the substance of the film, Moore's thesis seems to me to be as follows. George W. Bush stole the Presidential elections in the year 2000 (a fact documented elsewhere, such as here). In the first eight months of his presidential term, he was confronted by loss of Republican control of Congress, declining poll ratings and at least half the electorate angry at how he had taken office. His strategy for dealing with these problems was to adopt an attitude worthy of a "hands-off" CEO / investor, though not of a politician. This was celebrated by his admirers as his ability to "delegate". His minders knew that his appearing in public to make political pronouncements would probably only further damage his reputation, and his business managerial style allowed him to spend a lot of time away from Washington, where he could be seen shooting golf and clay pigeons and stalking game in the woods, like the Midwestern, middle-class white guys to whom he so appealed in the election campaign. When al-Qa'idah terrorists struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, Bush and his colleagues seized the opportunity to present the unelected President as an aggressive leader and a statesman and to implement plans they had previously devised for reconfiguring the Middle East. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, the country that had (sometimes uneasily) been succouring al-Qa'idah's chief Osama bin Laden, because he had to be seen to be doing something to bring the perpetrators to justice, but he committed neither the military manpower nor the subsequently the economic aid to secure Afghanistan from the Taliban or al-Qa'idah, let alone expend the energy to take bin Laden dead or alive. Afterwards, when he told a reporter that "I don't spend much time on him", a scene which Moore also captures, he says it is as though annoyed by the impertinence of the question. If Miller is right about Bush's emotional dispositions, this tone probably means that he means it. The invasion of Iraq -- partly for vengeance, partly for strategic control of petroleum -- was Bush and Company's true aim, which they accomplished on false pretences, successfully to the extent that they have been able to enrich themselves and their close associates in the short term. At the same time, they exploited the fear of further attacks by foreign terrorists, presumably including a linkage to Iraq, so as to prosecute their war. Meanwhile they have done very little materially to protect Americans from attack at home, though they have used the pretext of "security" for clamping down on the civil liberties of Americans and foreigners alike. The upshot has been that since September 11, 2001, thousands and thousands of persons, from Afghan villagers to US soldiers, have died in vain, while Bush and his cronies, in well trained manner, have avoided being held to account for their misdeeds. To my mind, this story, be it entirely supported by the facts or not, is at least fairly consistent. However, I have so far failed to mention some of the loose threads Moore leaves dangling, and I think that Moore was overly ambitious in trying to make a film about so many complicated issues. A well founded exposé with extended first-person testimony about the Bushes' connections with the Saudis would have made a better documentary. Another topic -- which I think Moore's lack of reference to is strange -- could have been the role of the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in formulating Bush's foreign policy.
I think that Moore substantiates two points fairly well. Moore makes a grave error here, be it deliberate or careless: by failing to mention the Clinton administration's countenancing the Taliban (though one might guess correctly, given the chronology), he creates the impression that the Bush administration's attitude toward the Taliban and al-Qa'idah up till 9/11 and seemingly again after the invasion of Iraq is part of a Texas-focused plot secretly to aggrandise a small coterie at everyone else's expense. It is one thing to say, as I think Moore does rightly, that Bush and Co. care little about the effect of war, tyranny and terrorism on most Afghans and Americans and can smell a fat business opportunity a mile away; it is quite another to insinuate that all the current problems of the Middle East -- or more correctly, West and South-West Asia -- are the result of a conspiracy whose axis of evil runs between Bush's estate in Texas and Cheney's in Wyoming. In this context, Halliburton's being awarded subcontracts to the eventually finalised Unocal deal, which Moore documents, should be seen as a shrewd business move, once the current administration had the political advantage. As Cheney said in 1998, before he was VP, "Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is". The board of directors of Occidental Petroleum could have said much the same. Moore's failure to provide any historical context broader than events since Bush's theft of the election, with the exception of the Bushes' connections with Saudi Arabia, presents a constant problem in the film, and it could lead the naive or ill-informed viewer to believe that the Republican leadership is to blame for everything, while the Democratic leadership is angelic. Indeed, the film did bring the conspiracy freaks out: when I went to see it, a group was handing out leaflets at the door of the cinema that suggested that the film did not go far enough in indicting the Bush administration and asked 20-odd (sometimes unanswerable) questions based mainly on circumstantial evidence, of the sort that childishly seek a god-like prime mover behind all the evils of the world. As for the prior point, the Bushes' close relations with the Saudis, I think this is one of the film's important strengths, though again Moore is sloppy in his presentation. While the United States had long recognised Saudi Arabia to be an important source of oil, it was really only after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the election of President Reagan in 1980 that the US seriously considered the particular strategic importance of Saudi Arabia and began to trade arms to it. The senior Bush was, as is well known, Reagan's second during both terms in office. George Bush had already helped fund the training of Saudi special forces while Director of Central Intelligence in 1976, when he also sold many of the CIA's assets to Saudi businessmen. During this period that he, already an investor in oil, cemented cordial relations with numerous rich Saudis and persuaded some of them to partake in his various ventures, including the Carlyle Group holding company, which was involved in weapons production and procurement among diverse other goods and services. These were to pay dividends to himself and his sons for the next three decades. While Bush senior was VP, the elite circles he travelled in still regarded Osama b. Laden as the courageous young son of a wealthy Saudi family who was fighting the nefarious Red Army in Afghanistan. Osama was the prototype for the mujâhidîn portrayed in Rambo II -- who feared no man, only God -- and it probably seemed natural for the anti-Communist Bushes to court so eminent a family, which was involved in the lucrative building trade. Moore is right to expose the studiously avoided fact that the present Saudi Ambassador to the US, Bandar b. Sultan b. Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, is fondly known as "Bandar Bush", that Saudi Arabian businessmen have given hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bushes since Bush Senior was DCI (Moore's precise figures are disputable) and that Saudi direct investment in the US is enormous. I do not mean to repeat Moore's catalogue of connections between the Bushes and the bin Ladens in particular, suffice it to say that even when he is handling circumstantial or hearsay evidence, his cases are at least plausible. This is the case, for example, when he asserts that Saleh b. Laden and J.R. Bath bailed George Junior out of the failed Arbusto 76 oil project, which is based in large part on the testimony of disaffected partner Charles W. "Bill" White. He is also right to point out that normal procedure would have required that federal authorities to question or subpoena members of Osama b. Laden's family after 9/11, not specifically permit three flights to transport them and several other eminent Saudis out of the US two days after the event. The New York Times reported on September 4, 2003, that an official in the White House had approved their safe return to Saudi Arabia, though the official in question was none other than Richard Clarke, Bush's terrorism advisor at the time and later author of Against All Enemies, whom Moore interviews as a friendly witness against Bush. There can be little doubt that this was done at least as much to save the Bushes from embarrassment as to save the bin Ladens from retribution. Not one of the latter has been called to testify. Moore's empathy shines through in various parts of the film, especially when he is talking to talking to people on the street or in their kitchen, but this is also responsible for some of the film's flaws. His remembrance of the destruction of the World Trade Center is powerful without exploiting those who can non longer speak: we see nothing of the hellish fire or pulverising mass that took 3000 lives, only the fearful, caring and brave reactions of those who witnessed this massacre. In the prolonged series of images of the aftermath, he seems also to convey the ultimate futility of global capitalism with its greatest monument reduced to dust and aerial flotsam. He very deliberately returns to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, scene of his first film, "Roger and me" (about his futile attempt to interview General Motors boss Roger Smith after massive redundancies in the company), where he introduces us to Lila Lipscombe, the assistant director of the local unemployment compensation office. He gradually provides us with a biographical profile of the woman before revealing that she lost her son Michael to war in Iraq, which has turned this grieving mother into a vehement protestor against the war. Moore is clearly at home among his "people", but his chatty manner leads him here, and elsewhere, to ask leading questions -- another flaw of the film as a "documentary". While I do not think that he would have got substantially different answers from anyone in the film if he had asked more open-ended questions -- or that he insinuated anyone's responses into a context with which they would have disagreed, were they aware or it -- he is intelligent enough, in addition to being trained as a journalist, to know that he should have been more rigorous in such a potentially incendiary exposé. I think that Moore's latent confusion about which audience he is addressing through this film is evidence that his informal style is not a deliberate ploy, but is rather his uncritical, white and working-class populism getting the better of him. When he seems to be agreeing with Lipscombe, saying "It's a great country, isn't it...?" about the US, he sounds condescending, despite his hailing from the same town. Moore enjoys the private ironies -- or ironies secretly shared -- his position as an internationally recognised figure allows him. I think of the episode of his short-lived series "TV nation", hounded from one network to the next in the US, in which he and the commander of the right-wing, self-styled Michigan militia in Flint celebrate the Fourth of July together by decorating a cake to look like the American flag and then eating it. At some points, he seems to be pandering, consciously or subconsciously, to such post-industrial, white, blue-collar viewers, as when he depicts the countries making up Bush's fatuously named "coalition of the willing" with ethnic stereotypes (a point raised in Robert Jensen's critique of "F 9/11"); certain white American audiences are likely to think foreigners and brown people are funny per se, but then these audiences are not the butt of the joke. Having pointed this bias out, it is probably worth pointing out that he is equally unfair to everyone: while the Palauans are portrayed wearing grass skirts and the Costa Ricans driving ox-carts, the Dutch are represented sucking on a bong and the Romanians by Nosferatu. So there may be cheap laughs all around. I think they are amply made up for by the evidence he present of how that unemployment sump known as the "poverty draft" is biased against ethnic minorities in the States. However, it is with respect to this point that Moore seems to be addressing a different audience: toward the end of the film, he says of the poor who make up the better part of the military ranks, "They serve, so that we don't have to". This sounds like US news anchorman Dan Rather's use of "we", referring to a predominantly white, middle-class audience who get their news mainly from the New York Times and network television. He then holds white anti-war activists aloft as examples of the oppressed. One is left wondering whether the film is intended for such viewers, who already constitute the better part of politically empowered Americans (and the most likely to vote) or is intended as a rallying point for the very people with whom he expressly identifies and whose stories he is trying to weave together, people who are relatively politically dejected -- indeed, often disenfranchised, as Moore himself points out in his coverage of the scandal in Florida in 2000. Fortunately, one does not see Michael Moore changing persona with different classes of interviewees -- for example, US Congressmen and black high school students in Flint -- unlike the two Marine recruiters he tails in a poor part of town, who start talking black street slang in an attempt to pull kids in. Moore does not seem guilty of this connivance, at least. Moore's own background and career must figure into our considerations. He is the son of an assembly line worker at the General Motors Plant in Flint. He became politically active while in high school. He attended the University of Michigan briefly, but chose instead to pursue a career as a journalist with the Michigan Weekly, one of the many renowned American "alternative" hebdomaires. He then landed a job at Mother Jones, the left-liberal monthly, where he constantly butted heads with the editors about what he perceived as their condescending and pedantic attitude toward popular struggles for social justice around the globe, leading eventually to his forced resignation with a compensation package. His subsequent career in film and television, seeded in part by his deal with Mother Jones, culminated in his seething excoriation of over-read liberals published in The Nation in 1997 (reposted here), in which he contended "'the people' are already way ahead of 'the left'". The problem is that from his current position, Moore increasingly makes extravagant and unlikely claims on behalf of "the people" -- the essence of the populism I ascribe to him. Moore travels between (at least) two very different worlds -- between Lake Superior and the Riviera -- and while this is the lot of many of us in our highly mobile post-modern global economy -- and no one has ever lived the life of a class of ethnic stereotype -- to do as Moore does and maintain any ethical or political integrity requires a considerable measure of both introspection (even self-criticism) and active (sometimes fraught) political interaction. It is not clear that Moore has either this capacity or this experience. (Hiring someone to dress up as a "corporate crime-fighting" chicken, as he did in his show "TV nation", and making tough group decisions about strategy and budget for some political cause are not actions of the same kind.) These are the sources of his evident confusion about his political audience. The problem is compounded when he asks apparently rhetorical questions in "F 9/11" and fails to answer them (what I call "von-Dänikenism", after the Swiss UFO nut case) or conjectures, however plausibly, and then treats his conjecture as the premise for a further argument. He is assuming that the audience is already on his side, or at least willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. In a class of his ownChristopher Hitchens quit the magazine Moore so despises for different reasons. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he became convinced that many on the left, especially the academic left, represented in such magazines as The Nation, reacted in the much-touted "knee-jerk" liberal way against American military intervention first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, apparently too eager to continuing enjoying their Olympian perspective on world affairs and their identity as the perennial unofficial opposition. (His essay "Wake up, peaceniks!" and his exchange with Katha Pollitt in The Nation are valuable reading.) There is some irony in this stance, since Hitchens comes from exactly these ranks of leftish litterati and is among the most erudite of them. Indeed, he seems to have sought this life out. Granted that direct comparisons can be unfair and that amateur psychology is easy, I think that illustrating the differences between his life and Moore's may be helpful in understanding their respective current political attitudes and in sorting out some of the problems of left-wing politics in the United States. In some respects Hitchens's life may have been harder than Moore's. He is the son of British naval officer who left the family while Christopher was still young, and it was Christopher who, while at university, had to collect the body of his suicide mother from Athens, where is had been found, some days old, in a hotel room. He wrote, "Family life pretty much ended then". In contrast with Moore, however, he was educated in a private school and at Oxford. Both he and his younger brother Peter went into journalism. Peter was briefly a Trotskyist, but finding contempt for his comrades, now writes for the right-wing Daily Telegraph (UK). Chris sought his fortune in the United States, where he fell in with the "Beltway bandit" set of Washington reporters and lives as an ex-pat. The oppositional intelligentsia are the only "people" he as ever known. (Perhaps I feel as though I can write about these issues with some conviction, since I myself have some experience moving about as a child, of trying to find life elsewhere and of finding myself isolated in politically and morally hostile territory.) Before pursuing the relevance of Hitchens's biography, however, I wish to consider his critique of "Fahrenheit 9/11", which he subtitled "the lies of Michael Moore". He sums Moore's assertions up this way. First, the Saudi elite in general and the bin Ladens in particular are very tightly knit with the Bushes. Second, Saudi capital is hugely important to the US economy. Third, the oil and gas company Unocal, for which Dick Cheney's Halliburton was a materials supplier, was willing to negotiate business deals with the Taliban of Afghanistan. Fourth, after 9/11, the Bush administration did not commit enough institutional intelligence of armed force to pursuing the masterminds of the terrorist attacks residing in Afghanistan. Fifth, the Afghan contribution to the later war in Iraq was risible, since Afghanistan is effectively a US protectorate. Sixth, the lives of American soldiers were wasted fighting in Afghanistan, since no justice, either for Americans or for Afghans has come of it. Question of patently snobbish ad hominem jabs aside for the moment -- illustrated by Hitchens's indirect comparison to Moore to reactionary blowhard Rush Limbaugh and his rhetorically wondering whether "Moore is as ignorant as he looks" -- Hitchens thinks that Moore grossly contradicts himself both on the significance of Saudi political and economic connections with the United States and on the topic of the US commitment to destroying the Taliban and al-Qa'idah. In the first case, he suggests that Moore wants both to assert that Saudi Arabia exerts enormous influence over US foreign policy and at the same time was unable or unwilling to prevent the US from overthrowing their Wahhabite political and religious cousins in Afghanistan or intervening to prevent the reconstruction of Iraq as an economic rival. In the second case, Hitchens believes that Moore wants both to denounce the US invasion of Afghanistan and to insist that it should have been more energetically prosecuted. In both cases, I think that Hitchens fails to see Moore's subtext -- though Moore hardly helps him -- and also makes a number of inferences of his own. In support of his first case, Hitchens points out that the Saudis maintained the closest diplomatic links with the oppressive Taliban, that they did not join Bush's "coalition of the willing" and that they did not permit those who did participate in the invasion of Iraq last year to use their country as a base of operations (though I note that they did in 1991, much to their political detriment). I think that subtext Hitchens misses is the political and economic opportunism of Bush as his associates -- not to mention the Saudis in particular. In other words, Moore is right to impute less-than-altruistic motives to all the major players. Hitchens contributes nothing to the historical context of the Bushes' relations with the Saudi elite, including the bin Ladens, which Moore does partially, and some of which can be explained by geopolitical strategy (brokered by Saudi-philes like Kissinger) and the rest by the words of Dick Cheney when he was boss of Halliburton, quoted above. Nor does he offer the answer that should be obvious to him, having harangued Saudi feudalism for so long: it may appear politically damaging for a US administration to support an oppressive fundamentalist Muslim regime in Afghanistan, if that regime is thwarting US political and economic interests, whereas it may seem politically advantageous to the Saudi monarchy to support such a regime, given the growing fundamentalist tendency among its own subjects, fuelled in part by cosy relations the US "have and have-mores"; conversely, it may appear politically profitable to oppose and even attack a despotic regime, especially if it thwarts or threatens the interests of US political-economic elites, given how every US school child has been fed lines about "freedom" and "democracy", whereas it may seem -- or palpably be -- politically disadvantageous to the Saudis to support the overthrow of an Islamist regime, let alone another predominantly Muslim Arab country. (In regard to the latter, the Islamists have the upper hand politically with their internationalist appeal.) None of these difference means that the American and Saudi upper classes will not try to maintain and expand their relative and mutual advantages both in the Mid-East and the US. In support of his second case, Hitchens contends that Moore has sneakily shifted ground (and perhaps continues to shift) on whether the US should have invaded Afghanistan and hunted bin Laden down or not. Even if one gives Moore the benefit of doubting some duplicity, Hitchens is on firmer ground than Moore here. However, I think that he accuses Moore of woolly-minded contradiction and cowardly indecision only as he himself lies bleeding to death, having already gored himself on one of the horns of an illusory dilemma. What I think Moore implies, if he does not say so in so many words, is that capturing Osama b. Laden and bringing justice and democracy to Afghanistan are very low on the Bush administration's list of priorities, which impugns their professed motives and casts doubt on both their interest and capacity to do so in any meaningful way. Even if Moore thought that the US should not have invaded Afghanistan, he might still be right to have thought that it is the wrong agent to do so. Hitchens seems to rely heavily in his assessment of the present situation upon tokens whose largely symbolic value is mainly redeemable in the West, such as there being a "emerging Afghan army" (under the tutorship and tutelage of US military forces), a point which he raises to counter Moore's claim that the Afghan contribution to the coalition in Iraq is essentially American, or the military command there being under the aegis of NATO (as small and frankly palliative international compromise). He states that economic and political development is taking place in spite of "hellish odds", as if the low levels of development aid and the warlord allies-of-convenience now running rampant beyond the Kabul-to-Kandahar green zone are comparable to a heavy blizzard sweeping down from the Hindu Kush. Such statements are akin to the US administration repeating the sound bite about its having a "road map" for peace in Israel-Palestine or point out the Palestine has or (oh dear!) had a secular prime minister, while at the same time ignoring or condoning Israeli intransigence in the region and doing less and less to disguise its own boredom with making any effort to establish Palestinian independence. These are indications that the White House cares about the issues only to the extent that such noises have propaganda effect and perhaps economic value, which is exactly the case I think Moore is trying to make about US intervention in Afghanistan. Hitchens's assertion that "local secular left" groups supported "regime change" in both Afghanistan and Iraq is another bit of cheap pseudo-internationalist tokenism: on the one hand, it should go without saying that support for regime change does not amount to support for US intervention, even qualified support of the latter, and on the other, old-fashioned CP-style groups modelled after Western left parties, usually with a deeply bourgeois leadership, are not an unqualified good thing, even if they do call for overthrow of a tyrant. Hitchens also seems to be flailing about for an argument when he tries to rationalise the US invasion of Iraq. He is right to criticise Moore for his choice of pre-war Baghdad film shots: Moore shows us smiling women in the market, children merrily flying kites and people getting married. If Moore's purpose it to help us to identify with the poor and oppressed of the word, from Kabul to Flint (as his purpose sometimes seems to be), then it does not behove him to draw such a stark distinction between Fun Park on Tigris and Hell Hole, Michigan. He suggests that Moore is wrong to say that Iraq was not responsible for the death of a single American by pointing out that it was a safe haven for the Palestinian terrorist leaders "Abu Nidal" (Sabri al-Banna) and of "Abu Abbas" (Muhammad Zaydan), the latter of whom orchestrated the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985, which resulted in the murder of the elderly, paraplegic American Jew Leon Klinghoffer. As terrible as this crime is, it is worth noting that such coddling of terrorists is not the same as the Iraqi government officially sanctioning Klinghoffer's murder, let alone plotting and carrying it out, and the United States likewise is a haven for international terrorists, especially of the Latin American kind, known or unknown to the authorities. The political rationale for keeping terrorists under one's wing can be implicit -- it would be unseemly to political allies to refuse them shelter or to expel them -- or explicit -- even if one has to acknowledge their crimes, one can claim that they are refugees from a greater evil (Zionism, Communism etc.). Hitchens writes that Iraq's government, alone among those of mainly Arab countries, celebrated the 9/11 attacks -- but then so did several over-educated, middle-class ostensibly bleeding-heart liberal Britons and Greeks stupidly or for self-congratulatory reasons in the archaeology department where until lately I did research. As much as this infuriated me, it did not lead me to conclude that they were complicit with the crime. Saddam likewise making cheap political capital of the event, particularly helpful given the dire straits his country was in, does not implicate him either. Hitchens also insists that the invasion of Iraq last year cut short Iraqi negotiations with the North Koreans for the acquisition of missile technology (not in itself a WMD, incidentally). Apparently, he has completely dismissed the work of the UN weapons inspectors from 1991 until 2002. Furthermore, he seems to be colluding with those who blatantly lied about the casus belli -- a sin now transparent to anyone who is not hopelessly unintelligent or abjectly partisan. More telling even than Hitchens's scrambling after scraps of elitist symbolic capital, as well as his evidently finding that the imperial gauntlet for dividing the world up according to vast abstractions fits him well, is the condescending way in which he dismisses Moore's observations about the military-industrial complex and the poverty draft, as if the importance of the concepts, which many American may still not understand, lies not in their utility for changing the world but is rather that he and his leftoid intellectual comrades discussed them first. He treats Moore's "discovery" that America is capitalist through and through with similar disdain. He thereby demeans the exploitation, oppression and enforced ignorance of millions of Americans in comparison with his elevation of such intangibles as the Afghan army flying its own flag, secular leftism and the promise of progress through enlightened US intervention abroad. This much at least Moore has to his political credit: he really does identify with a broad community of people, who are terribly affected by political decisions in their daily life, and he does seem to sympathise with their plight. Now that Hitchens has alienated himself from the litterati who were his "people" by arguing that most of them are irrational or political appeasers, he is politically and personally isolated, except for his "reluctant" support for George Bush, a man he once described as "abnormally stupid". My saying that Hitchens has no "community", as Moore has, is not to imply that he is friendless or does not feel fiercely loyal to certain persons. However, his loyalties surely colour his judgement of affairs in the Muslim world, since his best friend is Salman Rushdie, whom he protected while Rushdie was under the threat of a death edict from the ayatollahs in Tehran. One should recall that the threat was grave; several publishers of Rushdie's Satanic Verses were attacked and one killed. Therefore, Hitchens gives very short shrift to anyone he thinks does not take seriously the threat posed by, let alone give comfort to, the people he describes as "Islamo-fascists", a term which, be it accurate or not, he surely uses to challenge leftists. Thus it is easy to see how Hitchens has come to take politics very personally. Nevertheless, this stance should not be confused with "making the personal political". Here is the crucial difference between Moore and Hitchens. Moore has produced a film based on the lives of people with whom he can identify. Moreover, to the widely reported extent that he has deliberately or inadvertently appealed to both middle-class liberals, who are likely to despise Bush as much as he obviously does, and to white working-class and military families, who may not be so disposed, and has provoked discussion among them of important issues -- such as the poverty draft, the military-industrial complex and the extent to which foreign capital influences US foreign policy -- I think he has done everyone a political favour. The same cannot be said of Hitchens's alignment with the powers that be, in which discourse is restricted to how best to achieve their aims. This does not diminish my reservations or worries about Moore's films. The effect in the short term could be ridding the world of the Bush regime, which I for one do not think would be a bad result. However, an ill-considered and overly ambitious attack on the Bush administration is both asking for big trouble from the big boys -- especially the notoriously vindictive Bush -- which could backfire on Moore and his sympathisers, and it is not a well-founded recipe for long-term progressive politics. Politics of identity, scale and experienceWhat lessons can be derive from the foregoing comparison and critique? One issue seems to be the ambiguous value of Michael Moore's identity politics. At first blush, it might seem an unquestionable good that Moore has included "voices", as the jargon goes, that are not otherwise heard in discourse about American foreign policy. However, the fact that he seems sometimes to play their "voices" for laughs and condescend to them from a position outside their common experience does not bode well. Ultimately, it is not clear what political soil he is trying to till -- that of the majority of subjects in his film, or that of his audience, which may not necessarily coincide. It is incumbent upon activists to be aware of the fluidity of social identities in general at the present time in the US and elsewhere in the world and also of their own power to appropriate the means necessary to assume different identities in different situations. It has also become trendy to speak of the problem of "social exclusion" in left-liberal intellectual circles, as if social ills were entirely a problem of political participation, without regard to actual power. One result has been the valorisation of local and specific forms of political struggle for recognition in certain limited settings and simultaneously the disjuncture of these from other mechanisms of political decision operating at a different scale: hence the tension between a compartmentalised liberal "multiculturalism" on the one hand and a foreign policy still premised on national identity and ostensibly universal, but latently Western elite, values. The left may be condemned to the "parochial isolationism" Hitchens accuses Moore of only if it continues to debate only in terms of who is in and who is out of some idealised unified political process, since it may thereby contribute to the dichotomy in actual use of political power. Moore's seeming to flip-flop between giving voice to the disenfranchised and pandering to voting Democrats seems to illustrate the problem of two separate forms of political participation. The preceding perforce brings in another term: scale. Surely, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made is horribly clear that we cannot afford to frame our political opinions in terms of East / West, North / South, local / global. A war in a foreign land does not necessarily make the inner keep secure. Capitalism is global, both in principle and overwhelmingly in fact. It affects the majority of us in very much the same way, no matter where we are: war, famine, disease and meaningless death. AIDs, just to take one example, is simultaneously a political problem, an economic problem and an ecological problem; but the specific issues are localised differently -- from debates over intellectual property and economic sanctions, to question of diminishing work forces and sex tourism in certain parts of the world, to the impact it has on the ability of human beings to reproduce socially and live prosperously. Consequently, astute progressive political activists need to be sensitive to the scales of their analyses and critiques and to the forms of organisation appropriate for tasks at hand, rather than dichotomising fruitlessly between the local and the global, of which Moore and Hitchens may be guilty in their respective ways. This also means being aware of the way organisational linkages are made between different scales of activity. However, my political considerations must do better than exhortations to "do better", since this runs the risk of sounding like its own manner of moralising condescension, as though everything came down to a puritanical striving after an inner political "calling". Far from it. There is much in our world which has arisen and surrounds us that has little to do with our most earnest political causes. Network technologies, for example, have given us new tools and new metaphors for describing and explaining the complexity and variety of human social relations, amounting to consideration of overlapping scales. Hence, we have to live to learn from the situations which we sometimes unwittingly create. However, I fear making a fetish of the technology. It is one result of how we do and make things in social situations and of the work we do together. Our experiences are much more than applications of individual intellect. In today's world, we encounter and interact with people in variety of social settings which are also not entirely the product of our conscious efforts. There are collective identities that precede us and collective identities that we cultivate. Hence if we are to create rich and viable forms of identity which can counteract the totalitarian tendency of Empire, then we must simply learn to live with and among people. In the case of Iraq or Afghanistan, for instance, it is not a question of finding the right flag-waving allies among the warlords and armed factions, but rather of doing the honest work required to assist the people who time and again are left at the bottom of the heap, and build on this base, so that we will not be faced with the options which are constantly foisted upon us -- of permitting atrocities or committing them ourselves. Such subtle and concerted efforts would give substance and meaning to what the much celebrated turn-of-the-millennium, post-Zapatista "network of struggles". It would be a network of networks, in-deed. ("Fahrenheit 9/11", written and directed by Michael Moore, produced by Jim Czarnecki et al., original music by Jeff Gibbs and Bob Golden, cinematography by Mike Desjarlais; a Dog Eat Dog film.) Footnotes1. Miller makes this proposition in the 70-plus-page introduction to his book The Bush Dyslexicon, published in 2002, the name of which I think is unfortunate, since it sounds like the title of a joke book for own-back-patting registered Democrats. Judge his malapropisms for yourself here. [Back] 2. On the campaign trail in New Hampshire in 2000, Bush told an audience, ""I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family", apparently confusing "putting food on the table" and "feeding your family". [Back] 3. Bush's evident inability to empathise with anyone is a topic of a forthcoming essay on this blog, provisionally entitled "The Butcher of Crawford". [Back] 4. Readers may wish to compare these two stories posted by CorpWatch: Amazon Watch's "Enviros question Gore's commitment" (March 2000) and George Monbiot's "Bush's dirty war in Colombia" (originally in The Guardian, 22 May 2001). [Back] Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org 12 July 2004POSTSCRIPTLast night, BBC's Panorama television programme exposed flaws in the the British government's preparation and deceptions in its use of evidence of Iraq's WMD programmes, in advance of the Butler inquiry into exactly these issues, which is supposed to report finally this week. The key points of the BBC's investigation seem to me to be the following.
Sound familiar? Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org 10 July 2004A BRIEF TIRADESo the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that no evidence exists that Bush's White House attempted "to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgements related to Iraq's WMD capabilities". The Committee concentrated on the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002, put together by the various agencies of the National Intellegence Community (NIC), headed by the CIA. It blamed the CIA in particular for providing inaccurate and misleading information for the administration in its decision to go to war. The Committee also announced there had been a more encompassing "global intelligence failure". These conclusions don't wash clean. Even if you're looking the wrong way, it's at least likely that you'll stumble into the track beaten between the VP's office and Langley. I suppose we're to believe that this is just due to the social calls proper gentlemen like Cheney and Tenet pay to one another. Unfortunately, even for those who try to tread carefully, there are unavoidable footprints and smudges from dirty fingers everywhere. On the contrary, the available evidence of the combined analyses of the US intelligence services indicates that the CIA, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as the "INR") and other offices were under pressure from the White House from the beginning of the assessment to come up with a document useful for the administration's purposes. These agencies "failed" not so much because produced a wholly wrong and misleading report based on "systemic" failures and "group think", but rather, under White House influence, they deliberately produced a report from which the administration could pick juicy morcels. The CIA complied particularly eagerly with the White House's priorities in presenting the findings to the public. One has only to look at the NIE itself -- the declassified portions, of course -- though curiously, no one in the mass media seems to want to look. The best source for this information is still the report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, which compares the findings of the NIE to those of UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, the Iraq Survey Group and other US-led or international weapons inspections in Iraq (though see the primary sources). The CEIP makes three imporant remarks about the NIE, which follow -- or at least my gloss on them does. Firstly, it was produced in a record time of three weeks, in order to meet the administration's deadline for forcing the issue in debates in the UN Security Council. Secondly, the terms of reference given to the NIC were broader than those for any previous NIE, specifically not requiring consensus in all methodologies and conclusions, presumably so that the NIC could produce an authoritative document on short notice. Lastly, a compromise nevertheless resulted between expediency and support for foregone political conclusions, which was the inclusion of the largest set of dissenting opinions ever in an NIE. These mainly regarded Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. Among other things, the dissenting report specifically states that
When the CIA finally released a declassified version of the NIE in July of 2003, three months after the invasion of Iraq, it not only censored large portions of it -- crucially omitting the dissenting sections -- but it also changed qualified expressions of opinion to categorical statements of fact; for example, the first two words of "We judge Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs ..." were left out of the declassified version. This censored version was the CIA's own work, and it coincided neatly with the administration's priorities. Fortunately, heavily censored parts of the classified version were leaked to various organisations. One may find it edifying to compare the version for public consumption with the unedited version. The British Foreign Office and intelligence services produced two documents that the government could pick and choose from in order to make its case for going to war in Iraq: the first ("sexed-up") and second ("dodgy") "dossiers" of selective evidence on Iraq's WMD programmes. It has had to defend the first vigorously, however wrong it is, since the second was embarrassingly plagiarised from a twelve year-old PhD dissertation. The Americans were more efficient: they produced one document that, read one way, could be called "even-handed", and read by Bush and Co., could be gleaned to help make administration's case for war. But then the Americans have more practice at this sort of duplicity, the construction of the NIE being reminiscent of the "Team A" and "Team B" reports concerning Soviet military strength, supervised by George Bush Senior when he was Director of Central Intelligence under President Gerald Ford. The former estimated usable hardware; the latter constructed in imagination military machines out of assessments of available odds and ends. Needless to say, the Team B report was preferred by the Reagan White House. (For a recent discussion, see Chris Floyd's "Smells like team spirit" in Counterpunch.) Why Congress and the CIA seem to be going to such lengths to protect the Bush White House is a question that deserves further consideration. Suffice it to say here that saving face seems to be top priority all around -- among Republicans and Republican appointees, among members of Congress afraid to admit their own idiocy, and among those interested in preserving the prerogatives of the political establishment. Some might think it ironic that the current denizen of the Oval Office is so happy to bash the CIA, the company his father ran for a year -- a brief but clearly inventive period. Bush Senior acted as DCI because he is devious and cold-hearted, not because he was loyal the intelligences services. Remember too -- don't ever forget -- that Bush Junior is a ruthless and vindictive prick. As far as he's concerned, it's good if anyone other than him gets it in the neck; it's better if it's someone who's made him look bad. Feedback should be sent to me, Michael Lane, at mflane@acephale.org | ARCHIVESMarch 2006November 2005July 2005May 2005February 2005October 2004September 2004August 2004July 2004June 2004May 2004 |