Keeping in mind that realism as a political school only appeared when first used by the international relations theorists E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, the basic principles have a rich history. One of the most common historical examples of this tradition is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, dating back more than 2400 years.

In a nutshell, Realism is considered to be a set of laws for elites that span both time and space i.e. history and geopolitics. Those laws have common strands threading throughout history. Of course, there are a wide variety of different schools within realism (far too many to cover here) but all of them contain some basic principles.

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Ever wanted to fact check some obscure reference in a history book, or tried to research exactly what US government officials thought about, say, US attitudes towards oil in the Middle East, the Monroe Doctrine, or some other item of US foreign policy? Well, if, like me, you enjoy digging around for little nuggets of history and confirming what you read, you’ll enjoy the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Archives of the Foreign Relations of the United States.

For example, search for the Monroe Doctrine, and you can come across Robert Lansing (who became US President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State) describing his interpretation of it:

 �??In its advocacy of the Monroe Doctrine the United States considers its own interests. The integrity of other American nations is an incident, not an end. While this may seem based on selfishness alone, the author of the Doctrine had no higher or more generous motive in its declaration. To assert for it a nobler purpose is to proclaim a new doctrine.�?�

Regarding oil, you’ll find an often used quote by critics of US energy policy, which states, in 1945, that Saudi Arabia’s �??oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history�?� (one of the principle reasons, in fact, that the United States wished to destroy colonial Britain’s dominance in the region). You can also have a look at the proposed Petroleum Policy of the United States (1944) and how they intended to keep any competition (namely the British) out.

This tool is a must for anyone who enjoys history.

BBC4 just screened Nahid Persson’s Prostitution Behind The Veil, which was nominated in 2005 for an Emmy award. It also one a Guldbagge in Sweden for best documentary in 2005, and. achieved honours at the Creteil International Women’s Films Festival.

Born in Iran in 1960, Nahid Persson fled the country over twenty years ago and now lives in Sweden where she has studied microbiology. She also founded a radio station there. In 1993 she began studies at Film-och TV Skolan, and received master class education from 2003-2004. (Danish Film Institute)

The film was excellent, if rather shocking. Persson has returned to Iran “make a documentary, but not this one.” In Iran, “she finds the divisions between the classes greater than ever, unemployment has skyrocketed and widespread disillusionment provides a lucrative market for an elderly man, Habib, who sells prophecies on the streets” using canaries to pluck random, written predictions from a box. Deciding to make a documentary about the fortune teller, while filming “she was both shocked and intrigued to discover” Habib shared “his accommodation with Minna and Fariba”, two female prostitutes who are both heroin addicts. As Persson explains, the two “women were happy that someone was interested in their plight”:

“We had a natural relation. We trusted each other,” Persson says. “They even asked me on several occasions to go with them when they were going to meet some of their regular customers, because they were from some police station. But I didn’t do it out of the fear that I had to film someone who wears the uniform of a pasdar [Iran’s Revolutionary Guard]. And it was also better for them that I didn’t do it.”

Both women had become drug addicts due to addicted husbands. Fariba was given it by her husband to treat her kidney pain, and slowly got addicted; eventually “her husband sends her into the street and tells her, ‘Go bring clients.’” According to the film, Fariba had two children, one of which she still had, but the other, a three month old baby, was sold off by her husband. Minna’s story was similar in that her husband was arrested for drug running and more, and she turned to prostitution when she ended up living on the street with her child. She claimed she had no idea of his crimes, but he did get her onto drugs, too. Both women are often forced to take their children with them as they seek clients.

The film reveals how Shia Islam law can be used to “legally” conduct prostitution:

Men in Iran can find a way to buy sex and still comply with Muslim law by way of “Sighe,” a temporary marriage legal in Shia Islam. A Sighe marriage can last from two hours up to 99 years. Both Minna and Fariba participate in this pseudo-marriage with many of their customers

The film is well made, and sympathetic to the characters, and reveals a hidden side to Iran, where an official Iranian report concluded in 2000 that “Drug addiction is the rage among schoolchildren, prostitution has increased 635% among high school students and the (growth) rate of suicide in the country has exceeded the record by 109%.” The film looks at some of the prime causes of this: unemployment and poverty, and the fact that contraceptives were banned after the Iranian Revolution which led, from 1970 to 1990, to an almost doubling of the population from 28.4 to 54.6 million people.

All in all the film is worth watching to try and gain a better understanding of the social issues Iran faces.

Some recovered history here, one of my favourite pieces: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It’s nothing “new” if you follow these things, but it’s worth writing down. Anyway, the “official” doctrine for many years had it that the USSR invaded long before the CIA began funding their opponents that later went on to become the Taliban. In fact, the CIA’s own website still refers to the invasion as being an “intelligence failure”: “Earlier intelligence reports on activities by the Soviet military units had not been accompanied by warnings that this activity might indicate Moscow’s intent to launch a major military intervention.” It goes on to say that:

“while the United States continued strict adherence to [US] President Carter’s injunction against direct US assistance and the use of US weapons to support the Afghan insurgency, the CIA did consult with the Pakistan Government on its support to the opposition forces”

The reality was very different, however. According to Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, “former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates [revealed] in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, the $500 million in nonlethal aid was designed to counter the billions the Soviets were pouring into the puppet regime they had installed in Kabul.”

According to Gates’s recounting, a key meeting took place on March 30, 1979. Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe wondered aloud whether “there was value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, ’sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.’” Arnold Horelick, CIA Soviet expert, warned that this was just what we could expect.

National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski also revealed that, on the 3rd of July 1979, “President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul”, which in Brzezinski’s opinion would “induce a Soviet military intervention”.

We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

All of this is rather amusing when you then go and read The Scholarship Editions’ “Afghanistan” declaring that “Soviet officials had made extensive efforts to frighten [Aghanistan’s Prime Minister Amin and the Revolutionary Council] about an imaginary danger directed at Afghanistan.”

But the Soviet government as well as the Karmal regime have fabricated stories contrary to this conclusion. In December 1979 Soviet officials told Amin that the �??revolution�?� was in danger from the United States, which was about to launch a massive assault from the Persian Gulf. To meet the assault, Afghanistan should be prepared militarily.

That’s not to say that the US were about to launch an assault from the Gulf, but their fears were hardly “imaginary”. (Oh, and I couldn’t find any reference to Brzezinski’s admission, either). The irony, of course, is when Brzezinski was questioned as to whether or not he regretted laying the Afghanistan trap, he answered:

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. … What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? … It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Oops. Bet he forgot ever saying that. In fact, John Pilger reported that Brzezinski denied that this strategy was the beginning for al-Qaeda and terrorism; he said it was the Russian’s fault. Nevertheless, this was arguably the beginning of militarizing Islam to use as a US geo-political tool, something that continued long after the Soviets left Afghanistan.

Alternet has an interesting interview with historian Greg Grandin discussing his new book, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, and “how ‘militant anti-Communists’ in the Reagan administration developed the model for the Bush doctrine.” (There is an excerpt from the book also available here on Alternet). As he explains, the book tries to “look at how U.S. corporate elites — the Guggenheims, the Rockefellers and so forth — first established themselves in Latin America with their overseas subsidiaries and how U.S. political elites viewed the region as the first place to project American power.” Another great quote from the interview:

The war on terror or its component parts — gaining public acceptance of torture, for example, or rendition or the war in Iraq — is as much a domestic affair as it is a foreign one. If you read the writings of neocon intellectuals like Christopher Caldwell or William Kristol, it�??s all about steeling America�??s domestic culture and making the population more resistant to pain, both ours and the pain we inflict on others. And it seems that it�??s not just that they look at America�??s political culture and see dissent or anti-militarism, but they really see a culture of weakness, and they expected that the war on terror would bring about a restoration of American strength.

I’ve ear-marked this book myself for future reading as it looks pretty interesting. I first stumbled across Greg Grandin while searching around for information of American involvement in South America during the Cold War. He’d given an interview to the University of Chicago about another book he wrote entitled The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, which argued that “the spread of Latin America’s guerrilla movements was driven by the frustration of efforts to consolidate post-World War II social democracies.” In particular, he points out that “The overthrow of Arbenz” in Guatemala “was an important milestone” in the transformation of Latin America from having “a degree of political liberalization” to US-backed repression of “domestic dissent”, whereby “The already cramped space for political negotiation became even more restricted.”

The overthrow of Arbenz convinced many Latin American reformers, democrats, and nationalists that the United States was less a model to be emulated than a danger to be feared. Che Guevara, for example, was in Guatemala working as a doctor and witnessed firsthand the effects of US intervention. He fled to Mexico, where he would meet Fidel Castro and go on to lead the Cuban Revolution. He taunted the United States repeatedly in his speeches by saying that “Cuba will not be Guatemala.” For its part, the United States promised to turn Guatemala into a “showcase for democracy” but instead created a laboratory of repression. Practices institutionalized there�??such as death squad killings conducted by professionalized intelligence agencies�??spread throughout Latin America in the coming decades.

He’s a fairly regular writer at The Nation, is a teacher of Latin American history (New York University), and also helped contribute to the UN report on human-rights violations in Guatemala during their civil war. You can read his articles for the Nation here.

More4 (UK) screened a doc on TV the other night entitled “Tank Man”, covering the protestor who stood in front of a line of tanks at Tiannemen Square in 1989. (A homepage for the film can be found at PBS’s Frontline). The most amazing segment (for me, anyway) was when a group of Beijing university students (from one of the capital’s universities that were heavily involved in the protests at the time) were shown the infamous photo of the man against the machines of tyrrany. Not one of the students knew what it represented. China’s mastery over history appears to be complete, bringing George Orwell’s classic statement to life: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” (Of course, China’s by no means unique; western democracies have learnt how to keep things quiet, too, albeit a bit differently).

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The Washington Post recently reported on US war crimes during the Korean War. In 1999, an AP story about refugees being shot by US soldiers at No Gun Ri was investigated by the Pentagon, which concluded it was “an unfortunate tragedy”, and “not a deliberate killing.” But a recently discovered memo from then-US Korean Ambassador John J. Muccio refutes this claim. Addressed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, it states:

If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.

Charming stuff. Wonder if that’ll get into the school history books.