The Trouble with "Argo"

My wife and I went to see Argo last night. The venue was a shopping mall multiplex where New Jersey's suburbs and its truly mainland portions merge. Its virtues are that its screens are big, the prints are in good shape, and the sound systems deliver appropriate oomph. Argo, which we'd been told was a fabulous movie, seemed to deserve a decent theatrical experience.

By the end of the picture, I wondered if I had watched the same movie Argo's fans had. The movie, except for John Goodman's and Alan Arkin's delicious comic depiction of two Hollywood insiders, made me squirmy. Affleck takes a flag-waving, feel-good story and presents a flag-waving, feel-good story. While he's at it, Affleck scores some political points, mostly at the expense of the US State Department and the Carter Administration. Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, comes across as something of a provincial dim bulb, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's name is not even mentioned. Why Vance is spared while his department is unflatteringly depicted is a curiosity.

However, that's small potatoes compared to the movie's "uplifting" ending, in which the nervy Yanks escape the clutches of the evil Republican Guard. Argo makes it clear that the Iranian Revolution was a dreadful event. Inferentially, how could Americans today allow those same anti-Western religious fanatics any chance at obtaining nukes? No way. To that end, I wonder if Affleck and the movie's producers found it useful to remind the public about perceived American "weakness" with the dangers Iran's ruling mullahs and military Praetorian Guard represent. While the Tehran embassy hostage crisis took place during "weak" President Carter, they were released shortly after the inauguration of a "firm" Ronald Reagan.

Former Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor,
who hid the American embassy personnel in Tehran.
Read the Canadian TV interview with Taylor,
noting how Affleck's original ending (shown at the Toronto Film Festival!)
praised the CIA and implied the Canadians sat on their hands.

There was something eerie about watching Argo while Hamas (Iran's proxy along the Israeli border) and Israel (to some extent, America's regional proxy) begin their duel to the death in Gaza. This most recent conflict began on the American presidential election day, and reached the boiling point while President Obama was in Myanmar. It's hard to imagine 44 couldn't have been further from the world's media centers, or more inaccessible to the American audience that is separated by a dozen or more time zones from Southeast Asia. Of course, any military action against Iran proper would probably require Israeli neutralization of Hamas' military capability in Gaza. One wonders if Carter-Reagan was heading toward Obama-Romney, with Mitt on record as egging on Bibi Netanyahu's "bombs away" approach to Israel's neighbors.

The people in the movie audience who felt good about Argo's blend of daring escape and Rambo-style jingoism probably felt we delivered a blow against the bad guys -- a blow we should deliver again. We should be careful what we wish for. It's going to take more than Hollywood chutzpah to successfully manage any conflict with Iran and its allies.

PS. Ken Taylor's issues with Argo were amplified in a February, 2013 New York Times piece. Among them was Affleck's interesting decision to not invite Taylor to the film's premiere at, ironically enough, the Toronto Film Festival. Notable in the Times piece is Affleck's reasoning for "adjusting" history to fit narrative and entertainment "needs" (my quotes in both cases in this sentence).

America And International Cyber Warfare

The Washington Post reported today on an alleged cyberattack on an Illinois water plant. Apparently, the mischief succeeded in creating equipment malfunctions and consequent closure of the water facility. The attack's source was traced to a Russian IP address. The Post story relied for its key information from one source, an "industry security expert," whose due diligence found a report which outlined the incident and its immediate consequences.

(Postscript -- The Saturday, November 26th online edition of the Washington Post reports that the alleged attack on the Illinois water plant "was in fact caused by a plant contractor traveling in Russia." The story, released over the slow-news Thanksgiving weekend, also noted that "Plant and federal officials are still investigating the cause of the pump's failure." Why a contractor's computer activity could shut down a water plant's operation also remains unexplained.)

Regardless of this case's outcome, it does highlight what  mayhem cyber warfare and industrial espionage can cause. For some time, the sources of most high-profile cyberattacks against American assets have been Russia, Eastern Europe, and the People's Republic of China. Israel and France have also conducted cyberattacks and state-supported espionage, principally to acquire sensitive corporate information, rather than disrupt the American security state.

Russian involvement has sinister and dangerous overtones, thanks to its blurring of boundaries between the state and the underworld. However, China is the most ominous state player, with its apparent imperialistic ambitions, aggressive will, and ample means to launch and maintain disruptive activity to American computer-based systems. Beijing's goals include the ability to defend itself against what it perceives as American electronic intrusion. This drive has manifested itself in episodes such as the Chinese government's continuing anti-Google campaign.

Meanwhile, there is increasing evidence that the United States empire is on a collision course with its emerging Chinese counterpart. As the Greek historian Thucydides observed, it is in the nature of hegemony for these conflicts to happen. The Chinese government and military have few doubts about this development. They're getting ready, looking for American weak spots, preparing to exploit advantage when the situation seems ripe for it. Meanwhile, our military-industrial complex and its governmental allies are slowly coming around to understanding the challenge's full dimensions. Ultimately, the American government will need to ally much more openly with its elite tech firms to counteract hostile, state-sponsored cyberwarfare. Whether Silicon Valley libertarians, DC technocrats, and military brass can coalesce to fight back against this shadow over American international dominance remains to be seen.