Matt Damon stars in this tense chase thriller

Green Zone
dir Paul Greengrass. On general release from 12th March

Last year, British production company Working Title strayed beyond its natural comfort zone with dramas—notably Frost/Nixon and State Of Play—that failed to enhance parent company Universal’s bottom line. Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone might have been another such case until costly reshoots in late 2008 (its release was bumped all the way to spring 2010).

This troubled business context may be a factor in the transition from the property Working Title acquired—Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s account of the blundering postwar provisional authority in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City—into the film it has made. The marketers are trying hard to suggest a pulse-quickening military adventure from the director of The Bourne Supremacy, with a trailer that omits the words “Iraq” and “Baghdad”—and who can blame them? The Iraq war has proved toxic at the box office.

The surprise is that, for once, the marketing doesn’t lie. Green Zone really is a tense chase thriller, in which rogue CIA officer Brendan Gleeson sees the perils of Paul Bremer’s wholesale dismantling of Ba’ath power structures, and tasks American soldier Matt Damon with bringing in an Iraqi general the US authorities wish to eliminate. Happily, Greengrass’s signature gritty aesthetic—shaky handheld cameras, grainy night-vision footage—licenses the discerning cinemagoer to overlook the film’s bad faith to its source material and surrender to a big-screen guilty pleasure.

Broken, like its namesake. But is it worth mending?

Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” reviewed for Prospect by Matt Ridley, tells a story that will undoubtedly worry those who believe that our climate is warming—and infuriate critics (who are legion) of the book’s protagonist, Steve McIntyre.

If you haven’t come across him before, McIntyre was, in 2003, the first to publish a critique of the “hockey stick” temperature graph: the classic piece of evidence for man-made global warming used since 1998. McIntyre argued that the graph was fundamentally unsound by demonstrating, for example, that the model produced a “hockey stick” shape even when random data was put into it. There followed Montford’s story, of articles suppressed, data sets withheld and “warmist” malfeasance.

Since 2005 McIntyre has edited climateaudit.com, where he and a multitude of commenters dig for assumptions and oversights in every piece of climate science from a position of sceptical empiricism. His chief adversary is the Nasa climatologist Gavin Schmidt and his group of climate scientists at realclimate.org. (McIntyre has a maths degree, but no background in applied science.)

Climate science is one of the internet’s few debates (supposedly) to be based on hard evidence. Nevertheless, its participants contrive to misinterpret, bamboozle and irritate each other so successfully that they’re known to take leave of their data sets, as Gregory Norminton found out to his dismay when he tackled Lord Monckton in a debate at St Andrews University.

The British government, though, has made up its mind, and the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which aims to reduce CO2-equivalent emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, will begin charging £12 per ton for carbon emissions next year. And at the end of 2009, Prospect invited a number of leading thinkers to contribute their thoughts on climate change. For those concerned about global warming, and alarmed by the traction that the climategate and hockey stick stories have gathered, it’s worth looking at back at Prospect’s climate change special to see how much the climate change debate has brought attendant issues, such as waste, deforestation and resource geopolitics, into the public eye.

Does we still think of Scousers as irritable, light-fingered rogues?

Twenty years ago, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse created The Scousers. The usual scenario was that three brothers with tightly curled hair and moustaches would parade around in shell suits, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation. Things would be resolved by Ba (Barry), Te (Terry) or Ga (Gary) telling the others to “calm down, calm down.”

Joe McGann played one of The Scousers, Ba, for a while. He says the sketch was meant to be a skit on Brookside, but it wasn’t until after he left the programme that he realised it was compounding the Liverpudlian stereotype. There’s no doubt the image of the thieving Scouser has stuck. I’m not a Liverpudlian, but I’ve been working as a reporter for Radio 4 here for two years. When I go back down south, even I get jokes about how people should watch their wallets when I’m around. In a piece for Radio 4’s PM this Friday, I ask whether Liverpool’s year as capital of culture done anything to change the image of the Scouser.

Officials in Liverpool would like you to believe that the stereotype is long gone. The city council has commissioned Liverpool’s two universities to look into the impact of a year as European Capital of Culture on the city, and the study suggests Liverpool is now viewed as a proper tourist destination–capital of culture year (2008) attracted 9.7m visits and generated £753m for the local economy.

The study also claims that the national press has changed the way it reports on Liverpool. An analysis of national newspaper coverage suggests that the number of positive stories about the city increased by 71 per cent in the year leading up to 2008. The negative reporting on social issues, they say, has been replaced by a wealth of stories on the city’s culture and changing economy.

But maybe the culture was always here. Liverpool has the country’s oldest orchestra, The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, also known as “the Phil.” The city can also name six theatres, a vibrant music scene with countless venues, and two Premier League football clubs as part of its cultural heritage.

The Phil’s chief executive, Michael Eakin, says that a year as capital of culture has changed the perceptions of national reviewers, putting the orchestra firmly on the map. The Phil’s audience also agree that times have changed. One woman told me that when she first moved to Liverpool from the midlands five years ago, she got eggs thrown at her outside the concert hall. There are no egg throwers today, and she says she hasn’t seen them for a while.

But can the good PR work of 2008 last? Especially in bad economic times, when funding is tight? While classical music mags and papers like the Guardian sing the praises of this creative city, has Harry Enfield’s Scouser image stuck? Just as I’d finished making my piece for PM, I turned on Coronation Street to see Jackie Dobbs, Tyrone’s gobby, Scouse, ex-jailbird mother (played by Letter to Brezhnev’s Margi Clarke) having a catfight with her daughter-in-law. Oh dear. They do dough don’t de dough.

My conclusions: carnival is good when the number of participants isn’t grossly outweighed by the number of spectators, and when it’s easy for the “spectators” to join in (dancing and singing along). Carnival is good when the participants exhibit a range of skills from the absolutely minimal to the absolutely astonishing (the first being an invitation not to be intimidated—“Hey! I could do that!”—and the second an invitation to be amazed). Carnival is good when people of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, beauties and inclinations can get involved. Carnival is good when there’s too much to look at and everything’s mixed up and you have to sort it all out for yourself. Carnival is good when it dignifies and rewards all sorts of abilities—singing, jumping, laughing infectiously, writing the hit song of the carnival, wiggling your backside, standing on a soapbox praising Jesus or the local hardware store, frying salt fish over an oil drum in public, inventing symphonic arrangements for steel bands, building fabulously impossible things just for a day. Carnival is good when people try to outdo each other, and then applaud with delight those who in turn outdo them. Carnival is good when it gives people an alibi to experiment with being someone different. Carnival is good when it lets people present the best part of themselves, and be, for a little while, as they’d like to be all the time. Carnival is good when it gives people the feeling that they’re really lucky to be alive right now. Carnival is good when it leaves people feeling that life in all its manifestations is unbeatably lovely and touching and funny and worthwhile.

Now substitute “culture” for “carnival.” There’s a vision for the future of culture.

Shotguns: More effective than 999?

Nigel Warburton wrote in the February issue of Prospect that taking the law into your own hands, by beating up people who were attacking your family, for example, was not compatible with living in civil society. But people continue to do so, like the Sussex pub landlord who appeared in today’s papers saying he regretted not executing two burglars he held at gunpoint.

According to reports, as soon as he heard noises, Simon Thomas got his shotgun out, loaded it, and pointed it at the villains from a first-floor window. Once they were “begging for their lives,” he considered the situation sufficiently under control to call the police. They took 50 minutes to arrive, by which point the intruders were long gone. When the police are so useless, is it acceptable to do what he did?

“If push came to shove I would have fired the gun,” Thomas told reporters. “In some ways I wish I had done, to stop them.”

A rather extreme measure, admittedly, and he may have been overkeen to have a go with his gun: he describes himself as “a firearms man,” though he added: “I don’t want people to think I’m some kind of gun nut.” However, Thomas still had no faith in the police to protect him, and it turned out he was right to.

Nigel Warburton argues that “the risks of condoning retributive measures carried out by individuals are great, not least because, as American judge and theorist Oliver Wendell Holmes has pointed out, ‘detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.’” This is an excellent point—unless, of course, the “the uplifted knife” is a more reliable presence than the uplifted truncheon, or, after that, the uplifted gavel. When people feel that they’re more likely to be attacked than defended, they’re likely to try and defend themselves.

For the Wendell Holmes argument to work, people like Simon Thomas would have to have a better opinion of the police force. Otherwise the cause of “detached reflection” is quite unlikely to hold much interest for them—even the ones who don’t have to deny gun-nuttery.

Kathryn Bigelow arriving at the Oscars on Sunday

I’ve always been a huge Kathryn Bigelow fan. Near Dark is certainly the greatest redneck vampire film ever made, and who can forget the flaming gasoline-wielding “ex presidents” in Point Break? I even liked the gun fetishist stalker in Blue Steel, so when The Hurt Locker came out last year, I was very excited. Pretty much as soon as it arrived in London, I called up my friend Jonah and off we went to see it in Piccadilly Circus.

Jonah and I met in Gaza. We are both journos who have spent a fair bit of time embedded with the US military in Iraq, which I guess either makes us the perfect audience or the worst audience for this film. I hate to say that when we came out of the movie, we were both disappointed.

Let me begin by saying what Bigelow did get right. The film, shot in Amman, Jordan, looks like Baghdad. The dirt, the dust, the omnipresent brown, the ugly concrete block architecture, the empty and garbage-strewn boulevards, the trailers on the American bases, all look real. The handheld 16mm cameras make it feel like documentary footage. The relationships between the soldiers are spot on. There is a wonderful scene where reckless cowboy Sergeant James spots targets for the sniper rifle-wielding Sergeant Sanborn. The two had just had a big fight but they work together with the practiced professionalism that is the hallmark of the US military. In combat, the dispute, the disagreements are forgotten. Each man does his job, supports his comrade.

Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base, and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops. But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and misunderstanding.

Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.

I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with those of the Iraqis.

Maybe my criticisms are trivial and meaningless to those without experience in Iraq. I’m glad Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar. She is a great director with stunning command of film language but, I have to say, The Hurt Locker gives an inaccurate portrait of the Iraq war.

Mikhail Khodorvkovsky: Russia's Bernie Madoff, or a victim of the state?

Russia faces its first major test since the Duma took the unprecedented stop of ratifying Protocol 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, in January. The European Court of Human Rights has now begun hearing the case of Yukos, once Russia’s largest oil company, which was at the centre of one of the biggest corporate scandals in the country since the fall of communism.

Faced with charges of $27bn-worth of tax evasion from the Russian government, the company’s executive were arrested and the business was broken up and sold to state-owned enterprises before finally being liquidated in 2007. Although many in the west had voiced their concerns over the seizure of former state assets in the early 1990s that heralded the rise of the oligarchs in Russia, many even within the Kremlin ranks were shocked at the handling of the Yukos affair. As a consequence Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the company and Russia’s richest man before his high-profile arrest on his private jet in 2003, has become a symbol for those angry at the perceived corruption and politicisation of the Russian Federation’s justice system.

In the past the Kremlin has strongly defended its stance, claiming Khordorkovsky abused his proximity to Soviet power structures to facilitate the purchase of state assets at large discounts in the chaos that followed the implosion of the USSR. On a state visit to France last year Prime Minister Vladimir Putin likened the imprisoned oligarch to Al Capone and disgraced American financier Bernard Madoff, noting: “Mr Madoff in the United States received a lifetime, and no-one sneezed.”

Their accusations, however, have never been put under international scrutiny and this has left room for Khordokovsky’s supporters to claim the charges against him have been falsified in order to facilitate a de-facto expropriation of Yukos assets. Now, with the opening of proceedings in Strasbourg, both sides will finally have the opportunity to put their case to the international community.

A quick glance at the statistics might suggest that the odds are hardly stacked in the Kremlin’s favour. Of the 219 cases from Russia heard by the court last year, the judgment went against the government on 210 occasions. This is good news for the representatives for Yukos who are seeking $98bn in compensation for what they call the “unlawful, disproportionate, arbitrary and discriminatory” actions of the Russian government.

The long-running row has taken on new significance since the Duma voted to sign Protocol 14 in January. The protocol gives the Committee of Ministers the right to bring a member state before the Court of Human Rights for non-compliance with the court’s judgments. Such international pressure would draw unwelcome focus on the glacial pace of legal reforms in the country and, more broadly, would damage Russia’s reputation as a business destination, which has already been dented by the TNK-BP and British Council disputes in recent years.

It is worth noting, however, that the current case does not necessarily bear comparison to previous ones as the claim is the largest ever filed with the court—and the political stakes are far higher. Though it may sound perverse, that it has got this far illustrates at least in part President Dmitry Medvedev’s successes in thawing the traditional hostility of Russian politics towards international institutions. It is worth questioning whether Protocol 14 would ever have been passed under a Putin-led administration.

If the government’s case is found wanting, it would be a major embarrassment to a president who has repeatedly stated that legal reform is a key priority for his administration. The weight of responsibility on the judges in Strasbourg is therefore clear: a judgment against the government would be seen as a blow to Medvedev’s credibility and could threaten to derail the modest progress he has already made. But their true duty lies in illustrating the value of open and independent legal process—since any embarrassment suffered would merely be a reflection of how far short of this the defendant has fallen.

Point Omega: oddly brilliant

Point Omega
by Don DeLillo (Picador, £14.99)
Don DeLillo’s short, very odd but oddly brilliant new novel is set in just two locations. One is a room in a New York gallery where an unnamed man obsessively watches a video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of repeat screenings of Hitchcock’s film slowed down so that it takes a whole day to run. The other is a house in the desert, to which neocon intellectual Richard Elster has repaired, pursued by a young filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants him to talk to camera about his experiences advising the Pentagon in the run-up to Iraq.

Little happens in either storyline—or little that would conventionally be called “action”—but that of course is DeLillo’s point: this is a novel about the “slowing of motion,” and the kind of watching and thinking that become possible when the usual time constraints cease to apply. DeLillo’s prose rises to the challenge: both the snail-paced footage and the desert scenery are mesmerisingly described. Does the novel offer any profound insights into American foreign policy? Probably not, other than functioning as a kind of anti-argument, a wholesale rebuttal of the “overarching ideas and principles” that Elster, in his role as “conceptualiser” of war, was required to supply.

This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect

Hope via small business: micro-credit charity founder Vashti Richards with local businesspeople in Nepal

Just how little improvement millions of dollars of aid actually brings to poor countries has vexed policymakers for decades. How can a country like Sierra Leone receive some £50m annually in British aid, yet its healthcare system be so bad that one in six of its mothers still dies in pregnancy or childbirth? Alex Renton’s piece in the forthcoming April issue of Prospect tries to find out—but in the meantime, news of an innovative microfinance scheme called Deki offers hope that things won’t always be this bad.

Microfinance is one of the ways around unscrupulous elites who divert aid into their own coffers. It works by arranging loans for poor businesspeople. The foreign lender makes a contribution of, say, £10 via a local microfinance company, which then administrates the loan and repayment. Interest rates are a lot lower than local moneylenders’ and there’s no shortage of investors.

Deki, though, adds a new incentive by introducing lenders to borrowers via a website where each applicant has a profile picture, accompanied by a short pitch for their business. The lender is free to browse amongst the needy before deciding where their loan will be put to best use. Once it’s done, they can keep track of the improvements their money is making. Like most microfinance schemes, Deki’s local partners only lend to women: research has shown that men are more likely to default.

Oxfam-meets-Dragons’ Den is a strong brew. The scheme may not twang the heartstrings in quite the same way as traditional NGO and charity campaigns—which tend to focus on headline-grabbing privation—do, but using the internet to link the haves with have-nots in mutual interest is an excellent idea. It provides a real incentive to view aid as investment—which is what those millions of dollars need to be if they are ever to have a lasting benefit.

Not good foundations for economies

Here in the depths of the bust, it is tempting to feel nostalgia for the boom. Let’s not. The bust has been brutal but the boom wasn’t so great either. The British economy actually grew more in 1979, the year of the “winter of discontent,” than it did in 2006 at the height of the bubble. Most of the western economies did better in the late, unlamented 1970s than they ever have since.

For the past 30 years, the world’s engine of growth has been debt-fuelled consumption financed by asset price bubbles. Growth has been sketchy, financial crises common, inequality rampant. Last week I wrote about the fragility of borrowing and spending as an economic strategy and suggested it might be time for our policymakers to find a better one, by taking a look at what worked during the golden age, 1950-1973, the greatest period of growth the world has ever seen.

Back then, our grandparent’s generation managed to double their income in less than twenty years. Their governments shrunk the massive deficits that won second world war without even breaking a sweat. The financial sector was much smaller and much less well paid, taxes were higher, unions stronger. According to the Reagan/Thatcher orthodoxy that mutated into the Clinton/Blair orthodoxy, these policies were a prescription for stagnation. But the golden age created a far richer economy than the neoliberal era that replaced it.

Globalisation, deindustrialisation, deunionisation and the liberation of capital from national boundaries have changed our world irrevocably, but we could still take some lessons from the past. The first and most obvious piece of advice would be to shrink the financial sector. During the last years of the bubble, 40 per cent of US corporate profits were made in banking and finance. That is an unnaturally large share of national wealth going to a handful of people who produce nothing, and whose function is merely to allocate scarce societal savings towards productive investments. Unfortunately, much financial activity doesn’t even do that. Instead of serving the real economy of goods and services, finance has become a parasite on it.

The cure? Unproductive, self-referential transactions should be discouraged. A Tobin tax, the Volker rule, the prohibition of naked credit default swaps would all be a good beginning. Our regulators should demand how society can benefit from financial innovations instead of waiting to watch them blow up in its face. Banking was boring back in the golden age, and we had fewer crises and greater growth. Let’s make it boring again.

Secondly, demand grew during the golden age because of a hugely expanding middle class. Society became much more equal. Productivity increases translated quickly into wage increases, and rapidly rising wages allowed most families to improve their living standards dramatically. Our era is very different. It is not just that the top 10% of society is taking a larger share of the economic pie, it is the top 1%, actually the top .01%. That means everyone else has had to go into debt in order to increase consumption. Our higher debt levels today are the direct consequence of stagnating wages. To return to the golden age, our governments should support a more equitable distribution of income. Perhaps labour should be favoured over capital. In the United States, unionization should be encouraged. For the past 30 years, the economic benefits of massive productivity gains have gone overwhelmingly to the very richest among us. This has to change.

But the biggest difference between the productive golden age and the stagnant current era is their focus on investment and our focus on consumption. Barry Eichengreen, the foremost economic historian of the golden age in Europe, tells us its fundamental secret was a social pact between labour and capital. Labour promised to forgo wage increases greater than productivity gains while capital promised to reinvest profits in the business rather than siphoning them off as dividends. Today, firms will scrimp on investment, maintenance, research and development in order to boost quarterly profit numbers, and so impress Wall Street and goose share prices. This is remarkably short-sighted. Real investment works: giving workers capital goods makes them more productive and it is increased worker productivity that makes societies richer. For the past generation, even as the financial sector expanded, real investment as a share of GDP declined. Productivity gains today come not by providing workers with more capital goods, better machines with which to do their jobs, but rather by firing some workers and making the rest work harder.

Finally, probably because government officials back then had lived through the great depression, their main concern was full employment. Today central banks look first to safeguard the financial system and then to keep inflation down. The real economy is an afterthought to their continued tranquillity. Imagine how many jobs could have been created with the billions spent to bail them out? And yet, despite unemployment rates unseen in decades, a job programme remains unlikely.

Our policymakers want us to return to 2006. They hope that miniscule interest rates and massive government deficits will restart the borrowing and spending cycle that fuelled the boom. Maybe we should be more ambitious. Maybe we should strive to return to the policies of the Golden Age, which focused on real investment and job creation, rather than hoping that if we bail out the bankers once again, they will find it somewhere in their hearts to let some of their wealth trickle down to the rest of us. The biggest lesson of the golden age is that wealth trickles up.