After A Full Artistic Life, Ingmar Bergman Lets Death Checkmate Him

Bergman is one of my all-time heroes, along with Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, J.M. Coetzee, Anselm Kiefer, Bertolucci, and not many others. I have spent the past two days reading countless obituaries, and writing my own tribute to him. Here it is.

1. ALL-TIME GREATEST FILMMAKER

People say Bergman’s films were bleak. What they should really be saying is that all other films are sentimental.

One might go further: Bergman was an artist; all other filmmakers are boulevardiers.

Let’s not pull our punches here: in writing we have Shakespeare, in music we have Beethoven, in painting we have Picasso, and in film we have Bergman. Unlike any other filmmaker, he belongs in the pantheon of humankind’s greatest artists.

I count myself lucky: Bergman made his films in my lifetime. I could live my life waiting for the next Bergman film, like I spent my teens and twenties waiting for the next Beatles album. I am happy to have been alive when these two giant entities were doing their work, experiencing the same good fortune of those lucky Londoners who went to see Shakespeare when he was doing his work, those Germans who heard Beethoven and Mozart at the time they were creating their music, and those Parisians who went to Picasso’s shows while he was painting away in their hometown.

I have Woody Allen on my side: "There's no question in my mind that Bergman is the greatest of all filmmakers. No one else even comes close. His accomplishment is that immense. He is the only movie director to ever probe the human psyche on such a profound level. He's the first director to dramatize metaphysical issues. His body of work compares to Proust's cycle of novels or even the plays of Shakespeare."

Our greatest artists are known for the breadth and volume of their work, for their incredible work ethic. This is true of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso and Bergman: they churned them out like regular sausage-makers. Bergman made at least three to four times as many movies as a typical director of today, over fifty in all (only the really old film guys got to be this prolific: Ford made 144 movies, Mizoguchi 90, Kurosawa wrote 69, Ozu made 54, Howard Hawks 47).

Our greatest artists are also known for the transforming nature of their achievements. Picasso, for example, upended the way we look at things, banging forth from realism to cubism to abstraction. This Bergman did, too, incorporating all of film made before him in his work, and leaving his mark on all others who followed.

2. A PECULIAR PERSONAL VISION

Bergman’s achievement was something extraordinary and rather peculiar, in that his art was totally personal. He carried the highly metaphysical and the deeply psychological into moviedom, but it was all about the personal self – his own personal self. No other filmmaker brought such commitment to his own personal vision to his art. That’s all he did – commit his own dreams, fears, hurts and loves to his films. There is no other filmmaker who gets more personal, who was such a public dispenser of private angst. His films are one long, lasting, and painful confession, sometimes veiled, sometimes open, always brutally honest. Nobody delved deeper into the contradictions of his own human heart. Not for him the world out there – it was all about himself. Him and God. Him and death. Him and women. Him and his horror of himself. His personal vision was exclusively inward into his own ego, which made his the single and singular vision that penetrated the human psyche deeper than any other filmmaker. His was the art of personal intensity and obsession. He was the poet of personal extremes.

Touched by the Vietnam War, he gave us “Shame,” which is a grim meditation about how he himself would’ve handled a war that came to his island of Faro, and how it would’ve degraded him personally, and exposed his own defectiveness. This war film is not about war. It’s about projecting Ingmar Bergman into a war.

"The people in my films are exactly like myself -- creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they're talking," Bergman once said. "Mostly they're body, with a little hollow for the soul."

His life was a great mess until his last marriage (from 1971 till her death in 1995 to Ingrid von Rosen, who became his secretary and manager). This mess, this utter “fiasco” as he called it, was the material for his films. "I had been married three times when I was 30," he said. "I wanted to become a good director because as a human being I was a failure. In the studio and the theater I could live happily. I still feel that way." He had five marriages and innumerable affairs, moving from woman to woman like a randy tomcat. He had nine children in and out of wedlock, none of whom he was a father to. In the documentary “Bergman’s Island,” he admits ruefully about his non-parenting: "I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused. I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have."

The Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer put the point of Bergman’s personal filmmaking extremely well in an obituary in the LA Times: “The movies of Ingmar Bergman constitute a spiritual autobiography unlike any other in the history of film. He worked out of his deepest passions and, for many of us, this made the experience of watching his films seem almost surgically invasive. He pulled us into his secret torments. Looking at ‘The Seventh Seal’ or ‘Persona’ or ‘Cries and Whispers,’ it's easy to imagine that Bergman, who died Monday, was the most private of film artists, and yet, no matter how far removed the circumstances of his life may have been from ours, he made his anguish our own. Another way to put this is that Bergman -- despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films -- was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second. His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror movie directors.”

Bergman’s life side-stepped family and children into art and an extraordinary work ethic. He lived the life of the true artist: transmuting the entirety of his life into his art. Not other lives: he made art of his own life only. (Or of the art of other artists, in his other life of theater director: "The theater is like a loyal wife," he said in 1950. "Film is the great adventure, the costly and demanding mistress -- you worship both, each in its own way.")

3. BERGMAN’S LIFE IN BRIEF

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden. He grew up in Stockholm, where his father, a Lutheran minister, eventually became chaplain to the Swedish royals. His father was a harsh punisher, and his mother blew hot and cold, an unreliable source of comfort. He later speculated that she wanted to leave her husband but hung in there for the children.

"That strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against," Bergman said, giving his family some back-handed credit. "At the same time they taught me a number of values -- efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility -- which may be 'bourgeois' but are nevertheless important to the artist."

He was grateful for his parents having "created a world for me to revolt against."

His revolt started with an escape into self. He saw his first play — a Swedish fairy tale — at the age of 12. He built his own puppet theatre under a table, complete with a revolving stage and moving scenery, where he entertained his younger sister. He put on little works of the famous playwright Strindberg, whose dramas of torment struck a chord.

He recalled his seeing films for the first time as “an entry into heaven.” His grandmother took him to matinées at the local moviehouse. One of his first ambitions was to become a cinema projectionist. One Christmas, he traded 100 precious tin soldiers for a primitive movie projector, a "magic lantern," that a wealthy aunt had given to his brother Dag instead of to him. He got lengths of film from a local photography shop, and spliced together his own short dramas from this ‘found’ material.

His eccentric Uncle Carl was a failed inventor (hiding his patent applications in his underwear, and because he often wet himself, wrapping them in oilskin). He showed young Ingmar how to strip emulsion from film with hot soda water, and then paint scenes right on the strip. None of these bits of early films exist anymore, but in his movie “Prison” of 1949 Bergman refashioned one of them for a scene in which he had young lovers watch an antique biograph.

He went to the University of Stockholm in 1937. He worked in many student productions. He studied art and literature, doing a thesis on August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist who was an overwhelming influence. And he wrote: plays, novels, short stories -- none published.

He took a job as an apprentice-director at a Stockholm theater and in 1941 joined the Swedish film industry as a script doctor. Three years later his first script, "Torment," written with the film’s director Alf Sjoberg, became a hit in Sweden. Accordingly, he got his first directing assignment on "Crisis". There followed a run of journeyman stuff. In 1949, he produced his first characteristic excellent work: "The Devil's Wanton," about a prostitute's suicide, in which his metaphysical, psychological and moral interests came to the fore. Three films about women -- "Three Strange Loves," "Summer with Monika," "Sawdust and Tinsel" –- cemented his reputation in Sweden in the 50s. Then “Smiles of a Summer Night” won critical acclaim at Cannes and made real money in Europe, and Bergman was free to make anything he wanted. He rose to the challenge with two masterpieces. "The Seventh Seal," and "Wild Strawberries” made Bergman an immediate international arthouse staple, and he entered a golden period in the 60s and 70s, that included the Oscar-winning “The Virgin Spring” and his Absence-of-God trilogy "Through A Glass Darkly," “Winter Light,” and "The Silence.”

In 1976, his golden age came to a bizarre stop. Bergman was arrested during a rehearsal of his artistic forebear Strindberg’s “The Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater, bundled off in handcuffs, and charged with income-tax fraud. He went into a long pout and exiled himself from Sweden for eight years. Eventually the Swedish government dropped the charges and apologized profusely, hoping to lure him back. He had some sour revenge: hundreds of people lost their jobs because he wasn’t around anymore, and the Swedish film industry lost millions in potential income.

Abroad, he tried various things. He visited Hollywood and other filmmaking centers, he made his first film in English, the flop “The Serpent's Egg." He made a movie with his namesake (no relation) Ingrid Bergman, the very good "Autumn Sonata.” He directed plays, basing himself in Munich. He finally returned to Sweden when he was 60, more or less washed-up.

In 1983, he made a comeback film that became his greatest international success – a rather gentler-than-usual-for-Bergman autobiographical family movie, "Fanny and Alexander." It got six Oscar nominations (two for best director and original screenwriter) and won four Oscars – the biggest Oscar haul by a foreign film ever.

"Making 'Fanny and Alexander' was such joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,'' he told NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani when she visited him at his island home on Faro. ''I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn't understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with 'Fanny and Alexander' was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt. To make another picture and have it feel gray and heavy and difficult with lots of problems - that would be very sad. And I have seen many of my colleagues get older and older and more and more dusty until suddenly they are thrown out, and they cannot get money for their next picture and must go around with their hats in their hands. That is something I do not want - better to stop now when everything is perfect.''

This melancholy Swede whose life ended with a great triumph, was probably a low-grade clinical depressive for long periods of his life, and perhaps worked as hard as he did to keep depression at bay.

"I was very cruel to actors and to other people," he said when he was in his 60s. "I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, 'You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don't think I want anything else to do with you.' I don't say I'm pleasant now, but I think I changed slowly in my 50s. At least I hope I've changed."

Liv Ullmann, who lived with him for five years and had a child by him, tells this story: ‘We always had breakfast together, And, as we ate, Ingmar would relate all the nightmares he had experienced during the previous night. And I listened in horror. Because I knew that I would be acting them out as he filmed, later that day.’

The world knows Ingmar Bergman for his films, but in his native Sweden he was an almost overbearing cultural figure. Besides his filmmaking, he was the country's top theater director, he wrote and directed radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he made soap commercials, he wrote novels and two memoirs. Half the country watched his film of the Mozart opera “The Magic Flute’ on TV. His TV series “Scenes from a Marriage” embroiled the whole nation in a continuing debate on marriage. When he died, Sweden stopped. TV was interrupted to show his work, flags were hung half-mast, and the whole country mourned the passing of the world’s most famous Swede.

4. A MASTER CRAFTSMAN

Bergman made his films beautifully. He called them "handmade." His budgets were all under well under half a million dollars. Technically, as a craftsman, he has no peer. The camera simply exists where he put it. It moves like the gaze of an ur-observer. It frames like a Matisse or a Hopper. It sees the light like Rembrandt. He never saw a reason to hurry the viewer along, like Hollywood story-telling does, scared by its own vacuity. In fact, he was more interested in nailing the viewer from image to beautiful image. What he achieved in his cinematography and montage, in the pacing and flow of his images, in his magisterial control, is beyond compare. Nobody touches him. Technically, put next to Bergman, a much-touted technophile like Steven Spielberg is a loud, crass, obvious and unsubtle boor.

A set routine and a set crew brought Bergman to his technical mastery. He worked like Fassbinder, flitting between stage and screen with the same repertory company. "We've already discussed the new film the year before," Sven Nykvist, his second great cinematographer after Gunnar Fischer (“The Seventh Seal”), told critic Roger Ebert in 1975. "Then Ingmar goes to his island and writes the screenplay. The next year, we shoot -- usually about the 15th of April. Usually we are the same 18 people working with him, year after year, one film a year." Among the 18, there was the important job of the "hostess," she who served coffee and pastries and made the set a haven of domesticity. "How large a crew do you use?" David Lean asked Bergman one year at Cannes. "I always work with 18 friends," Bergman replied "That's funny," said Lean. "I work with 150 enemies."

Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer, wrote: "I was good friends with Sven Nykvist, who told me stories about Bergman. They sat in a big old church from very early in the morning until as black as the night gets. They noted where the light moved through the stained glass windows. Bergman planned where he would stage the scenes for a picture they were about to do. This had the practical advantage of minimizing light and generator costs. Sven said sitting alone with Ingmar in the church had a profound effect on him. I asked him if it made him more religious. He said he didn't think so but it did give him some kind of spiritual connection to Ingmar, which helped him deal with the times Bergman became very mean."

Bergman said rather humbly of his own process: “I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain. I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

In fact, he made three films about the artist and his persecution by society: The Magician, Sawdust and Tinsel, Hour of the Wolf. He had two traumatic brushes with society: his tax arrest was one. The other one sprang from a stay in Germany in 1934 at the age of 16, when he lived as an exchange student with a clergyman's family. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar. He listened to the clergyman toss off sermons based on ''Mein Kampf.'' ''We were absolute virgins politically and we found it marvelous,'' he recalled. ''We were infected.'' He returned to Sweden a ''little pro-German fanatic.'' Years later, he was overcome with shame. ''I understood I had made a great mistake, and since then political thinking has scared me to death.'' For many years, he never read political books or editorials. He didn’t vote.

5. HIS WORK WITH ACTORS AND ACTRESSES

The actress Sheila Reid worked with him: “He gave me very helpful notes that said things like, ‘She is a candle that never goes out’ and ‘She has a screen inside her up to her neck.’ I was extremely fortunate to have worked with Ingmar in both theatre and cinema.”

His actors and actresses were eternally grateful to him – he put their greatest performances on screen for all to see. Typically, he gave them little room for maneuver: he always told them exactly what he wanted and acted it out for them. They had to learn to shine and glow within absolutely exact and precise instructions. In that way, he was like Hitchcock: actors were cattle to him. He knew what he wanted from them and he got it. No director worked with more dictatorial freedom. After the international success of “Smiles of a Summer Night,” he had carte blanche from the Swedish film industry.

6. EXTRAORDINARY RANGE

Despite his films being so personal, Bergman displayed an extraordinary range. When one looks at his greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence, Shame, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage, Smiles of a Summer Night – the nine outright pinnacles of masterpieces in his enduring canon (at least twice as many masterpieces than from any other filmmaker), what does one see? A dizzying range. The following brief descriptions will give the reader some idea. They're ranked in my personal order of greatness.

1. “Persona”: an actress struck mute and her talky nurse. This film is Begrman's harshest blow struck deepest into the human soul. Into its alienation and cruelty. Also, into the depths of the making of art, specifically the art of film. Bergman’s “experimental” film.

2. “Cries and Whispers”: sisters and servant gathered around a dying woman. The excruciating pain and emotional isolation of life. First film in color, and the color is mostly red. Bergman’s great “family” film (way more devastating than his other "family" film, Fanny and Alexander).

3. “The Silence”: two women and a boy, disoriented in a hotel in a country whose language they don’t speak. Bergman’s “Huis Clos” and “Germany Year Zero.”

4. “Shame”: a man and a woman on an island where war arrives. Bergman’s “Rome Open City.”

5. “The Seventh Seal”: a knight in the plague-ridden Middle Ages striking a bargain with death. Bergman’s “Faust.” It was his medieval dance-of-death take on living in the spiritual crisis of the nuclear age, awaiting our apocalypse.

6. “The Virgin Spring”: a father avenging the rape of his daughter in a medieval setting. The closest to a plot-driven Hollywood movie Bergman ever came, and it wasn’t close at all.

7. “Wild Strawberries”: a successful man looking back on an emotional stunted life. Bergman’s “Citizen Kane.”

8. “Scenes from a Marriage”: Bergman’s own marriages, all-in-one. There will never be a better film on marriage.

9. “Smiles of a Summer Night”: a partying night of changing loves among couples. Bergman’s “Rules of the Game.”

Looking at this list, it is amazing to see how often he worked in allegorical conceits, the way J.M. Coetzee and Beckett and Kafka write. (Also, symbols: all those ticking clocks, windows, doors.) His people are himself, and he casts himself in allegory and conceits. The conceit of death as a white-faced monk playing chess with a knight. The spooky interaction between a woman struck mute and one sparked into talking talking talking. The startling Dali-like dream life of a professor on the brink of death. Etcetera.

7. BERGMAN’S PERSONALITY

The master of angst was always a suffering, sensitive creature. He was constantly scared of death. He thought about it all the time. But one day, coming out of a death-like anesthesia during a hospital visit, he found himself suddenly unafraid of death. The question of God vanished, too, after which his movies exhibited a sort of nervous humanism: maybe in human love there lay salvation.

He fed off his own anguish and that of others. ''If I would tell him I have a cancer and was going to die, he would be extremely sorry, but also extremely curious,'' said Harry Schein, a former director of the Swedish Film Institute. ''He's interested in the unhappiness of his friends. He dwells on it - he can get material. We often have long phone calls, and if he asks, 'How are you?' and I say, 'Fine,' he would be extremely disappointed. A human being in pain - he can learn much more.''

He had a direct line to his childhood self. ''I have maintained open channels with my childhood. I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was - with lights, smells, sounds and people. ... I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.''

''I think I have just one obsession -- to touch other human beings. That desire for contact, I think, was the reason why I came to this profession, because as a child I was very shy and very lonely and very afraid of other people. Of course, it was not only this very beautiful reason, but it was also a longing for power, for manipulating other people. I think that's a disease every director has - a kind of professional illness.''

Unhappy with his own father, who beat him and locked him a closet for hours at a time, scaring him with the threat that mice would nibble his toes, Bergman played the father to everyone else, discovering early on that he had the power to make people put themselves out for him. His colleagues aver that his manipulation of people reached far outside the studio. ''With his friends, with his actors, he plays the authority figure,'' said Jorn Donner, his producer on ''Fanny and Alexander.'' ''In a sense, he has become the father he hated. He can become very jealous, say, if one of the actors in his film works in the theater in the evening. And he tries to influence their professional life. He says, 'You should do that, you should not do this.' In Sweden, he has enormous power - he has made careers and indirectly probably destroyed them - and so people tend to listen.''

Mind you, he could be very helpful. Here’s director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) on some fatherly advice from Ingmar: “He asked me if I'd decided what to do after my film, and when I said no, he said, ‘Well you're fucked,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘One thing that can happen is that you fail, and it won't be good for your self-confidence. It's much worse if you have success - you're absolutely paralysed by it. So you always have to decide your next movie before the opening of the present one.’ And he was so right. You don't turn into a career pilot, trying to navigate by success or failure, instead of deciding from your heart.”

Bergman has said that his films grew ''like a snowball'' from some insignificant fleck of an event, often triggering a memory. Filmmaking was therapy. ''I have been working all the time,'' he said, ''and it's like a flood going through the landscape of your soul. It's good because it takes away a lot. It's cleansing. If I hadn't been at work all the time, I would have been a lunatic.''

''When Ingmar was younger, there was a bitterness to his films,'' said Harry Schein. ''With 'Fanny and Alexander,' there's a greater sense of harmony. I think Ingmar has it personally as well. In many ways, I feel he still lives a very difficult life - he talks of Angst, of that anxiety where you wake up in the middle of the night - but superficially he seems more harmonic. On the surface, he is nice and charming and almost civilized.''

The 50s Bergman, bent on establishing himself, was the archetypal angry young man, a temperamental, bohemian poseur. He split home, after coming to blows with his father. He read Sartre and Camus. He signed his letters with a scribble of a little devil. He even wore a beret and a scruffy beard. He tore telephones from the wall. He threw adolescent fits of temper. Once he chucked a chair right through the glass of a control booth. ''I was a package of emotions on two legs -- my life was completely chaotic.'' Since those halcyon days, said producer Jorn Donner, Bergman tried hard to change. ''Ingmar has been trying to fight the bohemianism in himself by leading a well-ordered life. When you think you are a bohemian or a lazy person, you have to fight that and impose a discipline - it's a little puritanical. He is very much the bourgeois today - he likes to see Ingrid and himself as the proprietors of a small French restaurant - you can't get more bourgeois than that.''

His wife Ingrid - a steady, kindly woman who looked exactly like his mother -- helped him get together with his brood of eight children from various marriages and liaisons. Later in life, his grownup children and four grandchildren gathered at Faro every July for his birthday.

On Faro, in his last years, Bergman rose every morning at 8 and wrote from 9 till noon. A lunch of berries and sour milk, and then back to work for two more hours. At 3, a nap. Before dinner, a walk. After dinner, TV – he liked ''Dallas'' - or a movie from his 16-mm collection.

Like the shrink Jenny in ''Face to Face'' who has a nervous breakdown, Bergman cultivated neatness and efficiency to contain his anxieties and fears. His surface calm was like Sweden's; underneath, he claimed, he was still ''extremely neurotic.'' ''Ingmar, at the slightest provocation, will produce a nervous breakdown,'' said his agent, Paul Kohner. ''He has a delicate disposition.''

8. AN EYE FOR WOMEN

Bergman was a man, but it is interesting that his three greatest films – Persona, Cries and Whispers, The Silence – feature women. Before he exploded on the international scene, he established his reputation in Sweden in the early '50s with three films -- Three Strange Loves, Summer with Monika, Sawdust and Tinsel -- that internalized the psychology of women and what he labeled "their special inner world." He had a dour view of his own gender, i.e. of himself. His male characters are always selfish, intolerant haters, self-indulgent and helplessly standing by, while his women are admirable, strong, empathetic, patient and intuitively wise. He was sometimes described as a prescient, vanguard feminist.

''I was in love with my mother,'' he says. ''I knew what she liked and disliked and I used to try to find ways to win her love.” He believes that ''women are more intuitive than men - they have their emotional life more intact.''

He certainly had an eye for women, featuring an extraordinary range of beautiful actresses in his movies. He was an inveterate ladies man and skirt chaser. He got all the best and brightest babes. He used the same actresses over and over, on stage and in film.

9. THE HUMAN FACE, THE BOURGEOIS SOUL

Bergman's landscape was the human face. And he got hold of some amazing faces. The supremely spiritual face of Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal). The sexually ravenous face of Gunnel Lindblom (The Silence). The unflappable, unfailingly polite face of Gunnar Bjornstrand. The suffering face of Harriet Anderson (Cries and Whispers). The kind face of Kari Sylwan (Cries and Whispers). The sensuous, troubled face of Bibi Anderson (Persona). The intelligent, caring face of Liv Ullmann (The Shame). The everyday face of Erland Josephson, an ardent excusemaker of a man (Scenes from a Marriage). His films expose the human face, blister and blast it, celebrate its suffering, burn it into our own faces.

He gave our inner life an outer form in his glowing, glowering full-frontal closeups. In filming the human face, he gave form to the human soul.

In fact, Bergman’s art makes it possible to speak of the human soul. But what kind of soul is that? It is the suffering soul. But not the soul under the duress of material want. If his art can be said to be about anything bigger than himself (and it can and it can’t), it would have to be about what he was – a bourgeois European. One could say his art was about the soul of the bourgeois. He asks us to think about how the fat, contented bourgeois soul – the soul from which, ostensibly, all worldly suffering has been removed by a fair and just society such as Sweden’s – still suffers. He convinces us that the bourgeois soul is still capable of human suffering -- that the bourgeois soil is perhaps, because of its contented lifestyle, doomed to suffer.

I’d like to get out of the way for the last thought, and quote someone who posted on a NY Times comments section when Bergman died:

July 30th,
2007
1:39 pm
There is a totality of scope in Bergman’s films that mystically inhabits every moment of time and every seemingly unimportant article, along the lines of what the poet William Blake expressed:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
Perhaps above all his films call for a life of inner courage, both in spite of and because of the human tenderness, frailty and resilience which his films exalt.
— Posted by Eric Spaeth


10. HOW TO SEE HIS FILMS AGAIN:

Individual DVDs of most of his films are available in the Criterion Collection.
Then there are these boxed sets:
1. For the total devotee, his first apprenticeship films are on the Criterion Collection’s “Early Bergman,” “Torment” (1944), “Crisis” (1946), “Port of Call” (1948), “Thirst” (1949) and “To Joy” (1950).
2. In the Criterion Collection, there’s a boxed set of his 1960s Absence-of-God trilogy, The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. It also includes is a fourth film, “Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie,” a five-part comprehensive documentary on the making of Winter Light, one of Bergman's favorite films. The documentary is directed by filmmaker Vilgot Sjoman (I Am Curious--Yellow), and was, in Sjoman's words, "the first and only time that Bergman let someone document his filmmaking from the first idea to the first showings."
3. “Scenes From a Marriage” (1973). The film was released theatrically in the United States in a 167-minute version. Criterion released the full 299-minute television series as a DVD in 2004.
4. “Fanny and Alexander” (1983). Both the 188-minute feature and the 312-minute original are now part of the Criterion catalog.
5. His final made-for-TV movie, “Saraband,” a look-back at the long-divorced characters in “Scenes from a Marriage, is on DVD from Sony Pictures.
6. There’s an Ingmar Bergman collection by MGM: six DVDs of Persona, Shame, The Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, and the big-budget mess The Serpent’s Egg, with a 2002 interview with Bergman.

11. ALL HIS MOVIES:

1. Apprentice Work:
Crisis (1946) (Kris)
It Rains on Our Love (1946) (Det regnar på vår kärlek)
A Ship to India (1947) (Skepp till Indialand)
Music in Darkness (1948) (Musik i mörker)
Port of Call (1948) (Hamnstad)
Prison (1949) (Fängelse)
Thirst /Three Strange Loves (1949) (Törst)
This Can't Happen Here (1950) (Sånt händer inte här)
To Joy (1950) (Till glädje)
Summer Interlude (1951) (Sommarlek)
Secrets of Women (1952) (Kvinnors väntan)

2. Maturity:
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) (Gycklarnas afton)
Summer with Monika (1953) (Sommaren med Monika)
A Lesson in Love (1954) (En lektion i kärlek)
Dreams (1955) (Kvinnodröm) aka Journey Into Autumn

3. International Breakthrough:
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) (Sommarnattens leende)
The Seventh Seal (1957) (Det sjunde inseglet)
Wild Strawberries (1957) (Smultronstället)

4. Period Movies:
The Magician /The Face (1958) (Ansiktet)
Brink of Life (1958) (Nära livet)
The Devil's Eye (1960) (Djävulens öga)
The Virgin Spring (1960) (Jungfrukällan) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)

5. Absence-of-God trilogy:
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) (Såsom i en spegel) (won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film)
Winter Light (1962) (Nattvardsgästerna)
The Silence (1963) (Tystnaden)

6. Greatness:
All These Women (1964) (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor)
Persona (1966)
Hour of the Wolf (1967) (Vargtimmen)
Shame (1968) (Skammen)
The Rite (1968) (Riten) (TV)
The Passion of Anna (1969) (En passion)
The Touch (1971) (Beröringen)
Cries and Whispers (1973) (Viskningar och rop) (won Academy Award for Best Cinematography)
Scenes from a Marriage (1973) (Scener ur ett äktenskap)
The Magic Flute (1975) (Trollflöjten), first shown on Swedish television, followed by a cinematic release
Face to Face (1976) (Ansikte mot ansikte)

7. After tax arrest:
The Serpent's Egg (1977) (Das Schlangenei)
Autumn Sonata (1978) (Höstsonaten)
From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten)

8. Last Period:
Fanny and Alexander (1982) (Fanny och Alexander) (won 4 Academy Awards)
Karin's Face (1984) (Karins ansikte) (TV)
After the Rehearsal (1984) (Efter repetitionen)
In The Presence of a Clown (1997) (Larmar och gör sig till) (TV)
Saraband (2003) (TV)

9. Last work written for others:
The Best Intentions (1992) (Den goda viljan) (directed by Bille August)
Sunday’s Children Söndagsbarn (1992) (directed by son Daniel Bergman)
Faithless (2000) (Trolösa) (directed by Liv Ullmann)

Adam's blogbox: how to make capitalism democratic

A fact of American democracy that is never discussed is how undemocratic our business lives are.

Many of us spend most of our waking hours on earth working under circumstances that are totally undemocratic.

In a big company, tens of thousands of workers can be fired because of one man’s decision. The CEO of an American company has as much power as an old-fashioned monarch. Life in a modern American corporation is about as democratic as Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin. Our CEOs are today’s version of Genghis Khan.

The basic fact of corporate life is that you have to obey your boss.

Hence the corporate duty of sucking up to the boss. The phenomenon of phalanxes of yes men. The underlying fear in everything a company man does: what will the boss think of this?

It’s amazing that innovation can blossom under such a system. But think how innovation happens: you need to get the boss on your side before you can do anything. It had better be something he likes. It had better be something he can take credit for.

One-man rule: that’s how American business operates.

Of course, democracy and capitalism are not natural bedfellows. A good case might be made that capitalism does better under a dictatorship: witness the runaway success of Singapore and China.

Perhaps an interesting line of enquiry might be to explore how capitalism might work if it were organized along democratic lines.

Let’s engage in a thought experiment: how would one organize a company along democratic lines? What would something as paradoxical as democratic capitalism look like?

A good place to start would be with the workers of the company. We might call them the citizens of the company, like one refers to the citizens of a country or nation.

Just calling them citizens immediately changes how one thinks about them, doesn’t it?

As citizens, the workers would have some rights and some say in how their company is run. Like, for example, the right to elect their leader.

Imagine what would happen to a company in which its citizen workers get to vote for a new CEO every three or four years.

Come election time, there would be campaigns from qualified would-be CEOs inside the company (or outside the company, for that matter) directed at the citizen workers to win their votes.

What kind of campaigns would these CEO candidates run?

Obviously, they’d come up with policies that show how they’d make more money for the company than the next candidate, and how they’d spend that money better than the next candidate.

Now think about this: it would not get these CEO candidates many votes if their motivation for making more money was to return more dividends to the shareholders in the company.

In fact, to get the most votes, they’d have to promise that a solid chunk of the profits generated by their policies would be returned to the voters -- the citizen workers -- themselves. Come to think of it, they’d have to provide really good reasons why they wouldn’t return a 100% of the profits to the workers. (Think of the motivating effect if citizen workers were to make more money when the company makes more money.)

But what about the shareholders? Shouldn’t they be getting dividends?

Certainly. But it very much depends who the shareholders are.

Here’s where things get interesting.

How would you organize a company in which shares are divided between workers and shareholders and owners?

Let’s float an idea that may sound off-the-wall, even though it’s not intended as a cast-in-stone solution. Think of it as a line of enquiry for people to explore, debate, rebut, refine, develop and run with. In other words, a thought experiment. A new model for a new kind of employee-owned corporation.

Here goes. Say you have an idea that could make money. So you start a company. It’s yours, you own it. Because you have a good idea, your company starts to grow. You add more employees as you make more money so that your expanding company can make you even more money.

Here’s the thought experiment: what if corporate life was arranged –- regulated by law -- as follows.

You are the owner of the company as long as your business employs under a 100 workers. You’re the dictator. You’re free to support your employees, or exploit them, as much as you want or need to.

But:

The day you decide to expand to the point where you need more than a 100 workers -- the minute you employ your 101st worker –- the second you find you need to employ more than a 100 workers to expand even bigger and faster to make megabucks –- at that point, a new change kicks in, legally mandated under the new democratic corporate regulations of our thought experiment.

This law says you now have to share ownership of the company with your workers. The minute you have more than 100 workers, you have to give your workers 51% of your company.

After this, if you and the citizen workers decide to take the company public, you can offer only up to 49% of the company to outside shareholders. Out of your share.

The shares of the citizen workers can never be alienated. They’re not even allowed to sell their shares themselves. If they leave the company, their shares go back to the company, i.e. to the other citizen workers.

In other words, the workers will always own at least 51% of their company.

So when you as the owner get to a 100 workers employed, you face an existential decision. You can decide to stay at 100 employees and be a dictator. But if you want to expand to make more money on a bigger playing field, you have to change your company from a dictatorship to a democracy.

You have to share ownership with your workers. You also have to share power, because now the citizen workers get the right to vote for their leader every three or four years.

They will keep voting for you, the original owner, if the company does well and makes money for them. But they will vote for someone else if you start to blow it.

If they vote for someone else, he or she starts running the company. You still own your 49% of the shares, but you have no power anymore.

If the citizen workers decide to sell shares to the public, they can do it without your say so. They can raise capital for the company by selling up to 80% of your 49% share of the company. The capital they raise goes to the company, not to you. You can decide to sell your 20% of your 49% share of the company in the IPO if you want to cash in.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view).

Every year, if there hasn’t been an IPO, you have to give away 5% of your 49% to the citizen workers until the last 20% of it, which you can keep forever and pass on to your kids. Or sell to the citizen workers in what used to be your company, or sell to shareholders.

Crazy, isn’t it?

But is it any crazier than what we have now? Who says it’s better to have a board-appointed CEO than one democratically elected by the workers? Who says it’s better to have outside shareholders in your company who may never have stepped foot on your factory floor and only bought the shares on the recommendation of a broker – what you might call a class of absentee landlords? What’s so logical about that?

One idea behind our crazy thought experiment is that it’s OK to be the dictator of a 100 people, but not of more than a 100. In fact, the workers who sign up with your dictatorship are there because they’re hoping your company will grow beyond a 100 workers into a democracy.

This is not meant as a hard and fast plan, but as a basis for discussion. A way to deconcept the logic of undemocratic capitalism and point out how democratic capitalism might work. You may have your own ideas.

What cannot be gainsaid is that the capitalism as it is practiced in the US today is totally undemocratic.

Under a more democratic system of capitalism, not only are power and assets shared, but also motivation and incentive.

When everyone is an owner, behavior changes. Everyone in the company, from the CEO down to the janitor, owns shares and will be thinking about how they can make more money for the company –- how they can do their job better, how they can save monet for the company, how they can maximize profit. The company’s money is their money. Isn’t that more true to capitalist ideals than it is for the workers to rely solely on a fixed wage?

My contention goes further: I say a democratic corporation will beat an undemocratic corporation, run by a board-appointed CEO and owned by absentee shareholders, hands down. Every time. It stands to reason: a company owned and run by many capitalists who actually work in the company, will work harder and smarter and more cost-consciously and more profit-mindedly and more competitively than any other.

The workers will work smarter and harder. The bosses will work smarter and harder. The CEO will work smarter and harder. They’re all working for each other as well as for themselves. They're all accountable to each other. They all want each other to do better, because that way they themselves will do better. They win by sharing. The CEO knows he keeps his job only while his decisions and actions do well for the people working under him.

The workers will follow a CEO who makes good money for them with a 110% of their smarts, goodwill and effort.

This could be the perfect model of a perfect company.

If workers could vote for their CEOs today, which CEOs would survive? Steve Jobs of Apple would, for sure. But how many others?

If you’re a CEO, engage in your own thought experiment: do you feel the cold breeze of democratic accountability raise the hairs on the back of your neck?

If only more of our American CEOs labored with that breeze down their necks.

If only our capitalism worked in a more democratic way.

But under our widely accepted and highly admired system, we just have to cope with the results of dictatorship-predator capitalism: cars and burgers that wreck our environment and endanger life on earth; HMOs that deny us operations that could save our lives; and CEOs who make more money in a day than their workers make in a year.

We’re stuck with the capitalism we have instead of the capitalism most of us may prefer, if only we knew about it.

Call me a dreamer. But if democratic capitalism actually happened, you yourself might find that, ohmigod, there’s a dream out there worth following.

(This is from my forthcoming book: Invisible Dictatorship and the Sovereign Self: Why America is a Dictatorship Cross-dressed as a Democracy and How to Live Free in it. Comments are welcome.)

Adam's blogbox: waiting for the Barbarians to leave Washington

What will Washington be like when the Barbarians leave town next year?

Will this hapless burg -- home of flagrant hypocrites and BS ejaculators, stuffed from snout to stern with an indigestible lumpen elite of corrupt souls, moral myopics, and wannabe-messiahs -- feel the relief of an epic enema?

We know what Washington has become since the Barbarians took over in 2000. Who back then, when Bush was campaigning as a “compassionate conservative,” could have foreseen what his Cheney presidency would bring us?

1. The deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Arab men, women and children, and nearly four thousand Americans -- not counting the thousands of severed limbs dropped on Iraqi soil.

2. The hatred and contempt of the world.

3. The turning of our proud Army and CIA into low-life torturers.

4. The creation of thousands of fresh, motivated, diehard Al Qaeda terrorists and hundreds of suicide bombers.

5. The staggering amount of $5 to $9 billion poured every month into a cesspool called the Iraq War (so far, more than $440,000,000,000 of our taxes).

6. The tactic of the big lie to con us into war (it worked for Hitler, it worked for Bush).

7. The selling out of America to China (we’ve given them the power to dump us into a depression whenever they fancy).

8. A headlong plunge from a comfortable surplus into a tsunami of debt, making us the #1 debtor nation on earth.

9. The absurd incompetence of FEMA after Katrina.

10. The rampant arrogance of cronyism. (You’re against abortion? Great, that qualifies you to be an administrator in the Green Zone.)

11. The suspension of habeas corpus. (Why have we locked you up without a trial for the past five years? Hey, it’s just the way things work in a democracy like ours, dude.)

12. The rebuilding of Al Qaeda in Pakistan. (Pakistan is on our side, isn’t it?)

13. The trashing of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

14. The trashing of international agreements and laws, such as the Geneva Conventions.

15. The breaching of the separation of Church and State (that would be an evangelical church – Jews and Muslims need not apply for our faith-based funding).

16. The breaking of laws by the President. (I’m above the law because I’m your Commander-in-Chief.)

17. The doctrine of “pre-emptive” war. (Didn’t you know? We had to stop the Iraqi Army from crossing the Atlantic en masse to come and bomb us with their scary nukes.)

18. The handing over of our Middle East policy to Israel.

19. The trashing of our environment.

20. The trashing of the middleclass and the poor.

21. Letting a member of Congress get away with chasing interns whose parents thought their kids would be safe in Washington.

22. Helping lobbyists to con Indian nations and others.

23. The enrichment of the already rich, to the point that beneficiaries like Warren Buffett and Bill Clinton are apologizing for it.

24. The use of US attorneys to accuse Democratic Party candidates of whatever it takes to turn the vote.

25. The employment of mercenaries – hired goons -- by the thousands.

26. No-bid contracts for Cheney’s old firm Halliburton.

27. The creation of a Supreme Court that now openly espouses racism and the exploitation of workers by their companies.

28. The refusal to implement laws passed by Congress by the extravagant use of presidential “signing statements.”

29. A foreign policy that has strengthened our arch-enemy Iran to become the #1 player in the Middle East.

30. The wholesale bungling of the occupation of a foreign country.

31. The fostering of a civil war in Iraq.

32. The wholesale spying on American citizens.

33. The wholesale outsourcing of American jobs overseas.

Truly, we’ve had six years of government by the Barbarians. No administration in US history has racked up a more odious record of incompetence, stupidity and venality. It’s like the sacking of Rome from the inside. The cons are running the prison. Darth Vader rules the galaxy. Child molesters oversee the nursery.

During Watergate, pundits proudly stated that the system worked. Well, in the case of the Barbarians, the system worked all right, but it was not the system we call democracy. It was something new in America – dictatorship lite.

Our so-called democracy, this supposedly robust system established by our founding fathers, of a separation of powers, of checks and balances, of an actual written Constitution, of equality before the law, was hijacked by no more than twelve men with a wacky agenda – Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Lewis Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton, Philip Zelikow, and Attorney General Gonzales.

The shame of it is that they were ably supported by not only the usual suspects -- the Weekly Standard, National Review, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the “scholars” of the American Enterprise Institute, the batty "Rapture” Evangelicals and creationists, the rightwing radio windbags, the flag-waving “uberpatriot” imbeciles, the greedy military-industrial complex slurping up our tax dollars -- the whole pea-brained troglodyte spastic chorus of hate-speech-spouting Bible-thumping crooked free-market monopoly capitalism liberal-decrying family-values war-on-terror gay-baiting women-suppressing stem-cell-fearing enemies-under-our-beds science-ignorant paranoid fetus-pitying SUV-driving beer-bellied gun-toting bash-the-poor hysterical racist ideologues who’ve made America the laughing stock of the civilized world, given noble conservatism a bad name, and caused Barry Goldwater to puke on the worms in his grave.

These twelve Barbarians -- who in any other country would be marginalized on the far-right loony fringe -- were also enthusiastically cheered on by the self-proclaimed stalwarts of our “democracy” like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC. These highly intelligent and liberal media fell for the most obvious lies, and became the useful idiots of the Barbarians.

Twelve Barbarians hijacked the country, and the country was only too willing to be hijacked. Hey, we may be against gay marriage, but that doesn’t stop us from bending over when our elite waves a big dick our way.

So much for our so-called democracy. Turns out it can be easily busted by a few determined wingnuts.

Even an election win by the Democratic Party has made little difference. Our kids are still being killed for no good reason in Iraq. The Barbarians, bloodied but unbowed, still rule. Nobody has thought to impeach the most impeachable President and Vice-President in history.

Our system of “democracy” has failed us. The truth is, the system never works. It’s people who make the system work, and we’ve elected the wrong people to make our system work. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach, and that’s that. The electorate never gets a proper alternative to the dictatorial powers-that-be.

It doesn’t really matter which party is in power. The credit-card companies will still get to write the bankruptcy laws. Big Pharma will still be writing drug laws. HMOs will be writing healthcare laws. Big Oil will make sure they’re subsidized by our taxes. The American people will still find themselves eternally ass-up-in-the-air, steadily buggered by their Barbarian elite.

The Barbarians are in charge because a nation of Barbarians put them there, and it took our nation of ignoramus hicks all of six years to find out exactly how Barbarian their chosen Barbarians are. At last Bush’s approval rate sleeps with the fishes, and most Americans want the end of a war most of them now think was a mistake to begin with, but wouldn’t you know? Bush is still on TV, refusing to get his butt out of Iraq.

Now that we know how easy it is to turn our “democracy” into a dictatorship (in the current jargon, a “unitary executive”), what can we expect future administrations to get up to?

Don’t think you can trust an administration run by Democrats to be more “democratic” than the Barbarians. The template has been set. It’s just too easy to hijack our “democracy.” Our media are simply too compliant. Our citizens are simply too ignorant (how many of them realize they make no more money than they did in 1970, even though they’re way more productive and work much harder?). And our business leaders simply buy too many profit opportunities under the Barbarians. Heck, they love the war; they’re making a killing in Iraq.

That shrewd old Nazi, Hermann Goering, explained the whole thing at Nuremberg: "Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

It sure worked here. The Barbarians took over, planning a war on Iraq long before 9/11 for their Barbarian dream of yet another puppet regime in the Middle East. Now they’ve afforded future administrations a shining example of just what a few determined men can do when they want war, or tax cuts for the rich, or the right for corporations to foul up our air, or however they want to screw the average American. The spiders spin, and we sit trapped in their web, being sucked dry, while those who should be warning us are basking in access to power instead of speaking truth to it.

Will anything happen to our Barbarians? Let’s take just one example: pundit William Kristol, the editor of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative vanity publication The Weekly Standard. He told NPR when the Iraq War started: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America, that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni … There's been almost no evidence of that at all.” What happened to this massive fool, whose brain has been squatting in his bowels for his entire life? Time Magazine made him one of their columnists. The stupider you are, the bigger the forum you’re given to be stupid in. The more you screw up, the likelier you are to get a Medal of Freedom pinned on your incompetent backside by our Barbarian-In-Chief.

Even now, our nation of Barbarians have no idea how truly Barbarian their Barbarian rulers are. Three of our GOP presidential candidates don’t believe in evolution. All of them are for torture. How can this happen in an educated society of rational grownups? We’re talking about idiocy on a massive scale here, a kind of dark age of the human spirit. Our leaders may be jokes, but what they do is not funny at all, since it usually entails thousands being ripped off or killed. (Last week’s joke from the NY Times: “Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel ... that he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.” America, never forget you voted for this pustule on a warthog’s butt.)

The American experiment with democracy is over. We need a new De Tocqueville to write not “Democracy in America,” but “Kleptocracy in America.” Here’s the definition of kleptocracy: a government that extends the personal wealth and political power of government officials and the ruling class at the expense of the population. Rings a bell, doesn’t it? Especially when we see our pols, after they lose elections, automatically become lobbyists to cash in big-time. And you thought they were there to work for you.

We can now look forward to Barbarian rule in perpetuity. Sometimes it will be Barbarian Heavy, like today, and sometimes it will be Barbarian Lite, like it will be under Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Hillary or Obama might make a cosmetic difference, but Paris Hilton will become a nun in the Congo before any administration actually SOLVES our problems of education, healthcare, energy, the environment, campaign funding and income inequality, as opposed to Congress paving them over with a thin coat of superficial law-making. Until public schools are funded equally and not by property taxes, until there's a single-payer healthcare system, until big business is forced to clean up after themselves, until corporate welfare for big oil and other businesses stop, until the rich pay their fair share of taxes, until we stop exporting our jobs overseas, until CEOs stop making more in one day than their workers make in a year, things will go on as before.

The Barbarians have won. Under Bush/Cheney, government of the people by the people for the people has perished from the earth. Sorry, Abe. Our Constitution never stood a chance against our 21st century elite. You thought you birthed a democracy, founding fathers. Tsk, tsk. Long live government of the Barbarians by the Barbarians for the Barbarians.

Even the New York Times, who did all it could to get us into the Iraq War, says it's high time to get the fuck out

1. The Road Home
New York Times Editorial

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq's government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs - after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush's plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation's alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America's allies must try to mitigate those outcomes - and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now.

The Fight Against Terrorists

Despite President Bush's repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.

This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaeda's leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.

And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.

The Question of Bases

The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.

There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy - and too tempting - to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington's real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations' governments.

The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

The Civil War

One of Mr. Bush's arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq's political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraq's neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.

Iraq's leaders - knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival - might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

The Human Crisis

There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq - Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria - and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees - some with ethnic and political resentments - could spread Iraq's conflict far beyond Iraq's borders.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors' conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.

The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will - translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers - whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.

The Neighbors

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors - America's friends as well as its adversaries.

Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq's borders.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans' demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened - the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage - with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.


2. IRAQ'S CURSE
The thirst for a final, crushing victory is firmly woven into the country's history
By EDWARD WONG/NY Times

BAGHDAD – Perhaps no fact is more revealing about Iraq's history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.

The word is sahel , and it helps explain much of what I have seen in 3 _ years of covering the war.

It is a word unique to Iraq, a friend explained. Throughout Iraq's history, he said, power has changed hands only through extreme violence, when a leader was vanquished absolutely, and his destruction was put on display for all to see.

But in this war, the moment of sahel has been elusive. No faction has been able to secure absolute power; that has only sharpened the hunger for it.

Listen to Iraqis engaged in the fight, and you realize they are far from exhausted by the war. Many say this is only the beginning. President Bush, on the other hand, has escalated the U.S. military involvement on the assumption that the Iraqi factions have tired of armed conflict and are ready to reach a grand accord.

"We've changed nothing," said Fakhri al-Qaisi, a Sunni Arab dentist turned hard-line politician. "It's dark. There will be more blood."

I first met Mr. Qaisi in 2003 at a Salafi mosque in western Baghdad, when the Sunni Arab insurgency was gaining momentum. He articulated the Sunnis' simmering anger at being ousted from power. That fury has blossomed and is likely only to grow, as religious Shiite leaders and their militias become more entrenched in the government and as Kurds in the north push to expand their region and secede in all but name.

Caught in the middle of the civil war are the Americans. To Iraq's factions, they are the weakest of all the armed groups in one crucial respect: Their will is ebbing, and their time here is limited.

"Everyone – the Sunni, the Shia – is playing the waiting game," an Iraqi leader told me over dinner at his home in the Green Zone. "They're waiting out the Americans. Everyone is using time against you."

Four years into this war, Sunni and Shiite attacks against the Americans are expanding. There is little love among Iraqi civilians for the troops, though many fear the anarchy that could follow an American withdrawal.

"I'm still sticking by my principle, which is against the occupation," Mr. Qaisi said. "I'm Iraqi, and I think the Iraqi people should have this principle. We have the right to defend our country as George Washington did."

As long as I have known him, Mr. Qaisi has rejected the idea that Sunni Arabs are the minority in this country. To him and many other Sunnis, the borders of Iraq do not delineate the boundaries of the war. The conflict is set, instead, against the backdrop of the entire Islamic world, in which demography and history have always favored the Sunnis.

For the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraqis, the unalloyed hostility of the Sunni Arabs only reinforces a centuries-old sense of victimhood. So the Shiite militias grow, stoking vengeance.

The Shiites have waited centuries for their moment on the throne, and the war is something they are willing to tolerate as the price for taking power, said the Iraqi leader who had invited me to dinner. "The Shia say this is not exceptional for them; this is normal," he said.

The belief of the Shiites that they must consolidate power through force of arms is tethered to ever-present suspicions of an impending betrayal by the Americans. Though the Americans have helped institute the representative system of government that the Shiites now dominate, they have failed to eliminate memories of how President George H.W. Bush allowed Mr. Hussein to slaughter rebelling Shiites in 1991. Shiite leaders are all too aware, as well, of America's hostility toward Iran, the seat of Shiite power, and of its close alliances with Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia.

"In the history of Iraq, more than 7,000 years, there have always been strong leaders," said Sheik Muhammad Bakr Khamis al-Suhail, a respected Shiite neighborhood leader in Baghdad who supports democracy. "We need strong rulers or dictators like Franco, Hitler, even Mubarak. We need a strong dictator, and a fair one at the same time, to kill all extremists, Sunni and Shiite."

I was surprised to hear those words. But perhaps I was being naive. Looking back on all I have seen of this war, it now seems that the Iraqis have been driving all along for the decisive victory, the act of sahel , the day the bodies will be dragged through the streets.


3. Private contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq
New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation.
By T. Christian Miller/LA Times

The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns.

More than 180,000 civilians — including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis — are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

Including the recent troop buildup, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq.

The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq — a mission criticized as being undermanned.

"These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing."

The numbers include at least 21,000 Americans, 43,000 foreign contractors and about 118,000 Iraqis — all employed in Iraq by U.S. tax dollars, according to the most recent government data.

The array of private workers promises to be a factor in debates on a range of policy issues, including the privatization of military jobs and the number of Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S.

But there are also signs that even those mounting numbers may not capture the full picture. Private security contractors, who are hired to protect government officials and buildings, were not fully counted in the survey, according to industry and government officials.

Continuing uncertainty over the numbers of armed contractors drew special criticism from military experts.

"We don't have control of all the coalition guns in Iraq. That's dangerous for our country," said William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert. The Pentagon "is hiring guns. You can rationalize it all you want, but that's obscene."

Although private companies have played a role in conflicts since the American Revolution, the U.S. has relied more on contractors in Iraq than in any other war, according to military experts.

Contractors perform functions including construction, security and weapons system maintenance.

Military officials say contractors cut costs while allowing troops to focus on fighting rather than on other tasks.

"The only reason we have contractors is to support the war fighter," said Gary Motsek, the assistant deputy undersecretary of Defense who oversees contractors. "Fundamentally, they're supporting the mission as required."

But critics worry that troops and their missions could be jeopardized if contractors, functioning outside the military's command and control, refuse to make deliveries of vital supplies under fire.

At one point in 2004, for example, U.S. forces were put on food rations when drivers balked at taking supplies into a combat zone.

Adding an element of potential confusion, no single agency keeps track of the number or location of contractors.

In response to demands from Congress, the U.S. Central Command began a census last year of the number of contractors working on U.S. and Iraqi bases to determine how much food, water and shelter was needed.

That census, provided to The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, shows about 130,000 contractors and subcontractors of different nationalities working at U.S. and Iraqi military bases.

However, U.S. military officials acknowledged that the census did not include other government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department.

Last month, USAID reported about 53,000 Iraqis employed under U.S. reconstruction contracts, doing jobs such as garbage pickup and helping to teach democracy. In interviews, agency officials said an additional 300 Americans and foreigners worked as contractors for the agency.

State Department officials said they could not provide the department's number of contractors. Of about 5,000 people affiliated with the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, about 300 are State Department employees. The rest are a mix of other government agency workers and contractors, many of whom are building the new embassy.

"There are very few of us, and we're way undermanned," said one State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We have significant shortages of people. It's been that way since before [the war], and it's still that way."

The companies with the largest number of employees are foreign firms in the Middle East that subcontract to KBR, the Houston-based oil services company, according to the Central Command database. KBR, once a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., provides logistics support to troops, the single largest contract in Iraq.

Middle Eastern companies, including Kulak Construction Co. of Turkey and Projects International of Dubai, supply labor from Third World countries to KBR and other U.S. companies for menial work on U.S. bases and rebuilding projects. Foreigners are used instead of Iraqis because of fears that insurgents could infiltrate projects.

KBR is by far the largest employer of Americans, with nearly 14,000 U.S. workers. Other large employers of Americans in Iraq include New York-based L-3 Communications, which holds a contract to provide translators to troops, and ITT Corp., a New York engineering and technology firm.

The most controversial contractors are those working for private security companies, including Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Erinys. They guard sensitive sites and provide protection to U.S. and Iraqi government officials and businessmen.

Security contractors draw some of the sharpest criticism, much of it from military policy experts who say their jobs should be done by the military. On several occasions, heavily armed private contractors have engaged in firefights when attacked by Iraqi insurgents.

Others worry that the private security contractors lack accountability. Although scores of troops have been prosecuted for serious crimes, only a handful of private security contractors have faced legal charges.

The number of private security contractors in Iraq remains unclear, despite Central Command's latest census. The Times identified 21 security companies in the Central Command database, deploying 10,800 men.

However, the Defense Department's Motsek, who monitors contractors, said the Pentagon estimated the total was 6,000.

Both figures are far below the private security industry's own estimate of about 30,000 private security contractors working for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, media outlets and businesses.

Industry officials said that private security companies helped reduce the number of troops needed in Iraq and provided jobs to Iraqis — a benefit in a country with high unemployment.

"A guy who is working for a [private security company] is not out on the street doing something inimical to our interests," said Lawrence Peter, director of the Private Security Company Assn. of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Iraqis make up the largest number of civilian employees under U.S. contracts. Typically, the government contracts with an American firm, which then subcontracts with an Iraqi firm to do the job.

Stan Soloway, president of the Professional Services Council, a contractors' trade group, said the number of Iraqis reflected the importance of the reconstruction and economic development efforts to the overall U.S. mission in Iraq.

"That's not work that the government does or has ever done…. That's work that is going to be done by companies and to some extent by" nongovernmental organizations, Soloway said. "People tend to think that these are contractors on the battlefield, and they're not."

The Iraqis have been the most difficult to track. As recently as May, the Pentagon told Congress that 22,000 Iraqis were employed by its contractors. But the Pentagon number recently jumped to 65,000 — a result of closer inspection of contracts, an official said.

The total number of Iraqis employed under U.S. contracts is important, in part because it may influence debate in Congress regarding how many Iraqis will be allowed to come to the U.S. to escape violence in their homeland.

This year, the U.S. planned to cap that number at 7,000 a year. To date, however, only a few dozen Iraqis have been admitted, according to State Department figures.

Kirk Johnson, head of the List Project, which seeks to increase the admission of Iraqis, said that the U.S. needed to provide a haven to those who worked most closely with American officials.

"We all say we are grateful to these Iraqis," Johnson said. "How can we be the only superpower in the world that can't implement what we recognize as a moral imperative?"

(t.christian.miller@latimes.com)


The back story

Information in this article is based in part on a database of contractors in Iraq obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the public access to government records.

The database is the result of a census conducted earlier this year by the U.S. Central Command.

The census found about 130,000 contractors working for 632 companies holding contracts in Iraq with the Defense Department and a handful of other federal agencies.

The Times received the database last month, four months after first requesting it. Because the Freedom of Information Act law requires an agency to provide only information as of the date of the request, the census is based on figures as of February. During interviews, Pentagon officials said the census had since been updated, and they provided additional figures based on the update.

Contractors in Iraq:

There are more U.S.-paid private contractors than there are American combat troops in Iraq.
Contractors: 180,000
U.S. troops: 160,000

--

Nationality of contractors*
118,000 Iraqis
43,000 non-U.S. foreigners
21,000 Americans

--

Top contractors:

Company: Kulak Construction Co.
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies construction workers to U.S. bases
Total employees: 30,301

Company: KBR
Description: Based in Houston, supplies logistics support to U.S. troops
Total employees: 15,336

Company: Prime Projects International
Description: Based in Dubai, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 10,560

Company: L-3 Communications
Description: Based in New York, provides translators and other services
Total employees: 5,886

Company: Gulf Catering Co.
Description: Based in Saudi Arabia, provides kitchen services to U.S. troops
Total employees: 4,002

Company: 77 Construction
Description: Based in Irbil, Iraq, provides logistics support to troops
Total employees: 3,219

Company: ECC
Description: Based in Burlingame, Calif, works on reconstruction projects
Total employees: 2,390

Company: Serka Group
Description: Based in Turkey, supplies logistics support to U.S. bases
Total employees: 2,250

Company: IPBD Ltd.
Description: Based in England, supplies labor, laundry services and other support
Total employees: 2,164

Company: Daoud & Partners Co.
Description: Based in Amman, Jordan, supplies labor for logistics support
Total employees: 2,092

Company: EOD Technology Inc
Description: Based in Lenoir City, Tenn., supplies security, explosives demolition and other services
Total employees: 1,913

Note: Data are as of February, which is most current available.
*Approximate - numbers rounded
Sources: U.S. Central Command, Times reporting

NATO knows how to fight in Afghanistan; the US never did (is there anything Bush can do right?)

NATO Didn’t Lose Afghanistan
By SARAH CHAYES /NY Times

Kandahar, Afghanistan


WHEN things go wrong — touchdown passes are missed, products come out defective, wars are lost — it is typical to blame the equipment, or the help. In the case of the unraveling situation in Afghanistan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has become the favorite whipping boy of American officials and military personnel. NATO countries aren’t sending enough troops, we hear. Those who do arrive are constrained by absurd caveats that prevent them from engaging in combat. NATO lost Helmand Province to the Taliban.

In fact, after watching rotation after military rotation cycle through here since late 2001, I see NATO as an improvement over its American predecessors.

One key difference is NATO’s training program, born of the challenge of gathering troops from different countries, speaking different languages, into a cohesive fighting force. In March, I joined about a dozen civilians who had lived and worked in Kandahar for years at the final training exercise for the NATO officers who recently took over Afghanistan’s Regional Command South. We spent 10 days briefing them, fielding their questions on everything from tribal relations to the electricity supply, eating meals with them and playing roles in a simulation of three days in southern Afghanistan.

“Uh ... we’ve got a bit of a situation here,” I heard one of my fellow teachers, an Australian who was a top United Nations security official, say calmly into the phone. He threw me a wink. He was starting the simulation by reporting the sounds of a large detonation and small arms fire. Later, on another line to an officer training to run public information, a sociological researcher played the role of a journalist, her voice incredulous: “Are you sure you want to say that?”

With the help of these seasoned civilians, experienced NATO officers and some Afghans, the new team was rigorously tested on the many aspects of its mission that go beyond combat tactics. Three months later, after these trainees had taken up their new jobs, the training staff traveled to Kandahar to debrief them to learn which aspects of the training had been useful and which needed improvement.

Given the constant disruption caused by short troop rotations, competent training is key to improving officers’ effectiveness as soon as they hit the ground.

The American troops’ training, in contrast, seemed ad hoc, usually carried out by each unit on its own, rather than by a dedicated training staff. And it involved very few civilians, despite the crucial humanitarian and political aspects of the mission here. (I have occasionally been invited to address American officers, but only when a friend in the unit has convinced a commander that I might have something to offer.)

NATO’s second advantage is continuity, despite its multinational makeup. I observed rivalry between American units lead to confusing policy reversals each time new troops came in. The best American commanders were those who understood that Afghanistan is no toy-soldier battlefield, that they would have to bone up on anthropology, diplomacy and civil engineering. But such commanders were rare, and their replacements — seeking to make their own mark — usually undid their work within weeks.

NATO has tried to reduce the disruption of replacing troops and officers en masse. Rotations are staggered. This may cause some logistical headaches, but it reduces abrupt changes in direction.

But if NATO is doing better than the United States, why is Afghanistan doing worse? The answer is twofold. NATO was brought in too late, and under false pretenses.

Within days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, NATO voted to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty — its core principle, which states that an armed attack on one member will be viewed by the others as an attack on themselves. Never before in the history of the organization had the principle been activated. The American reaction was thanks but no thanks. Our government was sure we could go it alone in Afghanistan, that allies would be an inconvenience.

In 2003, NATO moved peacekeeping forces into Kabul and parts of northern Afghanistan. But not until 2005, when it was clear that the United States was bogged down in Iraq and lacked sufficient resources to fight on two fronts, did Washington belatedly turn to NATO to take the Afghan south off its hands. And then it misrepresented the situation our allies would find there. NATO was basically sold a beefed-up peacekeeping mission. It was told, in effect, that it would simply need to maintain the order the United States had established and to help with reconstruction and security.

In fact, as was clear from the ground, the situation had been deteriorating since late 2002. By 2004, resurgent Taliban were making a concerted push to enter the country from Pakistan, and intensive combat between American forces and Taliban fighters was taking place north of Kandahar. By 2005, top Afghan officials could be blown up in downtown Kandahar without drawing much of a reaction from either the Afghan government or ours. Notorious drug lords governed the three main southern provinces to which we were dispatching our allies. It was the bloodiest and most belligerent situation since the fall of the Taliban.

NATO should have been brought in from the start and given the kind of muscular peacekeeping mission it learned to conduct in the Balkans. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, begged for peacekeepers, spread throughout the country, in those early years when they could still have made a difference.

Having snubbed our allies when we should have accepted their help, and having stuck them with the most difficult, yet most strategically critical, part of Afghanistan, the least we could do now is offer gratitude and support, rather than blame our friends for our own follies.

(Sarah Chayes is the author of “The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban.”)

If Jefferson were alive today, he'd lead a revolution to overthrow our new King George

Take the Revolutionary Road
The US has been the world’s principal anti-revolutionary force for almost a century. As Thomas Jefferson would have said, it’s time to rebel.
by Michael Hardt / the Guardian/UK

It cannot but feel rather odd discussing Thomas Jefferson , who occupies such a central position in the US national pantheon, as a figure of modern revolutionary thought. For almost a century, after all, the United States government has served as the principal anti-revolutionary force in the world, striving to suppress revolutionary movements, openly plotting to overthrow successful revolutionary governments, and supporting surrogate counter-revolutionary forces in countries throughout the globe.

National political traditions, however, are not cut of whole cloth but rather contain sometimes surprising divergences and contradictions. The present anti-revolutionary vocation of the United States, in fact, makes it all the more interesting to find the thought of a revolutionary such as Jefferson at its core. When reading some of Jefferson’s most radical writings it is hard not to be struck by the vast gulf that separates his thinking from that of the current United States, its ideology, its constitution, and its political system and culture.

After this initial surprise at the fact that Jefferson’s thought belongs to the revolutionary tradition, we should recognise how it still has important contributions to make, and can help us move beyond some of the central obstacles to thinking about revolution today.

Jefferson’s declarations of independence throughout his life not only mark the separation of the colonies from the colonial power but also, and more importantly, seek to keep alive the pursuit of freedom within society - striving to conceive of how the revolutionary process can continue indefinitely, how what 18th century revolutionaries called “public happiness” can be instituted in government, and ultimately how self-rule and democracy can be realized.

Like all great revolutionary thinkers, Jefferson understands well that the revolutionary event, the rupture with the past and the destruction of the old regime, is not the end of the revolution but really only a beginning. The event opens a period of transition that aims at realizing the goals of the revolution. The concept of transition, however, is today a fundamental stumbling block of revolutionary thought and practice. The (often authoritarian) means employed during revolutionary transitions frequently conflict with and even contradict the desired (democratic) ends; moreover, these transitions never seem to come to an end. The travelers on the long journey through the desert end up getting completely lost, no nearer to the promised land, and that leader with a big stick starts looking a lot like the old Pharaoh.

In fact, whenever revolutionaries start talking to you about “transition” today, you had better watch out: they are probably trying to put one over on you. Jefferson’s thought, however, poses a novel conception of transition, which can help steer revolutionary thought around its current obstacles. He provocatively brings together, on the one hand, constitution and rebellion and, on the other, transition and democracy. The work of the revolution must continue incessantly, periodically reopening the constituent process, and the population must be trained in democracy through the practices of democracy.

The first key to understanding Jefferson’s notion of transition is to recognize the continuous and dynamic relationship he poses between rebellion and constitution or, rather, between revolution and government. A conventional view of revolution conceives these terms in temporal sequence: rebellion is necessary to overthrow the old regime, but when it falls and the new government is formed, rebellion must cease.

In contrast to this view, Jefferson insists on the virtue and necessity of periodic rebellion - even against the newly formed government. The processes of constituent power must continually disrupt and force open an establishment of constituted power.

“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”

Rebellion against the government, he maintains (pdf), is so virtuous that it should not only be tolerated but even encouraged.

Rebellion is not just a matter of correcting wrongs committed by the government, and thus only valuable if its cause is just; it has an intrinsic value, regardless of the justness of its specific grievances and goals. Periodic rebellion is necessary to guarantee the health of a society and preserve public freedom. “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,” he writes. In Jefferson’s view, rebellion should not become our constant condition; rather, it should eternally return. By my calculation we are well overdue.

(Michael Hardt is a literary theorist and political philosopher. Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, USA, his recent writings deal primarily with the political, legal, economic and social aspects of globalisation. He has written several books, including the world renowned Empire. His most recent is a new edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence)

Sicko: nobody tells it like it is like Michael Moore

Michael Moore's Sicko
by CHRISTOPHER HAYES /The Nation

About forty minutes into Sicko , Michael Moore's excellent, frustrating new documentary about the American healthcare industry, Ronald Reagan makes his first and only appearance. It's surprising, if only because, unlike in his previous film Fahrenheit 9/11 , Moore focuses relatively little attention on the villains in his story, choosing instead simply to allow their victims to tell their tales. It's a montage of hard luck and innocence. But after introducing us to the horror stories all too typical among even the 250 million Americans fortunate enough to have health insurance, Moore takes a few moments for a brief history lesson. How, he asks, did we get here? And it's in this time warp that we encounter the Gipper. This is not Gipper the Governor or Gipper the President or even Gipper the B-list actor. This is Gipper, silver-tongued shill for the interests of capital.

It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative. As chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism , Reagan was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions. Reagan would be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he spent propagandizing the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged the distinctive Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an amiable uncle.

So as momentum for national, universal healthcare built during the Truman Administration, foes such as the American Medical Association sought to build grassroots opposition. In an ingenious stroke, as Moore reports in Sicko , it organized thousands of coffee klatches across the country where suburban housewives could sip coffee, gossip and listen to a special recorded message about the evils of socialized medicine, a message delivered by the one and only Ronald Reagan.

The presence of Reagan in the film, making an argument that is the inverse of Sicko 's, is fitting. Moore's entire post- Roger & Me career can be understood as a multimedia attempt to undo Reagan's great achievement: persuading blue-collar factory workers and other members of the working class to embrace his heady brew of jingoism, anticommunism, contempt for government and admiration for the virtues of unfettered capitalism.

For years Moore has, like Ahab pursuing the whale, been hunting the elusive Reagan Democrat--the heartland-dwelling, beer-drinking, blue-collar guy (or gal) who bowls on the weekend, loves his country and is fighting to stay afloat in winner-take-all America. He may look on the left with contempt, but it's not because he doesn't intuitively share its views: He is a visceral collectivist and unionist and an enemy of corporations. He is ready, Moore believes, to come over to our side, if only we would talk to him.

That's why Moore spends the final chapter of his first book, Downsize This! , talking to Norman Olson, a co-founder of the Michigan Militia: "You know, you guys were right in the sixties," Olson tells him. "The government lied to us.... So when we finally wised up in the nineties after all these jobs were lost, where were you liberals when we needed your help?" Writing in this magazine in November 1997, in an article titled "Is the Left Nuts? (Or Is It Me?)," Moore asked a variation of the same question, "just who the hell is reading this? Who is the Nation readership? Is it my brother-in-law, Tony, back in Flint, who last night was installing furnace ducts until 9 o'clock?"

It is Tony the furnace-installer who haunts Moore's work like a specter, and for whom the rotund and slovenly Moore acts as a kind of aw-shucks proxy. But the central paradox of his career is that his success in reaching the Tonys of the world is spotty at best. Though he's always communicated his politics in a comedic, accessible, populist vocabulary, his public image is that of an ideologue, a lighting rod, a polarizing figure: more Barry Goldwater than Ronald Reagan.

In what may be a tacit acknowledgment of this unfortunate fact, Sicko is different from Moore's last two efforts. Not just because of an absence of gimmicky gotcha moments, or a reduction in screen time for Moore himself, but because its topic isn't fundamentally polarizing in the way his previous works were. There's a whole lot of Americans who love their guns, and in 2004 there were a lot of Americans who loved their President, but it's pretty hard to find anyone who loves their health insurance company.

Moore's solution is simple: Get rid of the health insurance companies. Don't just tinker with the healthcare system, banish profit from the delivery of healthcare altogether. Socialize it. Make it a public good. It's a testament to the health insurance industry's power that as "universal healthcare" lurches toward the political middle, this proposal seems in some ways more radical than ever. Moore recognizes that if single-payer is ever going to come to America, it's going to be over the insurance companies' dead bodies. One way of understanding Sicko is as the opening salvo in a battle to make that happen. The movie alone can't do that, which is part of the reason Moore has teamed up with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the labor union most zealously committed to single-payer. It'll be sending its members, along with like-minded doctors, to every single showing of the film's opening night to talk up single-payer to audiences. And it's currently rolling across the country in a multicity tour designed to leverage the film's publicity to push single-payer back into the national conversation.

But Sicko is more than a potent weapon in the battle for single-payer, because in a deeper sense, the movie isn't really about healthcare. At its best, it uses healthcare as a kind of gateway drug to much harder stuff: a robust social democratic vision, articulated eloquently by legendary British Labour gadfly Tony Benn, who waxes poetic in the film about the radical promise of democracy to move power from the "wallet to the ballot." It's the extension of the logic of democracy into provisioning of public goods that provides the philosophical justification for socialized medicine. "The principle," as Benn says, "is solidarity."

As we sat in a movie theater in Bellaire, Michigan, an overwhelmingly Republican town where Moore and his wife, Kathleen, own a house and where Kathleen is vice chair of the local county Democratic Party, I asked Moore if the movie was intended as an argument for social democracy. His eyes lit up. "That's correct," he said. "You know, it works for the fire department, why can't it work for healthcare? They're both life-and-death issues, and we agree that profit should have no interest at all in how we run our fire department."

It's a message at once subversive and nonthreatening. Look at Canada, Moore argues in the film, or England or--gasp--France, where Moore even spends one scene reveling in the bourgeois comforts of a "typical" French couple as a means of rebutting arguments about the country's onerous tax burden. Or look at the United States: We "socialize" a lot of things here in America, Moore notes, as clips roll by of police officers and schoolteachers and public libraries. Why not this most crucial and important service?

That's the argument in a nutshell. "It's a simple thought," Moore told me, "but I think people get it when you put it like that." Oprah sure did. During Moore's recent appearance on her show, she was careful not to seem to be endorsing anything too radical, and Moore obliged by saying that healthcare wasn't a "partisan issue" and he was looking to reach across the aisle. Then Oprah turned to the audience and said she finally "got it" when in the film Moore points out that we don't charge for the services of firemen or think profit should have anything to do with firefighting. Then she told her audience to go out and see the film.

It's not surprising to find commentators noting, as Oprah did, that this film is less political than Moore's previous offering. It's less caustic, less outraged. But to call it less political than Fahrenheit 9/11 is a category error. Fahrenheit was an intensely partisan project, focused with laserlike precision on building a damning brief indicting the Bush Administration. And like a lawyer, Moore was only too happy to grab whatever argument he could find, even if it was at the expense of internal consistency. The film, while effective as propaganda, suffered a bit from this ad hoc approach, like the old law school chestnut about "arguing in the alternative": The kettle was in perfect condition when I returned it; it was broken when I borrowed it; and I never borrowed the damn kettle in the first place.

Sicko is far, far less partisan than Fahrenheit , but much more ideological. And as such, it is more consistent in what it offers--with one major caveat. The film's final half-hour, in which Moore takes 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba, serves only to reinforce the decades-old slander that equates social democracy with repressive socialism. It's a major miscalculation and nearly squanders the first hour and a half of the film in which Moore so deftly guts arguments that socialized medicine represents the vanguard of Marxism. But that final section aside, the film functions as a compelling advertisement for an alternative way of ordering society, one in which, as in France, there's vacation, paid sick time, doctors who make house calls and even, amazingly, a state-supplied nanny who will come to your house and do your laundry after you've had a child. Who wouldn't want that?

The healthcare industry, for one, and it's betting that itcan once again persuade Americans not to want it either. At a press conference after the American premiere, Moore said that in response to the film we should expect to see all the old chestnuts rolled out by the health insurance industry: "Canada's bad, they've got long lines they wait in, you know, blah, blah, blah," said Moore. "In the Canadian system, there is no wait if you have an emergency situation, if it's a life-and-death issue. The wait to see a specialist or if it's elective surgery, I think the most recent statistic I saw was that it was down to four weeks. But you know, sometimes that's what you have to do when you share with everyone--you have to wait."

Moore continued, "When you share the pie, sometimes you have to wait for your slice. Sometimes you get the first slice, sometimes you get the third slice, sometimes," Moore chuckled, "you get the last slice. But the important thing is that you get a slice, everybody gets a slice of this pie. That's not what happens in this country."

"There are no easy answers," Reagan once said, "but there are simple answers." Social democracy as pie. The Gipper himself couldn't have said it better.

Bookplanet: remembering The Alexandria Quartet

A Seductive Spectacle
The languid bazaar of Lawrence
Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet
still beckons 50 years later
By Charles Trueheart/ THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Speak the name Lawrence Durrell, as I have been doing recently, and you will have little trouble prompting the title of his masterwork, the four-novel cycle he called “The Alexandria Quartet.” Yes,