Spies, arms dealers, and a deflated secular saint

Rudolf Abel – not his real name – was a British-born Russian spy sent by the Soviet Union to the US and arrested in 1957.

James B. Donovan, a lawyer with little experience of criminal law, accepted the brief few others were willing to take up, to defend Abel. Naturally, he lost but he was able to save Abel’s life, if only by arguing that a living Soviet spy could be swapped for an American captured by the Russians, whereas a dead one had no useful purpose.

It turned out to be an inspired decision when, in 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in a U2 spy plane. Inevitably, Donovan was called in to negotiate the exchange – after all, it was his idea in the first place, wasn’t it? At least in a manner of speaking.

In Steven Spielberg’s film, Bridge of Spies, using a script to which the Cohen brothers contributed, Donovan is ably and engagingly played by Tom Hanks. But the show is stolen by the actor who won the film’s only Oscar (best supporting actor), Mark Rylance – amazing that an actor that good has only recently won himself an international reputation – playing Abel.

Abel, played by Rylance, next to Hanks as his defence counsel

A good story, with a fine script and excellent performances, Bridge of Spies is well worth seeing.

Just as powerful is the TV series the BBC built from John le Carré’s The Night Manager. Watching it tore me apart, between the compulsion to see what happened next, and the foreboding that whatever it was, it would be grim. Since the end of the Cold War, le Carré has made a specialty of writing books which are frankly dismal in outlook, long denunciations of the corruption and injustice of Western society. I don’t disagree with his judgments, but I prefer my reading of thrillers to give me a break instead of rubbing my nose in them. In other words, I’m keener on like The Little Drummer Girl than The Night Manager .

I’d forgotten the ending of the book, except that I had a sense it didn’t leave me feeling any better about myself, the world or anything else. So I kept waiting for the same thing to happen in the series, with growing depression at the idea. Without wanting to hand out any spoilers, the series ends on a substantially different note, which was a relief, although sadly by doing so it felt rather less believable… You can’t have it all, can you?

A star-scattered cast in the BBC's gripping version of
The Night Manager

It’s hard to list all the stunning performances: Hugh Laurie as the ghastly British arms dealer Roper (funny, after House to hear him playing with his native accent once more), Olivia Colman as his nemesis (a highly successful recasting of a male character in the book as a woman), Tom Hollander as Roper’s sidekick and Tim Hiddleston as the night manager were all outstanding. 

In passing, I should say that it was amusing to watch Hollander playing an adversary of Colman’s, after seeing them as husband and wife in Rev. 

Overall, The Night Manager’s story’s excellent, the pace just the right side of frenetic and the ending, as I said, cathartic if slightly implausible. Like Bridge of Spies, not to be missed.

I was looking forward to seeing Steve Jobs, with its screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Certainly, the writing abounds with great Sorkin-isms, probably the best being the moment when Jobs berates a colleague, Andy, for being too slow in his work.

ANDY: … this can’t be fixed in seconds.

STEVE: You didn’t have seconds, you had three weeks. The universe was created in a third of that time.

ANDY: Well someday you’ll have to tell us how you did it.

The structure of the film is creative too, as it simply tracks the behind-the-scenes tensions at one product launch after another, in effect telling the story of Jobs’ relationship with his colleagues and his family through a series of conversations (well, mostly rows) and flashbacks.

Most striking was seeing the Jobs’s saintly image being punctured. I don’t know what to call the opposite of a hagiography, where a reputed saint is cut back down to mortality, but this was certainly it. Unfortunately, just as a hagiography tends to be ultimately unconvincing and unsatisfactory, so was its reverse.

Steve Jobs: left a little to be desired

The film left me disappointed, hoping for more than it delivered. Plenty of good material in the script, some fine performances (particularly by Michael Fassbender in the title role and Kate Winslet, with a curious accent, as his marketing executive), but somehow it didn’t quite work. The verdict? Should have tried harder.

Refugee crisis: if only we helped as much to make peace as to make war...

Have you seen the film Charlie Wilson’s War? 

It may not be Aaron Sorkin’s best screenplay, but his work’s so good that even a minor piece is worth more than what most others produce.  

Based on historical events, by the end we see Charlie Wilson, a far from pure Democratic Congressman from Texas, managing to bargain up the minimal support the US was prepared to give the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan, into a billion-dollar subvention providing, among other things, the missiles they could use to bring down Russian assault helicopters. Wilson had, in effect, engineered a victory for the anti-Soviet forces.

Then, however, he goes in search of a mere million to help build a school and is unable to win a hearing anywhere. For war, he could find money. For help in peacetime, none.

That’s interesting, given that within the mujahideen the US backed, were the Taliban who eventually seized control of Afghanistan, with lamentable results for the West. As we all know. A million for a school? Chickenfeed. A billion for weapons? Impressive but hardly breathtaking. How about nearly a trillion dollars spent by the US fighting its erstwhile Afghan allies up to the end of last year?

We too, in Britain, share this Western love of astronomic expenditure on war. The war in Iraq cost Britain £8.4 billion. That’s trivial compared to the US Defense Department’s estimates of its own direct expenditure of $757 billion, and Brown University’s estimate of total costs at $1.1 trillion, but it’s still a massive expenditure for a smaller country less used to making that kind of military outlay.

Tony Blair, the chief figure responsible for Britain’s involvement in that war as the Prime Minister of the day, still maintains it was worth fighting. The world, he has always claimed, is better without Saddam Hussein. That’s true enough – as long as what replaced him was an improvement.

We live in perpetual fear of the next terror attack in the West. But in neither Britain nor the US has anyone died in a terror attack so far in 2015 (unless you count US gun crime). In contrast, in Iraq there have been 3500 deaths already.

Far more serious still, the election of a government representing the majority of the population – a good thing – has led to the arrival in power of Shiite leaders and the exclusion to the point of alienation of the former rulers, Sunnis – not such a good thing. That in turn has been a fertile breeding ground for ISIS, which now controls a large part of Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Tony Blair may be right that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, but his replacement by a failing state subject to constant terrorism, and above all the rise of ISIS, undo any good that came from it.

This is becoming increasingly critical today in Europe, as refugees driven from the region by ISIS atrocities begin to flood our borders. We’ve actually been fortunate not to have experienced the problem in its full intensity before: Lebanon, for example, with 4 million inhabitants has already taken a million refugees.

Refugees piling into trains in Hungary, aiming for Germany
What our £8.4bn – and the US trillion – bought us

Out £8.4 billion bought us a growing refugee problem. In an increasingly xenophobic country, that’s a terrible difficulty for a right wing government that isn’t particularly friendly towards immigration to start with, but likes to think of itself as Christian. In the face of a humanitarian catastrophe, clearly calling for a Good Samaritan response from anyone claiming to share the values of Jesus, David Cameron’s government is tearing around in panic trying to make it more difficult for migrants to reach the country.

This is in the face of a few thousand trying to reach Britain, compared to the 800,000, now expected to reach a million, forecast to be making for Germany.

The government claims to be doing more than one might think. It points to 5000 Syrians given asylum in this country, but fails to state that a great many of them were already here and were simply unable to return to their own country. In other words, they were students or tourists or businessmen – reasonably well off and probably able to cope with their exile. These were not the desperate individuals clinging to inflatables for the tricky crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands.

In one respect, though, the British government has adopted an intelligent policy: it feels the long-term solution lies in helping the home countries of the refugees to improve conditions, so that fewer leave in the first place. That’s certainly the best approach. However, when the government points to its investment of nearly £900 million over the next four years or Syria, one can’t help feeling it’s a little low compared to the £8.4 billion spent on war.

Equally, though the government is trying to make up for its passivity so far over the refugee flows by agreeing to take a few thousand from the camps inside Syria, that seems inadequate given that over 3 million have already left the country.

Isn’t that Charlie Wilson’s War again? So much to spend on war. So little on help.

Which reminds me of Aldous Huxley: ”that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

Cheney, the torture report – one of them is full of it

“The report's full of crap. Excuse me. I said ‘hooey’ yesterday. Let me use the real word.”

That’s how the man who was Dubya’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, dismissed the US Senate’s report on torture by the CIA, in the measured terms to which he owes his reputation for eloquence and moderation.

Dick Cheney: Aaron Sorkin's Colon Jessup
with the charm surgically excised

He reminds me of no one so much as Colonel Nathan Jessup, from A few good men who, at the end of the film, explains behaviour which – and I’ll pick my words more carefully than Cheney – was reprehensible if not criminal. The end, he suggests, “absolutely” justifies the means. “I’d do it again in a minute.”

No, no. Sorry. That wasn’t Jessup. That was Cheney. Jessup said “I did my job. I'd do it again.”

Jessup explained “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

According to Cheney, “what happened here was that we asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it never happened again, and that's exactly what they did.”

Jessup also made clear the rationale behind a strict chain of command: “We follow orders, son. We follow orders or people die. It's that simple. Are we clear?”

Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan
the marginally more appealing version of Dick Cheney

Cheney made it clear that the same approach operated in his boss’s administration. To the suggestion that the CIA were out of control and didn’t keep the President informed, he replied “He was in fact an integral part of the program. He had to approve it before we moved forward with it.”

With wisdom as clear-sighted as we all associate with the august figure of Dubya, who can doubt that the torture service was being directed with a sure hand and enlightened judgement? And if Dubya was napping or on holiday, there was always his friend Dick to make sure that guidance was maintained.

“You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives,” Jessup declares, talking of the victim of the crime central to the film, Willy Santiago, “and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”

Talking of the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is believed to have been behind the 9/11 attack, Cheney asked, “what are we supposed to do, kiss him on both cheeks and say, ‘Please, please tell us what you know?’ Of course not. We did exactly what needed to be done.” And it does need to be done, because otherwise people die: “what are you prepared to do to get the truth against future attacks against the United States?”

Fortunately, this kind of tale often has a happy ending. What a way to dismiss a vicious bully with no respect for the rule of law than to tell him “you're under arrest you sonofabitch.”

Sadly, though, such a happy ending tends to be limited to the world of fiction. Jessup is the target of the words, not Cheney.

But we can always dream….

Syria: when the West sits on its hands

It’s harrowing to watch the news footage from Syria. A warplane turns gracefully in the sky, taking its time to choose a target before it glides in and bombs another house, killing some more children, a family, some old people, occasionally a rebel or two. On the ground men and women scream and cry and plead for help from the West. 

Syrian warplane gracefully killing women and children in Aleppo

Of course they call on us: in their position my anger at the wealthy and powerful nations who are sitting on their hands would be exactly the same.

‘Why don’t you intervene?’ I would scream, ‘Why don’t you help? Is it because we don’t have oil? After all what’s happening here is just what you set out to prevent in Libya.’

But that’s just the point at which natural sympathy for a people being massacred by a vile government has to pause a moment and take stock.

Because how well did that go in Libya? Did our military intervention there usher in a new era of peace and democracy? With the US Ambassador, Chris Stevens, killed there a week ago, is that even a question worth asking?

There are no doubt people in Libya keen to build a new nation conceived in liberty. But there seem to be many looking for something quite different. Perhaps a theocratic autocracy. Perhaps an opportunity to settle scores with another tribe. Perhaps just the perpetuation of a low-intensity conflict which serves them well.

The idea of perpetual conflict is hardly unrealistic. The fighting shows no sign of ending in Afghanistan. Today we learned that NATO has decided to suspend joint patrolling with Afghan forces in small units, since there have been so many occasions when Afghan soldiers have rounded on their supposed colleagues in NATO and killed them: 36 attacks this year costing 51 lives.

And what about the longest-standing of the Western attempts to force enlightenment on the Arab-speaking world? In a burst of optimism, Iraq brought in a power-sharing regime in 2005. Tareq al-Hashemi served as Vice President under a Shia President. Last December he fled for his life, a decision he presumably regards as one of his more judicious, since last week he was sentenced to death in his absence. Only on Monday, he accused his former colleagues in government of helping Iran pass weapons through to the Syrian government, rather confirming the widespread view that if there was a victor in the Iraq War, it was the Tehran regime which hugely extended its influence in the country.

Coincidentally, Monday was also the occasion of the latest in the unbroken series of bombings that have rocked Iraq ever since Dubya Bush declared his ‘mission accomplished’. The latest left at least seven dead in Baghdad and 24 injured.

The West has proved itself good at taking military action but lamentable at building a legacy behind it. At least, not the kind of legacy anybody would honour.

Meanwhile, back in Syria itself, a report issued on Monday by Human Rights Watch suggests that there are elements of the rebel army whose behaviour is no more commendable than the government’s: they have been torturing and killing their opponents just as the regime tortures and kills its own. Perhaps we are beginning to discover, in time on this occasion, what we discovered far too late in Libya: just opposing Basher al-Assad or Muammar Gaddafi doesn’t necessarily make you a nice guy.

Supporting disreputable characters wouldn’t be new in the history of Western intervention in the region. Let’s not forget that the West spent a long time supporting and arming the Taliban against the Soviets in Afghanistan before we decided these erstwhile friends were a pretty nasty bunch too. If you haven’t seen Charlie Wilson’s War make a point of watching it now (and not just for the lesson: the script’s by Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing fame).

That news footage from Syria is as harrowing as ever. But, though my heart goes out to them, when I hear the persecuted civilians on the ground calling out for Western help, my inclination now is to say ‘be careful what you wish for.’ We’re good at delivering poisoned chalices but they’re not good presents.

It sounds heartless to say it, but bad though things are, I firmly believe that the West should hold to its present attitude and stay sitting on its hands. The alternative could be a lot worse. And last a lot longer.