A growing anti-war public, yet Bush has no answers

It took less than thirty seconds for President George W. Bush – in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg military base, about the ongoing crisis in Iraq – to invoke the memory of September 11th, 2001. He then went on to mention it a further five times. Subtlety was clearly not the way forward here.

Of course, despite his best impression to the contrary, the US President is no fool. He realises the importance of twinning the Iraq war with 9/11, well aware that public support for the war was largely grounded on the idea that invading Iraq would be revenge for the devastation wrought on American soil, and also be an act of self-defence, removing the non-existent threat of Saddam using his non-existent stockpiles of WMD. This myth was so well constructed, and given such prominence by the administration and it’s cheerleaders on television, that it became fixed as a common truth in the minds of a disarmingly large section of the populace. The evidence for this is startling. A study commissioned by the American Public on International Issues found that misperceptions on the Iraq war had become widespread. Polls conducted between June and September of 2003 found that 48% of people believed that there were links between Iraq and al-Queda, and of that percentage, up to 86% supported the war. The study went on to identify that news networks such as the stridently pro-administration Fox News were instrumental in disseminating such propaganda.

Bush has long realised that support for this illegal and immoral war rests on the idea that Iraq is the latest front in a war that began on that sunny September morning. Forget US foreign policy in the Middle East, ignore the fact that 17 of the hijackers were Saudi citizens – Iraq is the primary concern in the war against terror, and the president stepped up to the podium with the prime intention of convincing an increasingly sceptical public to stay the course. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look likely that this will happen, since some of the war’s key architects are no longer singing from the same hymn sheet.

A week or so ago, Vice-President Dick Cheney described the insurgency as being in the “last throes” of its activity. Surreally, Cheney then went on to clarify his comments in the wake of a restaurant bomb that killed 23 Iraqis, noting that “last throes” can in fact be exceedingly violent. That he said this without a trace of irony suggests that the vice-president may well have a future career as a deadpan comedian.

Cheney’s comments would have come as a surprise to the top US commander in the Gulf, General John Abizaid. He recently informed the Senate Armed Services committee that the number of foreign insurgents entering Iraq was now considerably higher than six months ago. Further, the type of attacks had matured, increasing in complexity and casualty rates. In a separate report, the CIA suggested that Iraq is fast turning into a breeding ground for new jihadists, much as Afghanistan was in the 1980s when the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zaharawi were financed by the US government in its attempts to repel the USSR.

Two days after Cheney’s assessment, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued his latest prognosis: the current insurgency could last as long as ten years, or perhaps even longer. It was a grim assessment from the man who once dismissed the insurgents as nothing more than a group of “dead-enders” and “former B’aathists” whose influence would soon drain away.

The problem for the coalition is that every time they have predicted the coming end of the violence, they have been proved wrong. The 2003 killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein; the capture later that year of Saddam himself; the handing over of power in 2004, and the elections in January of this year. All of these moments were hailed as turning points that would hasten the insurgency’s demise, but none delivered. Now the ongoing situation, and the escalating body count and the increasing complexity of the tactics used by the insurgency, has filtered through to mainstream American consciousness and the political damage to the US administration is growing. Hence the president’s recent address to the nation, yet once again he has come up short, offering neither plans for disengagement nor any realistic approach to defeating the insurgency.

There is, realistically, little that George Bush can do to shore up support for this war. A significant percentage of Americans may still buy into the scenario of Iraq as the logical reprisal for the 9/11 attacks, but the figure is dwindling. More than fifty percent of Americans now believe it was a mistake for the US to go into Iraq. Having failed to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis, George Bush is now scrambling to ensure that he doesn’t lose the hearts and minds of his countrymen. It is a battle that looks set to consume his second turn, and one that he is unlikely to win.

Pinochet's downfall marks a new Chilean society

It has become such a regular occurrence that to question its validity seems almost churlish. Every time the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet heads towards another milestone in his long battle against prosecution, his health mysteriously takes a turn for the worse. Last Wednesday, he was reported to have fainted and lost consciousness for some thirty minutes, coincidentally on the eve of a debate in the Chilean Congress on whether or not to strip him of diplomatic immunity and prosecute him. Ironically, he is being charged not for the crimes perpetrated by his regime in the 1970s and 1980s – charges which his lawyers claim he is too senile to fight – but for a recently-disclosed tax evasion scandal. Al Capone would appreciate this twist in the tale.

The likelihood is that he will be dead and buried before any judicial procedure is ever completed. But his hounding by the authorities over the last eight years – ever since his dramatic house arrest in Britain, at the behest of the Spanish judge Balthazar Garzon – shows how irrevocably ruined his reputation is in his homeland. His supporters, once a vocal group, have dwindled to insignificant figures, and the country is changing in many ways that are making it unrecognisable from the one that he ruled for seventeen brutal years.

Over the last decade Chile has steered the most successful and stable economy in South America. The gulf between rich and poor which blights the entire continent has, at least somewhat, been addressed through a number of social programs that have bolstered President Ricardo Lagos’ popularity while not endangering the country’s growth; and, most notably for the outside world, scores of key figures from the seventeen-year long dictatorship – not least, Pinochet himself – are at long last being prosecuted, in a clear sign that the country is beginning to come to terms with the atrocities that still linger in recent memory.

Two of the clearest indicators of the progress that Chile is making under Lagos come in the form of the leading candidates to replace him. Michele Bachelat, currently the country’s defence minister, and Soledad Olvear, the Foreign Trade minister, were locked in a tight race for the nomination of the ruling Concertacion party. What distinguishes them is the fact that they are women, and the likely prospect of a female Chilean president in the next year demonstrates a significant shift in the country’s attitudes. In recent weeks Olvear finally acquiesced to her opponent, and Bachelat will now represent Concertacion in December’s election. As the daughter of a political prisoner who died under Pinochet, and a self-described socialist, Bachelet is the type of politician who would have been unthinkable under the military dictatorship. Her ascendancy to the cusp of the country’s top job demonstrates the plurality of the new political order.

Meanwhile, further indications of the country’s progressive development are found in the new divorce laws. Until 2004, Chile was one of the few remaining countries in which divorce did not exist. The only way around this legalistic black hole was to arrange an expensive marriage annulment, far too costly for most Chileans. However, in March 2004 – amidst harsh condemnation from the Church – the Congress approved a divorce law, which became a reality in November. Since then thousands of Chileans have applied for divorce, legally separating couples who – in some cases – had been estranged for years or even decades. A new law against domestic abuse is also being debated in the Senate, which aims to give police more power to arrest and prosecute serial abusers. According to the English-language newspaper The Santiago Times, around 1 in 3 Chilean women are abused at home, and in a culture where male-on-female violence is all too accepted, it is encouraging that there are measures to tackle the problem.

Chilean society is changing in other ways too. The relationship between the civilian population and the military is now a far more transparent one that it was in the years since the dictatorship’s end. During the 1990s, the upper echelons of the military still retained immunity from prosecution, and figures such as Pinochet were self-elected as senators for life. However, such immunity no longer exists, and many of those who committed the atrocities during the seventies and eighties are being tried and punished for their crimes. The reaction by the public in May, when 46 army recruits were lost when their mismanaged expedition in the Andes hit a blizzard, was one of fury and incredulity. Several officers lost their jobs, and the episode managed to call into question the continuation of military service.

Of course all of these changes are not mutually linked, yet they are endemic of a widening of the conservative social mores that have traditionally dominated Chile. How far they go to permanently changing the structure of the country remains to be seen, but right now Chile has gone some of the way to regaining its pre-dictatorship position as a bastion of strength and stability in the often-unruly climes of South America.

US interference in Iran’s election can only backfire

For George Bush, of course, the world exists only in black and white. In a world of such binary opposites, a sovereign country can be either good or bad, “for us” or “against us”; its political system can either embrace “freedom” or else it becomes a force for “evil”.

Hence there was no surprise this week at his comments on the eve of Iran’s presidential election. Iran, lest we forget, is one of the original members of the hallowed ‘axis of evil’ and is long rumoured by some to be the next target on Washington’s list for regime change. Bush described Iran as an undemocratic country “ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world”.

Discarding the spurious allegation of Iran’s terror-spreading acumen, the US President is remarkably (and uncharacteristically) accurate in saying that the clerical leaders of Iran suppress liberty. The election is indeed massively flawed. From a list of over 1000 candidates – including some 90-odd women – the ultra-conservative Council of Guardians rendered all but six ineligible, none of them female. Only the intervention of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ensured the reinstatement of two reform candidates – one of who, Mostafa Moin, is likely to emerge with a significant portion of the vote. Far from being an example of good electoral jurisprudence, Khamenei is merely sentient of the need to legitimise the election, and fears that a shortlist of mainly hard-line candidates would lead to mass abstention by Iran’s predominantly young population.

So far, so bad, at least as far as the ideal of democracy goes. However, compared to the atmosphere that surrounded previous elections in the country, this year has seen the emergence of Western-style campaigning, open and honest debates, and even talks of rapprochement with the US. Could it be that the aging coterie of clerics, who have charted the country since the 1979 revolution are starting to fade in their significance?

The pre-eminent hard-line candidate, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former police chief, has shaved his beard to lessen his aesthetic ties to the clerical elite. Posters, billboards, T-shirts and other assorted election paraphernalia familiar to voters in Western countries have flooded Tehran and other cities. And as Jonathan Steele notes in the Guardian, the final list of eight candidates – while censured by the mullahs – offers a wider choice than any other Arab country today. While mainstream Iranian media remains overwhelmingly conservative, online blogs written by both nationals and ex-pats, amateurs and established journalists - "Mr. Behi" is one example - have proliferated widely, and are bringing a newly awakened political maturity across the entire country. The arrest of prominent bloggers by the authorities indicates how seriously they take this threat to their control of the media.

Furthermore, the country’s demographic quirk – where some 50% of the population are under twenty-five years old – has meant that politicians of all stripes have been forced to remould themselves to appeal to the young votes. Any references to Islam or Islamic notions have been scrubbed from election posters. The frontrunner, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has ditched the radical stance that saw him through eight years at the top during the 1990s, and now paints himself as a cautious reformist whose links to the unelected clerics would see his presidency able to affect real change. The importance of this cannot be understated in a country of economic stagnation and chronic unemployment. Under eight years of outgoing president Khatami, the country was too often immobilised by the tensions between the desire for reform and the reactionary spiritual rulers. As a close aide of the late Ayatollah Khomenei, Rafsanjani arguably has a strong chance of implementing the changes that he sees necessary for the country to grow. One of his main goals is a thaw in relations with the United States.

None of this, of course, is to suggest that Iran is a functioning democracy with an elected leader who is truly representative of his people. Patently it is not, and yet the mere existence of viable elections in a region that is beset by dictatorships and fixed ballots is a positive sign. The US and the EU should be encouraging the incremental changes that are happening, rather than resorting to knee-jerk denunciations. This is most acute in the ongoing crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. While US sabre-rattling may be just that – it is unlikely, with so many troops tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, that another major conflict could be waged – it doesn’t help the anti-clerical factions, and is used by the ruling authorities to justify ever-more invasive crackdowns. The Iranian public has no trust in the US: it is only fifty years since the democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh, a populist who attempted to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, was overthrown by a US and UK-organised coup. Thus, interference from the ‘Great Satan’, as clerics delight in branding America, can only strengthen the conservative leadership.

Whatever the result in the election, it is unlikely that rapid change will follow, and yet by losing the aggressive stance and opening itself up to a new relationship with the Islamic Republic, Washington could help to assist the flowering of true democratic representation that it purportedly wants to spread across the wider Middle East.

Bolivia’s future hangs in the balance as protestors overplay their hand

As protestors blockade the capital of La Paz, Bolivia edges closer to the brink of civil war, and what hope remains of restoring a temporary peace and order diminishes with each passing day.

A crisis over the division of the landlocked nation’s rich reserves of natural gas – which forced the resignation of former President, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, in 2003 – looks set to topple another, and has the potential to rip the country in two. The indigenous protestors who have stormed La Paz over the last three weeks demand the nationalisation of the nascent industry, fearing that foreign intervention will ultimately be of little benefit to the country’s majority poor. They have a fair point: in 2000 the American company Bechtel attempted to privatise the water supply in Cochabamba, in Bolivia’s altiplano Mass civic unrest soon forced the multinational to abandon it’s plans.

The success of this ‘water war’, as it became known, reflected in part the growing organisation of the rural poor. The MAS, or Movement Towards Socialism, led by the charismatic Eva Morales, tapped into a deep-seated sense of injustice amongst the millions of Bolivians who are blighted by extreme poverty. Combined with the various unions of ‘cocaleros’, or coca-plant growers, this vast underclass soon became a formidable political institution. In the 2002 elections Morales finished a close second in the race for the presidency, and established a distinct presence in Congress for his party. The following year, it was he who organised the countrywide roadblocks that toppled his former rival. Despite a referendum organised by Lozada’s replacement, Carlos Mesa, which authorised the expropriation of the gas by foreign companies, civil unrest has periodically risen to boiling point. The most recent – and most serious – is the result of Mesa’s decision in May to attempt a compromise, taxing the foreign companies rather than attempting outright nationalisation.

For the protestors who have clogged the streets of La Paz, leading to sporadic clashes with police and the military, full nationalisation of the country’s gas industry is now all that will placate them. This reflects a development even further than what Evo Morales has publicly called for. There is a growing consensus amongst the poor that the market-led economic model on which the country has gingerly balanced for some twenty years is now hopelessly inadequate. Furthermore, Bolivia’s history is littered with sad tales of colonial exploitation. Once the richest area of the continent, the gold and silver of Bolivia’s fecund mountains were taken and used to fund the adventures of the Spanish royalty. Many indigenous people see natural gas as the last God-given resource of a once-wealthy country, and are determined to avoid yet another raping of the land. Thus, nothing short of full nationalisation – and a rewriting of Bolivia’s constitution to wean it off a market-directed economy and increase state control of natural resources.

However, the success of these most recent protests – as I write Mesa has submitted his resignation and a snap-election appears likely – is unlikely to give anything other than a short-lived fillip to the movement. A nationalised gas industry would leave Bolivia, which is already losing untold millions every day due to the unrest, facing hefty compensation lawsuits from BP and Petrosur, amongst others. The country risks the indifference of other, wealthy nations, who could simply walk away from any proposed deals. The extraction and utilisation of the gas is far too complex a project for Bolivia to afford in isolation. Furthermore, since the ruinous War of the Pacific in the late 19th century, Bolivia has lacked a coastline; any exportation of the natural gas would therefore have to be processed through a Chilean port. Despite the long-standing and vicious animosity Bolivians harbour towards their more prosperous neighbour, it would make sense to keep this option open. By nationalising the industry, Bolivia would be tying setting itself adrift instead of embracing the international capital that would be harnessed if handled adroitly.

Furthermore, the trouble in La Paz has exacerbated the country’s other major crisis. In the eastern lowlands, the more prosperous regions around the city of Santa Cruz – where much of the natural gas lies – have in recent months stepped up their claims for increased autonomy. In August they plan to hold a referendum on whether to allot themselves more power as a region, a move that is opposed by most of the country’s indigenous people. The situation in Santa Cruz demonstrates a fundamental schism within the country’s ethnic makeup, which could erupt if – as President Mesa fears – the country descends into civil war. The people of Santa Cruz are white, of European descent, and traditionally far wealthier than their largely indigenous western countrymen.

It seems that right now a quick election will be the only way to solve the immediate crisis. One possible result would be Evo Morales assuming the presidency, but what then? The eastern elites will hardly be overwhelmed with enthusiasm for an indigenous president, and would push on with their plans for autonomy. Another possibility is that Senate president Hormando Vaca Diez could replace President Mesa. He would most likely grant autonomy to Santa Cruz and crack down on the protestors, which Mesa has admirably refused to do. The viability of Bolivia as a unified country would be fatally undermined in either case. Internationally Bolivia would be tainted as an unstable nation of democratic questionability, hardly the atmosphere that would attract much-needed foreign capital. The White House would make great capital out of calling for political ‘freedom’ and, looking at the recent presidential shuffling in Ecuador, could use this as justification for its own intervention in the Andes. Right now, it is difficult to see how Bolivia can even stay together as a unified country, much less address the wildly varying concerns of its 9 million inhabitants. Time will tell whether this blighted nation will survive or be torn apart by the potential wealth that lies underneath its land.

Review: "Notre Musique" (dir: Jean-Luc Godard)

Notre Musique (Our Music), Jean-Luc Godard’s latest cinematic meander through fact and fiction, unfolds into a curiously balanced triptych: the central section – an ostensibly linear quasi-documentary on a Sarajevo literary convention – is buffered on either side by two shorter, more esoteric pieces. After the perfunctory titles, the film opens with a fifteen-minute montage that combines footage of war and destruction with discordant, unsettling piano stabs. The coherent theme – the savagery and inhumanity of conflict – is clear enough, and Godard’s reverence for the filmic image is demonstrated in the breadth of sources from which he quotes. Mixing old newsreels, a myriad of feature film excerpts ranging from Eisenstein to Coppola to DW Griffith, documentary footage and more, the montage is entitled ‘Hell’ and viscerally lives up to its name. It is a powerfully arresting opening that displays the skill that Godard has mastered in creating shocking and visually rich juxtapositions.

Rather abruptly we segue into the film’s central, and most lengthy, part, subtitled ‘Purgatory’. In an airport in Sarajevo, Jean-Luc Godard and his translator meet with a Franco-Russian Jewish girl before jumping into a car that shuffles sombrely through the city’s landscape. The devastated buildings, lying amidst new developments and reconstructed apartment blocks, pay testament to the wars that have scourged the country over the last decade. At the residence of the French ambassador to Bosnia, the Jewish girl recounts how her family was shielded from the Vichy regime by the ambassador himself. Later on, an Israeli filmmaker interviews a Palestinian poet who considers how art informs and transforms a culture and a land. In another scene, some of the characters mill around a ruined school in which books are piled high in one corner and – in a familiar Godard trope – an ill-fitting American Indian couple appear, in full dress, decrying the theft of their land by the white man. The theme of conflict over land – whether between Israelis and Palestinians, or European settlers and American Indians, hangs loosely over the proceedings, yet Godard layers his narrative (if it can be so called) with murkiness and confusion. Rather than offering anything precise to grab onto, it seems that Godard is merely providing the pivotal setting of Sarajevo for a free-ranging exploration of territorial disputes throughout the ages. In typical fashion he offers no plausible logic or method of arriving at an answer, and layers the framework with aphorisms and wry observations that don’t necessarily lead in any coherent direction. Ultimately, it all becomes a little frustrating.

A more interesting development is when Godard delivers a lecture to a group of disinterested students on the displacement of the image in cinema. He begins by showing a picture of a ruined building and, deflecting suggestions that it is an image from Hiroshima or Sarajevo, reveals that the photograph dates from the American Civil War of the 19th century. He goes on to compare the art of filmmaking with the reconstruction of Bosnia’s famous Mostar Bridge, destroyed in the 1993 civil war. We are shown the rubble of the bridge, which is being rebuilt, brick-by-brick; yet despite its phoenix-like rise it will remain something of an artifice, a reconstruction rather than an original construction. Godard’s point, which he delivers to his jaded audience, is that this operation is similar to the art of filmmaking; the image – once chemically traduced onto a flimsy strip of celluloid – will always remain a facsimile of the real.

The film’s final section, ‘Heaven’, begins when Godard learns that the Israeli girl encountered earlier has been shot dead for imitating a suicide bomber. In a beautiful forest setting, the girl wanders through trees and streams, while young people cavort in a playfully languid style. The audience is left to assume that this is a bucolic afterlife, yet the innate beauty is offset by the quiet presence of US marines. It is a curious, yet not unsatisfying, ending to an intellectual puzzle that in some ways typifies the wilfully obscurant style that Godard has always revelled in.