Green Zone: Tigris Tales

As he steps off the Rugby Field, Matt Damon discovers how much less simple life is in Eye-Raq than it was in Clint's version of South Africa. Murky, devious so-and-so’s wheel and deal, and even the line between right and wrong has gone bendy. The CIA have a safe full of million dollar packs and they’re the good guys for a change. Young interns swagger and binge around the pool, and the walls of the palace are lined with silly political slogans designed to persuade everybody, against the evience of their own eyes, that the whole thing is a rightous, er, crusade.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran was Washington Post man in the Green Zone. In Imperial Life in the Emerald City, he knoweth whereof he speaketh. As the streets descend into anarchy and GI’s do increasingly dangerous and dirty work, fantasy reigns in Halliburton’s neocon disneyland. Where once Saddam’s republican guard strutted their stuff, George W. Bush’s, er republican guard is depicted in a thoroughly believable way, strutting its stuff around the pool. Occasional flashes of French door furniture indicate that in this film Iraq is played by Morocco.

This action caper is based on, rather than drawn from, Chandrasekaran’s factual book. Matt Damon is an clean-cut GI over there to clear up those pesky WMD’s, round up Saddam like a Raccoon, etc. etc. Much of this flm is shot on a not-so-steadycam yielding an occasionally dizzying documentary effect like a computer wargame. This technique will engage and please the young more than bifocal wearers. Saddam has legged it, but not his chum General Al-Rawi who, it turns out, has his own interesting past with the U. S. Government. A lot of doors get kicked in and henchpersons shot, but the good guys kinda win in the end.

I suspect that unless you are a complete wargaming nut, in which case, enjoy, your reactions to the film will line up around your take on the Iraq war. If you believe that it was a good idea, and the prospectus on which it was started was decent, legal honest and truthful you will feel affronted that such a film could be imagined, let alone made. Fox News, which believes everybody should ignore the government at home paradoxically also believes everything republican governments do abroad is, ipso facto, decent, legal, honest and truthful.

Back on planet earth, it is becoming evident as the enquiries unfold that you can argue with the details, but a squalid and confused fantasy-based computer game is not that far away from the way historians will view the Iraq War. There were no WMD’s twenty minutes away from Cyprus. In this regard Saddam’s brutal regime was all mouth and no trousers. The war’s whole prospectus was dishonest, and our politicans knew it but lied to us. Brave people took big risks, money flowed like water, and several hundred thousand innocent civilians died. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

What’s really going on out there

Timothy Garton Ash is one of the very few people around with the depth and breadth of historical understanding to produce genuine contemorary history. His new Book, Facts are Subversive, contains short essays, mostly originally written for newspapers, but far too good to let go for tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. At this year’s Kirchentag I was struck by the skill, good humour and perspective TGA brought to a shared seminar with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. He knows his way round the issues of the age, and has real critical insight about Europe (“If the EU were to apply to join the EU it would be refused”) without losing his grasp on the positive achievements of the whole project.

These essays range from big questions of definition and identity (“Islam in Europe”) to well known flashpoints (“The strange toppling of Slobodan Milosevic”, “9/11”) and contemporary predicaments (“Beauty and the Beast in Burma”). His main interests, as Oxford professor of European Studies, have been foreign policy — there is an extraordinary insider’s account of an attempt to brief George W. Bush about Yoorp, and another about Obama’s inauguration. To every subject he brings deft precision, like a peanuts cartoon — inscape in context.

TGA’s standpoint is classically Liberal. He articulates what the word could and should mean as more than just a hysterical reactionaries’ catch-all ra-ra term of abuse.

Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practise what we preach.

TGA is also highly articulate about the difference between secularism and new model atheism.

I do not believe there is a God and therefore assume that some 2007 years ago a couple called Joseph and Mary just had a baby. But what a man he turned out to be! Like the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, I can’t get anywhere with Christ as God, but as a human being Jesus Christ seems to me a constant and wonderful inspiration — perhaps even, as Burckhardt put it, “the most beautiful figure in world history.” And some of his later imitators didn’t do so badly, either.

As historians get down to work on Bush foreign policy, TGA draws up a preliminary balance sheet, measured against the administration’s stated aims at the outset. He is no knee-jerk anti-Republican, indeed much of his journalism as I remember from the period tried to encourage people to stand back and give Bush what benefit of the doubt they could. As the roll begins to be called up yonder, however, as a former advisor to Bush, he has to conclude:

In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse

He then forensically sketches the whole “amazing bloody catastrophe ” —

• Afghanistan worse (more dangerous and hospitable to terrorists),
• Pakistan worse (even more unstable, radical and effective as a clearing station and training camp for terrorists from all over the world)
  
• Iraq worse (now radicalised and unstable),
• Iran worse (newly prestigious, confident and dabbling in WMD),
• Israel worse (more worried, less secure and self-confident),
• Palestine worse (with a new radical terrorist government)
• Lebanon worse (Bush scored an accidental early goal in the Cedar revolution, but latterly managed to muck it all up by undermining the very government he had supported, so, on balance, less stable).
• Egypt, the Islamists are now scoring at the ballot box as well as with their AK47’s: worse.
  

The score is 8-1, then. The 1 was Gaddafi. We can credit Bush with a phenomenal performance, especially when his team was the only superteam in the league, with no serious opposition. Again and again, he played blinders, kicking the ball into his own net, stunning the occasional goalkeeper in the process. Hucknall Town played Manchester United and after 90 minutes the score is 8-1 to the giantkillers, 7 of them own goals, and the Manchester goal itself is a cracked and wobbling ruin with bigger holes in the net. Such is the trainwreck courageous and innocent young men and women are now dying to try and recover, as, tragically, horribly, the coffins come home.

For me, the jewels in the crown of this collection, however, are TGA’s essays on Gunther Grass and George Orwell. Most of the pieces are very short. Keep this book for train journeys and occasional reading. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, it flags up the real issues, remarkably consistently for a collection of occasional pieces. TGA lays out in historical order the events and alarums of our age in a way nobody else has yet managed, and I salute it as a tremendous and surprisingly readable achievement.

Gaza: Every breath cries out “Stop!”

Violence escalates in Gaza. The military do their stuff, short term relief that aggravates the long-term problem. Gandhi was right — an eye for an eye and everyone ends up blind. Meanwhile the weak, the poor, the vulnerable become roadkill. What is there to say?

You may not have been following the Israeli charts, so here is Sarit Hadad singing Shema’ Israel — the title recalls the ancient words of the daily foundational prayer, the Shema’ (Dt 6:4) — When the heart shuts up, every breath cries out, make it stop...

and the words, vocalised and translated by John Hobbins:

When the heart is crying only God hears
the pain rises from within one’s breath
a man falls before he goes under
with a short prayer, he cuts the silence

Hear Israel, my God, you can do all
you gave me my life, you gave me all
in my eyes a tear, silently the heart cries
when the heart shuts up, one’s breath cries out

Hear Israel, my God, I am now alone
make me strong, my God, so I won't fear
the pain is great, there's nowhere to flee
make it end, no strength is left in me

When the heart is crying, time stops moving
in an inkling a man sees his whole life pass
to the unknown he does not want to go
to his God he calls, on the edge of the abyss.

When the heart is crying only God hears
the pain rises from within one’s breath
a man falls before he goes under
with a short prayer, he cuts the silence

Hear Israel, my God, you can do all
you gave me my life, you gave me all
in my eyes a tear, silently the heart cries
when the heart shuts up, one’s breath cries out

When the heart is crying only God hears
the pain rises from within one’s breath
a man falls before he goes under
with a short prayer, he cuts the silence

Hear Israel, my God, you can do all
you gave me my life, you gave me all
in my eyes a tear, silently the heart cries
when the heart shuts up, one’s breath cries out

כְּשֶׁהַלֵּב בּוֹכֶה רַק אֱלוֹהִים שׁוֹמֵעַ

הַכְּאֵב עוֹלֶה מִתּוֹךְ הַנְּשָׁמָה

אָדָם נוֹפֵל לִפְנֵי שֶׁהוּא שׁוֹקֵעַ

בִּתְפִילָה קְטַנָּה חוֹתֵךְ אֶת הַדְּמָמָה.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל אֱלוֹהַי אַתָּה הַכֹּל יָכוֹל

נָתַתָּ לִי אֶת חַיַי נָתַתָּ לִי הַכֹּל

בְּעֵינַי דִּמְעָה הַלֵּב בּוֹכֶה בְּשֶׁקֶט
וּכְשֶׁהַלֵּב שׁוֹתֵק הַנְּשָׁמָה זוֹעֶקֶת.

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל אֱלוֹהַי עַכְשָׁיו אֲנִי לְבַד

חַזֵּק אוֹתִי אֱלוֹהַי עֲשֵׂה שֶׁלֹּא אֶפְחַד

הַכְּאֵב גָּדוֹל וְאֵין לְאָן לִבְרוֹחַ

עֲשֵׂה שֶׁיִּגָּמֵר כִּי לֹא נוֹתַר בִּי כֹּחַ

כְּשֶׁהַלֵּב בּוֹכֶה הַזְּמָן עוֹמֵד מִלֶּכֶת

הָאָדָם רוֹאֶה אֶת כֹּל חַיָּיו פִּתְאוֹם

אֶל הַלֹּא נוֹדַע הוּא לֹא רוֹצֶה לָלֶכֶת

לֵאלוֹהָיו קוֹרֵא עַל סַף תְּהוֹם

George Bush the Edomite

Praying the Bible liturgically every day you don’t half get to know the bits that aren’t headlines or sound bites. Seldom do you see them enacted before your very eyes, like Muntadar al-Zeidi’s dramatic gesture at Sunday’s Bush Iraq presser — a graphic example of the ancient Semitic gesture of disgust and contempt to be found in Psalm 60:8 (Doublet at Psalm 108:9): עַל-אֱדוֹם אַשְׁלִיךְ נַעֲלִי — Over Edom will I cast out my shoe (Coverdale).

The curious can regularly encounter this gesture in the prayers of monastic communities at around 5.45 a.m. every Wednesday and Saturday morning. None of us are at our most compos mentis that early. Jerome rather softened it (“In Idumæam extendam calceamentum meam,”). The Hebrew is down and dirty – (root שלך: looks like a straight hiph‘îl)— to chuck/ pitch an offending object, like the rocks God tossed down from heaven in Joshua 10:10. The 1945 Latin liturgical psalter headed back towards the orignal (“Super Edom ponam calceamentum meam’’), but 1980 went a bit soft — “Super Idumæam extendam ...” Call me old-fashioned, but Coverdale’s BCP hit the nail on the head.


President Bush himself was correct — This is the 8th century BC Semitic equivalent of giving the finger on the freeway, but more considered, contemptuous and rather more dramatic. It was very striking to see this done on cable TV, and eliciting so much comment. The Bible speaks today! Whatever next? ritual shaving for humiliation? Cutting animals in half to make a contract? Moloch?

If it takes some heat out of the situation, the Ship of Fools has a Biblical Curse Generator, where you can smite your enemies with boils like Amalekite Dogs...

Praying for the peace of Jerusalem?

CCJ Middle East briefing at the House of Commons with Professor Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis. Joke: CNN asked on the streets of Tel Aviv for a summary outlook. One word? “Good.” Two words? “Not Good!”

Wikipedia’s List of middle East peace proposals since 1919, says “this list is incomplete. You can expand it.” But how? Looking ahead to the Annapolis Convention, what exactly could this be whenever it happens?

1. The Crowning moment of a peace process? Lovely idea, but crowning what?
   
2. An opportunity to negotiate, like Camp David? fine, but Bush ain’t no Carter or Clinton in this region, especially not post-Iraq. Post-Iraq?
   
3. a Launching board for a new process phase, as the Madrid conference was? It could be, but will need careful timetabling and focus to reassure the parties they can move forward.

For what could we all focus prayers right now in the middle east?

1. Stabilization — West Bank settlement activity ends / Palestinians end violence. Great idea. All attempts so far to do this have failed...
2. Road Map 2 — “provisional state building” / “Comprehensive armistice” Some kind of recognition thing would be a start.
3. Negotiate permanent status agreement — ideal, but who’s really ready for this, and how?

It would be lovely to think that Annapolis could be more than a high class photo opportunity. But how, I wondered?

1. The cleansing of historical memory on all sides is fundamental. Competing narratives cannot be reconciled right now, not even on the level of “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” They have to be acknowledged for what they are, and how they impact the communities that hold them. Mental note to read the new edition of Benny Goodman’s analysis.
2. The good ol’ British Army Bloody Fool theory says the other lot are just like they are because they are who they are. Because everyone is, to a certain extent, a bloody fool, it explains everything. This thinking produces designer conflicts on the TV news, which the media just feed, like they used to in Northern Ireland. Stereotypes are not enough. Just say no. Progress will only come as people, including “us”, are willing to go the second mile, imaginatively, compassionately, and rationally. This means acknowledging provisionality but not losing hope. It means assessing people’s motives in terms of their basic needs and perceptions, and refusing to create simple goodies and baddies. When tempted to settle for “they just do it because they are...” just say no.
   
3. The Scriptures picture a future that is God’s, and hold out hope. It's always necessary to be realistic about others’ motives and intentions, but all forms of cynicism, including crude instrumentalism, are not enough. Everybody has legitimate needs and aspirations. How could these fit together? Religious people have a special duty, and, theoretically, special resources to cherish and model respect, imagination, compassion and understanding. Religion that doesn't do these things is just licensed insanity.

One way ticket to a madman destination...

...will you stop or will you just keep going?" What has the "surge" achieved, and where is it all going anyway, now even George Bush is using the "V" word?

It's been a disturbing year. General Tony Zinni, led the US Marines ably and effectively in the gulf, and afterwards back home. Now retired, his Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy presentation at Duke (available for free on iTunes — just key in "Terry Sanford Zinni" to find a free audio or video podcast) tells it, pretty much, as it is from a military perspective — Iraq, failures, realities and the Future.

Thomas E. Ricks is the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning military historian. His analysis is now in paperback, and the title says it all — Fiasco: the American Military adventure in Iraq. It's a terribly depressing read (people suffering from a surfeit of cheerfulness after the holidays can get it on Amazon in a job lot with Bob Woodward's State of denial: Bush at War part III).

In Ricks' view not only have many people died on all sides, many of them innocent bystanders, but the effect of the whole thing has been to destroy US credibility and stoke up terrorism. "Effective tactics harnessed to bad strategy equals military disaster." He investigates how the US could start a pre-emptive war based on false information (step forward Paul Wolfowitz, among others), and tracks carefully through the disastrous resulting imbroglio.

His Afterword ("Betting against History") suggests one of four denouements:

1. The best case scenario: the Philippines, 1899-1946 — thousands of troops there for many years to come while the place dials down and normalises
   
   
2. The middling secnario: France in Algeria or Israel in Lebanon — keeping a lid on low level civil war for as long as possible, whilst trying to keep casualties down to a publicly acceptable rate, until something can be cobbled together domestically. This took the Israelis 18 years in Lebanon.
   
   
3. A worse scenario: Civil war, partition and regional war. T. X. Hammes, the counterinsurgency expert says "We have lit multiple fuses. There will be multiple explosions. I'm thinking our grandkids could easily be there."
   
   
4. The nightmare scenario. This is where the 74% of Iraqis who say "it doesn't matter whom, the country needs a single strong leader" gets one. Then if the US bottles out for electoral reasons, you arrive at a profound irony: Iraq run by a real dictator (Caliph?), who really is all the things Bush & Blair said Saddam Hussein was, which SH was, but only in his dreams. Unlike SH this guy would be the real deal. Anti-Americanism would unite all kinds of people around him SH could never pull in. Thus (almost like Greek tragedy) the result of the war could be to bring about precisely the scenario it was intended to avoid, but in a much more virulent form.

Is there a 5th scenario?