I pulled up to my house one day but I didn't get out of the car for five minutes. I was listening to WORT, Madison's invaluable community station, and there was an interview on with a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. I couldn't turn it off. He was describing what had happened to him and his family on April 17, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge took over. He told of hearing shots, of seeing bodies by the side of the road. And he told of seeing his own mother shot dead by the Khmer Rouge a few days later.

I called up my friends at WORT to praise the program and to find out who the guest was. They told me his name is Sophea Mouth, and he lives right here in town. I decided to invite him in for a half- hour Second Opinion interview. The encounter has stayed with me ever since, and I thought you might be interested in his views on the need to bring Pol Pot before an international tribunal (see page 11).

A few weeks after I spoke with Sophea Mouth, Anthony Lewis wrote a column in The New York Times about Pol Pot and the left. "A few Western intellectuals, notably Professor Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia," he wrote. "At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution."

Was this true? I felt compelled to find out. I have to conclude it wasn't Chomsky's finest hour. Writing in the June 25, 1977, issue of The Nation, he and Edward S. Herman tried to poke holes in books that warned of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Though one of these books was "serious and worth reading" and did include a "grisly account" of Khmer Rouge "barbarity," they cited "repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false." They also gave short shrift to accounts from Cambodians who had fled, citing the "extreme unreliability of refugee reports."

Of course, Chomsky and Herman had reason to be skeptical. The American people had been fed lies about the situation in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia for twenty years. They were also correct to point out how the massive destruction of Cambodia by U.S. bombing paved the way for the Khmer Rouge. And they were right that the U.S. media tend to be much more interested in communist atrocities than in the atrocities that U.S. allies commit.

But they were wrong to suggest that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge may have been "more similar to France after liberation" than to Germany under the Nazis. Chomsky and Herman did equivocate, however: "We do not pretend to know where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments," they wrote.

And what of The Progressive? This magazine didn't exactly shower itself with glory, either. In a November 1978 editorial, The Progressive expressed skepticism about the reports of genocide in Cambodia and scolded Senator George McGovern for being "taken in." McGovern had warned that "something horrible is now transpiring in Cambodia" and called for an international intervention.

In the issue that followed, Milton Mayer, the longtime "roving editor" of The Progressive, mocked a UPI dispatch that concerned Cambodia. Mayer quoted the dispatch as follows: "A refugee from Siem Reap recalled a friend who was discovered having intercourse. The communists beat him to death, forcing his girlfriend to watch." Mayer then added this commentary: "Did the refugee from Siem Reap witness the intercourse? If so, he may have been a dirty old man. If not, how (and how reliably) was he informed of it? Did he witness the beating to death of his friend and, if so, why didn't he intervene (the cad), and if not, how does he know that it wasn't the communists who were having intercourse with the girlfriend and the friend who beat the communists to death -- in accord with the best anti-communist scenario?"

Only in August 1980, when William Steif wrote an excellent report for The Progressive from the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand, did readers of this magazine receive a glimpse of the Khmer Rouge holocaust.

What lessons do I draw from all this? First, we on the left need to recognize that the United States does not commit every evil in the world; there is plenty to go around.

Second, the Khmer Rouge prove, once and for all, the horrific potential of violent revolutions, followed by vanguard dictatorships, suffused with romantic Marxist and Rousseauian notions about creating a new man, a "species being."

Third, our anti-interventionism and pacifism can blind us to the grossest human-rights abuses abroad.

And, on a personal note, I have a renewed sense of caution about issuing pronouncements.

BOB EDWARDS, Host: It's 11 minutes before the hour. Using propaganda to rally the public behind foreign-policy objectives.

[News headlines]

EDWARDS: The ideas of linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky are the subject of a new Canadian film called Manufacturing Consent. The title is taken from the 1988 book Chomsky co-authored about the way reporters choose which issues to cover and how to present them; how journalists, in his opinion, manipulate public thinking about government policy. Pat Dowell has seen the film and says its not a dry, sober collection of sound bites and talking heads.

PAT DOWELL, Reporter: Manufacturing Consent runs nearly three hours, with intermission, spanning more than 20 years worth of radio and television recordings of Noam Chomsky here and abroad. Filmmakers Mark Achbar [sp] and Peter Wintonic [sp] also travelled to several countries themselves to film Chomsky's speaking engagements.

UNIDENTIFIED FILMMAKER: We couldn't make it to Japan. We had to fax our instructions to the camera crew there. The first film directed by fax machine, I think.

DOWELL: The film's unusual in other ways, illustrating and sometimes playfully dramatizing Chomsky's objections to the media's coverage of U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky calls it propaganda and so, in the film, while he explains how different governments control the thoughts of their citizens, the filmmakers cut from Chomsky to a Hitler rally, to American police arresting peace protesters, to a shot of a church steeple and a minaret.

[Excerpt from Manufacturing Consent]

NOAM CHOMSKY, Linguist and Political Activist: When you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem. It may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule, and therefore, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what, in more honest days, used to be called propaganda - manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions.

DOWELL: The film draws on 185 archival sources for many of its images, and also on Wintonic and Achbar's fertile imaginations, which conjure up such items as philosopher trading cards in a future world. The filmmakers themselves don scrubbies and impersonate surgeons in one scene. While a heart monitor and a respirator provide sound effects, they take scalpel and sutures to a newspaper article about human- rights abuses in East Timor, a country invaded by Indonesia in 1975. They're acting out Chomsky's allegations that because Indonesia is a U.S. ally, the New York Times played down the invasion's atrocities by reprinting a severely edited London Times report.

Mr. CHOMSKY: It ended up being a whitewash, whereas the original was an atrocity story.

DOWELL: Clearly, audiences expecting a staid presentation of ideas will get something else from Manufacturing Consent, perhaps even the kind of slick media object Chomsky himself might call manipulative. The filmmakers say their techniques recontextualize Chomsky, raise questions about the place of such dissenters in our society. Mark Achbar hopes the audience will think just as hard about the medium as they do about its message.

MARK ACHBAR, Filmmaker: Another function of these recontextualization strategies, if we can call them that, is to prod the audience as they' re watching the film just to continually remind people that they are consuming a media product - the media product being our film - and we want to keep that idea alive in people's minds as they're watching the film to encourage a kind of critical distance from the material itself.

DOWELL: Another way they do this, says Peter Wintonic, is by showing footage of people watching - and sometimes ignoring - their film, specifically in places where those people might expect to find commercials or news or sports scores.

PETER WINTONIC, Filmmaker: We rented the Olympic stadium in Montreal and had to pay the hydro company quite a bit of money just to turn on the lights. But we played back Chomsky there, or in Times Square on the Sony Jumbotron. And we replayed materials that we'd gathered over these years on the largest point-of-purchase video wall - which is like this 264-screen video cube in the middle of a huge shopping center.

[Excerpt from Manufacturing Consent]

DOWELL: Only the mall shoppers aren't watching. They're playing miniature golf, seemingly oblivious to Chomsky's looming image discussing thought control, the Gulf War, or spectator sports as training for irrational jingoism. Audiences who've seen the finished film in theaters have been more responsive. Chomsky says he's gotten lots of mail, much of it angry about his analysis of sports. More gratifying to him is the fact that the movie has proved useful to activists raising public awareness of East Timor. And that makes Chomsky glad he agreed to let Wintonic and Achbar follow him with a camera, literally for years.

Mr. CHOMSKY: In fact, for a while, I couldn't get off an airplane in some foreign country without seeing those two smiling faces there, and my heart sinking. It felt the first scene of Dolce Vita a bit.

DOWELL: Noam Chomsky goes to the movies? Fellini movies?

Mr. CHOMSKY: Yeah, I'm not as remote from the popular culture as I sometimes pretend.

DOWELL: He didn't let Wintonic and Achbar follow him everywhere, however.

Mr. CHOMSKY: My wife, particularly, laid down an iron law that they were to get nowhere near the house, the children, personal life - anything like that - and I agreed with that. I mean, this is not about a person. It's about ideas and principles. If they want to use a person as a vehicle, okay, but, you know, my personal life and my children and where I live and so on have nothing to do with it.

DOWELL: Which helps to explain why Noam Chomsky has not seen Manufacturing Consent, and won't.

Mr. CHOMSKY: Partly for uninteresting personal reasons, namely, I just don't like to hear myself and mostly think about the way I should have done it better, and so on. There are, however, some more general reasons. Much as the producers may try to overcome this, and I'm sure they did, there's something inevitable in the nature of the medium that personalizes the issues and gives the impression that some individual - in this case, it happens to be me - is the, you know, the leader of a mass movement or trying to become one, or something of that kind.

DOWELL: Chomsky says he's not any such thing and that movements for social change succeed not because of leaders, but because of largely unknown workers on the front lines. He does understand, however, that people can be reached by a medium that puts a face on ideas that challenge the official story.

Mr. CHOMSKY: There's very little in the way of political organization or other forms of association in which people can participate meaningfully in the public arena. People are- feel themselves as victims. They' re isolated victims of propaganda, and if somehow, somebody comes along and says, you know, the kind of thing that they sort of have a gut feeling about or believed anyway, there's a sign of recognition and excitement and the feeling that maybe I'm not alone.

DOWELL: Maybe Chomsky's right. The weekend Manufacturing Consent opened in San Francisco, it outgrossed every other movie but Indecent Proposal. The movie is also showing in Los Angeles, Boston, Hartford and San Diego. It opens in a dozen more cities next month. For National Public Radio, this is Pat Dowell in Washington.

[music]

EDWARDS: This is NPR's Morning Edition. I'm Bob Edwards.

[Funding credits given]

[Production credits given]

[This transcript has not yet been proofread against audiotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to accuracy of speakers and spelling.]

These are hard times for intellectualsof the left. Many have fled to cultural studies. A brave few seek to recast old political ideas. To what effect?

THE INTELLECTUALS AND SOCIALISM. By Friedrich Hayek. Institute of Economic Affairs; 28 pages; K4

AS A reminder, if one were needed, of how far the left has lost the intellectual initiative, it may be worth a look at Friedrich Hayek' s slender polemic first published half a century ago. Whether or not you accept Hayek's scornful dismissal of intellectuals as ``professional second-hand dealers in ideas'', with socialist intellectuals the worst of the lot, you will get a sense of Hayek's powerful conviction that socialist ideas of material equality had won the day and were posing a threat to post-war liberty. To Hayek there was an affinity between the preachiness of intellectuals and the bossiness of socialism, and though he never fully explained how, in a democracy, such an unappealing combination could be both popular and dangerous, he was in no doubt that conservatives should respond by developing liberal radicalism into a popular philosophy of their own.

ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN 20TH-CENTURY AMERICA. By Richard Rorty. Harvard University Press; 170 pages; $18.95 and K11.95

THE intellectual boot is now very much on the opposite foot, as Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, laments. At times you feel he almost shares Hayek's contempt for left-wing intellectuals. He regrets the rise of what he calls a ``spectatorial, disgusted, mocking left'', a university left distracted by cultural studies and post-modern theories of the ``end of man''.

Instead, Mr Rorty calls for a left which ``dreams of achieving'' America, a patriotic left he recognises from the days of the New Deal and which he remembers from the early 1960s when, for example, people campaigned for civil-rights laws to make their country better. Where, he wonders, has such reformist pride gone? In place of ``Marxist scholasticism'', Mr Rorty wants a left which makes reducing inequalities part of a ``civic religion''. Yet material differences are not the only sort of thing that bothers Mr Rorty about the contemporary United States. On a communitarian note, he argues that the ``civic religion' ' he advocates should include commitment to shared values that rise above ethnic or minority loyalties.

THE CULTURAL TURN. By Fredric Jameson. Verso; 206 pages; $45 & K30.

THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY. By Perry Anderson. Verso; 160 pages; $50 & K35

THERE is no better American example of a ``Marxist scholastic'' than Fredric Jameson, professor of comparative literature at Duke University. Not that anyone turning to this rich collection of essays about ``post- modernity'' in 1983-98 should expect to find straightforward politics and economics or even history. His range of reference is daunting, though like any generalist, Mr Jameson relies a lot on a fast tempo to get through the tricky bits. To sum up his take on things is a risk: he is too deft to be pinned to a position. But it is not far wrong to say that, for him, capitalism forms an all-embracing system, that how people think about things is somehow trapped and distorted by that system, and that in order to imagine alternatives to capitalism, you must first break its mental hold by thinking obliquely and unconventionally, especially about literature, architecture and the arts. It is a search strategy that will strike some people as despair. But it has its following on the intellectual left. Perry Anderson's short book, which began life as a foreword to Mr Jameson's, is as lucid and patient an account of the idea of post-modernity as you could wish for.

PROFIT OVER PEOPLE: NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL ORDER. By Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press; 176 pages; $32. Turnaround; K22

THOUGH Hayek mocked the intellectual capacities of intellectuals, in brainpower Noam Chomsky yields to none. A formidable MIT scholar who revolutionised linguistics and opened the door to modern cognitive science, Mr Chomsky could have chopped Hayek into liver paste and put him on toast. Yet mental brilliance and argumentative rigour is not everything in political economy: you need good assumptions. To Mr Chomsky liberal capitalism is structurally flawed and morally wicked. You have to accept that before much of what he says can make sense: unequal trade and destructive flows of capital hurt developing economies; in rich nations, big firms control politics and the media; the free market is a myth (huge American subsidies to industry); and much democracy is superficial (low voter turnouts). Mr Chomsky is a firebrand, untempted by cultural politics and unpersuaded by the soft social-democracy Richard Rorty recommends. His most recent collection excoriates neo- liberalism as a threat to democracy but offers little practical clue as to how welfare and equality are to be improved.

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM: AN INITIATIVE FOR POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REFORM. By Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornell West. Beacon Press; 94 pages; $20. Airlift; K15.99

BEMOANING the timorousness of today's progressives, these two Harvard professors want the left to think hard again about real economic and political issues. Like Mr Chomsky, they believe that correcting inequalities of wealth and power in America is urgent; yet unlike him they have specific proposals, which they throw out for debate: they would ``re- energise'' democracy with compulsory voting and public financing for campaigns; they would ``democratise the market'' with more consumption taxes, much higher federal spending on schools, greater tax help for new businesses and encouragement of profit-sharing schemes for company workers.

The question of whether rigorous strategic planning, guided by an overarching principle, or the pro-Israel lobby, constituted the real engine behind U.S. policy is not our major concern in this study. The dichotomy, in fact, is over-simplified and rather irrelevant, in as much as the perspectives and world views of the pro-Israel lobby and those of the U.S. strategic establishment have been congruent and complementary, hence the special and strategic relationship between the U.S. and Israel.(3) By contrast, certain Arab regimes share the same world view with the United States, but that has never qualified them as strategic allies. At best, they serve as facilitators, sub- contractors and local gendarmes in charge of public order. Today, after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, stability has remained a strategic goal for U.S. policy in the Middle East. It is now deemed as the primary guarantor of a hospitable environment for investment and trade.

There has been a wide-range of issues at stake - more than who and what dictates or influences U.S. policy in the region. There are large- scale, long-term economic interests that operate throughout the Middle East. These interests embody organized groups and socio-economic categories which influence various levels of policy-planning, including those which allocate resources and define goals. During the formative period of the Cold War, the organized groups with economic interest in the Middle East pursued policies largely conflictual with those advocated by the politically-organized constituencies associated with Israel. Today that gap no longer stands, in as much as the policy-making apparatus, which represented economic interests, presumably in conflict with Israel, has been phased out of Clinton's White House and Albright' s State Department. The last of the so-called Arabists in that apparatus, under-Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Robert Pelletreau, has just been replaced by Martin Indyk, the Australian immigrant who was sworn in as a U.S. citizen a few days before he changed jobs from executive director of a pro-Israel Washington think tank to the top Middle East advisor in Clinton's National Security Council.(4) Not only was Indyk the first pro-Israel lobbyist to occupy the key post for the Middle East in the NSC, but he was also the first lobbyist to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel and now under-Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

No longer can it be properly claimed that the economic and political dimensions of U.S. Middle East policy are separated on two different tracks. Post-cold war Israel is being groomed for the role of regional economic hegemon in the area. Arab resources, markets and labor would become available for Israeli investors equipped with superior technology, a sophisticated network of global business, and modern organizational techniques. The vision of Shimon Peres, a principal architect of the Oslo accords, is that of a Middle East in which the Arabs would be economically exploited, politically subservient and militarily inferior to Israel.(5) Israel's role in the region would be a microcosm of the U.S. role in the global South.

Prior to the era of Oslo and globalization, however, the U.S. policy process in the Middle East was informed by economic and political interests, which ultimately established the modalities and determined the time schedule that structured policy. United States policy in the Middle East has had and continues to have two important linkages: first, the economic/strategic, which comprises petroleum resources, banking and armaments. Policy makers in the U.S., whether Democrats or Republicans, hawks or doves, have almost always defined these corporate interests as matters of "national security." Secondly, the Israeli linkage, which stems from Israel's regional strategic role and powerful domestic pressure, leading to the largest subsidy program in the history of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military-strategic planners continue to relate to Israel as a "political contraceptive" against oppositional groups and nationalist upheavals in the region.(6)

There is an interplay between the two linkages, which has eluded many an analyst who would assert that U.S. economic interests are tied to the Arabs and not to Israel, thereby casually concluding that U.S. policy should be pro-Arab and not pro-Israel. They would then recommend that the remedy for that seeming discrepancy would consist of providing the American people with accurate information, as if the people make or even influence policy. A case in point are the public opinion polls, which reveal U.S. public support for the idea of a Palestinian state but rejection of that same idea at the governmental level.(7)

THE STRATEGIC/ECONOMIC LINKAGE: A GLOBAL STRATEGY WITH IMPRESSIVE CONTINUITY(*)

The United States military intervention in the Gulf in the wake of the Cold War is a natural extension of the policy it has pursued for four decades. Since the end of the Second World War, the Middle East has been viewed by the U.S. establishment through the prism of the conflict with the Soviet Union. The U.S. strategic doctrine underlying the course of the Cold War has been based on a distorted assessment of Soviet intentions.

That policy was based on the proposition that there existed a legitimate world order, for which the U.S. assumed the major responsibility, and that the Soviet Union, together with disaffected Third World nations, including Arab nationalist forces, were intent on challenging that order. A succession of U.S. doctrines and strategies which expressed a resolve to contain that challenge included the Truman Doctrine (1948), the Eisenhower Doctrine (1957), Kennedy's flexible response, the corollaries of limited nuclear war, counterinsurgency, the Johnson Doctrine (1865), the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine (1969), and finally the Carter Doctrine (1980) and Reagan's codicil (1981). These doctrines were predicated on the assumption that the United States had a title to the Arab World's petroleum resources, a privileged access to its markets and waterways, and an undisputed right to define, contain and rollback the region's enemies, be they internal dissidents (Eisenhower Doctrine and Reagan Codicil), ambitious regional leaders, such as Saddam Hussein (Bush Doctrine), or Arab states which would assume responsibility for strategic deterrence vis-avis Israel, such as Egypt in 1967 and Iraq in 1991. Syria, however, was able to prevent the knock-out blow delivered to Egypt and later to Iraq by restructuring its alignments.

While the U.S. seemed to be operating from a position of relative weakness vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia and in Angola during the early Seventies, it enjoyed a decisive edge over the U.S.S.R. in the Middle East. It presented the U.S.S.R. with several threats in the region forcing the erosion of Soviet influence and a corresponding ascendancy of American power. In his State of the World message in February 1970, President Nixon declared, "The U.S. would view any effort by the Soviet Union to seek predominance in the Middle East as a matter of grave concern."(8) Henry Kissinger called for and secured the expulsion of Soviet personnel from Egypt in 1972.

An important difference between Vietnam and the Middle East for U.S. foreign policy concerns the economic linkage between the U.S. and the Middle East. The status quo in the Gulf, which succeeding doctrines pledged to uphold, has provided the United States with an exceedingly favorable economic climate, one in which the levels of economic penetration are maintained and enhanced. Here, much more than in Vietnam and Central America, the economic stakes are very high, and the U.S. was bound to project its military power. Hence, when President Bush claimed in 1991 that his goal was to protect our jobs and our way of life, he really meant, first and foremost, corporate interest defined as a matter of national security. Such interests frequently condition military and political decisions.

Middle East trade had more than doubled its share of total U.S. trade between 1960 and 1980, almost tripled its share of Japanese trade, and increased by 50% its share of European Community (EC) trade. By 1980, Middle East oil provided 20% of U.S. supplies, 70% of EC supplies and over 75% of Japanese supplies. The region has the largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves in the world. The countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Abu Dhabi each contain greater oil reserves than those found in the United States. In fact, Saudi Arabia alone has reserves six times greater than the U.S. possesses. Middle East oil is not only plentiful, but cheap as well. The cost of producing a barrel of oil in the Gulf has been estimated at $2, compared to between $15 and $18 in Alaska.

U.S. economic gains are further enhanced by the exceedingly high rate of return on investments in the oil industry. While Middle East oil accounts for less than 2% of U.S. investments, its share of total U.S. foreign earnings is about 33%. Moreover, U.S. and British financial institutions claim the lion's share of Middle East oil surplus, which they recycle as loans to impoverished Third World nations. Throughout the post-World War II period a lucrative arms trade has claimed a sizable portion of the Middle East market, by far the largest arms- importing region in the world, with the highest military expenditure on a percapita basis and in terms of the Gross National Product. Seven of the largest ten arms importers during the past decade were Middle Eastern countries, and the West, particularly the United States, is their largest supplier. Annual percapita military expenditure in the Gulf region ranges between $1,060 for Oman to $2,400 for Saudi Arabia. The military expenditure as a percentage of GDP for 1991 ranges between 16.4% for Oman, to 12.5% for Qatar, and 14% for Saudi Arabia.(9)

The post-World War 11 period has witnessed increases in arms sales to the region at astronomical levels: from $2.36 billion for the entire fifteen-year period between 1955-1969 to $3.2 billion per year between 1970 and 1975 to $8.9 billion per year between 1975 and 1979. The Middle East accounted for $40 billion of the world military spending of $500 billion in 1980, with Saudi Arabia leading at the level of $20.7 billion. In 1992, Saudi Arabia spent $17.88 billion, while tiny Bahrein spent $1.48 billion and Kuwait expended $2.49 billion.(10) Most of these purchases were made in the United States.

Given these interests, the oil companies, major financial institutions and the defense industry, together with the political and social forces which supported them, projected their power into the policy-making arena and shaped the perimeters of U.S. interventionist policies in the Middle East. During the 1950s the defense of these economic interests was predicated on a network of alliances pulling together conservative pro-Western regimes in the area and on the readiness of the U.S. to intervene directly.

The history of the U.S. involvement with this region reveals a great deal about George Bush's claim that the 1990-1991 military conflict in the Gulf was about moral principles and jobs. It also explains the sudden discovery of Saddam Hussein as the most dangerous man in the world, the latest incarnation of Hitler. The sudden transformation of Saddam Hussein's Iraq from a virtual U.S. proxy in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) and protector of the pro-American dynastic regimes, including the Houses of Saud, Sabah, Khalifa, Abu Sa'idi and Thani, to a radical perpetrator of instability and the most menacing threat to U.S. vital interest in the Third World since Korea and Vietnam, is connected to this history.

The virtual occupation of the Gulf by the U.S. is the logical product of the transfer of imperial control from Britain to the United States. That transfer was completed in the mid-1980s, when the U.S. Navy began its reflagging operation on behalf of Kuwaiti commercial shipping. The term "responsibility," transferred from Britain to the U.S., means safeguarding the region for U.S. corporations. The conservative rich dynasties which rule in the Gulf act as virtual partners of the United States entrusted with internal security. American policy has endeavored to contain and defeat the enemies of the status quo and so the containment policy, whose strategic doctrine was based on the assumption that there existed a legitimate world order for which the U.S. assumed major responsibility, was extended to the Middle East in the early days of the Cold War. The stated enemy was, of course, Soviet communism. But the unstated enemy of the 1950s and 1960s was Arab nationalism, which vowed to unify the Arab World, nationalize its wealth and resources, and declare itself non-aligned in the East-West conflict. Today's enemies are subsumed under the rubric of terrorism, be they bombers of U.S. military installations in the Arabian Peninsula, resisters of Israeli occupation in south Lebanon, suicide bombers in Palestine/Israel, or simply dissidents who oppose the so-called peace process, even though it has lost the confidence of its own sponsors.

America's global posture has been characterized by an impressive consistency in terms of policy objectives since George F. Kennan wrote his famous 1947 "X" article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," an official policy paper based on the assumption that the United States had the ability to contain the Soviet Union and thus produce the kind of changes in Soviet society that would make it acceptable to the U.S.(11) The pursuit of these objectives in the Middle East region revealed two general patterns which entailed alternating between direct intervention and reliance on surrogates or regional influentials: (1) containment through military alliances, followed by an interlude of attempted containment through nationalism, and (2) the politics of informal alliances and what Zbigniew Brzezinski called "regional influentials." The first phase, during the period 1948-1960, was dominated by vigorous and consistent attempts to build a network of military alliances that would link up NATO with SEATO, thus forming a wall of encirclement around the Sino-Soviet periphery. The potential members of the alliance were Arab and Islamic states, but not Israel. The interlude between 1960 and 1966 saw the U.S seek a rapprochement with radical Arab nationalism in an attempt to "contain" the Soviet Union. The latter phase, from 1967 to the end of the 1980s, had its principal emphasis on the promotion of an anti-communist constellation of forces including Arab and Islamic states as well as Israel. The de facto alliance of regimes which shared U.S. strategic perspectives was counted on to hold the region within the U.S. sphere of influence. Crisis in the projected alliance, however, contributed to zigzags in U.S. policy between a direct U.S. presence in the aftermath of the downfall of the Shah's regime in Iran to a reliance upon surrogates. Actually, the second phase of U.S. policy is divided into sub-phases showing these policy swings.

Regardless of the means employed to accomplish America's policy objectives, these objectives remained constant: to ensure, through the threat of force, either directly or via certain regional influentials, that the region remained unalterably and irrevocably under U.S. hegemony. That implied a fairly high level of U.S. strategic and economic penetration through control of the area's strategic waterways, its most precious resources, oil, derivative financial surpluses and vast markets, all of which were defined as a matter of national security. The status quo, which U.S. policy has attempted to uphold during the past four decades, was a region free of Soviet intrusion and free of nationalist forces committed to social transformation, Arab unity, and liberation from foreign domination and occupation.

The crisis in the Gulf was the first important indication of the way the United States was going to respond to the much touted "New World Order." Military intervention in that region was an ominous sign that the United States perceived its international role as unchanged from the Cold War period. As it did throughout the Cold War, the U.S. continued to invest extraordinary resources in support of its military power, and the Gulf response was yet another demonstration of a foreign policy oriented to the use of that power. This remained so even while America's relative economic status continued to decline and a domestic debate raged over whether the U.S. should divert substantial resources from the military "peace dividend" to rebuilding an economy plagued with massive debt, bank failures, and a crumbling infrastructure. What President Bush believed to be at stake in the Gulf was American hegemony within its sphere of influence, the preservation of which has been a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy since the Truman administration, as noted above.

In the "New World Order," containment has lost its original rationale as a response to the Soviet challenge. Regional interventions can no longer be explained in terms of Soviet "aggression" or Soviet sponsored insurrections. The idea of global containment as a tool for maintaining the geopolitical balance of power has lost its force and indeed its raison d'etre. The anti-communist rhetoric of containment, however, masked the identity of another real enemy of American hegemonic designs: Third World nationalism and social revolution. In the words of Samuel Huntington, the post-Cold War interventions would be propelled by a civilizational threat.(12) That replaces the largely non-existent communist threat of forty years and would fill the threat vacuum.

THE ISRAELI LINKAGE

A tendency to identity United States security interests with a militarily strong Israel was beginning to take hold in Pentagon circles in the 1960s. A congressional sub-committee on Middle East peace concluded in April 1967 that the United Arab Republic (composed of Egypt and Syria) constituted the principal obstacle to peace, thus legitimizing the future offensive which came to be know as the Six Day War. Israel, which prior to 1967 was receiving the highest per capita aid from the U.S. of any country - a fact which remains true today - had indeed anticipated a proxy role for itself prior to the 1967 war and prior to the Nixon Doctrine. A spokesman for the Israeli foreign office expressed that readiness on 11 June 1966:

The United States has come to the conclusion that it can no longer respond to every incident around the world, that it must rely on local power, the deterrent of a friendly power as a first line to stave off America's direct involvement. Israel feels that it fits this definition. (13)

Indeed, Israel has emerged as the principal U.S. surrogate, entrusted with blunting the nationalist tide in the West's favor. The defeat of Egypt and Syria in June 1967 and the subsequent rise to prominence in inter-Arab affairs of such conservative Arab states as Saudi Arabia was cited as a vindication of this assumption. Although the offensive against Egypt and its brand of Arab socialism was not to involve the deployment of American troops, the 1967 War brought about consequences desirable not only to Israel, but to the U.S., as well, namely, the defeat of Nasserism as a potent force in Middle Eastern politics. This fact was emphasized by the former prime minister of Israel, Levi Eshkol, in 1968:

The value of Israel to the West in this part of the world will, I predict, be out of all proportion to its size. We will be a real bridge between the three continents and the free world will be very thankful not only if we survive but if we continue to thrive in secure and guaranteed frontiers. (14)

The June 1967 war, in which the American "hose and water" were placed in the hands of Israeli "firemen," anticipated the Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine. The Nixon-Kissinger Doctrine was premised on the ability and willingness of certain countries in key regions of the world to play the role of local policeman under the direction of the United States. The doctrine was articulated in several presidential speeches and policy statements, beginning with the Guam speech of 3 November 1969, and the State of the Union message of 1970. The new guiding principle postulated that unilateral intervention was expensive at home and unpopular abroad. Thus Israel, guaranteed by the U.S. a " margin of technical superiority"(15) over its Arab neighbors, was thrust into a position of dominance, enabling it to bring about conditions suitable to United States' as well as Israeli interests. Nixon's State of the World message explained this concept of partnership thus: " Others now have the ability and responsibility to deal with local disputes which once may have required our intervention." The New York Times reported that the Nixon administration remained "firmly committed to Israel's security and to her military superiority in the Middle East, for only Israel's strength can deter attack and prevent a call for direct American intervention."(16) [Emphasis added]

The first test of this partnership concept came in 1970, when during the confrontation between the Palestinian nationalist movement and the Jordan army, the U.S. alerted airborne units from its Sixth Fleet, which began to steam toward the east Mediterranean, and Israel expressed readiness for intervention in the event of a Palestinian triumph over King Hussein.

The October 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the ensuing oil embargo enabled Secretary of State Kissinger to embark on a post-Vietnam strategy in the Middle East. Gradually, the Big Four talks on the Middle East, which began shortly after the 1967 war, had dwindled to talks between the two superpowers. By the end of the October 1973 war, the United States was beginning to act as if there was only one superpower in the Middle East. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy as well as the American decision to ensure the failure of the Geneva Conference at the end of 1973 marked the start of a new era in Middle East diplomacy. The phrase "peace process" became synonymous with U.S. diplomatic efforts conducted in a solo fashion. One of the salient features of U.S. diplomacy was its consistent opposition to the internationalization of the Palestine question and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The U.S. was to emerge as chief arbiter despite a steadily growing special relationship with Israel, which compromised its credibility as mediator.

Kissinger's post-October 1973 mediation revealed three objectives. The first was to bring about a general eclipse of Soviet influence in the region. The second objective was to obtain a political settlement capable of creating a transformation of the very nature of the Arab- Israeli conflict, a settlement which would remove the conflict from its ideological context and transform it into an ordinary territorial conflict. Such an approach was inherently detrimental to the Palestinians and Arab nationalists, who, at that time, viewed the struggle as one against settler colonialism and imperialist penetration. Kissinger devised a settlement which would highlight the global concerns of American policymakers and address the economic and strategic imperatives of American foreign policy, i.e., the steady flow of oil to the West, the security of American investments and trade with the Arab World, the stability of the region, the security of pro-Western conservative regimes, and the maintenance of a strategic military presence. The third objective was to provide Egypt with such a vested interest in stability (through economic aid and territorial adjustments) as to insure its neutralization and effective removal from the Arab front against Israel. The overall aim was to give the United States the necessary leverage not only to neutralize Egypt but also to pressure Syria and the PLO into making significant concessions to Israel. The Sinai accord negotiated by Egypt and Israel under U.S. auspices in 1975 was calculated to achieve that end.

Furthermore, the United States committed itself then to continue refusing to recognize or negotiate with the PLO until the latter recognized Israel's right to exist and agreed to abide by U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. No such reciprocal demands recognizing Palestinian national rights were made on Israel. In fact these rights were non- existent in the Camp David formula negotiated later by President Carter, and for the first time, West BankGaza sovereignty was actually floated. Later, it would be classified by U.S. diplomats as a "final status issue," which effectively implied that the Palestinians would go to the negotiating table to discover whether they had rights rather than to assert their internationally recognized rights.

Under Reagan and Bush, the U.S. continued to press for a settlement based on two separate tracks (Arab and Palestinian) and two phases (transitional and permanent). The settlement, in full conformity with Israeli wishes, would not be predicated on Palestinian sovereignty, full Israeli withdrawal (later reclassified as 'redeployment'), any meaningful sharing of Jerusalem, or return of the Palestinian refugees.

A striking feature of United States policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 occupation was the insistence by the U.S. on playing the role of chief arbiter, if not sole peacemaker, when in fact it has been cobelligerent. The steady growth of the U.S.-Israeli special relationship, transformed into a full-fledged strategic alliance, during and after the Cold War, was paralleled by a corresponding ascendancy of the U.S. diplomatic role. That role has now dwarfed and eclipsed all the conventional methods of conflict resolution which have been attempted since 1967, including mediation, multilateral initiatives, regional endeavors and UN-sponsored peace-making.

The diplomatic history of the Middle East during that period reveals that half-a-dozen U.S. administrations stood consistently in opposition to a settlement supported by an international consensus, one that would provide for an end to the Israeli occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state, existing side by side with Israel.

At the same time, Israel had managed to reject every U.S. initiative involving a territorial settlement, even when such initiatives excluded Palestinian sovereignty. Israel still adheres to the position that Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 did not obligate it to withdraw from all the occupied Arab territories. The Palestinians have thus been confronted with two protagonists intent on denying them a national existence and a sovereign order. This is not to imply that U.S. and Israeli policies have been consistently in tandem but despite occasional wrinkles, higher interests have always prevailed. The two interests coincided to the extent that succeeding U.S. administrations viewed the disaffected Palestinians as a volatile anti-establishment group whose irredentist goals precluded any stakes in the existing regional order; hence the convergence of U.S. strategic designs and Israeli expansionist ambitions.

REAPING THE HARVEST

The U.S. endeavor to impose its hegemony on the Middle East, which predates the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, has finally reached an advanced stage. The new additions to the Middle East diplomatic vocabulary - Madrid, Washington, Oslo, Cairo, and so on - symbolize harvest time. The four-decade long U.S. investment of military hardware, economic aid, and diplomatic capital has finally paid off. The signing ceremonies at the White House (13 September 1993) and at Wadi Araba (27 October 1994) sponsored and witnessed by President Clinton, underscore a proclaimed domination based on a U.S.-Israeli alliance which is beginning to generate deep concern among ordinary Arabs.

The outcome was clearly the result of a coherent and consistent policy, which aimed to realize a clearly-defined, though euphemisticaily proclaimed objective: a region in which advocates of a variety of ideas or programs, including Arab unity, self-sufficiency, independent foreign policy, democratic governance, Palestinian self-determination and Arab-Israeli parity and mutuality, would be removed to the sidelines or held at bay. Instead, the region is being recolonized in the age of decolonization, and its post-World War II status is being settled on the basis of pax-Americana, pax-Israelica.(17) And yet, the endeavor is widely known as the "peace process," as if peace has some other meaning.

These objectives have been pursued relentlessly by U.S. politicians representing the right, "left" and center. It did not matter that Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, who represented the liberal trend, had pursued policies similar to those of John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon, the conservatives. Nor was it strange that Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan adhered to the same Middle East policy consensus, irrespective of the fact that the former's name is synonymous with human rights and international conciliation, while the latter was the advocate of rollback, who vowed to exorcise some of the demons of Vietnam which had haunted a whole generation of Americans. Now Clinton, whose mission is to expand and promote the new and strange concept of "market democracies" throughout the world, is collecting the "pay-off," which represents the fruit of the combined energies and resources mobilized by his liberal and conservative predecessors. This is a remarkable testimony to the ability of the U.S. politico-strategic establishment to forge a stable foreign policy consensus.

The tools of U.S. policy were constantly in place but they were not fully understood by those who were the object of that policy. Arabs and Palestinians in top-level positions have often misconstrued policy aberrations as policy changes, ignoring the permanence of U.S. long- term policy objectives. Short-term signals and seductions emanating from Washington, which invariably included widely-advertised threatened reassessments of U.S.-Israeli relations by disgruntled presidents, were mistakenly read as movements at last in the direction of fairness. Exceptional deviations, such as Gerald Ford's call for a reassessment, Carter's confrontation with Menachem Begin in 1977, Baker's ordeal with Yitzhak Shamir in 1990, the dialogue between the U.S. and the PLO, and the conflict over loan guarantees, among other episodes, were not seen by Palestinian and other Arab leaders as manifestations of normal disagreements in need of tactical adjustment, but as signs of a fundamental change. Such naivete or wishful thinking stems from a political culture in which policy changes derive from pronouncements or autocratic rulers decreed not by structural changes, but by short- term imperatives or the leaders' own preferences. Hence the simplistic comparisons between the policies of U.S. presidents, ignoring the role of permanent strategic considerations and objective factors, both domestic and international.

Thus, Arafat's appearance at the White House Rose Garden on 13 September 1993 was seen by him and by many around him as the crowning achievement of his career and the sure sign of a new American policy, when in fact Clinton, Rabin, and the informed public regarded it as a form of his surrender. Arafat's frivolous statement that the Palestinians have a new friend in the White House must have amused his Israeli and American listeners. Moreover, it would have made more sense had President Clinton been the one to thank Arafat three times on 13 September, rather than the other way around; Arafat, after all, had enabled Clinton to proclaim the realization of objectives detrimental to fundamental Palestinian rights, which U.S. policy-makers have been struggling to achieve since before Clinton reached the voting age. The Oslo accord was, therefore, not only the product of fundamental changes in the global and regional environments, but it was also a culmination of U.S. persistence and tenacity, coupled with a proclivity for ad hoc methods of decision-making by Arab leaders.

THE ARAB STATES AS INSTRUMENTS OF U.S. POLICY

Among the tools of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East were the Arab regimes themselves. The Jordanian military onslaught against the Palestinian movement in September 1970 had inflicted structural damage, the effect of which continued to retard the Palestinian struggle for years to come. Not only had King Hussein terminated the Palestinian- enforced de facto dual authority in Jordan between 1967 and 1970, but he also helped accomplish policy objectives for the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, when Palestinian fighters regrouped in Lebanon after the "Black September" debacle of 1970 and began to threaten the delicate balance inside Lebanon and in the region, Syria was tacitly accepted by the U.S. and Israel as the logical candidate for policing Lebanon in 1976. The Palestinian national movement once again had to be reduced to manageable proportions; this time, however, not by a conservative pro-western monarchy, but by a "revolutionary" Arab nationalist regime. The modus operandi, in which Israel and Syria came to share suzerainty over Lebanon, with differential U.S. blessings until this day, was the product of that mission. Egypt was subsequently drafted to deliver the coup de grace, peacefully this time, against the Palestinians. The 1978 Camp David agreement inflicted more damage on Palestinian nationalism by non-military means than the two previous armed onslaughts combined. Thus, the first Arab state to assume responsibility for strategic balance vis-a-vis Israel, from the mid-1950s until 1970, was transformed in the late 1970s to an enforcer of U.S. policy and a facilitator for Israel. Not only had Camp David secured the removal of Egypt from the Arab strategic arena, but it had also allowed Israel to dodge its legal responsibilities to the Palestinian people, and to shrug off its obligation to withdraw from Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territories, under Security Council resolutions.

Even Iraq, the third and most recent contender for strategic balance visa-vis Israel (after Egypt and Syria), had allowed itself to become an instrument of U.S. foreign policy during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. U.S. policy makers were gratified to see Iraq inflict damage on the Islamic Republic of Iran without cost to the U.S., and also to weaken itself in the process, while pretending to play the role of pace-setter in the Gulf. Moreover, Iraq's war against America's enemy in the Gulf had refocused Arab attention away from the Israeli threat and toward an imaginary new "Shiite Iranian threat." The Palestinian cause, already battered by Camp David, was further bruised by the new priorities of Saddam Hussein. And when the latter began to exaggerate his own importance to U.S. strategy in the Gulf, he was reduced to size, not only with the acquiescence of Arab regimes, but also with the active participation of many of them.

A "WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY" FOR THE U.S.

With the destruction of Iraq, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a settlement based on U.S. designs suddenly became possible and operational; Madrid was the venue. Although James Baker III was the architect of the Madrid Conference in 1991, much of the construction work on the road to Madrid had already begun under Baker's predecessors. In fact, the Madrid framework represents a synthesis of previous U.S. diplomatic initiatives. The two-track approach, the self-rule concept, and transitional arrangements are derived from the Camp David accords negotiated under Carter's auspices in 1978. The Jordanian dimension of a Palestinian-Israeli settlement is grounded in the Reagan Plan of 1 September 1982.(18) The linguistic bait designed to attract the Palestinians was largely inherited from the Shultz plan of 1988, which itself incorporated the salient features of Camp David and the Reagan Plan.(19)

Two characteristics are shared in common by all of these initiatives. First, they were all occasioned by structural changes in either the regional or the global environment. The de-Nasserization of Egypt, and the subsequent collapse of Soviet influence there in 1972, created a strategic imperative for U.S. diplomatic action, and the outcome was the meeting at Camp David. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had so weakened the Palestinian national movement that President Reagan declared the outcome an "opportunity" for peace, which effectively removed Palestinian national rights from the active global agenda.

Having just embarked on a new cold war with the Soviet Union and on revolutionary nationalism, Reagan welcomed the opportunity to rearrange the strategic landscape of the Middle East. His plan, however, was thwarted by a junior ally with strategic designs of its own. The prompt and categorical rejection of the Reagan Plan by the Israeli cabinet, only a few hours after it was announced on prime television time, had simply sealed its fate. The plan's denial of sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza to both Israel and the Palestinians in favor of Jordan guaranteed Israel's quick rejection. The stillborn plan was thus shelved, but aspects of it were resurrected six years later in the Shultz Plan, which deferred the issue of sovereignty to final status negotiations. The Shultz Plan itself, also failed to impress Israel, whose Prime Minister Shamir declared it "unwelcome" in 1988, causing it to be shelved until the following year, when Baker began to revive it.

Baker's "opportunity" in 1991, however, proved to be more auspicious than Reagan's opportunity in 1982. The U.S. defeat of Iraq in 1991 was more decisive than the Israeli storming of Lebanon in 1982, and more damaging to the Palestinians, hence Baker's "opportunity," which produced Madrid. Although the Madrid formula was based on the principle of the exchange of territory for peace, in accordance with a speech by President Bush to the U.S. Congress on 6 March 1991, it was not made clear whether that exchange included the West Bank and Gaza or only the Golan Heights of Syria. In fact, the Madrid formula, through the separate negotiating tracks for Israel and the Arab states, as well as the interim arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza, had effectively enabled Israel to defer West Bank and Gaza sovereignty while it derived Arab state recognition and obtained a measure of normalization with the Arab world. In that sense, it was utilized by Israel as a cosmetic ploy to do no more than reorganize its occupation.

The second important common denominator of the four U.S. plans is that the roles of the protagonists in the "peace process" were always overshadowed by the strategic dimension of that process. Interest on the part of these protagonists has often lagged far behind that of the United States, thus creating a corresponding disparity between the pursuit of comprehensive peace and the search for comprehensive security. The parties to the conflict did not share Washington's diagnosis that the circumstances were propitious for peaceful relations. And while Israel said "no" to the Reagan and the Shultz Plans, and later renounced its own election plans in 1989 in order to avoid a territorial settlement, most of the Arab parties opted for negotiations, despite the adverse conditions, in order not to displease Washington.

Given all of that, it was not a coincidence that most of the previous U.S. proposals for peace had ended in failure. Camp David may have terminated the belligerency on the Israeli-Egyptian front, but it has fallen short of establishing genuine peaceful relations between the two countries, let alone the comprehensive regional peace it promised to build. In fact, civil society in Egypt is the most vigorous of all in the Arab World in its opposition to normalizing relations with Israel on the basis of Oslo.

The U.S., however, pursued its objectives relentlessly, despite its rather isolated position in the world community, hedging its bets on favorable global or regional circumstances in the not-too-distant future. Help was extended by the unintended acts of two tragic figures: Mikhail Gorbachev and Saddam Hussein. The former had initiated the process which led to the demise of the Soviet Union. The fateful decision of Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait gave George Bush the green light to reshape the strategic landscape of the Middle East, terminate the existing Arab political order, and resolve the impasse in favor of Washington's Palestinian and Arab agenda.(20) It was a windfall for the U.S., a superpower then facing relative economic decline and sagging credibility, yet anxious to remain "number one."

The Gulf War had meant the destruction of Iraqi society, while it also spelled disaster for the Palestinian people, whose leadership decided in 1993 to acquiesce in the U.S. and Israeli agendas, which constituted a reformulation of old plans that excluded Palestinian self-determination and circumvented their national rights upheld by the international community. These rights are enshrined in numerous international declarations and UN resolutions. Even the "full autonomy" promised by Camp David is effectively excluded from the active peace agenda. The Palestinian people are now at a crossroad with limited options: either they insist on total Israeli withdrawal as the only path to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with an arrangement for sharing sovereignty in Jerusalem; or they accept a neo-apartheid system with Palestinian "autonomous zones," i.e., reservations and enclaves within a greater Israel. The first option is now unacceptable to Israel and to the United States, which, however, would not exclude a Jordanian alternative in which King Hussein rather than Arafat would be charged with the administrative chores while Israel enjoys sovereignty. Either way, a Jordan option or neo-apartheid, the Palestinians would be faced with having to surrender the basic rights recognized by the United Nations: the right of the refugees to return to their homes and property, the right of self determination, the right to struggle against the occupation, and their rights as civilians under occupation in accordance with the 1949 Geneva Convention. That Convention implies the nullification of all the unilateral and illegal measures undertaken by Israel in the course of the occupation, and continuing under the so-called autonomous rule of the Palestinian Authority.

The honorable alternative to all this is a binational state, which is more consonant with the territorial consequences of Oslo now prevailing on the ground. That, however is unacceptable to Israel and therefore to the U.S.

While these denials constitute the real Israeli agenda, under the Clinton Administration they have become effectively the U.S. agenda. The Clinton Administration has recently vetoed resolutions of the Security Council calling on Israel to refrain from grabbing Arab land, building settlements, and violating the rights of civilians under occupation. When these resolutions were sent to the General Assembly, the U.S. shared the "no" vote with only two member states: Israel and the tiny island of Micronesia. Under Clinton and Gore, Israel sets the content, the pace, and takes the lead. The U.S. simply follows.

CONCLUSION

Although containment lost its rationale with the disappearance of the Soviet State, the strategic dimensions of that policy have remained intact in order to assure U.S. hegemony. Also intact is Israel's role in that strategy. What we are seeing now, in fact, is the re-emergence of Israel as a super-regional policeman with a much broadened territory and a much expanded role.

Washington is currently promoting a new Baghdad pact-type military alliance in which Israel, which was deliberately kept out of the earlier Baghdad Pact (1955) to appease the Arabs, now occupies center stage with Turkey in second place, followed by Jordan and perhaps other Arab states in the future. Such an alliance would reinforce the current U.S. policy of dual containment against Iran and Iraq, and would also attempt to intimidate Syria and any others who dare oppose U.S. hegemony and normalization of U.S.-Arab relations outside the context of Security Council Resolution 242.

Israel's sphere of operations would be expanded even beyond that claimed by Ariel Sharon when he was defense minister in 1981. The Sharon Doctrine then claimed a sphere of influence that reached the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union in the North, the Horn of Africa to the South, Iran and possibly Pakistan (because of the revelations about an "Islamic bomb") to the East, and all of North Africa in the West. Now, Israel's strategic role would have an added economic dimension, the one that lies under Shimon Peres' vision for a "new Middle East." Stability, defined as the absense of war, a Pax Americana (not to be confused with a just peace) would provide a suitable environment to push America's globalization scheme.

What can the Arabs do in the face of this 30-year long record of U.S. uncritical support of Israeli lebensraum and complicity in a determined effort to deny basic human rights to the Palestinians and other Arab people? Is the situation so hopeless as to make their choices limited to accepting either U.S. or Israeli domination and Arab regime authoritarianism? The answer is clearly no. There are practical and honorable options, but they must be placed in the context of the structure of costs and benefits. The prevailing structure, which is heavy on benefits and short on costs would have to be altered, otherwise the "free ride" would continue. A policy will not change as long as the policy-maker is not made to pay a price for it. Washington's policy on settlements has gone from considering them "illegal" (under Carter) to an "obstacle to peace" under Reagan and Bush, to a mere "complicating factor" in the peace process under Clinton. In practical terms, Israel now has a green - not even a yellow light from Clinton's White House to build colonial settlements on Arab land, in defiance of almost unanimous disapproval by the world community. And yet, the Arab regimes have not only failed to raise the price for such complicity and defiance, but have also continued to pursue the process of normalizing relations with Israel, in full accordance with U.S. and Israeli dictates.

Clinton's U. N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, who now heads the State Department, has decreed all U.N. resolutions on Palestine "contentions, irrelevant and obsolete" in 1994. And yet, the cost-benefit formula has been allowed by the Arabs to remain intact. Moreover, more than 20 million Iraqi citizens have been subjected to one of the most ruthless punishments ever delivered by the U.N. at the behest of Madame Albright. Together with 20 million Sudanese and 4 million Libyans, they are subjected to virtual country-arrest, a form of incarceration which constitutes collective punishment and denial of adequate food and medicine. In the face of this onslought, most Arab regimes have stood by as onlookers, while some of them are cheerleaders.

Altering the structure of costs and benefits means that Washington should not be allowed to continue its prejudicial and inhuman policies by default. It means that the Arab World needs to restructure its own policies in accordance with the dictates of self-respect, of national interests and reciprocal relations.

* This sections relies heavily on Chapters 1 and 2 in my The Obstucton of Peace (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995)

NOTES

1. See Cheryl Rubenburg. Israel and the American National Interest. A Critical Examination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

2. See Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars, (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995); Stephen Green. Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel (New York: Morrow, 1984); Paul Findley. They Dare To Speak Out (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985).

3. See Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects. (Boston: South End Press, 1996); Chomsky. The Fateful Triangle (South End, 1993); Naseer Aruri. The Obstruction of Peace (Monro, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995); Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality In The Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

4. For a discussion of Clinton's Middle East Policy, see my The Obstruction of Peace, especially chapters 8, 11, 13; see also Avinoam BarYosef. "The Jews Who Run Clinton's Court," Maariv, 2 September 1994. For a discussion of Martin Indyk's own views on the Middle East, see his article in Foreign Affairs, December 1991.

5. See Shimon Peres. The New Middle East (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1995)

6. James Petras "U.S. Policy Towards The Middle East". Paper presented at the XIII Annual Convention of the AAUG. November 1980.

7. See, for example, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 1987; Mark Penn and Douglas E. Schoen. "American Attitudes Towards the Middle East." Public Opinion. May/June 1988, p.46; Gallup Organization. "A Gallup Survey Regarding the West Bank and Gaza Conflict Between Israel and the Palestinians." Princeton, NJ, 11 March 1988.

8. For Excerpts from Nixon's State of the World Message, see The New York Times, 4 November 1969.

9. Human Development Report 1944. Published for UNDP by Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 170.

10. Ibid.

11. Foreign Affairs, July 1947.

12. See the article by Samuel Huntington. "The Clash of Civilizations, " Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-49.

13. New York Times, 12 June 1966.

14. Newsweek, 17 February 1968.

15. Nixon's phrase during the presidential campaign. See the New York Times. 24 December 1969.

16. Ibid.

17. See my "The Recolonization of the Arab World." Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. XI, nos. 2 & 3 (Spring/Summer 1989), pp. 273-286.

18. For an analysis of the Reagan Plan, see Naseer Aruri and Fouad Moughrabi. "The Reagan Middle East Initiative." Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. XII, no. 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 10-30.

19. See State Department Bureau of Public Affairs, "U.S. Policy In the Middle East," no. 27 (June 1988).

20. See the following articles on the regional and global significance of the Gulf War: Tom Naylor, "American Arms In The Persian Gulf." Canadian Dimensions (March 1991), pp. 34-37; James Petras, "The Meaning of The New World Order: A Critique." America (11 May 1991), pp. 512- 514; Noam Chomsky, "U.S. Gulf Policy" Open Magazine (18 January 1991) pp. 117; Noam Chomsky, "What We Say Goes: The Middle East In The New World Order." Z Magazine (May 1991) pp. 50-64; Naseer Aruri, "Human Rights and the Gulf Crisis: The Verbal Strategy of George Bush," in M. Mouchabeck and Phyllis Benes, Beyond the Storm. Brooklyn, New York. Interlink Publishers, 1991.

Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He is also a former president of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates. Active in Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch/Middle East, Dr. Aruri has served on both organizations' Boards of Directors.

So here we all are in the Tad Smith Coliseum (home of The Rebels) at "Ole Miss." Across the campus is the Thad Cochran Research Center. Soon to be inaugurated is the Trent Lott Leadership Studies program, which I gather will not be offered as a major. Both distinguished senators were cheerleaders here. Behind the coliseum is a graveyard- -a mass grave, really--containing almost 700 bodies from the slaughter at Shiloh. Across the campus is the Lyceum, which took James Meredith so long to penetrate, with the aid of more than 10,000 armed soldiers. Facing it is a memorial to the university's "Grays" with a "Go Tell the Spartans" inscription in Greek on its plinth. (Only one of that 1861 class survived to see it dedicated.) Though locals are now inclined to point out John Grisham's old mansion on the edge of town, pride of place yet goes to William Faulkner's Rowan Oak plantation home. His riding boots are still where he left them on the floor. Sacked as the town's postmaster (a good job, he used to say, but it put you at the beck and call of any sonofabitch who wanted a 2-cent stamp), Faulkner retained a supercilious gentility that got him known round the place as "Count No 'Count," before it was understood that there was money lurking in the keys of his creaky Underwood typewriter.

We are here--Jack Kemp, Michael Kinsley, Robert Kuttner, myself and others--to recognize a master of the supercilious and the genteel. Tonight sees the recording of the very last of William Buckley's Firing Line shows. It's been thirty-three years--the life-span of the alleged Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike that possible role model, Buckley has chosen to quit while people can still ask why (rather than simply, why not?). Though I can't say I always feel completely at home in Governor Fordice' s state, the hospitality and courtesy exceed the billing, and in any case, Buckley deserves some kind of a send-off.

If you go on Crossfire or Nightline or any other of a dozen gab shows, you will infallibly leave the studio with that oppressive sense of what Diderot brilliantly termed l'esprit d'escalier. It is on the way down the staircase that one thinks of the point one really ought to have made. And this is because on these awful programs the whole studio is rigged against the dialectic. The clock is running too fast, there are too many guests, the control room is shouting into the earpiece of the presenter, the assumptions of the topic reflect the needs of the consensus and the pressures of the ratings.

People ask why you don't see Noam Chomsky on the tube. It's not just flat-out bias so much as the fact that his views are literally unutterable in the time and format available. I did my first Firing Line in 1983 and swiftly learned that if I left the studio cursing at what I hadn' t said, it was my own fault. Chomsky once told me that during the war in Indochina, the best opportunity he had to give his views on the air was afforded by Buckley. (A repeat appearance was promised but did not materialize. Well, you can't have everything.)

A restrospective of old Firing Lines is shown as a warm-up for the crowd, and there we get to see the very young Jesse Jackson, the very furious William Kunstler, the very urbane J.K. Galbraith. None of them ever got such a chance to present their opinions on (let's say just for a laugh) MacNeil/Lehrer. Tonight it's two hours devoted to the dry-seeming but actually enthralling question of taxation and Internet commerce. Who else would risk such a thing? Buckley is more languid than usual, as perhaps befits the retiring honoree; it's difficult to believe that this is the same man who snarled so hatefully at Gore Vidal in Chicago in 1968--though mind you, that notorious lapse occurred on someone else's show, and there's no danger, no danger at all, that ABC would even risk such a confrontation today.

I thought I detected suspicious signs of mellowing in Buckley when I met him for a debate, last summer, at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. (The show was Uncommon Knowledge, chaired by Peter Robinson, and one hopes that this will now succeed Firing Line on public television.) The subject was 1968 in retrospect. I was first asked my views on the Vietnam War and invited to say if I would alter them in hindsight. I said my only regret, amounting to shame, was that I hadn't done more to oppose it. Buckley, asked the identical question, said that he now wished the United States had never engaged itself in Vietnam at all. The chairman, looking slightly discomposed, said, Well, you also opposed the Civil Rights Act in those days, didn't you, but you wouldn't say that today, would you? Oh yes, replied Buckley, for whom the phrase "no whit abashed" might have been invented, in point of actual fact he would, too. As our chairman's face filled with alarm, Buckley added that while he might not now oppose the act in the same way, he still felt on balance that it had brought more trouble than it was worth. Whew, I thought. For a moment there I feared we had a love-fest on our hands.

The cover of the New York Times Magazine for November 28 bannered an essay of extreme tendentiousness by Jacob Weisberg, thoughtlessly titled "The Rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy." Liberals of all stripes lined up to say that perhaps the Senator from Wisconsin had been right after all, and Ronald Radosh was given yet another chance to state that the Spanish Civil War was won by the right side. The only anti- McCarthy revisionist quoted was...William Buckley. As Weisberg put it in a clumsy sentence, he "now also endorses the contradictory stance of Whittaker Chambers, who thought McCarthy was too indiscriminate to do the cause of anti-Communism any good and thus deserving of repudiation." Repudiation, no less! And this form Joe McCarthy's oldest and fiercest partisan. I don't know whether Buckley has also modified his once- friendly view of fascism in Spain, but leave it to Radosh to pick up the flag that's too dirty for the right to carry anymore and fawn on Generalissimo Franco too. This entitles me to be sorry that there' s no more Firing Line on which I could tell him what a creep I think he is.

In order to consider the historical accuracy of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam we must first consider the capacity of that text to construct history.

Stuart Cunningham has already extensively addressed this issue (1987, 1988(a), 1988(b)). He refers to the way that narrative practices are used to construct this text into a quasi-historical record.

Cunningham suggests that Kennedy Miller's Vietnam successfully exploits the national image and sound archives for more than the mere recognition effect that they produce. Rather kennedy Miller's Vietnam actively engages us, as audiences, in the process of inscribing those archival documents into our own experience. Via a seemingly conventional, dramatized narrative, the power of the record of history is invoked.

Myth, Image, History and Reality

A measure of the adequacy of media theory (or of any social theory) is its capacity to relate its analyses back to the broader social world of which the media are merely a part: its capacity to relate image to reality, or actual historical events.

But just as filmic discourse is obvious to many as a construction, historical discourse is also a construction. However, the dominance or primacy of literate (over filmic or televisual) discourse is still evident in our greater readiness to accept the plausibility of (written) history over the representations of other media.

Film (or TV) is merely a new medium by which history can be constructed or represented. (Traditional) written historical discourse holds no monopoly on the power to represent historical reality. Just as a history book can be taken as a construction of history, so too can a TV series like Kennedy/Miller's Vietnam. For instance, Cunningham (1988,(a)) concludes that Kennedy Miller have offered 'many memorable representations of major determinants of Australian history', and that their Vietnam mini-series is 'the jewel in (their) crown'. In contemporary society it is film and TV that have come to carry those dominant societal myths that were spoken or written in previous societies. This is what John Fiske and John Hartley have called the bardic-story-telling-function of TV (1978). The three main aspects of this bardic function are to articulate the main lines of the established cultural consensus about the nature of reality; to implicate the individual members of the culture into its dominant value system; and to celebrate, explain, interpret and justify the doings of the culture's individual representatives in the world out there.

Philip Bell (1988) in an article titled Remembering Vietnam has suggested that '(nearly) all film and TV fiction (claiming) to be about Vietnam is typified by amnestic and ethnocentric qualities' - a nostalgic distancing from, rather than an exploration of, the historical and political conditions that produced the war. For Bell such 'sophisticated nostalgia is a form of cultural and political amnesia'.

However, Bell argues that Kennedy Miller's Vietnam, by its not inconsiderable treatment of the Vietnamese, 'offers a more complex, less clearly ethnocentric image of the war' but also that it nevertheless manages to 'keep "history" and "politics" at the level of background forces which are significant only in so far as they affect the family's humanity.'

In contrast, Cunningham believes that Kennedy Miller 'invite different responses' and 'reopen "old" discourses buried by the amnesia of a "managed" history'. (1988, (b)) (I will return to Cunningham's important analysis in more detail.)

Such contrary 'readings' are all the more reason to consider the historical veracity and political analysis of the reconstructions offered by such an impressive text.

The text

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam presents itself as an account of the movement of history in Australia from November 1964 to December 1972; from November 1964 with the introduction of conscription, and just before the Menzies Government decided to commit combat troops to Vietnam (April 1965), through to December 1972, when the Whitlam Government is elected, conscription is ended and so is the Australian commitment to the war.

As the mini-series progresses across its 10 hours of prime TV ratings time, there is considerable change - or growth - coming-of-age, or maturing, within the main characters and within the Australian nation, and within our knowledge of these eight years. We begin in 1964 with the Godard family together - they proceed to breakup or separate, but by the end of the 10 hours, when the family unit re-forms, we can see many historical references in their separate developments. The family is used as a metaphor for the Australian nation - it also comes apart or separates or self-destructs - so the Godard family is a metaphor for the journey Australia went on from 1964 to 1972.

The four family members act as symbolic and figurative, historical indicators of some of the social divisions within Australia over those 8 years. The father as the authoritarian and deceitful Government with its behind-the-scenes machinations.

The son as the immature and somewhat amoral youth, receptive to the arbitrary lessons of empirical experience. The mother as initially rather impotently subservient to the law of the father, but responsive to the rise of feminism.

The daughter as the potential of the new, distinctly female force, necessary for peace and positive humanitarian social change.

These 4 characters allow Kennedy Miller's Vietnam to cover many aspects of the war. But what kind of historical record does Vietnam build? What are the politics of the Vietnam War as presented by Vietnam?

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam publicity claimed: 'A nation at war; a family in conflict. A time of family change. The moving story of an Australian family caught up in the deep personal conflicts of the time.' The ending and resolution of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is the re-forming of this family and analogously the extended family of Australia.

I believe the major weakness of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam in terms of historical accuracy is in this attempt to build a politics of national reconciliation around the metaphor of the nation as family.

The Historical Accuracy of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam

The happy ending - the resolution - is, I believe, largely the construction of Kennedy Miller. The Woodstock generation and the peace movement were only a passing phase in Western capitalist re-groupment. Let' s look specifically at several aspects of the reconstruction of history in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam:-

(1) Via the son Phil we directly see or experience the conflict itself - at the battlefront. Also via Phil, the Vietnamese themselves are introduced - initially Phil is like a tabula rasa - being inscribed with the empirical knowledge resulting from the experiences of a soldier for a neocolonial power - these neocolonial experiences of life and death give Phil a certainty about what he learns. Challenge to that certainty comes from the Australian anti-war movement, and also from the Vietnamese themselves - through the concluding speech by Le (Phil' s disabled friend's wife). Phil finally responds to the challenge by breaking away from his past knowledge as the Australian nation breaks away from the war. Kennedy Miller's Vietnam gives a variety of points of view - in contrast, say, to Oliver Stone's Platoon - which gives only one, (the US soldier). However the preferred point of view is that outside intervention was wrong - but a fairly comprehensive account of the complexities of the war is given.

(2) The politics of the war are mediated to us - the audience - via the metaphor of the Australian nation as family. The war is seen as a critical stage in the growth/ coming of age process of the nation. The rejection of the war is a sign of national maturity which involves suffering but also a healing - incarnated in Phil - but while there may be a resolution and a healing in Australian foreign policy and domestically, is an Australian solution possible in an interdependent world? Any adequate solution or resolution must involve Australia in recompensing and reconstructing Vietnam. But in the real world - off the TV screens - it's been hard enough for Australia to acknowledge its responsibility to its veterans; we are not even close to acknowledging our responsibilities for the suffering we helped impose on the Vietnamese people, and anyway, even now, in 1989, has a national reconciliation over Vietnam occurred?

(3) The presentation of Australian involvement: Kennedy Miller's Vietnam shows Liberal governments conniving to develop their paranoid, yellow peril, forward-defence strategy, based on kicking-the-communist-can. The Libs are shown to have connived not only to dupe the Australian public but also the US Government, and to have invited themselves into a war. So Western intervention, and specifically Australian, is shown to be wrong and unjustified: for example, Megan's final reply to Phil - 'it's not our war'.

(4) The adequacy of the representation of the war and the anti-war movement is questionable: Noam Chomsky has argued that in the US, both during the war and since, it has been difficult to gain a hearing for any principled opposition to US military intervention in Indochina. For instance he contends it is rare to find in the US media or scholarship, any acknowledgement of the US as the aggressor or the invader, (1979).

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam does show western intervention to be unjustified, but it doesn't go very far into the nature of the war e.g. civil war, war of aggression (by whom?) imperialist war? Kennedy Miller' s Vietnam doesn't explicitly present a principled opposition based on the right to self determination and the view that the west had no right to use force to intervene in the internal affairs of others. Also Kennedy Miller's Vietnam doesn't spell out a coherently principled opposition to conscription; either to this particular war, or to conscription in general. Given the history in Australia of opposition to conscription in both world wars, this is quite a lacuna. For instance, Serge's initial opposition to conscription is very pragmatic.

(5) Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is situated within a strong nationalism, even patriotism. It's only the nasty Yankee soldiers or the Vietnamese who commit atrocities, kill mindlessly and rape; Australian intervention - at least on the part of the soldiers - is portrayed as an attempt to help:- Australian aid is seen as benevolent, even the National Liberation Front (NLF) are embarrassed by it. The recent book edited by Maddock and Wright continues the denial that any atrocities were committed by Australian troops, (1987). How does this denial fit with the evidence of Australian involvement in the Phoenix Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assassination program? Could even the forced relocation of villagers be considered as some kind of war crime? During the Vietnam War there were attempts to reconstitute the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal by people such as Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre - most of us would agree that the My Lai massacre was a war crime, but what about the Phoenix Program? And what about the level of involvement of Australian soldiers as evidenced by Kennedy Miller's Vietnam? Under the recent euphoria of at last welcoming home 'our' Viet-Vets, what war crimes are buried? Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is important in resuscitating this issue - though the text is by no means consistent on this issue.

(6) Kennedy Miller's Vietnam acknowledges Vietnamese points of view, but not extensively; but still much more than nearly all US film/TV features do. As Terry Hayes, one of the Kennedy Miller scriptwriters put it: just as the metaphor for Australia is the family, the metaphor for Vietnam is the village - it becomes a VC base so the Australian soldiers burn it and relocate the villagers. How adequate is this metaphor? (or both metaphors?) Titling the series Vietnam is somewhat unfortunate; because the mini-series is not about Vietnam, but primarily a view of the effect of the war on Australia, and only secondarily a view of the war, from Australian points of view. For instance, Pauline Chan - who played Lien - claims the first draft of the script was mostly from the Australian point of view - she suggested they look behind, or inside, the doors of the village to bring the village alive, so they did. However, some of the Vietnamese cast claimed that both the South Vietnamese and the Australian soldiers were crueller than in the text, that they roughed up villagers, etc.

Most US films of the war hardly address the politics of the war - nor the point of view of the Vietnamese - rather they focus on the men who fought it, basically within the traditions of the war movie genre - macho/male films. Kennedy Miller's Vietnam is very different from, and much better than, most US features on the war.

This point leads to the conclusion that there is a need for films about the war, as told by its victims - Kennedy Miller's Vietnam touched on this, but not in enough depth e.g., the origins, history and development of the struggle first against the French, and then the US. We need to see the war through Vietnamese eyes.

Accordingly, there is also a need for films told by its hardcore critics - people like Chomsky who opposed the war on principle, and Michael Matteson (draft resister - a prime source for some of Serge's characterizations) who opposed conscription on principle.

Cunningham's Case

Firstly, there is a suggestion that some representations are inherently more valid than others. Cunningham insists that academic historians operate within a 'quite different (more valid? more accurate? more incomprehensible?) order of discourse' to mini-series, but also seems to question the sanctity of their position as 'keepers of the public past' (1988 (b) p. 184). While Fiske and Hartley's notion of the bardic function of TV does strongly undermine the dominance of academics as history tellers, Cunningham's case for mutually exclusive 'orders of discourse' needs to be established.

Secondly, Cunningham argues that the 'high commitment' of Kennedy Miller to the bardic function in their TV histories 'implies no one political or ideological position but a multiplication and historicisation of them' (my emphasis, 1988(b)p. 186).

While I do agree more with Cunningham than with Bell that there is a depth of historicisation achieved, the multiperspectivism that Cunningham claims is, I believe, more apparent than substantive, more nominal than consistent. As Jodie Brooks (1983) has argued with respect to Kennedy Miller's The Dismissal: ... the (bardic) models of narratorial intervention achieved... 'an unashamed spectacle offering security - the thrill of anticipation in the security of retrospection, and mastery - an incorporative voice-over claiming not only temporal control, but also spatial control...' Cunningham's claim for the attainment of multiperspectivism due to the complexity of the narrative structure begs the question. The four main family characters have somewhat separate narrative trajectories, but they do interweave with each other, and with the historical events within which they are set. The separate narrative paths derive from the family's breaking up, but they also come together as the family reforms.

There is a preferred reading of the historical record being offered to viewers. This reading is reasonably obvious. As Ronald Conway put it: '(Kennedy Miller's Vietnam) did not even bother to be even-handed and treat the entire South Vietnamese view of the war with the same gratuitous contempt as was done by the left and the dissenters 20 years ago...despite this obvious political bias...' (1987,p.61) Western intervention is shown to have been unjustified. There is a 'determining or meta-discourse' in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam which situates or subordinates the other discourses, (MacCabe, 1974). Phil's discourse, the insights deriving from his empirical experience of the war, are eventually out-argued by a combination of the discourses of the anti-war movement and the Vietnamese people (via Le).

History Telling - The Myths of Differing Political Interests

As Ina Bertrand has argued, Australian responses to the Vietnam War have been organized around varying mythic structures of heroes and villains, (1988).

The initial (early 1960s) myth was very clearcut. The villain was the communists (both Vietnamese, and also Soviet and Chinese); the victim was the South Vietnamese people; the hero was the USA, and Australia was a helper (to the hero).

Kennedy Miller's Vietnam suggests a very different, and less explicit myth: the villain is now the USA, and the Australian Governments that supported intervention; the victim is the Australian veteran and the Australian people (or perhaps the Vietnamese people in general? any room for the Australian draft resisters?); the hero is also the Australian veteran (or possibly the Vietnamese people); and the helper is the Australian people as they gain knowledge and maturity, and oppose western intervention (or possibly the anti-war movement?).

A fair reading of Kennedy Miller's Vietnam's mythic structure merely emphasises a reconciliation of the Australian people with each other, and in particular with the Australian Vietnam Veterans: 'a liberal humanistic concern' (Bell) or 'a radical humanism' (Cunningham, 1987). I believe a more accurate, non-ethnocentric humanistic text (let alone a radical text) would have emphasised the possibilities in parentheses.

The crucial question here concerns whose interests are served by these conservative or radical myths of reconciliation. Whose interests were served by the October 'Welcome Home' Vietnam veterans parade in Sydney?

In considering the reconstruction of history in Kennedy Miller's Vietnam I believe the (main) function of the seemingly fictional universe is to be referential - even if largely in a figurative way - and through a psychologizing of history. The measure of the adequacy of this mini- series as history is the connections the text establishes with discernible historical circumstances.

Figure 1 [Figure not reproduced] Noel Ferrier as Sir Robert

Figure 2 [Figure not reproduced] Mark Lee and Grace Parr

Figure 3 [Figure not reproduced] Conscript Phil Goddard (Nicholas Eadie)

REFERENCES

Bell, P. (1988) 'Remembering Vietnam', Current Affairs Bulletin, Vol. 65, No. 2, p. 16-23

Bertrand, I. (1988) 'From Silence to Reconciliation' Historical Journal of Film, Radio & TV, Vol. 8, No. 1

Brooks, J. (1983) 'Dismissing', NSWIT Media Papers, No. 19 (September).

Conway, R. (1987) 'Vietnam Revisited - Twice!' Quadrant, May, p.61- 2

Cunningham, S. (1987) 'Jewel in The Crown' FilmNews, May, p.8-9

Cunningham, S. (1988(a)) 'Style, form & History in Australian Miniseries' , Filmviews Vo.33 (Winter) p.30-37

Cunningham, S. (1988(b)) 'Kennedy Miller: 'House Style' in Australian Television' in Dermody, S. & Jacka, E. (eds) The Imaginary Industry.

Fiske, J. & Hartley, J. (1978) Reading Television.

Herman, E. & Chomsky, N. (1979) The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vols. 1 & 2

MacCabe, C. (1974) 'Realism in the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian Theses' Screen (Summer) p.7-27

Maddock, K. & Wright, B. (eds) War: Australia & Vietnam.

SANCTIONS are a blunt instrument that can sometimes be useful. Used against Iraq, they forced its horrible dictator to disgorge nearly all his most lethal weapons. Ten years on, the perspective has changed. Saddam Hussein remains implanted in power without, for the past 15 months, any UN inspectors on the spot to discourage him from reinventing his nastiest toys. At the same time, sanctions have all but destroyed his country: its health and educational systems have collapsed; its infrastructure has rusted away; its middle classes have disappeared into poverty; its children are dying. A lot of people now conclude that a change of policy is needed.

The authors of this collection of essays--Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, among others--will seem irredeemably parti pris to those who still believe that sanctions must be held steady, albeit with exceptions for humanitarian relief, until Iraq has come clean about the last globule of biological horror hidden away in a bottle in somebody' s fridge. Some of the writers do, from time to time, rant a bit. But much of it is good stuff: Mr Chomsky, for instance, describing how America's most favoured friend was suddenly transformed into the Beast of Baghdad. And if you believe that your country--the United States or Britain, which together have taken the strongest stand against ending sanctions--is responsible for the unnecessary deaths of some 150 children every day (a figure culled from UNICEF reports), a little ranting may be permissible.

The oil-for-food programme, passed by the UN Security Council in 1996, was supposed to rescue ordinary Iraqis from the deprivations of sanctions. Iraq is allowed to sell a certain amount of oil in exchange for ``humanitarian'' goods. Denis Halliday, an experienced UN hand, ran this programme for two years, but then resigned in disgust (as did his successor, a few weeks ago). Mr Halliday now writes forthrightly of ``genocide''. He and others describe how American and British representatives on the Sanctions Committee hold up everything they suspect, however remotely, to be of dual use. The list of suspect goods runs from heart and lung machines to wheelbarrows, from fire-fighting equipment to detergent, from water pumps to pencils.

Some of these points were confirmed this month by Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary-general, in his report on Iraqi sanctions to the Security Council. He revealed how far the oil-for-food programme still is from alleviating the Iraqi tragedy. Mr Annan has spread his criticism around but is particularly upset, first, by the dangerously dilapidated state of Iraq's oil industry and, second, by the Sanctions Committee's erratic delays in giving the go-ahead for the delivery of goods for hospitals: some $150m-worth of medicine and medical equipment is currently held up. At one time, outsiders were set in their views on Iraqi sanctions, seeing the situation in black or white. Now there is a large grey area, and an insistent question: are sanctions still the right policy? The authors document the impact of sanctions on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, and the arguments for change are pretty convincing. The undecided should pay heed.

Host: JUAN WILLIAMS Time: 3:00-4:00 PM

JUAN WILLIAMS, host:

This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams.

Who is an intellectual in America at this turn-of-the-century moment? What are her or his credentials? Is a professor an intellectual? How about the scientists at the forefront of the high-technology movement that is reshaping the nation's economy? For generations past, being ranked as an intellectual was to be stamped as one of the Western world's leading figures. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was a leading intellectual, as well as a president and Founding Father. Henry Adams, although he never ran for office, was an eminent historian and part of the Adams political aristocracy that produced two presidents in the 1800s. In the 20th century, Albert Einstein held rank as an intellectual, but scientists are often not considered intellectuals because they do not usually take part in the political and cultural discussions of the day. Einstein's positions on nuclear energy, however, made him a public figure who was widely given the moral authority of an intellectual.

The term `intellectual' is historically associated with a post-World War II group of Socialist-leaning men and women writers, most of whom were Jews. This group was centered in New York and included people such as Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer. Their ideas made news and shaped the national debate on the Cold War. Then the Vietnam War divided them, as some of the former leftists joined with conservatives, who supported the war and felt America's democratic values were being unfairly attacked both at home and overseas.

In today's world, there is a new term, `public intellectual,' for people who discuss daily news events and social trends. Public intellectuals can be seen on the TV talk shows, the lecture circuit and read on the Internet. And they can be found here in Washington in one of the nearly 300 think tanks. In this role, they're usually aligned with conservatives or liberals as convenient supports for one policy position or another. But are they really continuing the intellectual tradition?

My guest this hour is Norman Podhoretz, whose latest book is "My Love Affair with America." He joins me here in the studio. Later in the program, we'll speak with the director of Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center about his mission to reconnect intellectuals with government. And we'll talk with a journalist who has written about the politics of the intellectuals of the last century. If you want to join the discussion, our number here is 1 (800) 989-8255. That's 1 (800) 989- TALK. Our e-mail address is totn@npr.org. Please include your name and where you're writing from.

Norman Podhoretz, nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION.

Mr. NORMAN PODHORETZ (Author, "My Love Affair with America"): And it's a pleasure to be here, Juan.

WILLIAMS: How would you define an intellectual?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, in my day--I'm 70 years old now, so I go back to a time when the word was not so much of an honorific, as you suggested in your introductory remarks. In fact, it was often used as a term of derogation and denigration. And it was also used of a very limited number of people of a very special kind, what we called intellectuals. And when I was young and--the people called intellectuals in the decades prior to my advent on the scene tended, first of all, to be centrally interested in literature and the arts rather than politics or even philosophy.

Secondly, they tended to jump off from this interest in the arts into the much broader context out of which the arts emerged, which led them into a good deal of talk about society and the surrounding culture.

Thirdly, they tended to be very widely cultivated, extremely well- read. And to become a member, an accredited member of that group, you had to--obviously had no formal examination, but you were expected to have read most of the certainly major contemporary classics as well as to have read widely in the classics of the past. In fact, if you hadn't done so, you would have found most of the talk and the writing done by intellectuals almost incomprehensible because it was always very allusive and everyone thought it would be patronizing to identify a particular source or name, which is the common practice, say, in journalism. You know, the critic Lionel Trilling or something. So...

WILLIAMS: Right. Well, tell me, who was in this group?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, the people in my own day, you've mentioned some of them already--Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt. The central magazines for which they wrote were Partisan Review and, later, Commentary, of which I myself became the editor in 1960 and remained the editor for 35 years. They also tended to write articles in smaller literary quarterlies, such as the Kenyan Review or the Swanee Review(ph). They did a good deal of book reviewing. Actually, somebody once said that they specialized much more in articles than in books. They were- -if you want to use a sports metaphor, they tended to be sprinters rather than long-distance runners or milers.

But some of the other prominent personalities would have been Sidney Hook, who was a philosopher, but deeply involved in ideological politics; Philip Roth and William Phillips, who were the editors of Partisan Review, both of whom were literary critics as well as social critics. And one--you know, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick; Robert Lowell, a poet but also a critic; Saul Bellow was the preeminent novelist of this group; Delmore Schwartz, who was a poet, a short story writer and a literary critic all wrapped into one, also crazy.

WILLIAMS: And for the listeners' sake, let's say this time period is the 1950s? It's right after World War II?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, I'm telling you about a period that would stretch, in the case of the people I've just mentioned, from the mid-'30s up until the mid-'70s probably. Earlier, you had the quintessential intellectuals, who were people like H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, Randolph Bourne and so on. I mean, in other words, the people I talked about inherited a tradition that had been in an active mode for at least since the pre-World War I days.

WILLIAMS: And the contribution that they made as a group in that period that ran, as you describe it, from about the '30s through the '70s would, in large part, have to be that they stood on the forefront of sort of left-leaning politics in this country?

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. That would be only one element of this. In a way, it's a pity I'm talking about this subject in connection with my new book, "My Love Affair with America," since my previous book, "Ex-Friends," was about all the people...

WILLIAMS: Right.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...and what it was they were up to. It wasn't merely that they were left-leaning, though all of them were to one degree or another. It was that they had what I would call synthesizing intelligences. That is, they specialized--that word is itself a kind of oxymoron in this context--in seeing the connections among disparate areas of the culture. And that's a kind of perception that has increasingly been weakened for some reason and may even disappear. They were...

WILLIAMS: Well, let's stop right there. Why do you think there's been a weakening of people seeing patterns in the culture, in our politics? Has there been a weakening of the role for the intellectual in American life?

Mr. PODHORETZ: I think there has been, certainly as I would define the intellectual. One of the main reasons is the growth of specialization. In my day, specialists were, by definition, considered intellectuals. You mentioned scientists. Very few scientists would have been considered intellectuals. Virtually no contemporary politicians would have been considered intellectuals. The only politician of our era who would have been considered an intellectual, 'cause he actually is, is Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and perhaps Eugene McCarthy. If you knew him privately, he had all the stigmata, as you might say, of an intellectual.

WILLIAMS: But I'm thinking back, in my case, to my childhood reading about President Kennedy having these amazing dinners, at which he would invite intellectuals, leading intellectuals from around the country, to the White House. I don't hear of anything like that going on these days.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. Well, the Kennedy administration did help to legitimize and glamorize the whole idea of the intellectual, though some of the people who were most honored by the Kennedy entourage were not people who necessarily deserved it on the merits. But unquestionably Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was, you might say, the court historian of the Kennedy administration...

WILLIAMS: Right.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...was and is an intellectual. So was and is John Kenneth Galbraith. So was and is his near contemporary Jacques Barzun, who at the age of 92 has just produced a 900-page book...

WILLIAMS: Holy smokes.

Mr. PODHORETZ: ...called "From Dawn to Decadence," which is even a best-seller.

WILLIAMS: Wow.

Mr. PODHORETZ: But the Kennedy people were, I think, relatively indiscriminate in their cultivation of what they called intellectuals. Some of them, I think, did not have a clear grasp of what an intellectual was. And I think, although more than any prior administration, the Kennedy White House did make an effort to honor intellectuals. It was not the most glorious of all moments, Camelot, so far as intellectuals were concerned.

WILLIAMS: Well, you know, just this Sunday on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times--I should say the Week in Review section--they ran a piece that pointed out that in both the Gore and Bush campaigns, there's an absence of any intellectual pillars of support for the candidates, that they don't reach out to intellectuals. In fact, it seems they celebrate the idea that they are not bookish people at all.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah. Well, they like to do that, and politicians have always liked to do that. I mean, Abraham Lincoln liked to talk about, you know, being born in a log cabin and, `Aw, shucks, I'm just a country boy.' He was, in fact, an intellectual. But it's not true of Bush. I'm really not sure of Gore. Bush has spent an inordinate amount of time consulting with intellectuals, especially from New York. In fact, there's a joke going--well, used to go around New York, people asking each other, `Have you been on the Austin shuttle yet?' you know, meaning, `Had George W. sent for you yet?' And he' s made a great point of how much he's been influenced by certain books, one of them by Myron Magnet about the underclass--forgive me, I forget the names of the others. But he has made a show of having read several books and had his thoughts about policy shaped by them.

WILLIAMS: One of the things that really led to the ending of that intellectual cycle that you described, from the '30s to the '70s, was the notion that people--some of the intellectuals, yourself being the prime example--became conservative...

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: ...and, therefore, broke with your brethren.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Well, I certainly broke with my brethren. I even wrote a book called "Breaking Ranks" about it. But that led to a kind of civil war within the intellectual community. It did not lead to the destruction of the intellectual life. It led to the destruction of a monolithic, or relatively monolithic, intellectual community. And what happened was that you had a proliferation, relatively speaking, of intellectual magazines that were now fighting with one another. You had the birth of The New York Review of Books, which was on the left, much more so than it is today. It's still liberal, but it was much more on the left in the '60s than it is today. Commentary, which had been on the left, in the first 10 years of my editorship, I pushed in a conservative direction, and we were--you know, The New York Review and Commentary were kind of like two armies battling each other.

WILLIAMS: Two titans, yeah.

Mr. PODHORETZ: Yes.

WILLIAMS: All right. We're gonna have to take a short break right now. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Juan Williams. When we return, we'll continue talking about the role of intellectuals in today's culture and political life. And we'll begin taking your calls at (800) 989-8255. If you'd like to comment on the program, please write to us at TALK OF THE NATION, 635 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC. The ZIP code, 20001.

At 21 minutes past the hour, it's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

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