Tim Robbins, in conversation with Andrew Anthony about his play Embedded. For once - and for a wonder - his interviewer doesn't just roll over at being in the presence of an artist with the independence and the courage to speak out in favour of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. (Note, particularly, the opening remark of this excerpt - about the US and the Soviet media.)
[Robbins] says that the American media coverage was all about 'fear-mongering, propaganda, demonising', and compares its uniformity to Soviet news reporting. He then explains that while, in the wake of 9/11, he could not bring himself to protest against the war in Afghanistan, he did not agree with the strategy of 'indiscriminate bombing'. If he had been president, he 'would have trained special ops to go do the job right' and not interfered with Afghanistan sovereignty. 'The democratic movement in any country has got to happen on its own. It's never going to happen through bombs and airplanes. Never going to happen that way.'Various aspects of this speech strike me as naive or fantastic (not least the magical powers of special ops), but for the sake of historical accuracy I merely point out that there is a historical precedent for bombs and airplanes bringing democracy.
'How? When?' He sits up, suddenly rattled.I mention Germany and Japan in the Second World War.
'It seems to be that we always come back to that. I don't know it didn't happen without the determination of the people involved.'
I point out that it didn't happen in East Germany, and he replies: 'I'd have to go into the history and the specifics of that. It came at the end of the gun but with the influx of a huge amount of money: the Marshall Plan. In Iraq, the money is going into war-mongering. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about destabilisation. That's what Kosovo was about. It's the same thing any time there's a threat to US national security.' This is not the typical conversation one has with American film actors, and I feel a professional obligation to steer it back to more familiar territory such as marital infidelity and substance abuse (neither of which appear to loom large in the Robbins biography) but I recall something he had said in an interview some years back. 'The only responsibility I have to anyone is to make sure that when I talk about something, I know what I'm talking about, that I've done the research. I take that responsibility very seriously. I read a lot.'
So I ask how Kosovo was a threat to US security.
'Ahm...' he hesitates. 'I believe... I'm not the right person to talk about this... but that region of the world, this is the way I've heard it put... Can I go get a cigarette?' He disappears and, as if having remembered his Noam Chomsky, returns a minute later with a ready-fit anti-imperialist answer. 'Where it's all flawed is this hegemonic belief that if you bring business to a country it will help them.'
Leaving aside what he had said a moment earlier about the Marshall Plan, I say that when I visited Kosovo it was less about bringing business than preventing communal bloodshed.
'I'm ignorant on this subject,' he admits, without bluster. 'I'd have to read up on it.' He returns to Iraq, a subject on which he has done a fair amount of reading. Contradicting himself once again, he repeats the line that the Iraq war was a neoconservative plot hatched in 1989 by Bush advisers who believed 'they could spread democracy. They thought they were altruistic' - so not about destabilisation after all - 'They were wrong.'Robbins is not a politician and it is therefore a little unfair to parse his words, teasing out the contradictions and inconsistencies. But his muddled thinking, in which the only continuum is that American foreign policy is always bad, informs his writing as a dramatist. He shows me a scene that he's editing from Embedded that is both pretentious and simple-minded - not a happy combination - and is reminiscent of the worst shouty agitprop.