By PLS
When I decided to take an afternoon off to see the film The Wind that Shakes the Barley, I never expected that arch enemies Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness would be forming a government for Northern Ireland within the next few days. No. I mainly wanted a little eye candy—a desert-dweller's chance to look at a lush green landscape and (why not?) the pleasure of watching the light play on Cillian Murphy’s cheekbones. Plus—let’s get serious here!—I wanted to see the film’s take on terrorism Irish-style.
Little did I also know that I’d pretty soon be picking up a copy of The Atlantic. I found myself reading a very long article by David Samuels entitled "Grand Illusions." The pejorative refers to the mind set that governs the tragic interaction between US Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice—to say nothing of her boss—and the people of Israel, Lebanon and Palestine. As it turned out, the film and the article illuminated one another in ways I certainly hadn’t expected.
I then went to a dinner session addressed by the current Syrian Ambassador to the United States. He was on a friend-making expedition to the hinterland. He gave a slickly-rehearsed, entertaining and highly professional pep talk of the sort one always takes with a considerable grain of salt, but what he said also tallied with the Samuels article. Interesting.
Too Much Talk?
Unlike many film critics, I don’t see Barley as an action film compromised by too much jabbering. These are Irish people, for heaven’s sake! But levity aside, without the debate, the action would have been meaningless. The characters would have been mere psychopaths and sadists.
If you are going to overthrow a government of any kind, indigenous or colonial, you’d better have a pretty good idea of what kind of governance you’re going to set in its place—and why. If you have a political goal whose attainment may involve violence, you need to have a fairly clear notion of how means may compromise ends (a lesson the Bush administration consistently ignores, with ongoing dismal consequences). And, if you want an end to the fighting, ever, you need to integrate your dream of the ideal with a notion of the attainable, the workable, the doable, the bedrock acceptable. Oh, yes! How about economic systems? (Who deserves what and how much?) How about power relations and justice? (Who controls the controllers, for instance?) And in the end, the hardest gesture of all perhaps, you must be willing to bury pain, anger, resentment—and the past, the latter with a noble memorial, perhaps. That’s what the supposedly dull dialog in Barley is all about: the deep and difficult brain- and soul-searching that the Bush neo-cons, to our great cost, disdained when they invaded Iraq.
Back to Barley and the Emerald Isle. When, in 1920, a cease-fire finally comes and the offer is made of a (truncated) Irish Free State that nevertheless will remain a British dominion (like Canada, like Australia) under a figurehead King, the big question is: what should honest and true Irish Republicans (aka terrorists and/or freedom fighters) do? The pragmatists argue for acceptance. Given the state of the world, they insist, England can offer no better, for now. The diehards say it’s not good enough. They go back to the green green hills to fight their now compromised “brothers.” The fighting continued, more or less bloodily, in that part of Ireland still attached to the United Kingdom, right up into the 21st century. Once you decide to start fighting for something, it seems, it’s really hard to stop, which is why intelligent and/or wise leaders don’t go looking for wars to prove their manhood—or imagine a war, once begun, will be easy to end, let alone win.
The Ideological Trap
Not only are civil wars ugly, they offer a dreadful symbolism temptation to literary types. Turning the fratricidal aspect of the Irish struggle into a mortal combat between real brothers, one of whom ultimately calls the shots for the execution of the other, is the least effective of Barley’s plot devices, to my mind—a kind of cheap thrill. Brothers may end up on opposing sides in civil wars, but they’re usually excused from executing one another. For the same reason, husbands and wives are not required to testify against one another in court. The human factor counts in human society—and director Loach stumbles here.
More to his credit, though, Barley may be saying something deeper and more universal about the good terrorist’s moral predicament. Ultimately Damian can’t extricate himself from the resistance because he, a doctor, a healer, has executed an old friend for having cracked under interrogation. And so Damian is trapped. If his own vision is not worthy of total loyalty, he has made an irretrievable, unforgivable mistake. Thus, a very human need for psychological integrity prevents him from accepting the compromise that seems rational to others, including his brother. Stymied in all directions, Damian, even before his execution, has become an ideological robot, a dead man. So who will heal the healer?
As Damian faced the firing squad, I found myself reflecting that many idealists, having joined a movement that justifies violence, must be similarly trapped. Circumstances change. Even the enemy may change. But true believers can’t adjust. There are loyalties. There are past actions. Once you have blood on your hands, how do you get off the rampaging tiger? All too often, it seems, those who choose violent resistance have a hard time accepting any resolution short of total victory.
Fast forward to Northern Ireland in recent years: the sorry remnant of Irish Republican holdouts were ever ripe for exploitation by Unionist provocateurs—the diehards on the other side, the pigheads no less dedicated to preventing compromise, cooperation, resolution, peace. Year after year, decade after decade, such absolutists held everyone to ransom. They perpetuated the bleeding, the dying, the maiming, the waste of resources and hope. The religious factor didn’t help, of course. God willing, anything goes.
Americans as Honest Brokers...
Do these protracted Irish Troubles sound all too reminiscent of the sad interaction between Israelis and Palestinians? Ordinary people get exploited and manipulated by the unrelenting purists until well....forever, it often seems. But Northern Ireland was lucky. The British government woke up to the fact that defeating the IRA militarily wasn’t the key to peace—and some Americans stepped in as honest brokers. They were George Mitchell and Bill Clinton. The result was the Belfast agreement of 1995. Twelve years ago! Between then and now we saw stumbles and relapses as the diehards on both sides did their best to sabotage reconciliation. But the center held. And so there it was, a couple of weeks ago: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness forming a government. Together. Finis, perhaps, to 500 years of English-Irish hostilities.
...And Compromised Brokers
No one is looking to see Israel and Palestine united. That would be a demographic disaster for Zionists and political suicide for Palestinians. The attainable goal is some kind of final agreement on “land for peace.” But some Israelis and some Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. They want to eliminate the objectionable population. No Israel! All Palestinians chased from Palestine!
Unfortunately honest brokers seem to be in short supply in the Middle East these days. Once upon a time the U.S. aspired to that role. There was Camp David under Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton devoted an enormous amount of time and prestige to the effort. Bush 43 was less inclined to indulge in talk fests aka diplomacy—and now we know for sure what only the truly stupid had not suspected all along: this administration favors Israel uber alles, whatever the cost, which appears to be no peace and no (viable) Palestinian state.
Samuels in "Grand Illusions" describes an exchange of letters between George W. Bush and Arial Sharon in which
Israel agreed to obey the terms of the road map, and the United States would not move forward until the Palestinian Authority renounced terrorism and actively worked to dismantle terrorist organizations. If the two parties did make progress on the road map, the United States committed itself to backing Israel’s desire to regain major settlement blocs in the West Bank and agreed that Palestinian refugees would be resettled in the future state of Palestine, and not in Israel.Further:
From Israel’s perspective, the real purpose of the exchange of letters, and by extension of the entire disengagement plan, could be found in the diplomatic sequence they established: Since Palestinian terrorism would never end, Israel would never be obliged to withdraw from the West Bank.As Dov Weissglas (Samuels calls him Ariel Sharon’s “fixer-in-chief”) wrote to an Israeli newspaper, the letters froze the status quo by legitimating the Israeli “contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians.”
There will be no timetable to implement the settlers’ nightmare...and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance of freezing the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.This (at least the baldness of it) was news to me—and probably to most Americans. So here we are: the United States is no longer an honest broker in the Holy Land.
Savior Needed
But there’s worse. The Bush Administration has taken total control of the process on behalf of the Israelis. As Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad, told Samuels, the relationship between Israel and the United States has shifted dramatically. Previously the United States simply supported Israel by providing a ceremonial public ratification of negotiations already largely completed between Israel and the Palestinians. No more, says Halevy. “Israel today will not do anything, take no initiatives whatsoever...unless the United States approves it,” which can only mean that instances of apparent bad faith can no longer be blamed on Israel: the towering, land-gobbling wall; the invasion of Lebanon and its brutal prolongation; whatever.
And this is where the Syrian Ambassador comes in. He said the same thing, which I would have dismissed as propaganda had it not been confirmed elsewhere: the U.S. supplies the money; the U.S. calls the tune.
This Syrian perception is important, not only because it’s apparently in touch with reality, but because it helps us to understand why things are so terribly mired down in the Levant: the U.S. is player, not mediator. The Bush administration climbed onto the tiger called Iraq. The tiger’s tail is lashing destructively across the entire region. It's hurting far more innocents than terrorists. It's inciting virulent hatred of America. Now we Americans are in the midst of a heart-rending, ferocious debate on how to climb down from the disaster that is our Iraq policy.
Back to Damian, the good Irish terrorist, who never managed to get off.
This situation isn’t good for Israel. It isn’t good for us. But who will be the honest broker now? Who will be the savior? Unfortunately, our strenuously Christian President is a very dim Christian. Even I know it isn't the war mongers who inherit the earth. It's the peace makers.