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Rethink Afghanistan

Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has produced a documentary about the Afghan war that makes a strong case for disengagement. This is the first of six parts, all available online at Brave New Films' site, RethinkAfghanistan.com.

The documentary includes interiews with a large number of experts in the mechanics of the region, and considering the decisions facing us about getting further mired in this conflict, this is a point of view that we need to see:

Moore to Quit Documentaries?

Michael Moore was interviewed by David Germain of AP at the preview of his new film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" at the Toronto film festival this week, and made a startling statement. The country's best-known documentary filmmaker said he might be done with the genre, and might concentrate exclusively on fiction films in the future.

The most interesting part of the interview concerned how he felt like he'd been leading a protest for too long that had had insufficient public attention:

"I think people will be maybe somewhat disappointed because there's so many things we need to deal with right now, and they wish I would make a film about it. But I want other people to make those films," Moore said.

"I am tired of feeling like I'm doing this alone. All through the eight years of Bush, you Google `Bush' and `nemesis' and I'm the first name up. And there aren't a whole lot of other names," Moore said. "It doesn't work with Michael Moore and Sean Penn and Ted Kennedy and a few others. The people have got to get involved in their democracy."

That's certainly right. As Bill Maher said the other day, if we want this stuff to happen (health care reform, and energy policy, net neutrality, a reduced influence for corporate lobbyists and corporate cash), we'd better get busy. And if we don't want to see any progress we do make rolled back after the next election, we'd better get organized for that too.

Conservatives have spent years successfully selling the idea that we can't solve many of our problems, and those we can solve can only be solved by privatizing the solution. They've been successful at that sales pitch in part because they've been remarkably successful at sabotaging any government attempt to solve any problem; "first they accuse politicians of incompetence, then they get elected and prove their point."

That sales pitch and the resultant government we've had over the last thirty years has been a disaster, and if we don;t want to see more of it (at an increasingly critical time for our country and the world), we'd better get organized and involved with our democracy. Moore's right, and so was President Obama during his campaign; "We are the people we've been waiting for."

The End of Suburbia

The third film in my weekend Netflix film festival was "The End of Suburbia", a 2004 documentary by Canadian filmmaker Gregory Greene that describes the energy costs of our current infatuation with living on cul-de-sac streets in single family detached homes, and details the ways in which that infatuation is unsustainable in the long (and increasingly, even the short) term.

The film draws very heavily on the work of James Howard Kunstler, who wrote two great books on the subject of suburban living, The Geography of Nowhere (1993) and Home From Nowhere (1996), and who appears as the central interviewee in the discussion in the film itself. The "Nowhere" books focused about as much on the social impact of suburban living and the soulless and artificial nature of tract housing as on the energy impacts of spreading ourselves out all over the countryside, but that mixed focus doesn't stop them from having been prophetic about the energy drain when they were written 15 years ago (and Kunstler makes mention of the other downsides to suburban development in the movie as well).

Kunstler has been something of a Cassandra about the impact of US suburban development patterns on the coming energy crisis for a long time now (his "Clusterfuck Nation" blog has been a regular source of pointed commentary about the useless fiddling and posturing of both Republicans and Democrats on this issue for years), and the film is a provocative and interesting summary of much of what Kunstler and several others have been saying on the subject. The film paints a very stark picture, but one not entirely without hope in it. That distinguishes it from Kunstler's writings themselves, which have tended to take his (likely accurate) predictions of serious crisis, and make them so severe as to render the reader paralyzed with fear and depression.

There are other voices in the film, including urban planner Peter Calthorpe, energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, and a series of fairly dilligent analysts of the energy markets, all of whom make the case that we are going to see increasing energy costs for some time, and that those costs will break us if we don't take fairly drastic steps to mitigate them in short order.

The gist of the film is that suburban living, big box stores, industrial farming, widespread and profligate travel, globalized trading, and other forms of wasteful energy spending are all dependent on an energy price that is gone forwever, because the petroleum needs of the planet are now growing at a terrific rate, and the production of oil around the world has peaked, which means by definition that hydrocarbon energy will be increasingly expensive as the oil gets progressively harder to come by. It argues that we will not only have to find other sources of energy to power our economy, but that we will have to reorganize our society so that it no longer relies on an infinite supply of ridiculously cheap energy. Among other things, that means the end of suburbia, which combines several of the most profligate uses of energy in human history into an incredibly dangerous mix that underpins a good deal of our economy.

There is a good deal of discussion of the phenomenon of "Peak Oil", which was first predicted by a geologist named M. King Hubbert in 1956 (he said oil production in the US would peak in the 1970's - he was right - and world production would peak in the 1990s - he was about ten years early, in no small part because of the oil shocks of the '70's reduced demand for a short time). Hubbert was a respected geologist when he started making these predictions (senior geologist with Shell Oil, fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, and respected member of the Geological Society of America who later became its president), but making them damaged his career. Over time, he has proven to be right, and has gotten increasing recognition as such. The concept of Peak Oil was slowly gaining currency in 2004, and has grown in the intervening four years since the film was released from being perceived as the crackpot imaginings of a small group of ostensibly panicky paranoids to an increasingly recognized real phenomenon (see this article in Britain's The Independent newspaper for a more up-to-date look at the state of the analysis).

The film takes a brief tour of a movement of architects and urban planners that has been quietly trying to dream up alternative arrangements for more densely populated development and more efficient energy usage for the last twenty years. This movement is known as the "New Urbanism", and it's received a lot of ridicule as being entirely too precious and artificial over the years, but it deserves another look, because it's the only alternative to suburban living that has any hope of preserving our environment and our communities in the face of this shift in energy costs.

The film is sobering, but it deals with a topic that we've been waiting too long to deal with already (we've known this problem was coming for thirty years, and we're still dealing with politicians and oil company apologists who continue to whistle past this particular graveyard in hopes that the problem will somehow magically disappear). It's a good primer on both Peak Oil and the suburban development patterns in the US that make it so dangerous for us, and it's high time we got on with trying to save ourselves from the consequences of this mess, because it's already going to cost us a fortune, and if we wait much longer, it may cost us everything we cherish about our society, including our lives, if we wait long enough.

I should have watched this documentary four years ago, but it was still worth watching last weekend. If you haven't seen it yet, watch it. If you have, show it to someone who hasn't. When you're done watching, call your senator, your congressman, your city council, and anyone else who will listen. This is going to be ugly already, and the longer we wait, the uglier it's going to get. Kunstler finishes off the film with a telling quote (and one that is reminiscent of Al Gore's quoting of Winston Churchill in "An Inconvenient Truth" about entering "an age of consequences"):

“Irony was the ethos of the late 20^th century. But as we move into the 21^st century, we’re going to discover that irony is a luxury we can’t afford any more. This stuff isn’t just funny. Our lives are going to depend on whether we have an environment that’s worth living in, and that can actually support the project of civilization. We’re not going to be able to just sit back and make fun of it any more, and enjoy it ironically. That part of our history is over. It’s time to get serious.”

Iraq For Sale - The War Profiteers

Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films has turned into one of the most prolific and effective documentary shops in the country, maybe even in the history of the country. "Outfoxed" (Greenwald's Fox News investigation), "The High Cost of Low Prices" (about WalMart's predatory business and disgraceful labor practices), and several other documentaries have formed a gold standard for contemporary documentary films, and they released another great piece of work in 2006, which finally made its way into my DVD player last weekend.

I shouldn't have waited, but the film was still well worth the time. Much of what the film dealt with is not news any more to anyone who has been paying attention, but seeing important parts of the case all in one place is still capable of providing an impressive display of the dangers of privatizing our military (something that has been underway for several years, but has accelerated to an astonishing degree under the Bush administration).

"Iraq For Sale" is a scathing indictment of this shift in military strategy, making note of both the astounding costs incurred (in the name of "saving money by contracting services to private companies that can do these tasks more efficiently"), and of the distortions and damage to American foreign and military policy that attend on having unaccountable mercenaries representing American interests in war zones of any kind, let alone insurgencies where the winning of hearts and minds is the first priority. It draws heavily on the work of Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater and others, and it's a sobering portrait of how far down that road we've already gone.

The film makes the point that there are more "contractors" on the ground in Iraq than any force beside the US military itself - the coalition of the billing is far larger than the coalition of the willing. As of 2006, there were over 100,000 contractors in country, over 20,000 or whom were mercenaries, carrying weapons and performing explicitly military functions (like guarding Paul Bremer and Zalmay Khalilzad, protecting and filling our troops' supply lines, and interrogating prisoners - over half of the interrogators in Abu Ghraib were private contractors).

The costs are astonishing. As of 2006, Halliburton alone billed $18.5 billion annually for "reconstruction and troops support", Parsons billed $5.3 billion for construction, DynCorp billed $1.9 billion for police training (not an unqualified success), CACI billed about $1.5 billion a year for intelligence services, Titan billed over $2 billion a year for translators, Blackwater billed over $200 million for security guards, and there are a host of others. Overall, over 40 cents out of every dollar spent in Iraq is going to private companies. Since we're spending $2.5 billion a week, that's a lot of money.

The rationale for all of this spending is that these services are provided more "efficiently" by private companies, but it seems pretty clear that's not happening. Cost plus, single source, and no-bid contracts are the norm (which actively discourages saving money), and what appears to have happened is that the contracting companies have been handed the keys to the federal treasury under the guise of an effort to save the taxpayer money (this will not come as a shock to anyone who has read a newspaper in the last five years, but the details are infuriating nonetheless).

In addition to paying private soldiers and service employees roughly five times the salaries that military personnel make for the same tasks, there are way too many examples of outright larceny. KBR misorders tons of equipment for the war zone, and then burns it instead of returning it, because they get a piece of whatever is ordered, regardless of whether or not it's needed. Every secretary for Halliburton in the Green Zone has their own SUV leased for them at a cost of about $250,000/car, despite the fact that they aren't driving anywhere, KBR sells soda pop at $45/six pack, despite the fact that it's being made locally and therefore has no significant transportation costs, and does laundry at $100/bag, despite the fact that the laundry is so badly washed that soldiers are trying to wash their clothes in the sink. Contractor trainees stay in the finest four star hotels in Abu Dhabi and Kuwait, rent waverunners and enjoy lavish meals and entertainments, because all of that increases the bills that are paid on a cost-plus basis to the contractors and makes those contractors more cash.

If the American people were just getting fleeced, that would be bad enough, but what's more dangerous is the incompetence and the lack of accountability for making both the care of American troops and the realization of American foreign policy goals hostage to the profitability of private companies. We see US Army specialists in a variety of services describing having to train contractors to do the jobs they have been doing, so the contractors' employers can charge Uncle Sam ten times what we're paying the soldiers who trained them. We see several military interrogators discussing the prevalence of CACI and Titan personnel in the interrogations that went so well at Abu Ghraib. We see the widows and former colleagues of dead contractors lamenting the fact that the companies that promised to look after their security completely failed to do that and cost those men their lives. We see employees of various contractors describing the complete failure of their employers to do the jobs they were contracted to do, like providing safe water, decent and safely served meals, and other basic services. We see truck drivers describing risking their lives driving along dangerous routes with completely empty trucks, so as to be able to bill us for the trip. We see a translator describing the complete lack of qualifications for his fellow translators, and saying he has no idea how many initiatives have been misunderstood by Iraqis, how many insurgents have been developed, and how many soldiers and civilians have died due to the incompetence he saw around him every day, but claiming that it's a heavy toll of each.

There's no accountability for any of this, and the Congress has signally failed to introduce any, even after the Democratic victory in 2006. The privately contracted war criminals involved in the Abu Ghraib nightmare are legally protected from any criminal consequences for their actions by special dispensation given by the CPA (and kept in place over the objections of the Iraqi government), as are hundreds of other contractors who do things for which they would be court-martialed if they were soldiers, but who are only fired and sent home (and potentially immediately rehired by another contractor) since they are private employees. The costs of this cavalier treatment of criminal cowboys and the promotion of such swashbuckling are incalculable, but they can't be anything but enormous.

The film doesn't address this directly, but what may be even more troubling in the long term is the fact that this privatizing of so many central functions of the Army may well be hollowing out the core logistical competence of the armed forces themselves. It's an old commonplace that in discussions of what wins wars, amateurs discuss tactics and strategy, and professionals discuss logistics. If we contract out the central logistical missions of the armed forces to private (in many cases, multinational) companies who run wars for profit, what does that mean when we need those missions served and we can't find contractors inclined to fill those needs? This is the conservative fetish for privatization gone mad, and it has very real risks for the future of our military strength.

Again, very little of this is news at this point, but it's a useful reminder of how widespread and how dangerous this trend is, and that we need to stay on our representatives backs to change it. The amount of political money spent by these contracting companies and the amount of insider leverage they exert on our policy debates is massive, but it's paying them handsomely, and they'll keep doing it. The only thing that can stop the result from further eroding our control of what our military forces do in our names is to stay involved in these issues, even after the bloodshed is stopped for the time being in Iraq. "Iraq For Sale" provides a powerful argument for keeping that pressure up until the job of fixing the problem gets done.

My night(s) at the movies - Charlie Wilson's War

I've been hiding from my disappointment with Barack Obama's cave-in on the FISA legislation by catching up on some movies that have been occupying my Netflix queue for the last few weeks (i.e., sitting on my DVD player, waiting to be watched). I'm glad to say that, while very different, all three have been very good movies.

The first was "Charlie Wilson's War", which was a great yarn, as well as an interesting piece of history. First of all, it was an introduction to a classic character in American politics - Charlie Wilson may not have been unique, but he was certainly was unusual (for starters, even in the '80s, there weren't that many liberal Democrats in the House from Texas.) He is played in the movie with great charm and sympathy by Tom Hanks, and Hanks gets help at least as good as his own performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gust Avrakotos, the CIA officer who led Wilson through getting the Afghan mujahideen the help they needed to fight the Soviet Union in that country's invasion of their country (Hoffman won an Oscar for his performance). Julia Roberts also turns in a great performance as Joanne Herring, the Houston socialite, talk show host, and conservative heavyweight who prodded Wilson into his advocacy for the Afghan rebels.

The story is interesting because Wilson played a huge role in the increase of covert support for the Afghan resistance to Soviet interference, and it's entertaining because Wilson himself was such a character (he's dodging an investigation by Rudy Giuliani into his alleged drug use throughout the beginning of his support for increased involvement. Wilson's war played a large part in the collapse of the Soviet Union (his interest in sucking the Soviets into their own Vietnam was explicit in his interest in the resistance), and the explanation of the impact that such an otherwise little known figure had is great fun to watch. The film is written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Mike Nichols, so the fact that it can make history and politics interesting and engaging is less surprising than might at first seem likely.

It's also a flawed history, in that the film implies that the primary recipient of that covert aid was the leader of the so-called "Northern Alliance", Shah Ahmed Massoud, the guy that Al Qaeda assassinated just before they attacked the World Trade Center. That's not true. Massoud received only a small portion of that aid, and the vast majority of it went to far less friendly characters, such as Pakistani ISI pet and Osama Bin Laden buddy Gulbuddin Hektmatyar, a bloodthirsty warlord that played a large role in the destruction of Afghan society, both during and after the Soviets left the country. Hektmatyar and others like him received a much larger portion of the aid that flowed from the US, and they used it to fight not only the Soviets, but also their internal rivals for power in Afghanistan. That fight left the country in the tatters that created the vacuum that the Taliban and Al Qaeda filled when we withdrew our support after the Soviets left. Some say the movie also shorts the efforts of other Americans, like Carter national security advisor Zbigniev Brezhinski, CIA director Bob Casey and President Reagan , who also pushed for the increase in support for the rebels. On balance, though, it's a good tale, despite its flaws.

One entirely accurate piece of the story is important to our current concerns about Afghanistan, and the movie makes a worthwhile contribution in pointing it out (as well as being a very entertaining story). Wilson advocated strongly, but not strongly enough, for continued "nation-building" support for Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew, and it was the failure of that advocacy that both haunted Wilson himself after the fact and laid the groundwork for the eventual rise of Al Qaeda and the Taliban that provided the base for the 9/11 attacks. Wilson's quote at the end of the movie says it well:

“These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world… and then we fucked up the end game”

Picture New York

The Bloomberg administration is about to promulgate regulations that would require anyone who takes pictures in NYC with a tripod for more than ten minutes to get a permit and a million dollars in liability insurance. Also, anyone who takes pictures using more than two people, and a variety of other arcane requirements.

This is an infringement on free speech, and a "solution" in search of a problem. It's probably too late, but this group, Picture New York, is creating a petition to urge the city to stop it, at very least until a proper public comment period can happen. Sign here.