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<b>Subject:</b> The Problem is Bigger than the Bushes--ZNet<br><br>
</font><font face="arial" size=5><b>The Problem is Bigger than the
Bushes<br>
</font><font face="arial" size=2>Reviewing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11<br>
by Stephen Rosenthal and Junaid Ahmad; July 01, 2004</b> <br><br>
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<dd>Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 opened this past weekend (June 25) to
record crowds and box office receipts across the United States.
Moore is the author of the bestselling book Stupid White Men and producer
of the award winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. The U.S.
opening of Fahrenheit 9/11 was preceded by considerable excitement and
political controversy. Released earlier in Europe to enthusiastic
audiences opposed to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, it
received the prestigious Palme D'Or (golden palm) award at the Cannes
Film Festival. The internet based Democratic Party fundraising
machine MoveOn.org, to celebrate the film opening, organized over 3000
"house parties" on June 28 where its supporters heard Michael
Moore on closed circuit television urge viewers to "take back the
White House" this November. <br><br>
<dd>After Disney refused to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 in the U.S., the
Independent Film Channel (IFC), which is owned by Cablevision and
financed by JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, took over distribution and
promotion of the film. This struggle over the distribution of the
film, along with the film's obvious role in the 2004 election battle
between the Republican and Democratic Parties, reflects the deep division
Bush's debacle in Iraq has generated within the U.S. ruling
class.<br><br>
<dd>The large enthusiastic audiences in theaters throughout the U.S. and
at the MoveOn.org house parties suggest that opposition to the Bush
administration and to the war in Iraq has been growing considerably
during the past several months. The absence of Iraqi WMDs and any
connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the massive Iraqi insurgency
against the occupation, the growing U.S. casualties, the ballooning costs
of the war and the shaky economy have evidently had a cumulative effect
in undermining mass support for the war. <br><br>
<dd>Viewers who have suffered through the nightmare four years of the
Bush administration and marched against the horrendous invasion and
occupation of Iraq are understandably hopeful that Fahrenheit 9/11 will
help produce "regime change" in the U.S. this fall. That
may prove to be the case, but will putting Democrat John Kerry in the
White House lead to withdrawal of U.S. troops, military bases, and
profiteering corporations from Iraq, repeal of the Patriot Act, or a
reorientation of U.S. foreign policy away from its drive for imperialist
hegemony? And, if replacing Bush with Kerry does not deliver any of
these results, does Fahrenheit 9/11 at least provide its viewers with the
information and analysis they will need to understand why the leadership
of the Democratic Party has betrayed their hopes and needs? We will
attempt to answer these questions after first summarizing Michael Moore's
indictment of George W. Bush.<br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd>Michael Moore begins the film by defining George W. Bush as an
illegitimate President who stole the 2000 presidential election. He
traces the family, business, and political connections of the key players
who made sure that Bush won Florida's electoral votes. He shows us
Al Gore, presiding over the Senate in his last act as vice-president,
using his gavel to silence African American members of the House of
Representatives, whose protest against certifying the election results
cannot go forward because not one member of the all white U.S. Senate
will sign their appeal against the massive racist disenfranchisement of
black voters in Florida. <br><br>
<dd>Moore depicts Bush as an incompetent leader who spent 42% of the
first eight months of his presidency up to 9/11 on vacation. He
cites findings of the 9/11 commission confirming that the Bush
administration virtually ignored the threat of an Al Qaeda attack on the
U.S. He then devotes a significant part of the film to analyzing
the intricate network of oil, banking, and investment relationships
between the Bush family and the rulers of Saudi Arabia, including the Bin
Laden family. He informs us that George Bush senior is a major
figure in the Carlyle Group, which has major investments in several of
the biggest corporate military contractors. He describes how the
Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were invited to Texas in an effort to
negotiate the building of a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan from
Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean.<br><br>
<dd>Moore emphasizes how members of the Bin Laden family and other
influential Saudis were allowed to fly out of the U.S. after 9/11 at a
time when U.S. air space was otherwise shut down. Although Moore
never explicitly states why he is telling this fairly detailed story, it
seems pretty clear that he is trying to demonstrate that family business
interests made Bush determined to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq,
rather than go after the country from which most of the 9/11 hijackers
came. In other words, Moore is suggesting that Bush and his cronies
put their personal interests above the national security of the United
States.<br>
<dd> <br>
<dd>Moore then devotes most of the rest of the film to the U.S. war on
Iraq. He satirizes Bush's "coalition of the willing" by
listing some of the militarily insignificant countries that did agree to
join the coalition of invaders of Iraq. He briefly reviews the now
thoroughly exposed lies Bush and his pals presented to gain support for
invading Iraq. He dramatizes the human consequences of the war for
the tortured and bombed Iraqis, for the American military soldiers who
are fighting and dying in this preemptive war, and for the families, both
Iraqi and American, who are devastated by the war's deadly
destruction. He provides footage of meetings where corporate
leaders eagerly discuss the profits they expect to reap from the
exploitation and reconstruction of Iraq.<br><br>
<dd>Most poignant is the story told by Lila Lipscomb, mother of Michael
Pederson, killed in Iraq after Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and
declared victory in Iraq. Lipscomb lives in Moore's hometown,
Flint, Michigan. Lipscomb describes herself as a
"conservative Democrat," who used to despise anti-war
demonstrators. A white woman married to a black man, she has fought
to survive amidst the economic wreckage left behind in Flint by General
Motors in its search for cheaper labor and higher profits. She
encouraged her daughter and son to enlist in the army, and she reads from
her son's final letter home, in which he says of Bush, "He got us
out here for nothing." At the end of the film, she visits
Washington, gets as close to the White House as she can, and pours out
her anger at its occupant. Her obviously authentic testimony is
perhaps Moore's most potent ammunition in Fahrenheit 9/11.<br><br>
<dd>In stark juxtaposition to Lila Lipscomb are the Congresspersons who
scurry away from Moore when he tries to urge them to persuade their sons
and daughters to enlist in the armed forces, and the fat cats attending
one of Bush's fundraisers whom Bush calls his "base." By
the end of the film, we see the immense contrast between the Bush crowd,
who have launched a war to increase their wealth, and the ordinary
working class people, who, as Moore observes, always make the biggest
sacrifices in wars.<br><br>
<dd> <br><br>
<dd>In his speech to the more than thirty thousand people attending
MoveOn.org house parties last night (June 28), Michael Moore stated his
disappointment that Kerry had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
He suggested that Kerry may lose the election unless he responds to
growing popular opposition to the war. He hopes Kerry, if elected,
will withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq during the first 100 days of his
administration. Let's examine Moore's analysis of the Bush
Administration, the war, and the Democratic Party.<br><br>
<dd>The Theft of 2000 Election.</b> Fahrenheit 9/11 begins with an
implicit indictment of both Republicans and Democrats and ends with an
implicit indictment of the system of inequality in the U.S. But in
between, the film concentrates virtually all of its fire on the Bush
crowd and the Republican Party.<br><br>
<dd>Republicans stole the 2000 election with the spineless complicity of
the Democrats. Not one Democratic Senator is willing to sign the
appeal demanded by African American members of the House of
Representatives. But why did the Democrats passively accept the massive
disenfranchisement of Black voters in Florida (and other states) in
2000? Moore does not attempt to explain the Democrat's
spinelessness. The answer lies in the fact that the Democrats
colluded extensively in Black disenfranchisement. Democratic
majorities in Congress and the Democratic president Bill Clinton
repeatedly proposed and voted for legislation that resulted in the
massive criminalization of African Americans. Christian Parenti
wrote in an article,
"<a href="http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_3_53/ai_77150227"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">The
'New' Criminal Justice System: State Repression from 1968 to
2001</a></b></font>," Monthly Review, July 2001: <br><br>
<dd>During his presidency, Clinton signed the 1994 Violent Crime Control
And Law Enforcement Act, which offered up a cop's cornucopia of $30.2
billion in federal cash from which we got Clinton's one hundred thousand
new police officers, scores of new prisons, and SWAT teams in even small
New England towns...(In 1996) Clinton gave us the Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act, which massively expanded the use of the
death penalty and eviscerated federal habeas corpus The sad election year
of 1996 also delivered the ideologically named "Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act," which eliminated the
undocumented person's right to due process and helped bring Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) funding up to four billion annually.
These were the Clinton administration's demolition devices, strategically
placed to take out what little remained for prisoners in the Bill of
Rights. <br><br>
<dd>These acts contributed to the continuing rapid expansion of the
prison system, to the disproportionate incarceration of African
Americans, and to their disenfranchisement as convicted felons.
Whites make up over three-fourths of the violators of drug laws, but the
criminal justice system has, for the past three decades, under both
Republican and Democratic administrations, imprisoned millions of African
Americans. Moreover, those prisoners have increasingly been
subjected to the same kinds of torture that took place at Abu Ghraib,
sometimes even by the very same guards! Neither Al Gore nor the 100
white Senators-Republicans as well as Democrats-who themselves supported
this repressive racist legislation, were going to put their signature on
the appeal of black Representatives. The Democrats were spineless
because they were as guilty as the Republicans.<br>
<dd> <br>
<dd>The U.S./Saudi Connection.</b> This cozy relationship is much
bigger than the family and business ties between the Bushes and the Bin
Ladens that Michael Moore describes. Before the end of World War
II, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the U.S. establishment
as a whole decided that U.S. control of Saudi oil and U.S. protection of
the Saudi royal family would be the essential linchpin of U.S. global
hegemony in the post-war world (Michael Klare,
"<a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011105&s=klare"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">The
Geopolitics of War</a></b></font>," The Nation, 10/18/01 ).
This strategic alliance did not begin with Vice President Cheney's
secretive 2001 energy commission. It has been the unwavering policy
of every Democratic and Republican President for sixty years. That
helps to explain why the entire U.S. Government, including both houses of
Congress, both political parties, and the corporate media signed on to
Bush's plan for invading and occupying Iraq. Now that the policy
has become a disaster, politicians and the media are quick to proclaim
that they were misled by Bush's lies, but they knew the truth from the
beginning.<br><br>
<dd>The Bush/Bin Laden Terrorist Alliance.</b> Like the U.S./Saudi
alliance, the alliance between the U.S. and the international terrorist
brigades now dubbed Al Qaeda has also been more than the corrupt money
grab by Bush and his oil business cronies, as described in Fahrenheit
9/11. It too has been a bi-partisan strategy of the U.S. ruling
class. It was begun by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979 as
a way to draw the Soviet Union into a quagmire in Afghanistan. The
CIA and its Pakistani counterpart trained tens of thousands of Islamic
terrorists to invade and overthrow the pro-Soviet government of
Afghanistan. Even before that, the U.S., under both Republican and
Democratic Administrations during the 1970s, had undertaken the same
strategy in Southern Africa. The U.S., together with its ally the
apartheid government of South Africa, organized, trained, armed, and
financed terrorist groups in Angola (UNITA) and Mozambique (RENAMO) to
attack civilian populations and undermine unfriendly governments.
And, during the 1980s, the U.S. did the same thing in Central America
with the Nicaraguan Contras. In Central America and in Afghanistan,
the U.S. partly financed these terrorist operations with profits from
drug cartels run by the CIA's terrorist proxy forces. (Mahmood Mamdani,
"<a href="http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/mamdani.htm"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">Good
Muslim, Bad Muslim: An African Perspective</a></b></font>.").
Thus, it was not only Bush and his cronies but the entire U.S.
establishment that created terrorist proxies as instruments of U.S.
foreign policy during the past three decades. John Kerry knows all
this quite well. He was on a Senate committee during the 1980s that
investigated it.<br><br>
<dd>Between the Bushes: Cinton's Iraq policies.</b> It is
also a fact that Bill Clinton's policies toward Iraq, which Fahrenheit
9/11 never discusses, were as murderous as those of George W. Bush.
The Clinton Administration enforced the UN sanctions for eight years,
which prevented Iraq from repairing its infrastructure that was destroyed
by the US during the first Iraq war (1990-1991). Unable to repair
its electrical power and water purification system, unable to import
medicines and hospital supplies, Iraq became a death zone for its
civilian population, especially its children and the elderly. UN
studies found that approximately 5000 children were dying every month
throughout the 1990s as a result of these sanctions. By the end of
the decade, an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis died as a consequence of the
U.S./British enforced sanctions. When Clinton's secretary of state
Madeleine Albright was asked on television whether the death of half a
million Iraqi children was too high a price to pay for U.S. opposition to
the regime of Saddam Hussein, Albright replied that "the price was
worth it." A Pentagon study early in the 1990s projected mass
civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of the sanctions, so these genocidal
results were foreseen and deliberate. Denying Iraqi civilians
access to clean water was a form of biological and chemical warfare, a
weapon of mass destruction unleashed against the Iraqi population under
the imprimatur of the United Nations and enforced by regular bombing
raids carried out by U.S. and British forces. Why didn't Michael
Moore mention any of this in Fahrenheit 9/11? It certainly might
help to explain why Iraqis did not welcome the U.S. as liberators, no
matter how much they despised Saddam Hussein's regime. But it would
also lead the audience to recognize that both Republicans and Democrats
have pursued obscenely immoral policies toward Iraq.<br><br>
<dd>A War for Empire, not just Bush's war.</b> If Democrats signed
on to the war not because they were spineless or misinformed, and if the
war was fought in the collective interests of the entire U.S.
establishment, not just the private interests of the Bush family and
their friends, then what was really behind the U.S. invasion and
occupation of Iraq?<br><br>
<dd>Addressing this question could obviously require a very lengthy
essay, but we will try to summarize the central points. Numerous
well informed critics of the war have written many excellent articles and
books on this subject during the past year and one half. (We
suggest
<a href="http://www.rupe-india.org/34/contents.html"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">Behind
the Invasion of Iraq</a></b></font>, by the Research Unit on Political
Economy, from Mumbai, India, published by Monthly Review Press, as one of
the best analyses of this subject.) Distilling what they have said,
we come to the following analysis.<br><br>
<dd>First, we define wars for imperial domination as wars undertaken as
part of the profit driven struggle by capitalist ruling classes for
control of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets. The U.S. seeks
to consolidate its hold on the Middle East because that region is
strategically the most important of all in U.S. efforts to maintain world
domination in a period of global economic crisis and intensifying rivalry
amongst the leading world powers. The Middle East contains
two-thirds of all known petroleum supplies. Oil is the lifeblood of
all advanced industrial economies and is crucial for the exercise of
military power. Not only is the U.S. importing an increasing
percentage of its oil (currently about 55%). More importantly, the
economies of the European Union and Asia are increasingly dependent on
oil imports from the Middle East. U.S. control over Middle East oil
provides crucial leverage and influence over its competitors such as
Germany, France, China, and Japan, who have very limited domestic
supplies of oil and must import oil from the Middle East.<br><br>
<dd>During the past three decades, the U.S. has declined economically
relative to its major competitors. With neo-liberalism now being
fully embraced by Russia and China, there are more competitors, and there
is no communist enemy against whom the increasingly shaky trans-Atlantic
alliance can unite. Thus, a declining U.S. hegemony faces
increasing competition from its rivals in Europe and Asia. Most of
the rest of the world more or less sees current global conflicts in this
way, and thus they view the U.S. attempt to seize Iraq as an aggressive
attempt by the U.S. to solve its worsening economic problems through
military aggression. The U.S. attempt to prevent its competitors
from gaining a foothold in the Iraqi oil business was clearly not in the
interests of the French, German, Russian, Chinese, or Japanese, which
explains why the U.S. could not get those governments to sign on to the
U.S. seizure of Iraq, no matter how much bribery and intimidation the
U.S. tried to apply.<br><br>
<dd>The struggle to gain hegemony in the world capitalist system was at
the root of the two world wars of the 20th century. The U.S.
invasion and occupation of Iraq is a war not only for the maintenance of
U.S. hegemony, but for the strengthening and enlarging of an
Empire. That is something much bigger than the corrupt war
profiteering of Halliburton or the sleazy relationships between the Saudi
ruling class and the Bush family. It is much bigger than the
ideological fantasies of the clique of neo-conservatives in the Bush
Administration. Michael Moore has revealed a limited aspect of a
much larger problem. The Bush clique exemplifies the true character
of capitalism in this period, but the problem is the system as a whole,
not just a few arrogant corrupt liars.<br><br>
<dd>Israel: Unmentioned in Fahrenheit 9/11.</b> Michael Moore
has spoken out against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and
dedicated his most recent book to Rachel Corrie, the young American woman
who was crushed to death last year by an Israeli bulldozer, or rather an
American bulldozer driven by an Israeli, as she attempted to prevent the
destruction of Palestinian homes and olive orchards. A film on U.S.
policy in the Middle East, the war on terror, and the invasion and
occupation of Iraq cannot give its audience an understanding of what is
going on in the world without discussing the U.S./Israeli
alliance.<br><br>
<dd>Since the 1960s Israel has played a strategic role in helping the
U.S. dominate the Middle East and protect the undemocratic Arab regimes
in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab countries. The U.S.
provides Israel with billions of dollars of assistance annually and
defends Israel against all criticisms and threats. Israel has a
massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, including several hundred
nuclear weapons. Israel occupies the territory of neighboring
countries in defiance of numerous United Nations resolutions.
Israel is currently working extensively in Iraq with the Kurdish minority
in the northern part of the country. Much Arab anger at the U.S. is
a result of U.S. policy toward Israel. The U.S., in its brutal
occupation of Iraq, has in many ways emulated Israeli tactics toward
Palestinians. The barbarism inherent in the twin occupations of the
Middle East, Israel of Palestine and the U.S. of Iraq, is the source of
"terrorism" in and from that region. <br><br>
<dd>Both Bush and Kerry and the rest of the leadership of both parties
support the cruelest Israeli policies against the Palestinians, including
Israel's current efforts to build an apartheid style wall to imprison
millions of Palestinians within shrinking impoverished ghettos.
Michael Moore may have felt that the inclusion of any criticism of U.S.
policy toward Israel would have been a kiss of death for Fahrenheit 9/11
and his efforts to defeat George W. Bush. However, the exclusion of
this subject helps sustain the broader injustice of U.S. policies
throughout the Middle East and paves the way for a Kerry Administration
to continue the policies of all U.S. Administrations toward
Israel.<br><br>
<dd>Now that we have laid out these criticisms of Fahrenheit 9/11, the
reader may object that a two hour documentary could not possibly have
educated its audience on all of the issues we have raised in this
review. That is a fair comment. But Michael Moore could have
made a much better attempt to expose the role of both Republicans and
Democrats in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. It does a
disservice to the anti-war movement in the U.S. and around the world to
misdirect our anger away from the system as a whole onto a single ruling
class family or one political faction of the ruling class. It
particularly does a disservice to the tens of millions of oppressed
people around the world who will continue to be assaulted by the U.S. bid
for global domination under a Democratic Kerry Administration. It
encourages us to devote too much energy to getting out the vote on one
day, instead of building a mass movement that fights every day against
the Empire and its horrors.<br><br>
<dd>Finally, it could be objected that, if Michael Moore had made the
documentary film we wanted, it would not be showing in movie houses all
over the United States. We readily agree. And that tells us a
lot about the way the American establishment limits the range of
acceptable political criticism in the U.S. and funnels protest into the
corporate-controlled Republican and Democratic Parties.<br><br>
<dd>Steven Rosenthal is a professor of Sociology at Hampton University
and lives in Norfolk, VA. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:steve-rosenthal@cox.net"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">steve-rosenthal@cox.net</a></b></font>.
Junaid Ahmad is a member of the Progressive Muslims Network and works
with the Center for Progressive Islam. He can be reached at:
<a href="mailto:Junaid.ahmad@cox.net"><font face="arial" size=2 color="#003399">Junaid.ahmad@cox.net</a></b></font>.<br><br>
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