Green Zone – A sad, bad farce

I know I usually do political or current events stuff, but hey, I really wanted to review this movie and if I can’t take a little license with this site from time to time, what’s the point of publishing a blog in the first place?

Okay, so I went to the movies, undecided as to whether I was going to see Crazy Heart or Green Zone. Truthfully, I was in a pretty grumpy mood having been cooped up for too many days in a row in my southern headquarters, so I made a last minute decision to go for some blood pumping action. I knew it was going to be an anti-Bush administration movie, which isn’t a big problem for me. I knew it was going to be dealing with WMD and figured Hollywood would sensationalize it a bit. I can quite enjoy a thoughtful send-up of our country and government, as long as it’s done well, and, like I said, I was kind of in the mood for a ‘shoot ‘em up’. In the back of my mind I guess I was ready for something along the lines of War Inc, which in hindsight made no sense because War Inc. set out to be a satire, and was a brilliant one. I don’t know what critics have said about it, but my advice is that you’d be far more entertained and thoughtfully engaged by renting War Inc rather than the hackneyed and ham-handed Green Zone.

Bottom line, it has no regard for the facts as it meanders through the ridiculous fantasy adventures of a rogue Army Chief Warrant Officer, played by Damon,  who is tasked with finding WMD in Iraq after the invasion based on intelligence supplied to the military. First,  the action isn’t remotely believable. Damon just barrels around, going off mission and putting his men in way too much danger on a regular basis in ways that even I can see are ridiculous. Even less believable, Damon, operating apparently free of any operational command, develops his own intelligence source, is seconded to the CIA and then hunted down by our own special forces. Right, that’s exactly how things go down in the real world of military operations. He ultimately single-handedly discovers that the intelligence is entirely fabricated and then apprehends a senior Iraqi general, the commander of the Iraqi army, who subsequently tells him that he provided intelligence weeks before the war to the U.S. that there was no WMD in Iraq. This general is then shot by special operations forces under the command of the administration’s minion in Iraq. Right, yeah, that’s how it was under Bush.

Okay, what’s going on here? First, the feel of it reminded me a bit of the Generation Kill mini-series,  so, okay, and in recreating the feel of Baghdad, it seemed to work well – but that’s it. I think the director/writer stopped trying to engage in reality right then and there. One of the most ridiculous elements of the plot is that the CIA was actually trying to stop the administration’s puppet from behaving so badly, that somehow the CIA doubted the intelligence in the run-up to the war. I mean there is no mention of a CIA director telling  the President that it’s a “slam dunk. The entire story comes off like something a superficial, liberal wing-nut would scribble out in a single evening after smoking some fine weed.  It wasn’t even a thoughtful satire or a critique of the real situation, nope, it just made a story up with stick figure caricatures of characters. These characters lack depth, believability and aren’t even likable. It also makes overuse of the shaky camera, fast frame changing action effect of the Bourne movies which makes the action completely unintelligible. So, all in all, it simply doesn’t work on any level.

So, okay you say, another bad hollywood movie, big deal, why are you so ticked off, Glenn? Well, it’s because when treating a subject like this, so recent in history, with an authentic feel, I think the authors have a responsibility to have a basis in fact for their storyline. It’s not like Avatar, in which – as science fiction – I’m perfectly happy to ignore the corporate use of military forces to extinguish indigenous species because the story, characters and special effects are so captivating that I just don’t care about the politics. Green Zone seems earnest to be taken seriously and Damon is certainly trying hard to be taken seriously with his sternness and military rigor. But it just fails miserably to deal with any of the complexities of this issue.

You see, I’m a troublemaker. I actually read stuff like source documents, when I can. And guess what, there is a great document on WMD in Iraq and there have been several studies of the intelligence failures on Iraq. The Iraqi Survey Group, headed by David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector and no Bush administration lackey, did an in depth report of what we actually found and didn’t find in Iraq. First, WMD capability is about much more than just stockpiles of munitions. It also requires significant infrastructure of men and equipment to manufacture. In the concluding remarks by David Kay in his report, he claims that in significant ways Saddam was more dangerous than we thought and that he had substantial WMD operations in place. While there were no stockpiles of weapons found, when analyzed in it’s totality, there is no doubt that Saddam was a danger with respect to WMD. Second, after three separate investigations of the intelligence leading to our invasion of Iraq, not a single ‘smoking gun’ of politicization was found. Instead, the thoughtful critics have concluded that this was an epic intelligence failure. Also,  the entire scenario also reflects the grave difficulty of gaining intelligence in totalitarian, despotic regimes. It also should makes us all think about the very difficult nature of making decisions about what  acceptable levels of risk of this sort are. But these more nuanced and complex ideas, only arrived at after analyzing the facts involved, don’t even try to peek out from anywhere in this movie. Instead, we are treated to a Manichean story line in which the dumb, ambitious administration lackey, played by Greg Kinnear,  ignores or kills everything in the way of his agenda – an agenda which is never explored, btw.

I think that one of the biggest risks we face as a society is the pre-eminence of politics in our public discourse. Our entire public debate is politicized now – from global warming to health care reform, it’s all polemic and bashing the other, and the actual issues and facts aren’t even discussed that much in our media anymore. We are in real danger as a society if we all don’t try and catch ourselves more. Ask yourself, am I just railing for my side or am I adhering to a set of principles and looking at the facts to make my decisions? What are your principles? I think this is the core problem – neither the Republicans or Democrats have a fixed set of principles that I can discern. This is why I love the Libertarian Party – “The Party of Principle”. We work from clearly elucidated first principles that we’ve carefully examined and developed, and then make our minds up on issues based on those principles.  The lure of the outrageous polemic has less effect because we start from a different place. You should check it out at :  www.lp.org/platform . Most people will find themselves agreeing with our principles, but then start to have trouble with some of the positions/policies that flow from them. If that’s the case, you should ask yourself, am I willing to govern my views by principle or not? If the answer is yes – we are the party for you. If not, well, good riddance – you are the problem in our society.

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