The Times of London ran a 40-word news item on page
38 of its March 23 edition about an outbreak of industrial unrest that had
occurred in Dubai, one of the Gulf emirates.
The disturbance was described as a riot in the
report, in which migrant construction workers had damaged equipment at the site
of the Burj Dubai tower, set to be the tallest in the world, and computers and
cars had been attacked. Al Jazeera, the television station and news agency,
explained that 2,500 low-paid workers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and
China, the linchpin of the building
boom in this tiny family-owned fiefdom, had gone on the rampage calling for
better pay and employment conditions. It quoted one man, Khalid Farook, 39, who
said: “Everybody is angry here. No one will work.”
Thousands
of other workers building a terminal at Dubai International Airport had also
downed tools in solidarity with the men at the Burj Dubai tower. The Al Jazeera
report noted that skilled carpenters employed by the joint venture of Al
Naboodah and British firm Laing O’Rourke were paid $7.60 a day while labourers
received $4 a day. (Laing O’Rourke, the main contractor at Heathrow Terminal 5
in west London pays labourers on that major project £55,000 a year, while those
in the “biblical trades”, such as carpenters, earn much more.)
Another
report filed by the Khaleej Times noted that a reporter who had attempted to
make inquiries about the disturbance was ordered to leave the site. An official
in the Dubai interior ministry, Lieutenant Colonel Rashid Bakhit Al Jumairi,
who investigated the incident, said the workers wanted better medical care,
overtime pay and humane treatment by foremen. He promised to hold talks.
This
incident, and the way it was reported in most of the press tell us a lot about
how the West treats the Middle East,
and, it has to be said Iran, Venezuela and anybody else who creates
“difficulties”. But for those of us who have seen Syriana, starring the famous
George Clooney, this whole episode had an eerie feeling of déjà vu. The
poisonous vapours of exploitation and oppression that seep out of the Burj
Dubai episode is an ever present in the film, from the opening scenes where we
see workers milling around near their desolate accommodation and squabbling
among themselves to get on a bus that will take them to work, to the station of
the cross where company guards beat up the “hero” Arash, for defending his
father, and confirm his transition to becoming an Islamic martyr.
This
is a good film and Clooney and Stephen Gaghan, the writer and director,
deserves praise for having nursed it through, as it has certainly incurred the
wrath of those sections of the American right who reject the “blood for oil”
thesis that runs through it. The film is unsparing in its implied criticism of
the revolving-door relationship between business and the American security
services though it also takes a hardnosed view of the Western nuclear family and
identity politics (one of the black actors is a fully paid up member of
the ruling class, the other is shown heading that way fast), while showing the
realities of a “multicultural” America where, in one of the many discreet
understated scenes in the film, Clooney meets his estranged son at a roadside café and is served
silently and efficiently by a Latina.
But
the film is especially good on oppression. In one of the wittiest and most
eloquent passages in the film we overhear the imam of the mosque where the
young would-be martyr has gone for a meal and spiritual nourishment, making his
pitch. If we had slipped into any momentary orientalist assumption that he
might start talking about the doings of the prophet in the seventh century we
are quickly disabused. “The pain of
modern life will not be salved by deregulation, privation and lower taxes,” he says,
Western secularism, liberalism and Christianity have failed. The world conjured
up by the imam for his audience of alienated young men is a vista of fire and
degradation reminiscent of that of
another great prophet, William Blake, as he walked over Blackfriars Bridge in the 1790s, past the
hell-hole of Albion Mill, as the industrial revolution picked up speed. The
point is well made that the madrasah that these teenagers attend is an oasis in
an oppressive world. They do not need to be offered 72 virgins, or whatever
else snide put-down is made, to sacrifice their lives.
The
sub-plot about the CIA is more difficult to untangle and assess. Much of the
detail is based on the portrayal of the agency in the book by Robert Baer, See
No Evil: the true story of a ground soldier in the CIA’s war on terrorism.
(Baer also plays a bit part in the film as a CIA security officer.) The Clooney
figure is clearly based on that of Baer, a multilingual veteran from Beirut in
the 1980s when the CIA was hit by a number of disasters, including the
abduction and murder of the Beirut station chief William Buckley by the
Iranians, and the killing of five case officers in a suicide bomb attack on the
embassy.
But
you get a clearer idea of where Baer is coming from in the book when you know
that his hero is Oliver North. Baer’s solution to the CIA’s problems is to
create a free-fire zone in which it
would be totally unaccountable in much the way it was when it launched
Operation Ajax to install the shah in 1953, overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala in 1954, orchestrated the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in
1961, bugged Watergate in 1972 and helped along the coup in Chile in 1973. He
is in other words, a throwback who hankers after an era when the US exercised
its superpower hegemony validated by the post-war institutional framework of
Bretton Woods and the cultural ascendancy of McCarthyism and the cold war .
(Unsurprisingly his post-Watergate critics at the CIA referred to him as a
“cowboy”.) All this has to be omitted or toned down in the film to give the
conversion of Clooney on the road to Damascus (or Dubai) more credibility,
though it still has a forced ring to it. It also begs the question of whether
the US is now following the brutally rational policies of a successful
hegemonic power, as in the Dulles days,
or lashing out King-Kong style because the era of the Seven Sisters
cartels has been superseded and the traditional savagery has become a form of
nostalgia. “Blood for oil” assumes the former thesis is true, whether you are
on the left or right. The latter thesis, not considered in the film, is a
thousand times more frightening.
This
brings us to the real problem with the film, which, despite all its
merits, stems from its politics.
Despite Clooney’s accolade as a “left wing traitor” Syriana isn’t too hot on diagnosis and doesn’t really address the
issue of how to create a fair society in a capitalist world dominated by
imperialism. The fictional Prince Nasir Al-Subaai, who Matt Damon’s financial
consultant figure advises after the
death of his son, is clearly an updated
Mohammad Mossadeq, mixed in with a born-again Prince Faisal of Lawrence
of Arabia days. Why? Good question. Clearly the suit-and-tie secular modernism
of the 1950s calls to mind too many failures of top-down command economies, so
it has been dropped. Hence also the slightly gnomic symbolism of the prince self righteously stopping his
convoy of cars for some Bedouin goats in the final scene. The point is that
Gamal-Abdul Nasser wouldn’t have done that. The prince isn’t
an-end-justifies-the means “Leninist” like the Ba’athists, or like the
neo-conservatives.
In
fact it is interesting that while Mohammad Mossadeq is referred to by the
prince as a model of where he wants to go there is no mention at all of Nasser,
who was the key exponent of the type of economic nationalism that the prince
advocates, while the playboy brother is equally obviously a King Farouk figure.
The explanation, of course, is obvious. Mossadeq is the golden hope who never
was while the Nasserist project had run into the ground by the time he died in
1970 and this raises serious issues that go well beyond dressing up in
traditional Arab gear and stopping for goats. Both Nasser and Mossadeq had
broadly similar economic strategies but whereas Mossadeq’s ambitions were never
fulfilled (because of the CIA-backed coup in 1953) Nasser was able to ride out
the attempt to overthrow his government in 1956 at Suez and give state
controlled capitalism a ride for its money. (If I’d have been the prince I
would have written my Phd at Princeton on Nasserism. If socialism in one
country is a problem state capitalism in one country has even more
difficulties.)
The
other big difficulty with the film centres on the conspicuous absence of the
Israelis and the role that they have played in Middle East politics over the
last 60 years. In particular we are asked to believe that the CIA, a civilian
agency that dislikes putting any instructions into writing because of the heavy monitoring of its actions, would fire
a missile at the Mossadeq prince, killing him and the rest of his family, in
order to clear the way for his US-compliant brother to become emir and solve
the problems of US Plc. Ugh? Firstly, we know that post-Watergate CIA has been
backing away from covert operations like this for 30 years (Madeleine Albright,
the then secretary of state, even apologised, sort of, in 2000 for the Mossadeq coup) and,
secondly, we know exactly who does things like this. But, of course, we also
know that if the final scene had been datelined Tel Aviv it is highly unlikely
the film would have got off the ground.
Depite these caveats about the Jacobean blood-bath at the end the film holds good not only as a commentary on the Middle East but as a shaft of light on contemporary America. It is also worth noting that the head of Dubai’s ruling family, Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, was clearly rattled by the Burj Dubai incident, and criticism from human rights groups, and a week later the government announced that it intended to start what it called a “union”. A frosty spokesman made it clear, however, that it would make the rules and those workers held responsible for the recent unrest would be deported. No “colour revolution” in Dubai then.
April
2007