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Alice Neel painted the human comedy.

Its a phrase she repeated often in interviews and in text, throughout her life. It is the title of one of the sections of Alice Neel: People Come First, her outstanding and moving retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In one sense, what she meant is obvious. Memorable and interesting characters abound in her paintings, running from her many lovers to the luminaries of New Yorks Depression-era political and literary Left; from art celebrities like Andy Warhol to her acquaintances in the East Harlem neighborhood where she toiled in obscurity for decades; from the feminist activists and critics who championed her work in the 60s and 70s to her own self, shown naked, at 80, paintbrush in hand and gazing skeptically out at the viewer as if sizing them upone of the most indelible of all 20th-century self-portraits.

Alice Neel, Self-Portrait (1980). Photo by Ben Davis.

The text in the Mets The Human Comedy gallery explains that she meant the phrase as a reference to French author Honor de Balzacs story collection La Comdie humaine, which examines the causes and effects of human action on nineteenth-century French society. It notes that Neel wanted to chronicle suffering and loss, but also strength and endurance, as Balzac did.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, and falls in line with the shows framing of Neel as an anarchic humanist. But the effects of human action is a pretty vague phrase. As opposed to what? The effects of the movement of the planets?

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The truth is that the words the human comedy had a lasting magic for Alice Neel because Alice Neel thought of herself as a Communist intellectual. Every artist with an interest in Marxism would have gotten the reference, becausealmost all of Communist aesthetic theory looked for legitimacy, in one way or another, to Marx and Engelss approving remarks on Balzacs La Comdie humaine.

The authors of the Communist Manifesto thought Balzac captured not just the spirit of his time, but provided a portrait of the pathologies of bourgeois society, the toll that money took on human relations (despite Balzacs aristocratic personal politics).

Alice Neels Pregnant Woman (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed by the Yale Press podcast, the exhibitionss curators, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, seem very concerned with emphasizing that Neels politicswere independent, non-dogmatic, and that her affinities for Communist ideas softened as she aged. Which may be true: Times change, people change, art and politics and how they intersect change.

You see, its not so much that I am pro-Russia as that I am pro-dtente, she said onstage towards the end of her life. But she also said, around the same time, Reagan has said the government doesnt owe anybody anything. In the Soviet Union you get free medical careeverything is free. There the government owes you everything.

In 1981, just three years before she died, she contributed to a fundraiser for the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, a depository for Communist Party history located in the headquarters of the attenuated CPUSA. The same year she actually did a show in Moscow at the Artists Union, organized by Philip Bonosky, the Moscow correspondent for theDaily World, which was the successor to the CPs Daily Worker.(She had painted him three decades earlier, when he was editor at the Communist magazine Masses & Mainstream.)

Alice Neel, Phillip Bonosky (1948). Photo by Ben Davis.

Interviewed at the age of 82 by art historian Patricia Hills, Neel was still making the case for the significance of her portraiture by referencing Vladimir Lenins respect for Balzacs The Human Comedy (she kept a poster of Lenin in her apartment all her life, according to Phoebe Hobans 2010 biography) as well as Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukcss advocacy for Thomas Mann.

Neither Lenin norLukcs were names you brought up in the 1980s to win points for being with-it, artistically or politically.

Rather than trying to fit Neel into the framework of a rose-colored contemporary progressivism, it seems much more interestingand more accurateto consider how the artists actual, passionately felt, difficult allegiances shaped her: the sacrifices she made in her life; the specifics of her art; and her relation to the New Left feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s that pulled her from obscurity, and that now probably overdetermine the reading of her work still.

Born into small-town Pennsylvania respectability in 1900, Alice Neel went to study art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women looking for a more interesting life. I came out of that little town the most depressed virgin who ever lived, she remembers in a 2008 documentary directed by her grandson. She met and married Carlos Enrquez, a soon-to-be-important Cuban painter, and travelled to Cuba in 1926, where the sight of poverty in pre-revolutionary Havana radicalized her.

Alice Neel, Futility of Effort (1930). Photo by Ben Davis.

Returning to New York, she suffered the loss of her first child, Santillana, to diphtheriathe subject of the ghostly Futility of Effort (1930), later featured in a 1936 issue of the journal of the Artists Union, Art Front, retitled asPoverty. The couple would separate, and Enrquez would take their second child, Isabetta, back to Cuba.

New Yorks Greenwich Village was where Neel found her most lasting community, in the demimonde that swirled together leftist radicals and artistic strivers amid the hardship brought on by the Great Depression.

Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing (1935) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

When the New Deals art projects started up in 33, Neel seized the opportunity as a lifeline, painting a canvas every six weeks on government wages, her eye turning for a time to urban scenes and public demonstrations in the mode of the day.

(An anecdote she liked to tell later in life is that Harold Rosenberg, the critic of abstraction, schemed his way onto the government payroll by submitting two Neel paintings as his own, before becoming an art writer.)

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party was enthusiastic about the New Deal Arts Projects and a force in pushing for their expansion, and Neel soon joined the Party. It might surprise us now that a figure of Neels scrappy, bohemian independence would be drawn to the CP, even given the fact that she joined in 35, when the USSRs foreign policy needs aligned with Roosevelts agenda, and the turn to the Popular Front opened the doors for fellow-traveling artists of all kinds.

Alice Neel, Nazis Murder Jews (1936). Photo by Ben Davis.

But Cold War dogma and our knowledge of the actual evils of the Soviet system cloud our assessment of the Communist Partys on-the-ground profile at the time. Its opposition to US social order led it to engage with both racism and sexism in ways that mainstream institutions often wouldnt. As Andrew Hemingway writes in his great history of the time, Artists on the Left, Neel is representative of that type of woman artist and intellectual who gravitated to the CP becausewhatever its limitationsit offered the most sustained critique available of class, racial, and sexual inequality.

Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neels role model would have been someone like Ella Reeve Bloor, aka Mother Bloor, the most well-known female leader in the CPUSA in the 20s and 30s. Born 1862, Bloor was a formidable organizer who supported six children while divorcing and marrying as she pleased. She was a comrade of Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair, and her labor journalism inspired Woody Guthries song about the Ludlow Massacre. In her sixties, during the Great Depression, Bloor toured the Great Plains with her son, organizing farmers.

Detail of Alice Neels Death of Mother Bloor (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel painted Mother Bloors funeral in a 1951 work. She is pictured, sainted, in a coffin as a multiracial crowd of mourners files past. A wreath above her head reads COMMUNIST, the word PARTY vanishing as it wraps around a bouquet of roses.

The curators of Alice Neel: People Come First cite approvingly a line by Neel saying that she was never a good Communist, because she hated bureaucracy and the meetings used to drive me crazy. But a distaste for bureaucracy or political meetings doesnt mean she didnt imbibe the party line. (It just means she was an artist.)

In the very same interview Neel also stresses that it [the Communist Party] affected my work quite a bit.

Its one thing to join the Communist Party at a time when Communist ideas were in vogue with the artistic mainstream, and capitalism was in a crisis that was plain for all to see. Many did in the Depression years. But Neel remained faithful to the movement long after.

Alice Neel, Alice Childress (1950). Photo by Ben Davis.

In the 40s and 50s, she studied philosophy at the Jefferson School for Social Research, an adult education school in New York run by the Communist Party. She delivered some of her first slide lectures about her art there.

One of her teachers, V.J. Jerome, chair of the Partys Cultural Commission, was convicted under the Smith Act for his 1950 pamphlet Grasp the Weapon of Culture!, which described mass culture as anti-human and a narcotic polluting the masses, arguing the need for a revolutionary art to bring down capitalism. Neel made sure to visit Jerome to show support after he was released from jail.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

This was the high tide of McCarthyism, when most others of the so-called New York Intellectuals were abandoning their earlier, 30s-era Marxist commitments and turning hard towards Cold War liberalism and anti-Communism.

And yet the very title of the Met show, People Come First, comes from a line in a 1950 Daily Worker interview with Mike Gold, the foremost propagandizer of proletarian art in the United States. Even as Abstract Expressionism was being coronated at MoMA, Gold had quoted Neel: I am against abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings.

(Incidentally, when figuration reemerged in the art world in the late 60s, it was in the form of Photorealismand Neel hated that too. She argued that it also sinned by treating humans the same as things, replicating capitalist ideology. She thought special attention should be reserved for the human. Her particular Marxist aesthetic, therefore, gives insight into the ways she set her subjects off from less defined backgrounds and the meaning she gave to the expressive, painterly qualities of her paintings in that era.)

Alice Neels Mike Gold (1951) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold championed Neel as a pioneer of socialist-realism in American painting, and she returned the love with a portrait from 1951. His weathered, tan features appear thoughtful and ready for debate. Depicted on the table before Gold in Neels painting is a copy of the Communist intellectual journal Masses.

Detail of Alice Neels Mike Gold. Photo by Ben Davis.

Beneath that is a newspaper. In what I take to be a deliberate suggestion of Neels continuing alignment with Golds output as a writer and propagandist, she has placed her own signature as if it is a part of the newspaper.

Neel had moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938 with her lover, the singer Jos Santiago Negrn (whom she had met when she was 35 and he a decade younger). For her, the paintings she did of neighbors, acquaintances, and comrades from the Puerto Rican community werent just sentimental or picturesque. Works such as Mercedes Arroyo, The Spanish Family, and T.B. Harlem made their debut in a show at the Communist-controlled New Playwrights Theatre, with an essay by Gold, and were presented explicitly as part of a Communist political-cultural project, bound up with the Partys advocacyand sometimes fetishizationof Third World struggle.

Alice Neel, The Spanish Family (1943). Photo by Ben Davis.

Gold quoted Neel like so: East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people there, and they inspire my painting.

In the popular imagination, the story of the 60s New Left movements is that they raised issues of race and gender that the Old Lefts idealization of a white male factory worker had ignored. But its a little more complicated than that.

An interesting twist highlighted by recent museum shows reconsidering this period is that, as it turns out, the artists who were adopted as the most vital, heroic exemplars by the insurgent 60s social movements had, in fact, often been forged by the Old Left artistic scene. It was in terminally uncool Social Realism that the idea of an art that honored the experiences of the suffering, oppressed masses had been preserved and could be picked up again when new social movements rebelled against the reining formalism.

Charles White, the masterful social realist who was affiliated with the CPUSA until 1956 and was nurtured in some of the same Communist spaces and periodicals as Neel, was an example for the Black Power generation. Neel was an example for Womens Liberation.

Cover of Time magazine featuring Alice Neel painting of Kate Millet, on display at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

The Communist Party had all but imploded after Khrushchevs secret speech in 1956 revealing Stalins crimes. Without the new feminist movement, there would have been no Neel revival.

Neel, in turn, helped shape the image of the ascendant movement, doing a steely painting of writer Kate Millett for the 1970 cover of Time magazine on The Politics of Sex, just as Womens Liberation was moving into mainstream consciousness.

Alice Neel, Cindy Nemser and Chuck (1975). Photo by Ben Davis.

She painted the luminaries of the feminist movement as faces of their time, just as she had painted the earlier Communist intellectuals: art historians Linda Nochlin (with daughter Daisy) and Cindy Nemser (nude, with husband Chuck, also nude), Redstockings founder Irine Peslikis (described as Marxist Girl), and many more.

Alice Neels Nancy and the Twins (1971) at the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Neel also did numerous images of women nursing and pregnant nudes, among her most celebrated works. Here, her eye for honoring the realities of ordinary peoples lives hidden beneath bourgeois ideology met the feminist project of honoring the hidden world of womens work beneath the sentimental domestic cliches.

But Neel also had a famously difficult relationship with the Second Wave of feminism, even as she reveled in its attention and clearly believed in the importance of Womens Liberation. Partly, this was generational. Like Georgia OKeeffe (though a quarter-century younger) or Joan Mitchell (though a quarter-century older), Neel had spent a lifetime trying to escape the stigma of being patronizingly reviewed as a lady painter, and was suspicious of being touted for her gender.

Alice Neel, Marxist Girl (Irene Peslikis) (1972) in Alice Neel: People Come First at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

But this was also partly political, inscribed in the very creed that had allowed her to hack it out all those lonely, unrecognized, pre-feminist-movement years. She had chosen a life of poverty out of an ideological belief in solidarity with the working class and the oppressed. With a combination of insight and narrow-mindedness, she considered a lot of the preoccupations of the new feminist artists she encountered to be self-absorbed and tritein a word, bourgeois.

In 1970, her work was included in the Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin-curated Women Artists, 15501950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show had been the product of actual protests by feminists, who had threatened a Civil Rights complaint against the museum for not showing women.

Alice Neel, Linda Nochlin and Daisy (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.

Yet reflecting on the shows reception, Neel was characteristically salty and dismissive of those who didnt share her fundamental political outlook:

What amazed me is that all the woman criticsyou see, you are very respected if you paint your own pussy, as a womans libber. But they didnt have any respect for being able to see an abused Third World. So nobody mentioned that I managed to see beyond my pussy politically. But I thought that was really a good thing if they had a little more brain.

There is ego here: Alice Neel was never shy about saying why her art was better than anyone elses. But the judgement flowed directly from the Marxist theory she used to understand her practice, which held that capitalist life kept us wallowing in immediate subjective experiences, unable to generalize and so unable to change the world.InGeorg Lukcss 1938 essay Realism in the Balance, he had written:

[I]f we are ever going to be able to understand the way in which reactionary ideas infiltrate our minds, and if we are ever going to achieve a critical distance from such prejudices, this can only be accomplished by hard work, by abandoning and transcending the limits of immediacy, by scrutinizing all subjective experiences and measuring them against social reality. In short it can only be achieved by a deeper probing of the world.

You can see how this artistic theory of hard looking would resonate with Neels sense of what a portrait should be.Lukacsian realism was about neither simply life-like description nor the depiction of ordinary experiences in an accessible way; it was about art that moved through the specific case to a revelation of the overall social context that had shaped its meaning and identity.

Installation view of Alice Neel: People Come First at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

When, in the Hills interview, Neel says that what she values most in her own art is that she tries to paint the complete person but also, though that depiction, to capture the spirit of the age, it is just such an operation she seems to have in mind.

The favorite author of Georg Lukcs was Thomas Mann, Neel continues, because Mann could see how sick the world was. But the sickness has now been transformed into junkiness. You see, the character of this era is its utter lack of values.

Alice Neels Dominican Boys on 108th Street (1955) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.

How seriously did Alice Neel take the mission of her art to capture its time, which went considerably beyond the personal satisfaction she got from organizing paint on canvas or communing with her many interesting sitters?

So seriously that, when it came time to paint the character of the 70s and its utter lack of values, she would show it in the face of her own adult son.

Having lost two daughters, Alice Neel raised two sons on welfare, in poverty, all while committed to making unsellable art. In the 2008 documentary, Richard Neel remembers Alice tolerating a lover, Sam Brody, who beat him, because she was dependent on him for money and he flattered her artistic ego. Burned by the dispiriting instability of their upbringing, both sons would reject her communist and bohemian values, steering clear of the new movements of the 60s even as they elevated their mother. They became, respectively, a doctor and a lawyeras solidly middle class as you can get.

Alice Neel, Richard (1962). Photo by Ben Davis.

She had painted Richard warmly in the handsome Richard (1962), when he was 24, with five oclock shadow and a casual sweater.

By the time Richard evolved into the late-periodRichard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79), the real Richard had become an ardent Nixon supporter and chief executive council for Pan Am Airways. In the year she made the painting, Pan Am was okayed by Jimmy Carters Airline Deregulation Act to snap up National Airways for $437 million.

There are very few people as right-wing as I am, Richard says in the 2008 documentary. His mother would say that Richard in the Era of the Corporation was her attempt to capture how the corporation enslaved all these bright young men.

Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

Now 40, Richard is shown again on a chair, this time in suit and tie. Compared to the earlier composition, this one is one step farther back, less intimate; the warm brown palette has yielded to a slightly icy climate.

Splashes of green linger around the mouth. Green veins trace his hands.

Detail of Richard in the Era of the Corporation. Photo by Ben Davis.

The 1979 Richard projects cool assurance, his legs casually crossed as beforebut the foot is suspended at a strained angle. Hes literally twisted.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

The white patches in the hair in both the figure and his reflection suggest a man graying into middle age, but also make him look as if he is fading away or that something is literally missing from him.

Detail of Alice Neel, Richard in the Era of the Corporation (1978-79). Photo by Ben Davis.

But its his eyes that I notice. Childhood malnourishment had left Richards eyesight damaged. Uniquely among her bespectacled sitters (compare her own self-portrait from a year later), Neel has given Richard shark eyes, all pupils. His glasses, strangely left unfinished, float unevenly around them, agitated halos, as if he were spellbound or hypnotized.

Neel rightly gets credit for painting aspects of female experience that hadnt gotten a lot of play in art before, in her pregnant nudes and nursing mothers and scenes of childbirth.Richard in the Era of the Corporations depiction of political estrangement between mother and son is another intimate experience I am not sure had ever been depicted.

And this painting was telling, not just in terms of capturing a mood among the Neel family but in terms of capturing the larger zeitgeist.

The story of the backlash against the movements of the 1960s by the rising generation and the consolidation of corporate hold over life was indeed the story that defined the decades to comewith so many horrible consequences.

I love, fear, and respect people and their struggle, Neel told Hills in 1982, especially in the rat race we live in today, becoming every moment fiercer, attaining epic proportions where murder and annihilation are the end.

Banner for Alice Neel: People Come First outside the Metropolitan Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.

Finally, why bother spending so much time on Alice Neels Communist affinities?

Theres enough Neel to go around in this show: Theres an erotic Neel; a familial Neel; a Neel as painter of wonky domestic still-lifes. But clearly we are more comfortable with these aspects of her work and are embarrassed by the Communism, rendering it as a soft-focus radicalism or classless feminism that she herself would have hated.

The topic is worth lingering on, but not because you need to defend Communism to defend Marxism or activism. The opposite is closer to the truth, in my opinion. For the entire period Neel was working, there were Marxists and activists who were critical of the CP, critical of the Soviet Unionthey were just much less visible than the CP.

But Communism was a motivating passion for Neel. Its sense of destiny kept her going. Its theory offered a model of intellectualism that was committed to speaking to ordinary people. It offered critical insights that werent easy to find elsewhere along with tragic blind spots. (If you are interested in what it felt like to live these difficult dynamics, Vivian Gornicks The Romance of American Communism cant be beat.)

Neels politics were bound up with all that other stuff that made her remarkable. The art-historical dilemmas they leave us with are heritage of the fact that the society she was trying to survive and depict was actually full of awful dilemmas. The best way to honor her as a painter of difficult truths is by not smoothing these over.

Alice Neel: People Come First is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1, 2021.

Excerpt from:
Alice Neels Communism Is Essential to Her Art. You Can See It in the Battlefield of Her Paintings, and Her Ruthless Portrait of Her Son - artnet News

"The US is participating in the force generation process for NATO Mission Iraq and will contribute its fair share to this important expanded mission," Pentagon spokesperson Cmdr. Jessica L. McNulty told CNN. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke about the mission with his NATO counterparts during a meeting with defense ministers on Thursday.

Late Thursday night, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby clarified that there are "no plans" to send more US troops into Iraq itself. However, US troops could also support the mission from outside the country, a defense official told CNN.

At a press conference Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the NATO mission would increase in size from 500 personnel to about 4,000.

"The US and its partners in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS remain committed to ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS, and the Department looks forward to continued consultations with Iraq, NATO, and the Global Coalition going forward," McNulty added.

Austin "welcomed the expanded role" of the NATO mission in Iraq, according to a readout of the discussions provided by the Pentagon. He "expressed confidence that all of the work done to date with the Iraqi government and security forces will lead to a self-sustainable mission."

Stoltenberg stressed the importance of the NATO mission to prevent the resurgence of ISIS.

"Not so long ago, ISIS controlled territory as big as the United Kingdom and roughly 8 million people. They have lost that control," Stoltenberg said. "But, ISIS is still there. ISIS still operates in Iraq, and we need to make sure that they're not able to return. And we also see some increase in attacks by ISIS. And that just highlights the importance of strengthening the Iraqi forces."

The increase in NATO forces would be incremental and comes at the request of the Iraqi government, he added.

Trump's acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller touted the withdrawal of troops prior to Biden taking office as a sign of the mission's success, saying, "The drawdown of US force levels in Iraq is reflective of the increased capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. Our ability to reduce force levels is evidence of real progress."

In early February, Austin announced a global force posture review, in which military leaders would examine US troop levels around the world, including the "military footprint, resources, strategy and missions."

Austin stressed the importance of alliances and partnerships as part of the review.

"From Afghanistan and the Middle East, across Europe, Africa and our own hemisphere, to the wide expanse of the Western Pacific, the United States stands shoulder-to-shoulder with allies old and new, partners big and small," Austin said. "Each of them brings to the mission unique skills, knowledge and capabilities. And each of them represents a relationship worth tending, preserving and respecting. We will do so."

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said that no final decisions or recommendations have been made as part of the global force posture review.

This story has been updated with additional comment from Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.

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US signals it is open to sending more troops to support ...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) An explosion rocked a market in east Baghdad on Thursday, killing one person and injuring 12 others, according to Iraqs military.

The military said the blast in the capitals Sadr City, in the Habibiya neighborhood, was caused by a car laden with highly explosive materials that blew up while passing through a popular used furniture market. It sent a cloud of black smoke above the area. Shortly afterward, a crowd of people gathered around the mangled wreckage of a charred car and a burned-out white van. A fire engine was parked nearby.

A military statement said one person was killed and 12 injured, according to a preliminary investigation. Five vehicles were burned, it added. It did not say what caused the detonation.

The driver of the car was killed in the explosion, the statement said.

Iraqs president condemned the attack, calling it a shameless attempt by terrorist groups to destabilize the country during the holy month of Ramadan.

We stand firmly against these attempts, Barham Salih tweeted.

Explosions in the Iraqi capital, particularly in the predominantly Shiite Muslim Sadr City district, were once almost daily occurrences but have become less frequent in the past few years, particularly following the defeat of the Islamic State group in 2017. In January, twin suicide bombings ripped through a busy market in the Iraqi capital, killing more than 30 people and wounding dozens.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for Thursdays bombing.

The development comes hours after a drone strike targeted US-led coalition troops near Irbil airport and a Turkish military base in northern Iraq.

Wednesday nights drone attack targeted coalition forces based near Irbil international airport and caused a fire that damaged a building, according to the Kurdish regions Interior Ministry and coalition officials.

Separately, a rocket attack targeting a Turkish military base in northern Iraqs Bashiqa region killed one Turkish soldier and wounded a child in a nearby village, Turkeys Defense Ministry said.

There was no claim of responsibility for either attack.

___

Associated Press writer Samya Kullab contributed reporting from Istanbul.

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1 killed, 12 wounded in market explosion in Iraq's capital - Associated Press

After exploring the Watergate scandal, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and more, the podcast Slow Burn will offer a beat-by-beat accounting of the years leading up to the Iraq War when it returns for its fifth season, April 21st.

Reporter Noreen Malone helmed this investigation, which will examine how the Iraq War now widely considered a disaster was launched with tremendous support. The new trailer highlights interviews with people who remain staunch defenders of the invasion, as well as those who voiced early objections but didnt get very far with them. The clip also touches on the post-9/11 anthrax scare that helped fuel further support for the war and seems to nod toward the lies that surrounded Americas claims that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction.

In an email interview with Rolling Stone, Malone said she wanted to explore the run-up to the Iraq War specifically because of how peculiar the vast support for the war looks in retrospect. She noted it wasnt just Republican politicians and commentators who were in favor of the war, but a wide array of respected journalists and others across the political spectrum.

This started as a bit of an investigation for me why exactly had they believed what they did? Malone said. What have we forgotten about that moment?What looks different now through the lens of recent history?

As for the repercussions of that 2001 to 2003 period (as opposed to the Iraq War as a whole), Malone said she was struck by how many people involved in the invasion were more sincere in their intentions than we tend to believe in hindsight. She continued, But I think that common perception of malintent actually speaks to what was broken in that time trust in government to tell the truth, and to get the facts right, and to act in the best interest of Americans and the world. Not to mention that the failure to properly plan out for a post-invasion Iraq didnt exactly make people think our government was capable of effective action on large-scale projects. That period of time also probably helped erode trust in the media, which largely failed to actually investigate claims from the government at the time. A lot of whats happened in our politics since can, unfortunately, be chalked up to that distrust.

Among the people Malone interviewed for Season Five of Slow Burn are former George W. Bush White House official Frank Miller (a special assistant to Bush, and Senior Director for Defense policy and Arms on the National Security Council staff), Senators Tom Daschle and Dick Durbin, journalists Dan Rather, Bill Kristol and Ann Curry, and intellectuals like Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi academic who was one of the leading voices in America advocating for the other throw of Saddam Hussein.

Slate

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Slow Burn Examines the Lead-Up to the Iraq War in Season Five Trailer - Rolling Stone

Iraqs government is trying to accelerate the process that lays out timetables for the withdrawal ofUS-led coalition troops, in an attempt to pull the rug from under Iran-backed paramilitaries and secure some modicum of calm before Octobers parliamentary elections.

For Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, an end to the relentless attacks on US targets in Iraq cannot come soon enough.

Wednesday night saw the latest attack on US forces, as a drone dropped explosives on a base hosting American troops, resulting in no reported casualties but stirring tumult nonetheless.

EXCLUSIVE: US agrees to staged withdrawal of forces from Iraq, says negotiator

The attacks, predominantly claimed by previously unknown Iraqi armed factions but widely believed to be carried out by powerful Iran-backed paramilitaries, are accompanied by demands US troops leave Iraq.

Last week, Iraq and the United States moved a step closer to that eventuality, announcing their agreement to withdraw US-led coalition forces according to timetables determined by joint technical military committees.

The Wednesday statement followed a third round of strategic dialogue between the two parties, and included an agreement to change the nature of the anti-Islamic State coalitions mission from combat to advisory and training.

By setting time limits for the withdrawal and having Washington publicly commit to abiding by them would relieve the huge pressure on Kadhimis government, giving him room to manoeuvre until a new parliament and government is sworn in.

Moves to speed up the process are beginning. Days before the Erbil attack, Kadhimi announced the formation of a technical military committee headed by the Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Abdul Amir Yarallah.

And on Saturday, the Iraqi negotiating team sought to follow up with the US ambassador and a number of officials in Baghdad over details related to the formation of the committees in an attempt to hurry things along, two Iraqi negotiators told Middle East Eye.

'The current US administration is aware of the reasons why we pressed them to expedite the formation of technical committees and start setting timelines'

- Iraqi negotiator

"The current US administration is aware of the reasons why we pressed them to expedite the formation of technical committees and start setting timelines," one of the members of the Iraqi negotiating team said.

According to the negotiator, Washington is keen to prove the credibility of last weeks statement.

The prime minister announced the formation of the Iraqi technical committee headed by Yarallah, and we are waiting for the American side to announce the formation of their committee and decide the president's representative to start the next stage of negotiations, he added.

"There will be a meeting of the Iraqi-American committees, perhaps this week or next week. It is likely that the meeting will be in Baghdad and it will be face to face, but if officials from Washington join the US committee, then the meetings will be conducted via video call."

The US negotiating team did not agree to withdraw combat forces and change the mission of these forces in Iraq for free.

Iraq must secure the protection of Western diplomatic missions and coalition forces as part of the agreement, Iraqi negotiators told MEE, in order to prove Baghdad can assure foreign officials security after the pullout.

In a meeting with the prime minister on Thursday outlining the outcomes of the US dialogue, the leaders of the most prominent Shia blocs showed Kadhimi "support and satisfaction", sources said.

Iraq: Paramilitaries feel the heat as Kadhimi steps up moves against them

Yet the picture that emerged from meetings on Friday and Saturday at the office of Hadi al-Ameri, head of the Iran-backed Fatah parliamentary bloc and Badr Organisation paramilitary force, was quite different.

There, Shia political leaders and armed factions commanders told MEE, talks including Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Kataeb Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada resulted in a great division among Iran-backed groups.

Some at the meetings saw the Iraqi-US announcement as a step in the right direction and an achievement.

But others perceived it as a "deception that Kadhimi and the Americans agreed upon, with no concrete steps, no schedule for withdrawal and no real change in the coalitions status, said a prominent commander of an Iranian-backed armed faction familiar with the meetings.

Kataeb Hezbollah was the most hardline and rejected the outcomes of the Iraqi-American negotiations, then Asaib Ahl al-Haq comes second," the commander said.

"This means that the attacks will not stop. Even the Iranians cannot stop it this time. As long as the major factions continue to deny their connection to these attacks, no one has the ability to stop them.

"It is likely that the Iraqi arena will flare up again."

US forces and diplomatic missions have long been targets of Iranian-backed Iraqi paramilitaries.

But following the January 2020 US assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the godfather of most Shia armed factions, forcing the United States out of Iraq became one of the paramilitaries chief aims.

Since then, Iran's proxies have targeted US interests and Iraqi military bases hosting coalition forces with attacks that often kill Iraqis and damage governmental property.

An unofficial truce was reached between the US and the Iran-backed factions in October, when tensions reached a height and the Trump administration threatened to close its Baghdad embassy and attack Iranian targets inside and outside Iraq.

In recent weeks raids have intensified once more, however, targeting logistical support convoys of Iraqi and coalition forces across the country almost daily, this time in attacks claimed by groups no one had heard of.

These claims and the major factions continuing denial of responsibility has increased the complexity of the scene and swings open the door for the return of attacks on diplomatic missions and governmental institutions under the pretext of fighting occupying forces, Iraqi officials and armed factions commanders told MEE.

Last week, Kadhimi took the issue to the Iranians themselves.

The prime minister met Soleimanis successor Esmail Qaani during a two-day visit to Iraq, during which he unofficially provided sufficient information indicating the involvement of the prominent Iranian-backed armed factions in these attacks, political leaders and armed factions commanders told MEE.

In addition to Kadhimi, Qaani met with a number of Shia political leaders, including Ammar al-Hakim and Amiri, as well as commanders of the big armed factions and several senior clerics in Najaf.

'Kadhimidemanded an end to these attacks, but the problem that everyone became aware of and recognised is that Iran and the leadership of the Popular Mobilisation Forces lostcontrol over the armed factions'

- Shia political leader

"The meetings focused on the repercussions of the Iranian-American conflict and the need to continue the calm, stop any attacks targeting the coalition forces, and support the Iraqi government in its ongoing negotiations with the American side," a Shia political leader familiar with the meetings told MEE.

"The commanders of the [armed] factions continued to deny their responsibility for the attacks targeting the logistical support convoys, but Kadhimi provided information indicating the involvement of the known factions in these attacks, he added.

"Kadhimi spoke about the confessions of the perpetrators of some of these attacks who had been arrested. He demanded an end to these attacks, but the problem that everyone became aware of and recognised is that Iran and the leadership of the Popular Mobilisation Forces lost their control over the armed factions."

This week, those discussions are ongoing.

On Monday, Qasim al-Araji, the Iraqi national security adviser, flew to Tehran to meet his counterpart Ali Shamkhani, "in response to an official invitation from the Iranian side", to discuss "security issues of common interest and borders, and to enhance security and intelligence cooperation between the two countries," according to the statement issued by Araji's office.

Araji's meeting with Shamkhani was followed by another meeting with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, and Amir Hatami, the defence minister.

In south Iraq, political murders are dismissed as 'personal' to quash investigations

Araji, who led the truce negotiations between the Iraqi government and the Iranian-backed armed factions last month, had met the US ambassador in Baghdad prior to his visit to Tehran, his office said.

He also participated in the last Iraqi-American round of talks, and was one of its leaders, along with Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.

Araji's frantic movement during the past few days clearly indicates that the Iraqi government is racing against time to achieve some goal.

"Kadhimi seeks to take advantage of the surrounding conditions as much as possible to restrain the factions and prepare the appropriate ground for the upcoming elections and attracting investment companies, a member of Kadhimis team told MEE.

The source said Tehran was showing a keenness to dial down tensions in all areas as it conducts negotiations with the US in Vienna over resuscitating the 2015 nuclear deal. Similarly, he noted, the Biden administration was proving much more flexible than its predecessor.

"Using Irans wishes and the flexibility shown by the United States to push the armed factions back several steps is Kadhimis top priority now, the source said.

"The Iranian-American negotiations have started, but they will not be short, and their results will not be tangible overnight, just as they are like any other negotiations that will involve a tug-of-war according to new developments. Therefore, this positive atmosphere may not recur again until months later, he added.

"Also, all signs indicate that some [armed] factions will seek to escalate, stir up trouble, and even move their masses to demonstrate against the government and ignite the street for one reason or another. Therefore, everyone seems to be in a race against time."

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Iraq pressing US to agree on troop withdrawal timetable as tensions escalate - Middle East Eye