Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? BBC iPlayer
It opens with the always affecting images of the Holocaust as discovered by the Allies at the end of the Second World War, and the view that the world would never allow it to happen again.
Corridors of Power shows that under America’s watch, evil continued to take place and, in some cases, while the superpower turned the other way.
This eight-part, monumental series is an excoriating critique of US foreign policy but also a reasonable and understanding one.
Film maker Dror Moreh accepts that complexity, self-interest, error and human failure means wrong decisions are often taken.
And his programme, first shown in the US last year, is essential viewing for those with binary and simplistic views of the rights and wrongs of American actions in Ukraine and Israel’s troubling response to Hamas.
Moreh opens with the disastrous interference in the Middle East by the US and in particular its relationships with Iran and Iraq.
The US policy goal was exclusively to maintain the flow of oil from the region and ensure that no country had too large a slice of the cake. After the fall of its client leader, the Shah, in 1979, the US had a major problem with the new theocracy of Iran.
It knew that Saddam Hussein, who had just taken power in Iraq, was a monster, but my enemies’ enemy etc.
The US gradually opened relations with Iraq and supported Saddam with intelligence and weapons during his eight-year war with Iran.
It ignored Iraq’s use of poison gas and continued to ignore it when Saddam began an attempted genocide against the Kurds.
Saddam’s cousin and number two, Chemical Ali, was well named. He’s remembered for his despicable phrase about the Kurds that “for every insect there is an insecticide”.
The US ran out of patience with Saddam when he threatened their oil interests by invading Kuwait, and we got the Gulf War of 1990/1.
In Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Syria, other genocides and mass atrocities took place without significant US intervention and Corridors of Power tries to give us an insight into Oval Office and US State Department thinking at the time.
Narrated by Meryl Street, it features contributions from a sweep of significant figures including Paul Wolfowitz, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Lake, Colin Powell, James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and Richard Haass, among others.
Each episode investigates monumental US decisions to ignore awkward problems – ones which were politically difficult at home, which would affect relationships with allies or, simply put, had no economic advantage to US interests.
Wolfowitz, an undersecretary of defence for George W Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks, doesn’t hide the truth: “If Kuwait grew bananas, we would never have liberated Kuwait.”
It’s ugly but the kind of straight talking that might help the US.
It’s the country’s moralising about a ‘new world order’ and defending freedom and human rights around the globe that leaves it quite correctly labelled a hypocrite.
Would it be better if the US stated cleared that it will use its dominance, economic supremacy and military power for its own interests and benefits, but where possible will also defend freedom and human rights?
It’s a position I suspect most reasonable people would accept.
After all, there is no utopia without hierarchy, where all nations are treated equally, and disputes are sorted out diplomatically at the UN.
History tells us that there will also be someone at the top of the tree and others trying to take their place.
US dominance cannot last forever, but the other options are not very appealing.
A world run by a coalition headed by the Chinese Community Party anyone?
