www.nzherald.co.nz 27.02.2003

A year ago, the proposals for a second Gulf War seemed very much the brainchild of the American right. The intellectual arguments backing the conflict emerged almost entirely from hard-right US think tanks and senators.

But then a funny thing happened: a significant portion of the dissident left began to come out, in dribs and drabs, for overthrowing Saddam through force. There is now a considerable school of British centre-left thinkers and commentators who are lobbying hard for the war to happen so the Iraqi people can be freed: Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, John Lloyd, Julie Burchill, Roger Alton, and David Aaronovitch (who has a unique claim to consistency among this group, since he was calling for Saddam to be overthrown by the US over three years ago in the Independent).

On the surface, there seem to be few similarities between these disparate lefties-for-the-war. Lloyd, a senior reporter for the Financial Times and contributing editor at the New Statesman, for example, is a fierce defender of the Blair government, while Cohen detests New Labour.

Yet below the surface there is an intriguing commonality: almost all of them are former communists.

John Lloyd, who was a member of the Communist Party and considered himself a Marxist until his early thirties, identifies a strand of Marxism which seems to have echoes in the pro-war arguments being made today. He explains: "It's that side of Marx that argues that imperialism was good for India and industrialisation good for the working class. It's the side of Marx that disliked soft liberals, and said that if you're going to make the world better you have to go through a number of necessary evils. I don't think Marx was especially worried about those evils -- he was a real arsehole -- but we [Marxists] accepted that in order for history to triumph and a more enlightened future to prevail, certain bad things would have to be endured."

Although Lloyd was never what he calls a "break-any-amount-of-eggs-to-make-an-omelette communist", there is a similar acceptance on the pro-war left of necessary violence and the creation of victims which soft liberals blanch at.

The pro-war left insist that power - even American hyper-power - can be used for constructive purposes. Lloyd says that "when I ceased to be a communist and therefore ditched an essentially undemocratic philosophy, I adopted democracy as a new faith with the real fervour of the convert. We [centre-left ex-communists] believe passionately in democracy because we've reasoned ourselves towards it, so we are perhaps more prepared to support wars that establish or defend it. We are articulating the democratic case for war. Our belief is that the revolution which has really lasted is the democratic revolution emerging from France and the US in the eighteenth century. We believe that liberal democracy still holds out a promise to all societies -- all our political values are based on this -- so we must support those who are fighting for it within their own societies, like in Iraq."

Another common strand for pro-war lefties is disillusionment with the contemporary mainstream left, and especially the anti-war movement Observer editor Roger Alton is unreserved in his dislike for "the vapid old cack that you get from the implacable opponents of the war", and in particular "Tony Benn's spine-chillingly, stomach-churningly disgusting interview with Saddam Hussein".

Columnist for the Independent Nick Cohen divides the anti-war protestors into two groups. The first are "those who just lack imagination -- the actors and so on who can imagine war because they see it on the TV but, because there aren't pictures of the Marsh Arabs or the on-going Iraqi tyranny, they just can't picture themselves in the position of the Iraqi people and they don't realise how few options the Iraqis have." The other group are, he says, "the ones who have become trapped in a cul-de-sac. They're the absolute mirror image of the Americans: whatever the US supports, they oppose. I remember in the eighties, working with Iraqi refugees when it was a big cause of the left, and you had people like [leftwing MP] Jeremy Corbyn [who now opposes sanctions and the war] calling for sanctions against fascist Iraq. But when the US shifted to opposing Iraq in the early 1990s, they mirrored that hypocrisy and dropped the Iraqi exiles too." This wing of the left "has become incredibly conservative, with nothing to offer Iraqis but the brutal status quo." It's because of this that far too few people are campaigning for Iraqi democracy. "Almost nobody," Cohen notes, "is demanding of Blair and Hoon: what kind of Iraq are you fighting for?"

The mainstream left have forgotten the need to vigorously overthrow tyranny and build democracy. This leaves a hole where its positive agenda should be.

As Lloyd explains, "The left now sticks up for anybody who complains. Anybody who resists any change by any government, especially our own [centre-left] governments, is now an honorary part of the left. They've abandoned the idea of lesser evils. Leftism has really become an extreme form of anti-powerism."

His most unreserved contempt is reserved for "the Pilger/Benn left," who "believe that anything any government ever does is bad, because it has downsides. Iraq is just an obvious example of that. It's the belief that all power is corrupt."

Cohen is equally contemptuous of the likes of George Galloway and Benn, who form the spine of the anti-war movement

"Anybody who knows anything about history knows that there is a very dark side to the left," he explains. "It has its own graveyards As soon as you see people like George Galloway and Tony Benn sitting in front of Saddam and asking sycophantic questions, and then you see them come back [to Britain] and attack Iraqi democrats for being stooges of the CIA, you know they are part of a very dangerous left tradition which you see in the Stalinists of the 1930s."

The intellectual genesis of the pro-US-intervention left lies in the events of the 1990s. The twin shocks of the Rwandan genocide and the collapse of Yugoslavia into sectarian murder forced a reconsideration of the position of thinkers like Christopher Hitchens.

Attacking all actions by Western governments as imperialist suddenly seemed hollow, especially in Kosovo, where, as Lloyd explains, "There was nothing to plunder in the former Yugoslavia. It was a barren piece of land filled with people trying to kill each other. The war and the UN presence have been of no financial or strategic benefit to anybody, it's just swallowed lots of money. If the US was really the kind of imperial power that people like [Noam] Chomsky and [John] Pilger imagine, they would never have gone in, and they would certainly have pulled out long ago. When the implications of Kosovo really sank in, it forced many people on the Left to seriously think again about their old assumptions."

Cohen also traces the shift to a change in US foreign policy itself. "From the early 1950s to the mid-1980s, the USA caused as much misery in the world as the Soviet Union. That still isn't properly acknowledged. But since the time of the Contra campaigns, the US doesn't really support tyranny. If you look at what's happening in Venezuela now, thirty years ago the US would have just authorised a coup. Now they won't."

Cohen freely admits the flaws in current US policy -- "The US is not upholding universal values. They won't support the International Criminal Court or Kyoto" -- but adds, "nor is the Left consistently supporting universal values. They won't support their extension to Iraq. They won't even listen to the Iraqi democrats."

Everybody on the pro-war left is taking a huge amount of flak at the moment. My own email inbox is heaving under the weight of all the hate-mail I receive on this issue, and all the others are experiencing the same. (The hundreds of emails from Iraqi exiles explaining that they are bewildered by the anti-war left and are extremely grateful for making the case for the Iraqi people are, admittedly, more than enough compensation.)

Now that so many prominent figures on the left are supporting their comrades in the five-million strong Iraqi exile community, it is no longer accurate to say that the left is anti-war. The left is divided; and at least when all this is over, some of us will be able to defend the reputation of the left as exponents of deposing tyrants and building democracy in the Arab world.

www.thehill.com JOSH MARSHALL

What profiteth a man if he gain regime change in Iraq and lose the whole world order in the process?

Back in 1999 and 2000, one of then-candidate George W. Bush’s chief campaign trail applause lines was his pledge to “strengthen our alliances.” He said they’d fallen into disrepair under the Clinton administration. Yet today — aside from a few autocracies in Central Asia — it’s difficult to find any countries in the world with which our alliances are stronger than they were two years ago.

Europe and the Middle East are getting the most attention today. And we’ll get to them in a moment. But look at the rest of the world.

In East Asia, our historic alliance with South Korea is in shambles. Partly because of the administration’s bellicose and shambling policy toward North Korea, the South Koreans recently elected the first president in their history to openly question the alliance. Incoming President Roh Moo-hyun is trying, as he must, to calm the waters with the United States. But behind him is a Korean electorate that remains embittered at Bush administration policy and increasingly alienated from the United States itself. Not all South Koreans feel this way, of course. But it’s a bad sign that America’s supporters there are concentrated among the old.

Nothing so worrisome has occurred in our relations with Japan. But there, too, frustration with our brusque mismanagement of the Korean situation has led them to question and buck the U.S. line as never before.

Or take Latin America.

Improved political and economic ties with Latin America were supposed to be a centerpiece of the new administration’s foreign policy. Remember that? The idea was to embed improved relations in expanded free-trade agreements that would eventually encompass most or all of both continents.

The events of Sept. 11 were bound to pull a lot of attention away from these goals. And the struggling world economy has put a drag on support for free trade. But it’s astonishing to see just how badly things have gone. The prospects for hemispheric free trade have been pushed back years, if not decades.

The United States stood by while the Argentine economy swirled down the drain. The crisis in Venezuela remains a bizarre running wound complicating our dealings in the Middle East by wreaking havoc on global oil markets. And Brazil has just elected an America-bashing president who now publicly presses his country’s need to acquire nuclear weapons. Even the president’s much-ballyhooed relationship with Mexican President Vicente Fox has withered under the weight of our policies abroad and perceived inattention to relations with Mexico.

Knee-jerk left-wingers claim that the opposition of the world means that we’re in the wrong. Meanwhile, whiny right-wingers see only our allies’ perfidy, betrayal and opportunism. But both camps’ sides miss the point.

Diplomacy is above all about pragmatism, a task of managing our relations with sometimes querulous and petty foreign leaders who always have their own domestic and foreign political ambitions.

Are the French preening and self-aggrandizing? Yes, far too often. But this is one of those things we pay presidents to handle, not complain about.

Our current predicament is the product of the administration’s dogged pursuit — often strong-arming and brusque — of what it perceives to be America’s interests. But managing the world requires hard choices. And burning through goodwill and trashing old relationships for insignificant or ephemeral gains has its consequences, as we’re now beginning to see.

Was dealing with Saddam important enough to rile our Arab allies? Probably so. But then we might have smoothed our path considerably by taking a different approach to the Middle East peace process. Leaning hard on NATO might have been similarly unavoidable. But then we might have helped ourselves by not spurning more NATO involvement in the war on terrorism or taking such an intransigent stance on issues like global warming and other international agreements.

This isn’t about right or wrong, just foresight and setting priorities. As most of us eventually learn from our personal and professional lives, success almost always requires the willingness to anger some folks. But angering everyone at the same time almost never makes sense since it leaves you isolated and friendless when you need to call on others for help.

Awash in a sea of so much bad blood, the administration has now taken to treating alliances like it does fiscal discipline – making a virtue of necessity by pooh-poohing the importance of something it’s already squandered away. Like the budgetary red ink they’re churning out at the White House today, this will be a mess left to others to clean up.

Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

In his weekly column Lt. Colonel Francisco Arias Cardenas says the opposition must re-think its political action and objectives after the way the national stoppage ended.

“Things aren’t the same … the answer of an apparently victorious government and an opposition that some say has been defeated cannot be linear … the situation isn’t traditional."

Unlike his opposition colleagues, the Colonel recognizes that “popular sentiment of the dispossessed see in President Chavez Frias their hope of redemption and they are ready to defend what they believe belongs to them … they little to lose and everything including death … liberation and achievement."

As for the opposition, Arias Cardenas is adamant that it must assume that "there are no military officers that will do the work of getting rid of the President for us or Americans who feel threatened in their backyard and are ready to defend their privileges … at the same time, it has been shown that when we act with cunning and a degree of coherence we obtain important results. "

Chavez Frias doesn’t want to go to the polls, if he is at a disadvantage and even though he controls public powers, the armed force and the government, the opposition is in the majority and rejects his actions and public policies.

"The challenge is to find ways of changing that reality to the advantage of everybody, including the dispossessed, the idealists and the spongers that are with the government … there is no quick fix."

The opposition leader, who is facing problems inside his party and seems to be the only opposition figure with a consistent level of common sense, insists that the opposition work hard to get a constitutional amendment for early elections or a recall referendum if that fails and to stop the "Smart Alecs" from blowing the solution.

www.globeandmail.com By PAUL KNOX Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - Page B1

CARACAS -- Engineer Teo Risquez used to know many key players in Venezuela's state-owned oil firm. Gonzalo Feijo was a senior adviser in its planning department. Francisco Navas remained bitter after leaving the firm nine years ago.

That was before the dramatic upheaval at Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), the world's fourth-largest oil company, where a crippling, politically inspired strike led this month to mass firings and a major reorganization.

Seizing the chance to tighten his grip, President Hugo Chavez has dismissed 16,000 employees and launched a radical restructuring of PDVSA that brings it under the control of his leftist government.

Now Mr. Risquez says he doesn't know whom to contact at PDVSA about contracts. The engineering firm where he's a vice-president is surviving at half-speed on work for other clients.

Mr. Feijo has become a full-time anti-Chavez political activist -- a leader of fired PDVSA professionals who wonders if he'll ever work again in Venezuela's oil patch.

And Mr. Navas? He's delighted to be back working as a maintenance supervisor at PDVSA's El Palito refinery. He's one of thousands of former employees who have been recalled as the government fights to push oil production back to prestrike levels.

The three men have walk-on parts in a titanic struggle over the future of Venezuela and its vast oil deposits. The country was the world's No. 5 petroleum exporter before the strike, part of a national protest aimed at driving Mr. Chavez from office, began on Dec. 2.

Control of PDVSA has been wrested from its internationally oriented executives and engineers and given to Chavez loyalists whose assignment is to squeeze more revenue out of the company for government coffers.

Mr. Chavez says he has smashed a cabal of elitist technocrats who milked the company for their own benefit while 80 per cent of Venezuelans lived in poverty. He has accused striking workers of sabotaging refineries and oil fields -- a charge they deny -- and demanded that the courts jail their leaders.

"We are redefining the mission of PDVSA," Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told foreign journalists recently. "Besides being a commercial enterprise, it's a Venezuelan state company -- one that must be identified with our national goals and plans."

The Venezuelan crisis has helped push North American energy prices higher this winter, although unusually cold weather and fears about disruption of production in the Middle East are more important factors.

Mr. Chavez, an ex-paratroop commander who led a failed coup d'état, was elected as a civilian in 1998 and re-elected in 2000 under a new constitution.

He has improved education and health care for children and made a modest start on land reform -- programs he says he wants to accelerate with more oil revenue. But his opponents say he has also militarized the government and is leading Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism.

The national work stoppage was called by business, union and civic leaders in a bid to force Mr. Chavez to submit to a vote on whether he should continue in office. PDVSA (the acronym is pronounced peddevessa in Spanish) was the linchpin of the protest.

Most businesses that took part in the stoppage threw in the towel after two months. But roughly half of PDVSA's 40,000 employees -- mostly white-collar workers -- remain on strike. More than half of those have received dismissal notices.

The result is a portrait of chaos.

"I don't know who I'm supposed to deal with," said Mr. Risquez, vice-president for special projects of the engineering firm Tecnoconsult SA. The company, which also does engineering work for multinational clients, has placed its staff on reduced hours and pay.

Mr. Risquez expects projects he planned to bid on to be cancelled for lack of financing, since data on which lending decisions are based are suddenly murky. The government says crude oil production is now at two million barrels a day -- well below the prestrike level of 2.8 million -- but strikers say it is just 1.4 million.

"The problem is going to be now that there are so many stories on production levels, which lender is going to believe you?" Mr. Risquez said.

Mr. Feijo said the loss of expertise will cripple its ability to manage the complicated affairs of Latin America's largest company -- a fully integrated operation that not only pumps oil and gas but refines a wide range of products and distributes them around the world.

"It's one thing to produce oil," he said. "It's another to produce the right mix according to international requirements . . . change all the recipes and formulas when you need to, time the maintenance schedules properly and so on."

PDVSA president Ali Rodriguez, a former guerrilla leader who belongs to the leftist Fatherland For All party, acknowledged in an interview that PDVSA is short of trained staff.

"We are recovering production and getting refineries working with significantly fewer people than were working at the company before," he said. "That doesn't mean we don't need some specialties that are indispensable."

Beyond numbers is the issue of competence. The strikers say PDVSA had developed a culture of meritocracy, rewarding performance and remaining aloof from the corruption that corroded other Venezuelan institutions.

But they say that after Mr. Chavez took office in 1998, his political allies began showing up in senior company posts and making questionable decisions. "During 19 years in PDVSA I had never seen such a rapid deterioration," said Merle Mawad, an oil trader and former refinery worker.

Thousands of retired PDVSA employees and former oil workers have been called in to replace the strikers. Questions have been raised about their competence.

Mr. Navas, the maintenance supervisor, is working for the first time since 1994 at the El Palito plant, 120 kilometres west of Caracas.

He said he quit because he had been passed over for promotions several times following job evaluations. "You'd work and work, and you got no recognition," he said.

Meritocracy was a myth at PDVSA, Mr. Navas said. "If you didn't have a good relationship with your boss, that weighed more heavily than how well you worked."

Formed in 1976 when foreign oil operations were nationalized, PDVSA grew to become the largest business enterprise in Latin America, with $46-billion (U.S.) in revenue in 2001.

It pursued a strategy of investing in downstream operations to secure markets for Venezuela's heavy, high-sulphur crude oil, which requires special refining techniques. PDVSA's Citgo subsidiary operates 13,400 gas stations and has interests in refineries and asphalt plants in the United States and the Caribbean region.

"We are a country that lives off oil," Mr. Risquez says, and the figures bear him out. In normal times, oil exports account for 80 per cent of export earnings and 50 per cent of government revenue.

But there has always been tension between company executives who want to plow earnings back into diversification and development of new resources, and governments that see PDVSA as a cash cow. In 2001, it paid $11.8-billion to the state and reported a profit of $4.3-billion, 40 per cent lower than the previous year.

PDVSA brass have also tended to favour higher production levels than governments. As a founding member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Venezuela acts in concert with other oil exporters to control production levels in an effort to keep prices from falling too low.

A new hydrocarbons law passed last year boosted royalties to 30 per cent from 16 per cent. PDVSA also pays dividends and taxes.

A sweeping restructuring now being carried out will see PDVSA's headquarters in Caracas gutted and the company split into two divisions to manage assets in eastern and western Venezuela.

"We want a more flexible business, a more nimble business," Mr. Ramirez said. "It didn't make sense to have a concentration of more than 8,000 senior managers here in Caracas, where we don't produce a single barrel of oil."

Mr. Rodriguez said authorities hope to boost oil sales to Asia to lessen Venezuela's dependence on markets in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. "There are markets farther away that are reachable for Venezuela," he said.

Critics say the cuts will eliminate PDVSA's strategic planning capability and turn it into a politically driven operating arm of Mr. Ramirez's ministry. But the changes are popular among poor supporters of Mr. Chavez, who have long been envious of PDVSA's high salaries and gilt-edged benefits, which included low-cost loans.

Paradoxically, those benefits are now bankrolling the strikers as they wage a political battle against Mr. Chavez.

Ms. Mawad said she and her husband, who also worked at PDVSA, own their home and car. By cutting down expenses they could last for months on their savings, she added.

"I don't have much hope of returning to PDVSA," Ms. Mawad said.

"But by protesting I hope I can do something for my country."

www.nytimes.com By ROBIN FINN

MUCH as the good husband is not supposed to covet his neighbor's wife, the good curator is not encouraged to covet a museum's art. But, hurrah, the Museum of Modern Art's terribly British curator at large, John Elderfield, briefly drops his second-skin decorum and diplomacy — cribbed from C. P. Snow novels — and makes a tiny confession inside this blah conference room at the museum's office near Rockefeller Center.

Nothing larcenous, mind you. Merely a flight of fancy that causes Mr. Elderfield, 59, to work up a blush beneath his silver hair and scholarly specs, and to lower his voice as if the texts, some written by him, in this book-lined room have ears. Matisse, it seems, has exerted a giddy influence on him for 35 years and shows no sign of letting up. Factor in some Picasso and before you can say, "Blue Nude"-"Two Nudes," Mr. Elderfield, whose cubist-patterned socks and polka-dot Miyake tie hint at a whimsical soul behind the gray business suit, undergoes a kid-in-a-candy-store transformation.

His harmless excursion into covetousness occurred last month as he and his co-curator, Kirk Varnedoe, installed the blockbuster "Matisse Picasso" exhibition commandeering the museum's temporary headquarters in Queens. Sixty-seven works by Matisse (Mr. Elderfield's hero) are displayed in an intricate dialog with 68 works from Picasso (Mr. Varnedoe's hero). It was installation as intoxication.

"When you're hanging the pictures," says Mr. Elderfield, "you can maintain the fiction that these are all yours. But then you're finished, and people come, and there's a slight postpartum feeling, you know, that you've lost them. During the installation, Kirk and I started making a list of the works whose actual owners we felt don't deserve to have them, but it got too big." Naughty boys.

Mr. Elderfield is a Courtauld Institute of Art-trained dabbler whose Upper West Side apartment, shared with his companion of 20 years, Jeanne Collins, is dotted with landscapes, some on wood, some on canvas, painted by him, not Matisse or Picasso. If he could take one painting home, it would be "Bathers With a Turtle." But wait. It might be politically correct — Mr. Elderfield, slyly paraphrasing Nelson Rockefeller, says he learned his politics at the Modern — to select a painting by each artist.

Now he's getting greedy. Which two paintings?

"I've gotten quite attached to those final two surrogate self-portraits that end the show," he says, referring to "Violinist at the Window" by Matisse and "The Shadow" by Picasso. "To my delight, I've been told people have been found crying in front of them."

Not to digress, but what was his and Mr. Varnedoe's rationalization for exiling a zillion dollars' worth of masterpieces to a concrete-floored facility that more resembles a warehouse than a museum? Not counting the practical reason, the $80 million renovation of the Modern.

"Queens has its good and its bad points, but we sort of concluded the big raw space reminds us of an artist's studio and lends the works a different kind of resonance," he says. "Or maybe this is just our justification."

He paired Matisse and Picasso once before, linked by Cubism, at the close of the Modern's 1992 Matisse retrospective; it was a snap success, but why reprise it? Even Mr. Elderfield needed convincing after his mentor, John Golding, proposed a show for the Tate that morphed into a collaboration of museums in London, Paris and New York.

"It isn't King Kong versus Godzilla," he says of "Matisse Picasso." "It's about what it means to make works of art in a context where there's somebody else of your stature. I never understood, before working on this show, how Matisse wouldn't have been as great without Picasso pushing him, or how Picasso wouldn't have been as great without Matisse."   MR. ELDERFIELD comes from Lazenby, a village in Yorkshire. His father, in the British Air Force, died two weeks before he was born. He and a twin brother were raised by another war widow, his maternal grandmother, until his mother remarried. His stepfather, an amateur artist, taught him to paint, and he studied painting at the University of Leeds under Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf's nephew; after a foray into architecture, he immersed himself in art history.

He saw his first Matisse in London in 1968, and was floored. "I'd had tremors before the earthquake," he says, "but nothing like that."

While on a fellowship at Yale, he began writing for ArtForum, and his work was noticed by the Modern's Bill Rubin; they chatted, but Mr. Elderfield went back to a teaching job in Leeds and forgot about the Modern until he received a phone call in 1975. The Modern needed a curator. First assignment: assemble an exhibit of Matisse and the Fauves, and fast. Go to Paris and confer with Matisse's daughter: "Terrifying!" Write the catalog in three months; open the show in six.

Mr. Elderfield's next project involves a virtual unknown, the Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón, but there's been a snag — the domestic unrest in Venezuela. "As much as I believe in the power of art to work wonders in the world, Caracas has more important things to think about at the moment than someone from MOMA knocking at their door and asking to borrow their paintings," he says. "I can wait."