Brief Bio of Richard Wright 

Wright was named in the late 1930s to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1940 Wright’s Native Son became an instant best-seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks.

…

In 1949 Wright joined George Plimpton and others in founding the Paris Review. He acted in the film based on the novel Native Son – the American release was not successful and the film was banned in several cities. Wright’s existentialist novel THE OUTSIDER (1952), depicting a black intellectual’s search for identity, received mixed reviews. It was praised mostly in Europe. In Paris Wright was not treated like in the American South, but he gradually lost touch with his inspiration, or “the rhythms of his life”.

During his years in France, Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954), and witnessing the rise of the Pan-African movement. Among his other works in the 1950s were SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), about a white man caught in a web of violence, THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia, PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book of a Catholic country full of contradictions, and WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice. Wright’s last short story, ‘Big Black Good Man’, which originally was published in Esquire and was collected in EIGHT MEN (1961), was set in Copenhangen and dealt with prejudices. THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi, had a poor reception. Its sequel, Island of Hallucination, set in Paris, was not published. “Everything in the book happened, but I’ve twisted characters so that people won’t recognise them,” said Wright to his agent. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.

Wright distanced in the last years of his life from his associates. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious about the activities of CIA in Paris – in which he was right. Wright’s plans to move to London were rejected by the British officials. In 1959 he began composing haiku, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy. Wright’s daughter Julia has claimed that his father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001.

Blood Diamond, Hollywood and Sierre Leone, by Lansana Gberie

For brief, fleeting moments almost every decade now, the rich world tends to embrace Africa – a continent badly wracked by poverty, wars and related crises – as pet project. Africa as the object of the fantasies of the West is an old pathology, and it is not limited to the entertainment industry – though
Hollywood has represented its most crude and egregious form in recent decades. Stalked by the disaster of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (who, to be fair, cannot by any means be accused of prior indifference to Africa) embraced the old continent with renewed vigour, in 2005 producing “Our Common Interest,” a sprawling, well-meaning document which sets out detailed plans for wiping out African poverty and related crises. Less than two years later, the document is all but forgotten.  Africa, however, has not been, at least by
Hollywood. By the end of 2006, Africa became “suddenly hot” to the entertainment industry, to use the appropriately frivolous words of the New York Times. Before the end of the year, the continent somehow managed to attract the interest of big name stars – and therefore big media – beginning with Bono, then Clay Aiken, Jessica Simpson, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, George Clooney and a few others. Even Madonna, not usually associated with high-mindedness, was “suddenly casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa” (this is from the New York Times), that year famously adopting a child from Malawi. Ed Zwick and Leonardo di Caprio and Jennifer Connelly took the pathology a step higher (or lower), coming from nowhere and seeming to adopt a whole country, Sierra Leone. Their ‘Blood Diamond’, a film that purports to recreate the horrors that befell Sierra Leone mainly in 1990s, came out just before Christmas. The producers of this film, which makes the word narcissism inadequate, claims that the intention is to save Sierra Leone (and countries like it) from the predatory degradation of diamond hunters and their wretched native allies who pressgang children into their militia and commit unspeakable atrocities. 

There was a time, a few years back, when films like ‘Blood Diamond’ would have been most welcome, not least by the long-suffering people of Sierra Leone….

BERNARD SMITH, FORCES IN AMERICAN CRITICISM (1939) —

“There was one critic who apparently possessed all the virtues—fine taste, poetic sensitiveness, intellectuality, an experimental inclination. His literary scholarship was beyond dispute, his writing deft and memorable. He was, moreover, a poet of the first rank, which gave his criticism of the art an extraordinary authority. He was universally respected: by Pound, by the later expatriates, by the impressionists of the Dial, by the Hound and Horn group. This critic was T. S. Eliot. His volume of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, is still considered to be one of the truly distinguished works of esthetic criticism produced in this century…. The reader will note that he is here described in the past tense. His works are many now, but The Sacred Wood alone is a consideration of esthetic problems. In the rest the emphasis is on the esthetic effects of moral and social beliefs. His development is one of the ‘consequences’ touched upon in the following chapter….  (358-359).

“[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’

“Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’

“To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….

“Eliot spoke of alternatives, not of choices…. He believes that one of the alternatives has greater value, is nobler, is in a sense more real, than the other. The question is therefore not simply one of personal taste. It is a question of evidence and reason. But the alternative he favors admits of no evidence and derogates from reason. His philosophy is, in the last analysis, wholly mystical. It is not capable of being tested and verified and improved. The alternative he rejects is, on the other hand, the one that is favored by those who are determined to be as scientific as one can be in a non-physical field.

“The literary criticism of the neo-classicists is a criticism composed of obiter dicta inspired by intangible emotions. The literary criticism of the materialists stands or falls by the findings of the social scientists, psychologists, and historians. Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….” (384-387).

“To whom does the future belong? In January 1939 Eliot announced that the Criterion, the literary journal he had edited since 1922, would no longer be published. His Europe had crumbled; the culture in which he had put his faith was dying. The Criterion had served its purpose. Eliot had arrived at a mood of detachment. There was nothing he could hopefully fight for now. But those who believe in scientific methods, in realism, in social equality and democracy, are hopeful and are fighting.”

MORE, RELATED, FROM BERNARD SMITH, FORCES IN AMERICAN CRITICISM (1939) —

“Socialist criticism in America may conveniently be dated from the founding of the Comrade—‘An Illustrated Socialist Monthly’—in 1901…. The Comrade appeared at the beginning of the muckrake era. It was superior to the muckrakers in the clarity of its vision as to the basic cause of social evils and the way to cure them….

“The aims of socialist critics were propagandistic, and it was inevitable that they should be paramount in a time when American critical systems were divided between art for art’s sake, art for morality’s sake, and various compromises between those two exhausted theories of esthetic purpose.1 Consider the essays and lectures on the contemporary theatre by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Miss Goldman made no bones about her intentions. Her essay on ‘The Modern Drama’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911) was frankly a salute to its subject as an instrument for the dissemination of radical thought.”

(1”’propaganda’ is not used here as an invidious term. It is used to describe works consciously written to have an immediate and direct effect upon their readers’ opinions and actions, as distinguished from works that are not consciously written for that purpose or which are written to have a remote and indirect effect. It is possible that conventional critics have learned by now that to call a literary work ‘propaganda’ is to say nothing about its quality as literature. By now enough critics have pointed out that some of the world’s classics were originally ‘propaganda’ for something”) (289-292).

“The socialist’s affinity with realism was stated forcefully in the leading editorial of the Masses in February 1911—the second issue of a magazine…which was a successor, on a more mature and ‘politicalized’ level, to the Comrade. It said: ‘It is natural that Socialists should favor the novel with a purpose, more especially, the novel that points a Socialist moral. As a reaction against the great bulk of vapid, meaningless, too-clever American fiction, with its artificial plots and characters remote from actual life, such an attitude is a healthy sign …’”(289-290).

“Its militancy is the most obvious characteristic of American criticism since the war. In the whole of nineteenth century there was only one critic, Poe, who was deliberately and consistently disputatious. No one else made polemics the basis of a critical method. Whitman was a maverick, but he was exclamatory rather than argumentative. Now, however, it is customary for critics to be bellicose, and there are few who have let politeness stand in the way of controversy. The reason is not hard to find. Criticism in our time has been largely a war of traditions—a struggle between irreconcilable ideologies…” (302).

“The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today….

“Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature…” (330-331).

ALSO SEE, UPTON SINCLAIR’S STUDIED VIEWS ON LITERATURE — MAMMONART (1924) — and “Books on Trial by Burial“ for other neglected progressive literary landmarks.

___________________

See also:

by  Tony Christini

 

Arundhati Roy returns to fiction writing after 10 years

“I am very conscious that, from the time of The God of Small Things was published 10 years ago, we are in a different world … which needs to be written about differently, and I really very much want to do that,” she explained.

“Just as resistance movements need to reinvent themselves, to shed their tired, old slogans, we all need to find new ways of doing what we’ve been doing. And that includes me.”

More reports here and here, and some commentary here.

More on TV and torture — political fiction in service of the State.

 [Human Rights] Group: TV torture [by Americans] influencing real life

by David Bauder

The advocacy group Human Rights First says there’s been a startling increase in the number of [American] torture scenes depicted on prime-time television in the post-2001 world.

Even more chilling, there are indications that real-life American interrogators in Iraq are taking cues from what they see on television, said Jill Savitt, the group’s director of public programs….

A former U.S. Army specialist who questioned prisoners in Baghdad’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and several other facilities around Iraq…said he saw instances of mock executions like that in [the TV drama] “24.” Once, some fellow interrogators asked an Iraqi translator to pretend he was being tortured to strike fear in a prisoner, after they had just watched a similar scene on a DVD….

Prior to 2001, the few torture scenes on prime-time TV usually had the shows’ villains as the instigators, Savitt said. [Now torture on TV is used by the shows’ American “heroes”.]  In both 1996 and 1997, there were no prime-time TV scenes containing torture, according to the Parents Television Council, which keeps a programming database. In 2003, there were 228 such scenes, the PTC said. The count was over 100 in both 2004 and 2005.

They found examples on “Alias,” “The Wire,” “Law & Order,” “The Shield” — even “Star Trek: Voyager.”

There’s been a surge in general in the level of violence tolerated in prime time.

…Herrington said he’s concerned that much of what’s on TV is misleading.

Television interrogation frequently works to a ticking clock: someone needs to find out the location of a bomb from a prisoner within the hour or it will explode. That’s so rare in real life that it’s essentially mythology, he said….

Kim Alphandary

Psychological Operations and Art

 

 

 

 

 

Fatima, the Virgin of Abu Ghraib

 

The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq 

By Joshua Key

As told to Lawrence Hill

Review by Michael Vernon

from the Globe and Mail

When he signed on as a combat engineer in 2002, Joshua Key claims he was misled by his quota-conscious recruiter, told he would almost certainly never have to serve overseas. One thing he did understand, however, was the U.S. army’s dim view of desertion: “I saw a poster on a wall that read: ‘Desertion in the time of war means death by a firing squad.’ ”

Key’s memoir is an attempt to justify why he deserted midway through his combat tour in Iraq, in a war he says is unjust.

He’s not alone. An estimated 8,000 members of the U.S. military have deserted since the Iraq War began in 2003. According to the War Resisters Support Campaign in Toronto, as many as 250 have come to Canada. To date, no one has been deported, though several refugee claims, including Key’s, have been rejected.

Key describes himself as a member of the so-called “poverty draft”: poor, ignorant Americans, drawn to the military by its promises of money, education and security as an antidote to a life of continued desperation.

Key’s upbringing in an Oklahoma trailer park is a white-trash cliché: absent father, abusive stepfather, plenty of booze and guns. Shortly after high school, Key marries his sweetheart, they quickly produce three children, and struggle to hold their dead-end life together. The military offers them a way out.

Elements of his army training are straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket. Twice, on orders from a drill sergeant, Key leads his peers in midnight raids to beat another recruit who is falling behind in the training: “My buddies and I threw a blanket over his head and beat his chest and ribs with a sock stuffed with soap. I whacked him hard while he cried out in pain.”

At first, the military gives Key stability and a sense of identity: “I must say that I loved boot camp. . . . I was no longer wondering how I could possibly put enough food on the table for Brandi and the boys. I was now an American soldier, and proud to think of myself as a perfect killing machine. I felt patriotic and invincible.”

Six months in Iraq changed that.

In places such as Ramadi and Fallujah, Key places the explosives that blow in the doors of Iraqis’ homes. He and his fellow soldiers search and intimidate the civilians inside. At first, Key enthusiastically bullies and thieves, confiscating and keeping any money he finds.

Over time, however, he begins to question the utility of these operations. In 200 raids, he says his squad never found anything they could link to terrorism. They only succeeded in inciting hatred: “A sick realization lodged like a cancer in my gut. It grew and festered, and troubled me more with every passing day. We, the Americans, had become the terrorists in Iraq.”

Key recalls several incidents involving the abuse and killing of civilians. He experiences a moral epiphany when he sees American soldiers kick around the decapitated heads of four Iraqis “in a twisted game of soccer.” He’s not sure who else sees this and he never reports it. In most of the cases he relates, he says soldiers acted with impunity. Their officers failed to punish those involved. It’s impossible to confirm the veracity of Key’s accounts here. At the same time, Canadians reading this might be grateful that their own soldiers are not mired in Iraq. Judging from what Canadian soldiers have told me about their experiences overseas, Afghanistan is — for now, at least — far different.

After more than six months in Iraq, Key returns home to his family for two weeks of much-needed leave. When his return flight to Iraq is delayed, he acts on impulse and goes into hiding in Philadelphia, before eventually driving north to Canada with his wife and four children.

The writing style is stark and compelling. There are no stylistic flourishes here as there are in Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir, Jarhead, or Evan Wright’s account of the invasion of Iraq, Generation Kill. Judging by what I’ve read of Lawrence Hill’s new novel, The Book of Negroes, I suspect he restrained himself when it came to assisting Key with his prose, in order to preserve the authentic voice of an ordinary soldier.

What’s most engaging about this book is its essential honesty. Key takes pains to recount incidents from his childhood and his military service that lay out his own shortcomings; as if to say, I’m telling you all this about myself so that you’ll believe what I say about Iraq. It caused me to reassess my notions of duty.

Even though Key was a soldier who voluntarily assumed the obligations of service, one can sympathize with his moral quandary. Soldiers don’t get to choose where they are sent, or how they are employed, but that doesn’t immunize them against a roiling conscience. Choosing to disobey orders takes guts. So does living underground with your family, enduring poverty and paranoia for the sake of your principles.

At the same time, as someone who’s been a professional soldier, I wonder how the men in Key’s squad felt when he failed to return from the United States, leaving them to continue the dirty work of counter-insurgency. And what do they think of the fact that for two months he carried a useless M249 machine gun because he couldn’t be bothered to have it repaired, jeopardizing their lives in a war zone?

The Deserter’s Tale ought to be required reading for soldiers heading overseas, to prepare them for the stresses and dilemmas they are likely to face.

Q&A: Ngugi wa Thiong’o

by Matt Cheney

Ngugi has just returned from traveling, but was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work, his ideas, and Wizard of the Crow:

Q: How did you settle on the structure and design of Wizard of the Crow?  It is such a large, rich, all-encompassing book … how did you decide what to put in, what to leave out, and which characters’ stories to tell at particular times?

Ngugi:  The writing of Wizard of the Crow was more of a possession than conscious plotting.  The structure developed with the story. As they dawned on me, many incidents were a surprise to me too, often eliciting laughter. However editing later does allow for reduction of redundancies.

Q: Much has changed in Kenya, in Africa, in the world since you began work on Wizard of the Crow — did those changes affect how the book progressed when you wrote it or translated it?

Ngugi:  No, no, because the essence of globalization within Africa and between Africa and the West remains the same despite surface changes. That is why I call it a global epic from Africa. 

1984:

Art cannot be outside that which affects human beings.  Art, literature, is about life, about the quality of human lives, about human relationships.  Therefore whatever affects the quality of human life, whatsoever affects the changing pattern of human relationships is connected with a legitimate area of art.  As such, any art which divorces itself from those social forces that impinge on human lives can only be an art which is denying itself its real life-force.  So politics, economics — everything which has to do with the struggle of human beings — is a legitimate concern of art.

1988:

Literature is indeed a powerful weapon.  I believe that we in Africa or anywhere else for that matter have to use literature deliberately and consciously as a weapon of struggle in two ways: a) first, by trying as much as possible to correctly reflect the world of struggle in all its stark reality, and b) secondly, by weighting our sympathies on the side of those forces struggling against national and class oppression and exploitation, say, against the entire system of imperialism in the world today.  I believe that the more conscious a writer is about the social forces at work in his society and in the world, the more effective he or she is likely to be as a writer.  We writers must reject the bourgeois image of a writer as a mindless genius.

Reviews of Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Dark Metropolis

Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism

 

This exhibition, produced on the occasion of what would have been Irving Norman’s 100th birthday (1906-1989), features paintings that remain as poignant and relevant today as when they were first created. Norman’s monumental paintings reflect a troubled and turbulent world. His works teem with detail and are populated with swarming, clone-like humans. People are constricted by small urban spaces and modern technology, caught in the crunch of rush hour, and decimated by poverty and war. Shocking, revealing and profound, the paintings aim, as Norman himself described, “to tell the truth of our time.”

The Social Surrealism of Irving Norman by Mark Vallen

Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism, is an extremely important exhibition of paintings just opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and running until April 15th, 2007. Until his death in 1989, Irving Norman had painted in California since the early 1940’s – and my having discovered the art works of the brilliant artist only a few years ago is a testament to the state of a blinkered art world. The irony of my discovery is that it wasn’t facilitated by a fellow artist or an art historian, critic or journal, but by a political activist who wrote to me one day in November of 2003 to ask if I had ever heard of the painter. Embarrassed by my unfamiliarity with the artist, I did a bit of research on Norman and was astounded at what I found.

Michael Duncan, a curator of contemporary art and corresponding editor for Art in America, wrote a July 2003 article for that magazine in which he described the paintings of Norman as “jaw-droppingly effective social indictments that would have been endorsed by Orwell and Huxley. The unrestrained passion and monumental energy of this work blows most contemporary political art out of the water.”

Kim Hubbard-Alphandary — Analogizing …

Alex Lilly — Zero Riot Cop

by Mark Vallen —

The Social Surrealism of Irving Norman

Fernando Botero and Abu Ghraib

From the review:

A few months ago, the American documentarian James Longley gave us Iraq in Fragments, which looked under the big news stories to some strands of Iraqi life, less about the war than about living. Now Philip Haas, the American director of such intelligent fiction films as The Music of Chance and Angels and Insects, has made a sort of companion piece to Longley’s film, called The Situation. This is the first picture that, fictional though it is, tries to deal with some realities of the Iraq war itself. Familiarly, the first casualty of war is truth: Haas tries to cut through the public presentation of the war to some of the actualities. 

…

The key person in this project was obviously the screenwriter. She is a journalist named Wendell Steavenson who spent a year in Iraq and whose writings attracted Haas. She would surely be the last to claim that she has rendered the whole of the situation, but there seems no reason to doubt the verity of what she does tell us–stories of Iraqi corruption, ambition, sectarian commitments, family devotion; stories of American military and political intent being ground into accommodating shape by daily wear and tear. Very little of the screenplay is surprising, yet it continually jogs us because of its immediacy and because it is so different from what we are fed every day from Washington. For instance, no one in this film, Americans especially, ever uses terms like “victory” or “stay the course.” And the Iraqi talk about Americans is often full of dislike and contempt and plans to exploit. 

The Thrill Is Gone — The Withering of the American Environmental Movement 

Jeffrey St. Clair

The power of the people can still overwhelm the influence of big money. Look at Chiapas. Read Edward Abbey. Listen to Mandela and Evo Morales. Anything is possible. Find your place, take a stand. People will join you.

Peter A. Welsch:

I randomly listened to Metallica’s One on the way up, which was inspired by Dalton Trumbo’s anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun. I first read that book when I was in middle school and it inspired me to declare myself a pacifist. Both that experience and Paths have me thinking about the role that militarism plays in our culture and society, especially considering the online row that has resulted from William Arkin’s item at the Washington Post Online, “The Troops Also Need to Support the American People.”

Also see Art, Literature, and the CIA

The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

by James Petras

  

The CIA’s cultural campaigns created the prototype for today’s seemingly apolitical intellectuals, academics, and artists who are divorced from popular struggles and whose worth rises with their distance from the working classes and their proximity to prestigious foundations. The CIA role model of the successful professional is the ideological gatekeeper, excluding critical intellectuals who write about class struggle, class exploitation and U.S. imperialism—”ideological” not “objective” categories, or so they are told.

The singular lasting, damaging influence of the CIA’s Congress of Cultural Freedom crowd was not their specific defenses of U.S. imperialist policies, but their success in imposing on subsequent generations of intellectuals the idea of excluding any sustained discussion of U.S. imperialism from the influential cultural and political media. The issue is not that today’s intellectuals or artists may or may not take a progressive position on this or that issue. The problem is the pervasive belief among writers and artists that anti-imperialist social and political expressions should not appear in their music, paintings, and serious writing if they want their work to be considered of substantial artistic merit. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship. Today at the opera, theater, and art galleries, as well as in the professional meetings of academics, the Cold War values of the CIA are visible and pervasive: who dares to undress the emperor?

ZNet Commentary
Iran: The War Begins
By John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of “buying time” for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a “surge” of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. “We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria,” he said. “And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”

“Networks” means Iran. “There is solid evidence,” said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, “that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government.” Like Bush’s and Tony Blair’s claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the “evidence” lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, “neo-con” fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran’s oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington’s Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their “strategy” is to end Iran’s nuclear threat.

In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations – until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use.

The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to “go anywhere and see anything”. They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have “catastrophic consequences” and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world’s fifth military power – with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world’s longest illegal occupation – Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The “threat” from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s “nuclear ambitions”, just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]”; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be “wiped off the map”. He said: “The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” This, says Cole, “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all”. Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

Nuclear option

The one piece of “solid evidence” is the threat posed by the United States. An American naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls CONPLAN 8022-02, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004, National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled “Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorisation”, was issued. It is classified, of course, but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the stockpiling and deployment of “tactical” nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what were then called “limited” nuclear weapons is being discussed openly in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that American bombers “have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery missions . . . since last summer”.

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran before the end of April. One of Russia’s most senior military strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the Mediterranean. “The war in Iraq,” he wrote on 24 January, “was just one element in a series of steps in the process of regional destabilisation.

It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis . . . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US Congress is going to authorise the war.”

Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the “surge” of US troops to Iraq, Vice-President Cheney said: “It won’t stop us.” Last November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.

Apart from insipid speeches of “disapproval”, this has not happened and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in his party as a “liberal”. He was one of a high-level American contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke about “an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon.” Hillary Clinton has said: “US policy must be unequivocal . . . We have to keep all options on the table.” Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of becoming an “apartheid state”. Pelosi said: “Carter does not speak for the Democratic Party.” She is right, alas.

In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled Answering the Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honourable exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.

Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the invasion of Iraq, which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked? North Korea has nuclear weapons.

In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC World Service, “we”, the majority of humanity, have made clear our revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists, scholars and artists, writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about “freedom of speech”, are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-year Reich, or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?

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Molly Ivins 

From The Texas Observer —

She didn’t say that, did she?

To which we say…

Pictures

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Bill Moyers remembers…