Depleted Humanitarianism
On the tenth anniversary of operation 'Desert Storm' in which 180 000 Iraqis were killed by shells and missiles tipped with depleted uranium (DU), Nato chief George Robertson said he was satisfied that the weapons were entirely safe. In a surreal inversion of the actual record of DU- tipped weapons, not their targets in Iraq and Yugoslavia, but the troops that fired them were protesting at the risk to their health. Casualties in the Gulf War stood at a ratio of more than one thousand Iraqis killed for every allied service man or woman (nearly all of whom were killed in accidents in the allied mobilization, such as 'friendly fire'). Two years ago, over Yugoslavia, similar odds were repeated as allied bombers flew so far above the reach of anti-aircraft fire that only a tiny proportion of bombs hit their target. The West's overwhelming military technology has made its troops safer than any other fighting force in history.
Though largely free from the danger of return fire, troops have been in the front line of the moral collapse of the Western alliance. Of negligible military or economic significance, recent allied operations in Iraq, Kosovo and elsewhere, were first and foremost propaganda exercises, intended to invest Western leadership with moral purpose. The troops-not-quite-on-the-ground, though, could hardly fail to see that the slaughter on the Basra High road was, as described, a 'Turkey- Shoot', not a noble blow against tyranny. The spread of 'Gulf War Syndrome' amongst American and British servicemen was an hysterical reaction. Unable to face up to their own role in the slaughter, troops fantastically projected themselves into the role of the victims - struck down by a suitably invisible and undetectable poison or virus. The new outbreak of Kosovo-related leukemia fixes on an equally intangible fear of radiation - though rates of leukemia are no higher amongst troops than they are amongst the rest of the population.
Nato's defensive reaction to the panic indicates that overwhelming firepower is no defense against demoralization at the West's loss of purpose. How else could the head of Nato be persuaded to promise to keep his troops out of harm's way?
BBC's new drama season: elegies to bygone age
British television has been in a £250m deficit on the world market since 1985, when the expansion of broadcast channels massively outstripped programme production. With Film Four, the British Broadcasting Corporation surprised critics by emerging the industry's major exporter. The new season of BBC drama shows that the industry has settled into its role as exporter of period drama and nostalgia. The adaptation of Tim Pears novel In A Land of Plenty is marketed as social comment but turns out to be the complaint of a bored wife and sensitive son against vulgar industrialist Dad in 1950s England - with the sulking proletariat the common victims of Dad's wrath, but unjust persecutors of his family. It's hard not to think that Dad's factory is paying for all of Mum's poetry evenings, and the kiddies' dinner, but then social commentary these days is a polemic against the bread winner.
In the 1970s Ronan Bennett was interned without trial along with a generation of Irish republicans, but today he is author of Rebel Heart - a dramatization of the Easter rising of 1916, when Padraig Pearse and James Connolly seized the General Post Office in Dublin. If it had been founded in 1916, they would have seized the BBC, but that has not stopped the Corporation making a costume drama out of a crisis. Bennett is bold to cover ground previously attempted by Sean O'Casey (the Plough and the Stars already sets out Bennett's theme of ridiculing national pretension from below), WB Yeats (whose Easter, 1916 understood better that all had 'changed, changed utterly') by novelist Roddy Doyle (malevolently) and composer Michael Tippett (whose abandoned 1916 opera was re-written as the anti-war 'A child of our time'). Sadly Rebel Heart is a hackneyed story of heroic stupidity, with two left-wing Irish Citizens' Army volunteers drafted into the role of Shakespearean proletarian comic gravediggers to make the point.
Bennett is under no dramatic obligation to show Liberal Prime Minster Herbert Asquith telling the cabinet that 'interests in India, the industrial world and throughout the Empire might be broken up by catastrophe in Ireland'. But setting the rising in the twee and reassuringly stable world of BBC period drama, where familiarity is registered in the props department's olde worlde knick-knacks, does hide the pending collapse of British rule in Ireland, as the Empire conscripted a subject people to fight its war against Germany. Making Dublin into a comfortable and prosperous Edwardian town makes Citizens' Army leader Connolly's statement that 'generations, like individuals, will find their ultimate justification not in what they accomplished, but rather in what they aspired and dared to attempt to accomplish' (11 March 1916) seem wildly Quixotic. It's a problem Bennett escapes by putting Connolly sentiment into Pearse's mouth, the better that we can jeer at the strutting nationalist Hamlet. -- James Heartfield