Charles Grant
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.
William Skidelsky
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
Stefan Simanowitz
Campbell refused to criticise his old boss at the Chilcot Inquiry
By the end of his six hour cross examination by the Iraq Inquiry panel this week Alastair Campbell must have felt as if he had been, in Dennis Healy’s immortal phrase, “savaged by a dead sheep”. Arriving at the Chilcot Inquiry, the bags under his eyes suggested that Tony Blair’s former communications and strategy director might have suffered a few sleepless nights. But by the end of his ‘grilling’ by an ineffectual panel, he seemed relaxed and was clearly enjoying the opportunity of setting out his version of history unchallenged.
His performance was masterful, simultaneously playing down his role in the decision to go to war whilst at the same time making it clear that he was present at every step of the way. While he may have been involved in all the meetings with cabinet, intelligence chiefs and US politicians, he was only responsible for communications and not for policy. While he may have put the sexed-up dossier together, any changes made to it were entirely down to Sir John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and it was the media who were to blame for writing misleading headlines claiming that Iraqi chemical and biological weapons that could reach a British base in Cyprus. Tony Blair may have been forced to engage in an illegal war but that was only after the French “pulled the plug” on a legal route by stating that they would not support a second UN resolution under any circumstances.
Campbell’s repeated accusations that the French had been ultimately to blame for the failure of the UN path has been the British Government line ever since February 2003 when it became clear that a second UN resolution would not be passed. None of the panel pointed out to Campbell thatother Security Council members would not have backed a second resolution and that the words of President Chirac had actually been that France would “vote no because she considers this evening that there are no grounds for waging war”.
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Tom Streithorst
Iraqi oil auctions: does economic power trump military force today?
George Galloway and Alan Greenspan agree: the war in Iraq was all about oil. But perhaps they were wrong.
In last weekend’s Iraqi oil field auction, US companies were almost utterly iced-out, despite their government’s 100,000 boots on the ground. Russian, Chinese, Dutch, Angolan, and Malaysian oil companies all won rights to exploit the massive Iraqi oil fields, and none of those countries had to go to the trouble to invade. If America, in conquering Iraq had been able to actually steal its oil reserves and move them to say Michigan’s Rust Belt, the war might have made some sense, but unfortunately for America in the modern world, military force no longer automatically translates into economic advantage.
For most of human history—from Neolithic hunting bands, up until the Franco-Prussian war—the military was a massively profitable enterprise. Genghis Khan’s soldiers were just poverty stricken pastoralists until they got on their ponies and sacked more civilized folk. The Roman invasion of Egypt won the tribute of grain that fed the city for over 300 years. The return on capital for William of Normandy’s crossing the channel, for Hernan Cortez’ conquest of Mexico, must be close to infinite.
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Tom Streithorst
Bright idea: can beauty create a more peaceful world?
Poverty, for the outsider, is often picturesque. But not here. This neighbourhood on the outskirts of Amara in southern Iraq has got to be the most hideous place I have ever seen: garbage, dirt, battered metal carcasses of “dead” cars, deep holes gouged out of the ground, dusty children wearing filthy clothes, the houses simultaneously decrepit and unfinished.
But it isn’t the poverty that is shocking, it is the ugliness. Yes, the people here are poor, but I’ve been to poorer places in Afghanistan, and in India. But even in those places at least your eye could rest somewhere and find something of beauty.
What, I wonder, would it be like to grow up here? Not in terms of the danger or the poverty—we can all pretend to imagine what that is like. But what would it be like never to see anything pretty—only brown dirt, brown houses, dirty red cloth, and dust everywhere? In the middle of a warzone, do I sound like an effete aesthete? Maybe. But there are worse things to be in the midst of a warzone.
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Tom Streithorst
Iraqis will re-elect Nouri Maliki not because they like him, but because they crave strong government.
I’m a cameraman, so facts have never been my strong suit. Vibe and mood are. And despite Sunday’s brutal bombing, the mood in Baghdad is worlds away from the dark days of 2006-2007, when ordinary Iraqis feared driving home, feared the militia checkpoints where so many had been taken out of their cars, tortured and killed.
Baghdad is much more tranquil now. If you are stopped on the streets, it is by the police—and the police is no longer just another Shia death squad. The Americans like to think that “the surge” is responsible for the decrease in violence. I disagree. Baghdad in 2006 was as close to Hobbes’s state of nature as any place I ever hope to visit. Civil war understates the hell that Iraq had become. Civil war suggests two sides, maybe three. Back then, every neighborhood, nearly every block had its own militia. Iraq, for 35 years ruled by the Ba’athist Leviathan, had descended very quickly into Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”
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Mark Cousins
The eight-year-old Mohamed: Kurdistan’s filmic future?
I’ve just spent three weeks in a village of 600 people in northern Iraq. Goptapa, which looks north-eastwards towards Turkey and Iran, is on a hilltop lined with goat paths. When there aren’t dust storms you can look down onto a vast oxbow lake valley whose river snakes to the Tigris and Mesopotamia. The villagers grow pomegranates and keep geese, goats and cows. About 100 of them were gassed in Saddam’s Anfal operation in the late 1980s. There’s a new school, and a little mosque. For three nights, I made a cinema there out of sparkly fabric, the first time there had been one in the area. I gave the kids in the village little high-definition video cameras to make movies. They queued up to use them. One of the eight-year-old boys made a beautiful four-minute film. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. Here’s what I want to say:
Dear Mohamed
I’m back home, in a place called Edinburgh, in Scotland, in Europe. The air is chilly here, the sky is grey, silver and blue this morning, like a mackerel.
I walked around your village at 7am on my last morning, but your gates were shut and I didn’t want to wake you. I need to tell you something, my friend. You have great potential. When you first took our camera, your footage was wobbly and nothing special. But then you crouched down, held the camera steady, and filmed that wee boy sitting beside the irrigation channel in your father’s farm. I heard you tell him to play with the mud. Then you whispered, “He’s building a house in his head.
He’s giving his dreams to the mud.” This touched my translator and me a lot because in those few short minutes you did what the best documentary film-makers in the world do. You used your camera to film another person’s thoughts.
Perhaps in 20 years’ time, Kurdistan will be united and sovereign, but whether it is or whether Goptapa stays part of Iraq, the iniquities inflicted on, and the ethnic and religious enmity within, your country can be worn down by the kind of empathy you showed. The American philosopher Richard Rorty said that revolutions redescribe the world. Few places on our planet need redescribing more than Iraq because for most of us the name of your country conjures images of war. When you grow up, you must conjure different images with your camera.
But how are you to make films? The Kurdistan regional government has a culture ministry and a film commissioner, and has started to part-fund feature films. In Erbil recently Shawkat Korki, an Iraqi Kurd who was brought up in Iran, showed me his film Crossing the Dust, which was funded by the KRG and has been shown at more than 50 film festivals. It’s about an Arab boy your age who gets separated from his parents on the day that Saddam’s statue in Baghdad was toppled, and is looked after by two Peshmerga Kurds. It’s very good. The most famous Kurdish film-maker of the moment, Bahman Ghobadi, who made the gorgeous Turtles Can Fly, is godfathering young Kurdish directors, and somehow I will try to introduce him to you.
The best Kurdish director whose work I know is Yilmaz Güney, who made Yol and The Wall in the 1980s (Yol was directed for him by a friend while he was in prison), and had been an actor from the 1960s. He had to make his films in Turkish, but when you are older you must see his work because it is part of your heritage.
So Kurdish film has a history and production methods—though you can take inspiration from films made anywhere in the world. I loved the fact that when I showed you the French film The Red Balloon last week, you reached up into the air at the end to try to catch hold of the balloons that were carrying the boy up into the sky, as if they were real. You told me that you wanted “to be two pigeons” when you grow up, and that you want “to fly slowly” over Goptapa.
When I asked you about who you love and why, you answered by talking about the men who protect your village from the enemy. It dispirited me to see how militarised your thoughts are. Are there guns in your dreams? I suppose so. I noticed that when we filmed with one of your friends recently, he had a gun in one hand and a dove in the other.
If the documentary that I’m making about you gets into a major film festival, I’ll contact your family to see if you can travel to the screening. And perhaps I can return to Goptapa to show it in the village? I don’t know when we will meet again, but I am looking at your face now, in the edit suite.
Mark Cousins’s documentary on Iraq, “True Stories: The First Movie,” will be broadcast on More4 on 18th December
Tom Streithorst
Wolfowitz: operating in a word without nemesis
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading architects of the Iraq debacle, has an article in today’s Financial Times, telling world leaders what to do about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Surprisingly, nowhere in the article does he say, “Of course I was spectacularly wrong last time anyone asked me my opinion, but here I go again.”
Imagine you hired a plumber. He tells you the job is both vital and easy. The cost ends up being twenty times higher than his estimate, you flood the entire neighbourhood, make things much worse than they had ever been before, and then you find out the putative problem that occasioned the emergency did not even exist. Would you ever hire him again? Would you ask him his advice on the next plumbing problem?
The men who lied to us, who bamboozled us into war, have not paid the price for their hubris and idiocy. The government officials have moved on to think tank sinecures, they continue to fly first-class, and respectable publications still print their opinions. The Lib Dems—right about Iraq—are still considered somehow not serious, while Tony Blair picks up $1m from an Israeli foundation for his contributions to world peace.
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Jonathan Power
Osama bin Laden: too little was done to track him down
Six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, President George W. Bush declared that the capture of Osama bin Laden was his prime objective. “I want justice,” he said. “There’s an old poster out west that I recall that said ‘wanted dead or alive’”. He also said that the purpose of going to war was to “smoke him out.”
The US and Britain then unleashed their bombs over Afghanistan, killing far more innocent Afghans than the number of people killed on 9/11. It did no good at all, and certainly didn’t touch bin Laden and his team who were safely hidden in caves in the impenetrable mountains of Pakistan. Not long after Bush turned his attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Less and less was spoken of the need to hunt down bin Laden. None of this made sense. Afghanistan is now in a mess. The US and its allies are in as deep as the previous Soviet invaders were, with the Taliban as apt at keeping them on the defensive and wearing them down by a war of attrition as the Mujahedeen were 25 years ago.
Today the Western powers say their aim is to change the nature of Afghanistan society—ending Islamic militancy, liberating women via educating, building clinics and roads. But are we there to refashion a conservative society? That, surely, is not our business.
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