Film

Book

Charting the Way Forward in Revolutionary Times The Leaderless Revolution – How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century (Carne Ross, Simon & Schuster, 2011) Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere – The New Global Revolutions (Paul Mason, Verso, 2012) (Reviewed for International Affairs) Frequently described as a “high flying former diplomat”, Carne Ross resigned from the Foreign Office over the Iraq War. Being so close to mechanisms of power provided him with an understanding which ultimately shook his belief in our national and international systems of government. Indeed the author admits that he does not come up with his arguments ‘by way of academic study, or historical research. I know this because I once did it’. Ross’s earlier work, ‘Independent Diplomat’, was an exorcism of his institutional past while his latest effort is a far more ambitious attempt to outline a better future for global governance. Ross, now running his own diplomatic consultancy, has transformed into a thinking man’s neo-anarchist whose book outlines both the failures of representative democracy in the era of globalisation and ways in which empowered individuals can succeed in the future. The author’s central point revolves around the failure of institutions to meet peoples aspirations. While global surveys confirm that while people prefer democracy, as Ross puts it ‘they are less and less happy with the practice of democratic government’. The nation state represents an archaic and ill fitting answer to multifaceted non-localised issues, brought on by the pressures of globalisation and climate change. From flu-epidemics, to the spread of rioting, he carefully plots the ways in which our interconnectedness has led to problems which require global cooperation to solve. Yet the best efforts at multilateral cooperation have yet to deliver the answers. Ross parallels the enormous rhetoric of the 2005 G8’s promise to ‘make poverty history’ with the reality of its ‘utter failure’ to do so with a shortfall in pledges of $20 billion. Read full review

Rock the Casbah – Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World Robin Wright (Simon & Schuster, 2011)   (Reviewed for International Affairs) Veteran US newspaper correspondent Robin Wright has released a timely, enthralling, yet somewhat inconsistent venture into understanding the tumultuous dynamics around events in the Middle East and across North Africa.     The author initially explores the origins of the Arab uprisings venturing that they were produced by a “confluence of at least four factors: education, raised expectations, demographics, and communication technology”. Yet while these reasons are touched upon and explored this is by no means a straight forward account and Wright’s central and most controversial thesis surrounds the dynamics of what she describes as the ‘counter-jihad’. This reflects a slightly US-centric approach concerned with al Qaeda-like threats as the author suggests that “the counter-jihad will define the next decade as thoroughly as the extremists dominated the last one”. Wright later declares that America’s most basic challenge is “comprehending the post-jihadist phase”.   Read full review

An Innocent Abroad The Other Side of the Mirror (Brooke Allen, Paul Dry Books – Philadelphia 2011) (International Affairs) Brooke Allen, an American critical writer, attempts in this book the ambitious task of writing a travelogue that opens up the closed state of Syria to an American public. Sadly, what Allen has created is a fragmented, superficial and deeply flawed foray into Syria that, considering the great potential of the task, is disappointing. Although featuring sections of history and political commentary, the book reads much like a holiday diary. Much of the 248 page work comprises chunks of quotations ranging from Mark Twain to T. E Lawrence and a number of postcard-like pictures of Syria’s greatest tourist attractions. What’s more, the Syria that Allen describes is almost completely devoid of real characters. With no Arabic language skills to enable her to converse with Syrian people, the majority of the author’s encounters are with workers in the tourist trade. Allen admits to having ‘untutored eyes’ and one wonders how much you can really learn from an author whose book is based on seemingly only two short  trips to the country. Read full review

Arab Youth Energy Fuels Democratic Revolutions The Arab Revolution (Jean-Pierre Filiu, Hurst, London 2011) (Reviewed for International Affairs) It is hard to put into words the enormity of the events that have occurred across the Arab world in 2011. Mubarak, Gaddafi and Ben Ali have been unseated from power, Saleh and Assad are on the brink, all other Arab leaders watch on with their own degrees of nervousness. These rapidly evolving events of historical proportions have not only dominated the global news headlines but have forced scholars into auditing the region anew. Jean-Pierre’s book is timely to say the least, offering a short but concise series of historical perspectives and modern analysis to form ten lessons from what he terms the ‘democratic uprising’. Read full review

A Knight's Tale Cables From Kabul – The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign   Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Harper Press, 2011   (Reviewed for International Affairs) Joining the ever expanding series of memoirs from former officials involved in the Afghan and Iraqi wars, Sherard Cowper-Coles book attempts to ‘illuminate some of the political and diplomatic aspects’ of the war in Afghanistan. As British Ambassador in Kabul between 2007-2010, in what he described as ‘the best and the worst of diplomatic postings’, Cowper-Coles has written an immensely readable and insightful account of what appears to be a structurally flawed expedition.   Cowper-Coles describes his position at the Embassy as being ‘the headmaster of a rundown but generally happy and successful prep school’. The book is full of diplomatic gems such as the naming of the Embassy bar as the ‘Inn Fidel’ and the excitement of a beard growing competition. Cowper-Coles comes across as a likeable narrator throughout and any potential disgruntlement with an institution that ultimately failed to match his ambitions is largely hidden.   The former Ambassador is fulsome in his praise for those he worked with, but is critical of the structure of the British presence in the country, with the rapid cycling of tour rotation leading to an ‘addiction to high allowances’ which created a ‘post-conflict stabilisation industry’. The problem was more pronounced for the military where the ‘six-month rotation system risked the British Army in Helmand continually reinventing the wheel’. What is more, upon arrival each brigadier would do what ‘soldiers expect to do’ and launch a major kinetic operation, regardless of the subtleties of counterinsurgency theory. Read full review

Islamic Nuclear Crisis in the Middle East “The Sixth Crisis – Iran, Israel, America, And The Rumors of War” – Dana Allin, Steven Simon (Oxford University Press, 2011) “Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East” – Sami Zubaida (I.B Tauris, 2011) (Reviewed for International Affairs) With the eyes of the World transfixed on the ongoing Arab uprising the threat of a conflict between Iran and either or both of the US and Israel has moved somewhat into the shadows. The Sixth Crisis joins many books in being surprised by the current events, erroneously describing the Arab states as “more mature now than they were in the wake of decolonization and more secure than they were in the spring of 1967”. Nevertheless the authors, one a  senior Professor at John Hopkins University and the other a former member of President Clinton’s National Security Council staff, get it spot on when they argue that “Middle Eastern regimes have never feared invasion as much as subversion”. Such subversion is now out in the open and on the streets and in the squares of cities across the region, truly an unexpected seventh crisis is upon us.   Recent events aside Allin and Simon’s work is a remarkably ambitious foray across the history and the strategic hotspots of the region in what amounts to essentially well informed speculation on how and what kind of potential conflict could emerge as the ‘sixth crisis’. The book attempts to be both an explanation and a warning. America, the authors argue, has confronted five distinct crises in the Middle East since World War 2, each drawing the country progressively deeper into the region. Today America stands at the crossroads of another crisis with intelligent leadership the only hope for Washington to steer through such choppy waters. Both writers largely endorse Obama’s approach to the region which demonstrates what the authors refer to as ‘psychological realism’ that understands that America is unable to impose its own moral and historical narrative on the rest of the world. Where the book is at its most coherent is in an analysis of the simmering Iranian-American/Israeli conflict. The nuclearization of a ‘thuggish’ Iran is articulated as a ‘reckless and frightening escalation of the shadow conflicts and real wars in the Middle East’. The Iranian intent is judged as hostile and monitoring measures such as the NPT are dismissed as ineffective regulators of Iranian ambitions with Tehran described as ‘writing the book on how to achieve a near-nuclear weapons status within the broad parameters of the treaty’. So what can be done to stop them? While not very much is offered in the way of constructive solutions plenty is written about options doomed to fail. War against Iran would be a ‘tragic mistake’ and although the potential for Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities is very real, the authors dismiss its likely effectiveness with the best scenario being the programme ‘might be set back by a couple of years’. Meanwhile sanctions on Iran are casually dismissed as ‘of utterly unproven efficacy’.  Read full review

1001 Tragedies Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 (Mark Kukis, Columbia University Press, New York 2011)   (International Affairs) In interviews accompanying the release of his book former British Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated that history will ultimately judge him on Iraq. Yet there is always the danger that an elite’s history written by those responsible for events can create its own reality. What has long been needed therefore is a people’s history of the Iraq war that incorporates descriptions of ignored events and unheard voices.  Mark Kukis’s book is a credible first attempt at such a people’s history that "is meant to be a collective portrait of those Iraqis who endured the most trying ordeals of America’s war years in Iraq”. The work appears to be partly inspired by Howard Zinn, who sought to write “an American history through the eyes of common people rather than the political and economic elites”. However Kukis does not exclude the elites, his portrait is painted through the experiences of close to seventy Iraqis ranging from interim Prime Ministers and tribal sheikhs to bus drivers and underwear sellers. Each of their stories of fear, loss and violence is told within a chronology that tracks the start of the war, the fall of Baghdad, the beginning of the insurgency and the descent into civil war, before finally touching on the optimism born of the improvements in security from 2008. Read full review

Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East Radwan Ziadeh (I.B.Tauris, 2011) (Reviewed in March 2011 for International Affairs) Written before the recent wave of revolutions across the Middle East, this book by Syrian exile Radwan Ziadeh provides a informative, well intentioned but inconsistent account of the politics of modern Syria. The zenith of this inconsistency is the book’s claim to focus on Syria’s intelligence services, a worthy and important subject but one whose secretive and authoritarian nature makes it somewhat impenetrable. However, while Ziadeh fails to shine a light on the dark recesses of Syria’s security institutions, he does provide a very readable snapshot of the first ten years of Bashar al-Asad’s rule, placed into the context of a brief history of the country and the transition from Hafez to his son Bashar. Part of the book’s failure is self-imposed. Ziadeh boldly begins by stating that academic studies of Syria “tend to place too much emphasis on a particular Syrian leader without attempting to study what mechanisms lie behind the political system”. The author critiques Patrick Seale’s masterly biography of Hafez Assad for claiming that “Asad is Syria, and Syria is Asad”, however such an attack on the behaviourist approach can only hold water if the work truly managed to propose a different hypothesis. Ziadeh’s research uncovers only what Seale would have himself confirmed: that Hafez Asad “was completely and single-handedly the one decision-maker who could set in motion any all-inclusive system at his disposal”. Ziadeh’s book offers little change, stating that “any differences between President Bashar Asad and his father stem from psychological differences between them rather than differences in the political system”. Read full review

From Beirut with Love ‘War & Memory in Lebanon’ – Sune Haugbolle ‘Beirut’ – Samir Kassir   (Reviewed for International Affairs) Lebanon has returned to the news in recent months with talk of possible renewed civil conflict, making it apt timing to read two books examining both the history of the country and how memory has come to play such an important role in managing societal relations.   Haugbolle’s book is thoughtful ethnography of social memory, based on time spent in the country analyzing a plethora of cultural records.  The work attempts to provide a ‘detailed analysis of cultural products’ to highlight the interplay between collective ideas and individual formation and, more specifically in the context of Lebanon, to unmask the preservation of memory culture following the devastating civil war (1975-1990). Read full review

Review of Invisible War by Joy Gordon (Reviewed for International Affairs) Joy Gordon has crafted a well researched and sobering story of the US-led failure of international governance in the case of the 13 years of sanctions on Iraq. The underlying argument made is that the UN Charter's mandate to achieve 'health, education and economic development' was fatally compromised by a US policy which was premised on 'an ongoing commitment to regime change'. As far as the US was concerned, sanctions were designed to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein by depriving the Iraqi state of an income that could lead to a military coup. Yet Saddam remained and what the sanctions did achieve was the relegation of Iraq to what one UN official described as 'a pre-industrial age'. The Security Council provided a fig leaf of legitimacy to sanctions that consistently 'prioritized disarmament over humanitarian concerns'. Effectively, Gordon argues that the result of UN involvement was to ensure the complicity of international governance in the 'legalization of atrocity'. Read full review

Theatre

Black Watch Review Following success at the National Theatre of Scotland and after a global tour, Black Watch made its long awaited début at the Barbican at the start of June. Read more...

Television

Britain's Hidden Alcoholics - BBC Panorama (February 2012) Another barrage of statistics showing up how worried we in Britain should be about the state of our drinking culture, which this documentary aptly described as a combination of Southern European meal drinking with Northern European feast drinking. Apparently some 200,000 Britons travel to work hungover, 9,000 die every year due to alcohol related illness with liver disease responsible for 100 deaths per week costing the NHS £2.7bn. Yet the drinks industry in Britain is worth some £36bn with 2 milllion jobs supported/dependent on it. Of particular concern was the science behind encouraging people to drink - with shots a 'functional technique for intoxication' and some 1.6billion bottles of wine drunk in 2010. Sobering stuff...

America's Poor - BBC Panorama (February 2012) After returning from a trip to Las Vegas I was shocked by this insight into poverty in America. It told stories of people living in tent cities and in storm drains, of 1.5million homeless children, of 50million Americans still without health insurance who would wait overnight to see a free doctor. It appears that Obama-care has yet to kick in for many. The Vegas section showed that while $16 million is spent every night in the 'city of sin' some 300-400 people live in the storm drains underneath the city, eaking out a life handing out flyers to the shows and sights of the city during the day. Some 47 million Americans qualify as poor, the most in 1/2 a century, this against a backdrop of the top 1% of the population earning 1/5th of the richest county on the planet's wealth. Particularly sad were the stories of children having to eat rats and use ketchup satchets to make soup in order to eat. Depressing stuff.

Generation Kill Review Unlike previous depictions of the US in Iraq ‘Generation Kill’s ability to capture the dilemmas of modern soldiering stands out Erasmus once wrote that “dulce bellum inexpertis” - war is delightful to those who have no experience of it. Former President George Bush’s now somewhat moribund ‘Global War on Terror’ was experienced largely by volunteer soldiers and the civilians of Afghanistan and Iraq. Generation Kill is the dramatization of these soldier stories as they fight their way into Iraq in 2003. As with the excellent ‘Blackwatch’ production, ‘Generation Kill’ is translated to western audiences through the reporting of embedded ‘Rolling Stones’ magazine correspondent Evan Right. The use of a journalist as a storyteller and the casting of former soldiers as characters in the drama highlight how the military fraternity have a culture and customs that are considerably distinct from their civilian counterparts. Read more...