PBS documentary on Iraq

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Last night PBS aired a Frontline documentary that marked the first
retreat from its lockstep support for US wars of aggression since 9/11.
You will also be able to view the entire show on the website
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/) starting on
October 11. Titled "Truth, War and Consequences", it was basically a
liberal "tragic mistake" interpretation such as the kind that cropped up
in the 1960s when things turned sour in Indochina. In fact the website
has a section titled "What Went Wrong".

By "wrong" PBS does not mean the same thing as in the sentence: "Insider
trading is wrong". By "wrong" they mean that something has backfired,
for example the decision to overrule Jay Garner's plan to hire former
Iraqi soldiers to repair roads and other infrastructure. Once these
soldiers found themselves unemployed, they naturally resorted to
violence. The PBS documentary never once asks the question of whether
the US had the *right* to invade and overthrow the government of Saddam
Hussein.

The most useful aspect of the documentary is that it allows Ahmad
Chalabi and Kanan Makiya, who are featured prominently, to hoist
themselves on their own petard. For example, when Frontline interviewer
Martin Smith, who is also credited as writer, asks Chalabi if there is
any connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, Chalabi says of course. He has
evidence of this and gave it to the USA. When Smith, who has the
demeanor in these interviews of a Catholic schoolboy confronting a
pedophile priest, asks if he can see it, Chalabi says he cannot. All in
all, it has the impact of a better "Sixty Minutes" episode.

There is a telling moment in this documentary that makes the Iraqi
resistance understandable. Shortly after a decision has been made by the
US to crack down on looting, we see an army patrol that has captured a
perpetrator who has a bunch of stolen wood on the top of his aging car.
While they dress him down about the evils of looting, a tank rolls over
his car reducing it to rubble. Afterwards, GI's "high-five" each other
as if the car were a prop on "Fear Factor". Later, Frontline learns that
the man is a taxi driver and that the car was his sole means of income.

Makiya is a real piece of work, as we put it in the USA. He appears
rather disillusioned with what has happened in his native country but
cannot make the connection between the US invasion and all that has gone
wrong. This Brandeis professor is effusive in his praise of George W.
Bush but blames just about everybody else in his administration for
lacking the president's commitment to democracy.

Makiya has often been described as an ex-Trotskyist. This morning I
examined an online version of his "Republic of Fear" to detect any whiff
of Marxism. This is what I found:

>>All of this development highlights a dilemma whose underpinnings in
our century arise within the communist tradition. The Russian experience
has deeply affected all thinking on the relationship of political
freedoms to development in backward countries irrespective of political
persuasion. The contradictions were most paradigmatically expressed in
the thought of Leon Trotsky. In his trenchant attack on Stalinism, The
Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky sought an explanation of the Stalinist
phenomenon taken from outside its own peculiar distinctness and history
of development. He wrote of the despotism of the new state as being an
outcome of "the iron necessity to give birth to and support a privileged
minority" in conditions of backwardness and how "the power of the
democratic Soviets proved cramping, even unendurable, when the task of
the day was to accommodate those privileged groups whose existence was
necessary for defense, for industry, for technique and science." The
sense is of a transcendent causality maybe beyond the capacities of
human intervention, through which today's freedoms have to be sacrificed
in the interests of progress. This did not come from an economist,
academician, or armchair revolutionary; it came from a leading intellect
and political actor of the Russian revolution who had himself been cast
aside by the "iron necessity" of the course it later took.

What was for Trotsky a wrenching universal and personal dilemma, which
he could only resolve by holding fervently onto the idea of world
revolution, was transformed in the nationalist withdrawal and
accelerating parochialism of all subsequent revolutions into an
immutable law of the historical process, one that had been proved by the
Stalinist experience. Invariably the ideology that captures this quality
of imperial economic necessity in the Third World is the carping on
about the "falsity" of bourgeois freedoms and the universal tendency to
dislocate the realm of "true" freedom from the political to the social
and economic domains. All later revolutions of this century (China,
Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria) and all post-World War II nationalisms
(Nasserism, Peronism, Ba'thism) have reaffirmed to one degree or another
the apparently stringent objectivity of the choice: development or
freedom?<<

So evidently Makiya did at least read Trotsky. Whether he understood him
is another question altogether. The freedom pole of the
development/freedom polarity referred to above needs to be elaborated
on. What does Makiya mean by freedom? It appears that this is the
freedom to organize political parties, to put out newspapers--in other
words the sort of freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. It does not
address social and economic freedom, however. If a nation does not have
the freedom to develop its resources for the national good, then what
use does civil liberties have? If Egyptians lacked the power to
nationalize the Suez Canal or if Cuba could not expropriate the landed
gentry, then true freedom would have eluded them no matter the trappings
of formal democracy. But once private property is attacked, such
countries inevitably find themselves threatened by imperialist war and
blockade and are often required willy-nilly to impose somewhat draconian
political norms. If they don't, they risk going the route of Allende's
Chile or Sandinista Nicaragua.

These questions constitute the cutting edge of politics today. Since the
USA poses as a defender of "freedom" against all sorts of totalitarian
dungeons from Cuba to North Korea, it is crucial that the left comes to
term with this freedom/development contradiction. Elements of the left,
including the social democratic Dissent Magazine that publishes Makiya,
fail to understand that the USA has ulterior motives when it presses for
parliamentary democracy. It sees this governmental form as a necessary
first step in privatizing state property. This is what happened in
Yugoslavia and it is about to happen in Iraq--that is unless the heroic
Iraqi people stop the invaders in their tracks. Unless the left can see
things in class terms, it will inevitably serve as cheerleaders for US
imperialism as Makiya does, no matter his Trotskyist background.

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