| 14 July 2004 | Wednesday | 25 Jamadi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
A history lesson in Iraq
A novel political party
Into battle, armed with words
For the last week the American press and, by extension, much of the western media has devoted an enormous amount of space and time to the Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page report on pre-war intelligence about Iraq. The report contained no real surprises.
It had been known for long that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had been dead wrong in their assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities.
It had been known also that Iraq's conventional military capability had deteriorated since 1991 and that it was not in a position to threaten militarily even its neighbours, leave alone the United States.
The report was nevertheless devastating because it provided chapter and verse about the failings of the intelligence community and its slip-shod methods.
In the words of The Washington Post, "The 511-page report.... supports with scalding rhetoric and devastating detail what previous investigations have shown: that the United States lacked reliable reporting about one of its most dangerous enemies, that the handling and interpretation of the data by its intelligence professionals was shockingly incompetent, and that the CIA and other agencies badly served the policymakers who relied on them in making the fateful decision to go to war."
Such a finding was perhaps inevitable. The CIA director George Tenet, the longest serving director since Allen Dulles, resigned in anticipation of this report which, he knew, would hold him and his agency primarily responsible for the "intelligence mess".
The Republican chairman of the committee echoed in his public comments the tenor of the report maintaining that "all of these problems stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and cannot be solved by simply adding funding and also personnel."
What was perhaps less inevitable was the assertion in the report of the committee that, "the committee was not presented with any evidence that intelligence analysts changed their judgments as a result of political pressure, altered or produced intelligence products to conform with administration policy, or that anyone even attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to do so."
The committee was a bipartisan body having both Republican and Democratic members. The price the democrats paid to have the report unanimously adopted and published was the acceptance of the proposal that the question of what the administration had demanded and how it had used the information provided by the intelligence community and other related issues would be taken up in the second phase of the investigation.
This second phase as also the report of the independent panel appointed by President Bush would come only after November i.e. after the presidential elections were safely out of the way.
I am not sure that John Kerry, the democratic candidate for the Presidential election, welcomed this compromise. From his perspective it would have been far better if the democrats on the panel had insisted on completing at least part of the second phase of the investigation before the election so that the report could have been used to attack Bush more forcefully.
In the event, however, it seems that the absence of chapter and verse is not keeping the American media from drawing the conclusion that some of the CIA's failings could be attributed to the pressure that the Bush administration was exerting.
The Democratic vice-chairman of the committee, Senator John Rockfeller IV, said that the CIA had been working in an "environment of intense pressure". Media commentators pointed out that the report had "failed to explain the environment of intense pressure in which intelligence community officials were asked to render judgments on matters relating to Iraq, when policy officials had already forcefully stated their own conclusions in public."
Other media comments recalled that Tenet had been told time and again by his analysts of demands from administration officials for additional information etc. with the implication that they wanted this additional information to bolster the case the administration was making to justify the war against Iraq. Tenet apparently made no effort to quash such queries.
The report mentioned the fact that Vice-President Cheney had frequently visited the CIA headquarters for briefings and while the committee rejected the view that this was a form of pressure on the CIA analysts, it would be difficult to escape the conclusion that Cheney in these visits was looking for material to confirm the unequivocal assertions he had publicly made about Iraq's possession of WMD and about the imminent danger that Iraq posed to the United States.
The New York Times editorial, speaking of what the administration wanted from its intelligence community put it well when it said "By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr Bush wanted".
Seeking to protect President Bush the chairman of the committee maintained that the "group think" - the tendency in the CIA to accept the premise that Iraq was a danger and then to look for evidence to support this premise - was not unique to the agency but was a world wide phenomenon.
According to him, "this group-think also extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programmes," and that "this was a global intelligence failure".
Relying on this, President Bush said, in a speech a couple of days ago that "my administration looked at intelligence on Iraq and we saw a threat. Members of the United States Congress from both political parties looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a threat.
The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence, and it saw a threat. The previous administration and the Congress looked at the intelligence and made regime change in Iraq the policy of our country."
The fact however is that the world was not convinced. Secretary Powell's masterly presentation at the UN Security Council, now revealed to be deeply flawed and dead wrong in many details, was needed only because the other members of the UN Security Council were not convinced on the basis of their own information that Iraq posed the danger that the Americans were alleging.
Admittedly there was a presumption that since Saddam had thrown out the UN inspectors in 1998 he must be hiding something. But the world was pleading, once the UN inspectors had been readmitted to Iraq, that they should be given more time and more cooperation to determine exactly what Iraq had by way of WMD.
The UN inspectors, in turn, had made it clear that this exercise would take time and would need cooperation from the Americans who theoretically had the best intelligence material on Iraq's so-called clandestine programme.
As the Committee report however makes clear, the CIA, with no secret agents on the ground in Iraq, had only dubious sources of information and even this dubious information was not shared with the UN inspectors in full.
Of the 148 suspect sites identified by the CIA before the war, only 67 were shared with the United Nations. Requests from UN inspectors for permission to interview the Iraqi defectors on whom the CIA was relying were turned down.
The Republicans may have succeeded in ensuring that the report attributed no direct blame to the administration and made the CIA and the intelligence community the scapegoat.
But there is material in the report that points the finger of blame directly on to the Bush administration and this is something that the media and more importantly the democrats are going to focus on as they make the case that the Iraq mess was not a creation of flawed intelligence alone but of the bad policies of the Bush administration.
They will also make the case that the administration's obsession with Iraq diverted attention away from the battle against terrorism, made new enemies for the US in the Muslim world and led to an estrangement from America's traditional allies. In the speech quoted above, President Bush said at least half a dozen times that America had been made safer by his decision to invade Iraq.
He also claimed that the dismantling of Libya's nuclear programme came about because Bush had been tough on Iraq. He claimed successes in the war in Afghanistan, the capturing of Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the dismantling of the underground nuclear proliferation network.
All this was immediately called into question by his political opponents with John Kerry maintaining that "in the two years since 9/11, less nuclear materials have been secured than in the two years prior to 9/11," and that making America safer required more than just making speeches. Even more scathing was the criticism from another presidential hopeful Ralph Nader who termed Bush's Iraq war an impeachable offense.
From President Bush's perspective however the importance of all this criticism pales in comparison with the significance of the most recent poll which shows that 55 per cent of the Americans feel less safe after the Iraq war.
What the pollsters call the fear factor is now some 22 per cent higher than it was six months ago. Given the fact that both the republicans and the democrats acknowledge that "security" is going to be the most important issue in the forthcoming elections this poll result can hardly be found comforting by the incumbent president.
There is little that President Bush can do to help his cause in Iraq. Even if the situation there is handled well by the Allawi government there is little prospect of the level of violence being brought down in the short period that remains before the Americans go to the polls.
There will be more casualties to add to the 900 US soldiers who have already died there. One can be certain that Kerry will repeatedly call upon the president to explain why these men and women had to die when there was no clear threat and why their deaths have only added to the security concerns of the Americans.
President Bush will have to turn to elsewhere in the world to be able to point to a foreign policy success. The obvious choice is Afghanistan where it theoretically all started.
Currently the prospects for success seem limited but as the effort is made Pakistan as much as Afghanistan will find itself in the maelstrom created by the American election season. Will we any more than President Karzai in Kabul be able to deliver on expectations?
The writer is a former foreign secretary.
A history lesson in Iraq
The Americans could learn a lot from Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with eloquence and humour, he has the same forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather - the man who led the Shia Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920.
He brings out a portrait of the grand old revolutionary, who has a fluffy but carefully combed white beard. One of the most eminent scholars of his day, he ended his life in exile, negotiating with Lenin's Bolshevik government and dying mysteriously - poisoned, his supporters believed, by British intelligence.
Sheikh Jawad's shoulders shake with laughter when I suggest that there are more than a few parallels between the Iraqi insurrections of 1920 and 2004. "Exactly", he says.
In 1920, the British tried to introduce an Iraqi government in name only - it looks like a copy of UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi had become the grand 'marja' (the leading Shia scholar) after the death of Mohamed al-Shirazi and he issued a fatwa telling his followers and all Shias in Iraq not to participate in elections, not to give legitimacy to a government established by occupation forces.
"Not only the Shias responded to it but the Sunnis and the Jewish, Christian and other minorities as well. The elections failed and so the British forced my grandfather to leave Iraq.
They arrested him at his home on the other side of this religious school where we are today - a home which many years later Saddam Hussein deliberately destroyed."
It was a familiar colonial pattern, of course. The Brits were exiling troublesome clerics - Archbishop Makarios comes to mind - throughout the 20th century, but Sheikh Mehdi turned out to be as dangerous to the British abroad as he had been at home.
He was transported to Bombay, but so great was the crowd of angry Indian Muslims who arrived at the port that British troops kept him aboard ship and then transported him to the hot, volcanic port of Aden.
"He said to the British: 'You don't know where to send me, but since the pilgrimage season is close, I want to go on the 'haj' to Makkah.' Now, when Sherif Hussein, the ruler, heard this, he sent an invitation for my grandfather to perform the 'haj'.
He met Sherif Hussein on Arafat Mountain at Makkah. And then he received an invitation to go to Iran, signed by the minister of foreign affairs, Mohamed Mossadeq. And in Iran, waiting for him, were many religious leaders from Najaf." Thirty years later, the Americans would topple Mossadeq's Iranian government, with help from Colonel Monty Woodhouse of MI6.
Sheikh Jouwad uses his hands when he talks - Shia prelates are far more expressive with their hands than Anglican clergymen - and each new episode in his grandfather's life produces a pointed finger.
"When Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi arrived at the Iranian port of Bushehr, he received a big welcome but an official of the Iranian Oil Company fired 10 bullets at him. Many people said at the time that this was a plot by Colonel Wilson, who had been the head of the British occupation in Iraq in 1920.
All the great religious leaders from Qom in Iran were waiting for him - Al-Naini and al-Asfahani, Sheikh Abdulhalim al-Hoeri al-Yezdi, who was the professor of the future Ayatollah Khomeini - and then King Feisal, who the British had set up in Baghdad, announced that exiled religious leaders could return to Iraq, providing they promised not to interfere in politics."
Sheikh Mehdi angrily dismissed the invitation as "an attack on our role as religious leaders and on the independence of Iraq." Instead, he travelled to the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashad where he established an assembly "to protect the holy places of Iraq," publishing treatises in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Russian and Turkish.
"There was even an indirect dialogue between my grandfather and the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Lenin," Sheikh Jouwad says. "They wanted to use difficulties in the international situation to help Iraq to become a really independent country.
There would be a revolution in Iraq. That was the idea. But then in 1925, he suddenly died. They claimed he had a disease. But my father always believed that the British consul in Mashad had Sheikh Mehdi poisoned.
"On the afternoon that he died, the consul had invited all the doctors in Mashad to a reception outside the city and so when my grandfather became ill, no-one could find a doctor and there was no-one to care for him."
And now?, I ask Sheikh Jouwad: What of Iraq now? He chairs the 'Iraqi Islamic Conference' - which combines both Shia and Sunni intellectuals - and which is demanding independence for Iraq, just as Sheikh Jouwad's grandfather did more than 80 years ago.
"The Shias will not separate and they will not isolate themselves from the Sunni. They will have their rights when all the people of Iraq have rights. We have the right also to resist occupation in different ways and we do so politically ... The Americans want civil war, but they will fail because the Iraqi people will refuse to fall into civil war."
And what of Saddam's first appearance in court? The Sheikh laughs again."Saddam said it was a theatre and that Bush was a criminal. This was true. But when the judge talked about the gassings he committed at Halabja, this was also the truth." - (c) The Independent
A novel political party
More than four years ago I introduced in this column the birth of a new political organization in Pakistan. I call it an organization and not a party because the stress of the founder has been on building it up as a party based on the recognized principles of politics in the West and not just an ad hoc entity floated for the purpose of personal advancement.
It is named the Pak Jamhoor Party. It is very much there, still being organized and built up, and for that reason it has refrained from indulging in the prevailing popular modes of playing politics.
We claim that our concept of parliamentary democracy comes from Westminster, and we want to transplant it in Pakistan in its pure form. We do try to do so, though half-heartedly, but our subservience to the feudal system and the ambition of the lowliest among us to become a political overlord on the feudal pattern prevents us from going on the desired path. Most of us trip on the way and think nothing of it.
Some effort is made to show a semblance of democracy to the outside world. But what we cannot do, and what we have consistently failed to do in the last 57 years is the regulated and systematic organization of political parties, shorn of the element of personal loyalty and even remotely based on their much-hyped manifestos.
Maybe it has been impossible because, as a people, we are temperamentally unsuited to being good followers, either of trusted leaders or of principles, and each one of us wants to become leader himself. This is also the experience of the founder of Pak Jamhoor.
How do most parties or party factions come into being in Pakistan? A so-called political leader develops differences with the party to which he belongs, or is expelled by the party.
So he holds a press conference, announces the birth of a new party with himself as convener, chairman, secretary-general and what not. Then he tours the part of the country to which he belongs, sets up branches and appoints regional officer-bearers, all owing allegiance to him.
There is no attempt to form a broad base of like-minded adherents and to build the normal hierarchical pyramid. Even the two big parties, the PPP and the PML (N) have never been unduly bothered about recruiting basic cadres.
The newly-hatched PML follows in their footsteps, though its secretary- general, Mushahid Hussain, puts up a brave face about reorganization. (Have you noticed how parties incessantly talk about reorganization but never about organizing themselves?) I shall not include the MMA in this category for it is an alliance of religious parties, each duly disciplined. Even the MQM is different because no one in it dares to flout a decision from the top leader.
All these big parties could take a leaf from the copy-book of ex-bureaucrat-cum-writer, Masud Mufti, founder and convener (mind you, not president or chairman) of the Pak Jamhoor Party.
It is amazing how he has been patiently proceeding, in a scientific manner, to secure the people's adherence on the basis of the party's avowed programme. All this without any of the selfish and deceitful gimmicks and airy-fairy promises to attract members, and also in complete disregard of the tricks of the trade that constitute normal politics in Pakistan.
Pak Jamhoor may never win seats in the assemblies, but most of those who join it will remain loyal to its aims and objectives. There is no place in it for loyalty to Masud Mufti.
The entire concentration in Pak Jamhoor is on electing office-bearers from the lowest level upwards. Yes, electing them, not nominating them by the convener. Branches have started functioning in 56 districts, though you don't read about them in the press because self-publicity is prohibited.
Wherever there are enough people willing to join, Mufti goes personally to supervise the election. Before this, literature of the party is distributed so that there is no confusion that Pak Jamhoor is just another party striving to throw its weight about for clout.
I liked his words in one of his regular newsletters to members, "With the elimination of nomination, the intending officer-bearers do not have to flatter the top leadership but devote their energies for a good image among their voters." Can you imagine Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif or Shujaat Husain saying that?
What do ordinary members and workers of the big parties do when there is no electioneering to be done, no fruits of election victory to be greedily grabbed and no rally to be arranged for the party boss? Nothing.
There is no involvement in public service. The expectation in Pak Jamhoor is for everyone to undertake some kind of social work and create civic awareness. A directive calls upon the local leadership to provide examples of upright and useful behaviour, no matter how small the field of activity available.
In fact, social service is a central theme of the party's manifesto. Mufti believes that social service generates constructive attitudes. Sometimes it requires money, e.g. setting up schools and health facilities.
This they must collect, for the central office has nothing to give. But mostly no funds are required, as in persuading people to form queues, ensuring cleanliness in front of one's house, providing tuition to poor children, reducing pollution, adopting a generally helpful attitude towards people, and making small attempts to improve the social environment along progressive lines.
Humble jobs that anyone can do with ease and which leave a good impression. Pak Jamhoor exhorts its members never to forget that successive inefficient and corrupt governments in Pakistan had abandoned their responsibilities towards the citizens.
In such a situation a lot can be done by human will and sincerity for one's suffering countrymen. Members should prepare citizens to fight for their constitutional rights and speak out against injustice, oppression and corruption, and demand proper accountability. One of Mufti's slogans is, "Don't despair and lose your faith in Pakistan. Create new leaders and save the country."
There have been problems. Despite intensive indoctrination about the purposes of Pak Jamhoor, new members tend to act like workers of the established parties. Sometimes they want their allegiance to yield perks (there was a demand for mobile phones from one place, and for motor cycles from another!), sometimes there is the ambition to rise in society on its strength, and mostly it is the desire to possess clout.
But Mufti is hard. "We'll do all those desirable things other parties are not doing, and avoid all the undesirable things that they constantly do." Those who flout party principles are given a quick shift out of it.
Do you think such a political party can ever catch the imagination of the people and become strong enough to fight elections? It's an uphill task, but slowly, very slowly, Masud Mufti is acquiring a band of dedicated adherents.
I suppose his best bet is for the existing parties to continue in their wayward and anti-people ways and for Pak Jamhoor to provide an acceptable alternative. That is still a long way off.
Into battle, armed with words
Fight beside me and I will deliver to you all the weapons of my poetry.
- Pablo Neruda
Days after the September 11, 1973 coup that brought to a brutal end the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, the Chilean armed forces raided the Isla Negra home of Latin America's best-known poet.
An ailing Pablo Neruda was in bed when the soldiers burst into his room. "Look around," he said to the commander of the unit. "There's only one thing of danger for you here - poetry."
The troops left, little realizing that the accurate witticism wasn't yet the dying poet's final act of defiance. That would come posthumously. When Neruda's condition deteriorated, his wife, Matilde Urrutia, took him to a clinic and returned home to collect some belongings.
As Adam Feinstein recounts in his recently published biography, "she soon received an agitated phone call from him, urging her to return to his bedside. There, he told her: They're killing people, they're handing over bodies in pieces ... Didn't you hear what happened to Victor Jara? He was one of those they tore to pieces, they destroyed his hands ... The body of Victor Jara in pieces ... And they say he kept on singing and singing and that drove them wild.'"
Jara, considerably younger than the 69-year-old Neruda, was one of the most popular singers and songwriters in South America. Like Neruda, he was closely associated with the Popular Unity government.
And he paid for it with his life. So did Neruda, in a way. The poet wasn't murdered, but Matilde insisted until the end of her days that if Allende's administration had survived, Neruda would have recovered.
He didn't. And the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet denied permission for the poet to be buried at his beloved Isla Negra, within reach of the sea that helped to shape so many of his metaphors.
But this unnecessary indignity turned around and bit the junta on its backside. The funeral procession from Neruda's ransacked Santiago residence kept growing as it made its way towards the city's main cemetery, under the glare of soldiers. Without warning, one of the mourners started singing The International. Other voices joined in. Fists rose into the air.
Then a baritone voice among the crowd shouted "Companero Pablo Neruda" and hundreds of voices responded with "Presente!" The chant was repeated a few times. The same voice then intoned: "Companero Victor Jara", which elicited the same response - "Presente!" When Neruda had heard of Jara's fate in Santiago's football stadium, he had been pained at two levels, as a human being and as a poet. Oh my God," he had said to his wife, "that's like killing a Nightingale."
At the funeral, the baritone boomed again, this time invoking the memory of one of Neruda's best friends, a man who until just over two weeks ago had been the elected president of Chile.
"Companero Salvador Allende". Feinstein quotes Neruda's friend Hernan Loyola as recollecting: "Then the response was a hoarse, broken howl distorted by emotion and terror and the desire to shout it out so that the whole world could hear: Presente!' ... And singing at the top of our voices, all of us crying, we entered the General Cemetery. Perhaps the presence of so many foreign journalists saved our lives."
Thus it was that a poet's funeral turned spontaneously into the first public act of collective protest against the Pinochet regime. Of course, Neruda was no ordinary poet. Fellow Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez has famously described him as "the greatest poet of the 20th century - in any language".
And in an article last year, marking the 30th anniversary of Neruda's death, Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman noted: "It was symbolic that this inaugural challenge to the forces of doom and authority from on high surged from the farewell ceremony to a great poet, a man who had always proclaimed that poets were not gods but more like bakers or builders, entangled in the everyday life of ordinary men and women and sharing their fate."
Like most other Chileans, Neruda had seen the coup coming. And he endeavoured, until the very end, to avert it. Having composed diatribes in verse against the likes of Standard Oil and the United Fruit Company decades earlier, he also knew where it was coming from.
One of the last things Neruda published was titled A Call For the Destruction of Nixon and Praise For the Chilean Revolution, in which he declared he was assuming "the duties of the poet/ armed with the terrorist's sonnet", provoked by "this villain/ who practises genocide from the White House".
It was Chilean democracy that perished rather than Richard Nixon. And for the next 17 years it was barely possible to publicly mention Neruda's name in Chile. The eventual return of democracy paved the way for Neruda's body to be exhumed and reburied at Isla Negra. But until this year, his rehabilitation seemed incomplete.
On Neruda's 100th birth anniversary last Monday, the majority of the Chileans - starting with President Ricardo Lagos - were involved in celebrating the poet's legacy in one way or another, with even right-wing mayors and the military joining in.
Apart from saturation media coverage, people were literally bombarded with poems as sheets bearing Neruda's verses rained down from aeroplanes. And Monday only marked the climax of commemorations spread out through the centenary year.
The significance of the celebrations lies not so much in their peripheral relationship with Neruda's already secure reputation, but in the fact that they represent Chile's return to self-respect.
Neruda's birth centenary is also being marked elsewhere around the world, not least in the United States, where Neruda's popularity far beyond the Spanish-speaking population testifies to the power of his verse even in translation.
The breadth of Neruda's appeal is also based on the vast variations in his style and content. He was barely 20 when he established his credentials as a romantic with the publication of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, an exquisitely sensuous and erotic collection of verse that several generations of young men (and not just in the Spanish-speaking world) have employed as a wooing device.
And it is indeed hard to go wrong with lines such as: "I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,/ dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses./ I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees" or "My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning".
The government of the day favoured Neruda with diplomatic postings while he was still in his 20s, and it was during such an officially sanctioned sojourn in Spain, during the mid-1930s, that the poet was inexorably politicized.
In his first major collection, Residence on Earth, at one point he explains: "You will ask: why doesn't his poetry/ speak to us of dreams, of leaves/ of the great volcanoes of his native land?/... Come and see the blood in the streets,/ come and see/ the blood in the streets,/ come and see the blood/ in the streets!"
In Spain he befriended the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who described him as "A poet nearer death than philosophy, nearer pain than intelligence, nearer blood than ink".
Disconsolate when Lorca was murdered by General Francisco Franco's Falangists, Neruda wrote: "If I could weep with fear in an empty house,/ if I could feast on the eyes I plucked from my head,/ I'd do it for the mourning orange tree of your voice/ and your poetry, shouting its way into the world." He was later instrumental in ensuring that 2000 Spanish Republican refugees found a home in Chile.
Back in Chile, Neruda was elected to the Senate on a Communist Party ticket in 1945. Two years later, when the government of president Gabriel Gonzalez Videla (whom Neruda had helped to elect) cracked down viciously against striking miners (among the agents of repression was a young Pinochet), the poet could take it no more.
He published a stinging attack on Videla in a Venezuelan newspaper, and followed it up with a resounding denunciation in the senate. He then went into hiding, eventually escaping to Argentina via an arduous journey he described in detail at his Nobel lecture in 1971.
His epic Canto General - a sweeping view of the history (and the geography) of the Americas - was composed mostly in exile. "Liberators," he wrote, "in this twilight/ of America, in the morning's/ forsaken darkness,/ I give you my people's/ infinite leaf, the exultation/ of every hour of struggle."
Every continent deserves a Canto General. The privilege has only been extended to Latin America. But Neruda, more prolific than most poets of his calibre, also left behind a great deal more - from poems celebrating the fruits of human labour and the beauty of the female form to his amusingly profound Elemental Odes, in which the subjects range from the atom to the onion and the artichoke.
Even without his political commitment, there can be little question that Neruda would have been remembered as an excellent poet. His greatness, however, derives from his passionate quest for a better world, a more humane existence for all. His enthusiasm for wine, women and song doesn't contradict this essential humaneness, it serves only to round it out. As the inimitable poet himself pointed out:
I have a pact of love with beauty:
I have a pact of blood with my people.
mahirali2@netscape.net.