A government investigator turned journalist, Greg Palast was quickly blacklisted in his home country – a White House spokesman says of him, ‘We hate that sonofabitch’ – and has since worked for Newsnight and the Observer, a kind of H.L. Mencken in exile. Not that he’s that popular over here either. In 1998 Palast broke the Lobbygate scandal, which revealed that the Blair administration (which was really popular back then – remember?) was allowing its policy to be shaped by rich corporate interests rather than the people who had delivered it from the wilderness only a year ago. In 2002 Palast published a book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a collection of reports including an investigation into Enron and the theft of the 2000 presidential election. Then Palast lapsed into a silence only unpunctuated by the odd screed fired off on his emailing list. Now, after four years at work, Palast is back.
This book deals with the motivations for the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s use of the War on Terror as a propaganda tool while at the same time utterly failing to protect its country, and the failure of freemarket globalisation to ensure a safe and prosperous world. Despite having broken several major stories and his shelfload of awards, Palast is derided as a conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theories are by their nature unprovable: in the mindset of the paranoid the lack of evidence becomes evidence. Yet everything Palast says is backed up by hard fact, source and interview. Confidential documents are laid out on the pages, with an explanation of the Deep Throat-style methods Palast has employed to get them. (One memo got into the journalist’s hands through a web parodist whose email address is ‘georgebush.org’. Dubya’s actual address ends in georgebush.com, but clueless White House staffers got the domains mixed up).
When a conspiracy theory can be backed up with proof, it ceases to be conspiracy and becomes simple fact – or at least a good argument. Palast takes us through the machinations that allowed the Republican Party to steal the 2004 election just as they had in 2000, largely by employing dodgy computer contracts to purge black and low-income voters from the electoral roll. Three million votes from that election were not counted, votes that would almost certainly have put Kerry in the White House. In one district of Mexico, Bush polled twice the numbers of votes than are actual voters, leading Palast to speculate that the undead may have all gone Republican.
On to Iraq. I and many people on the left supported the Iraq war because it was essentially the only way of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and giving Iraqis some hope in the first time in thirty-five years. But the pro-war left are a bit starry-eyed, imagining a decisive shift in US foreign policy which never in fact took place. As Johann Hari said, the Bush administration are not the armed wing of Amnesty International. ‘This war is all about oil’ seems like the lazy cry of an SWP member, but we are deluding ourselves if we ignore the ancient and ugly motivations behind the rhetoric of human rights. Palast lays out exactly how the war was about oil; there were two conflicting plans for Iraq’s natural resources, and the conflict between these plans and the two wings of the Bush administration makes for fascinating reading.
Palast has been compared to Michael Moore, but he is really more like Hunter S. Thompson without the drugs. The title of this book, taken from an Allen Ginsberg poem, and the subsequent chapter headings have all Thompson’s savage whimsy. The book is illustrated by the artist Winston Smith, whose surreal perception makes him a rival to Ralph Steadman. Palast is also like Thompson in his wit, his patriotism and his tireless stalking of his enemies – Dubya, Pat Robertson and the empty-headed freemarket evangelist Thomas Friedman. Best of all, Palast gives us his obituary of Ronald Reagan, detailing his funding of terrorism in Nicaragua and his undeclared terror campaign against the US poor. While the mainstream press has reduced obituary to panegyric, Palast’s send-off to Reagan must rank with Thompson’s goodbye note to Richard Nixon in 1994.
Unlike many in the antiwar movement, Palast is a keen advocate of freedom and democracy and has not staggered down the road of supporting any dictator or theocrat who is against the US. Palast’s great problem with Bush, he says, is not that Bush is a crook but that he is un-American: he is breaking the heart of the American Dream. Welcome back, Greg. Let freedom ring.