Green Zone-A Review
There is a moment in Paul Greengrass’s extraordinary tale of post invasion Iraq that is the perfect metaphor for the American policy. Matt Damon, playing an Army WMD specialist has been risking his men’s life on the streets of Baghdad chasing down WMD’s that always turn out to be a mirage. He goes into the Green Zone to visit a CIA officer played with wonderful cynicism by Brendan Gleeson. The dusty soldiers go into on of Saddam’s palaces and emerge from a dark corridor to a huge swimming pool, where the young neo-cons in swimming trunks and bikinis cavort to rock music drinking beer. They could be poolside in Vegas for all you know. The CIA officer knows the whole WMD pursuit is a crock, but it’s the Pentagon and the DIA that’s running the game and truth means nothing to them.
This is a very important movie that will make your blood boil. Told in the wonderful tradition of political thrillers like Costa Gavras’s Z 
Go see this movie. Prepare to be on the edge of your seat from its kinetic energy and to leave the theater in that cathartic mood that only real tragedy can bring.
America’s memory span isn’t that short, Jon. It’s just that the President, as Nancy Polosi told Rachael Maddow yesterday, did not want to delve into the matter at this critical juncture.
It would have divided the nation even further, absolutely preventing anything from being done to drag the economy out of the abyss.
This is not the early ’70s when the country had a stable economy and relatively low unemployment rate and people felt secure. Beyond the fact that the country is almost evenly divided between Republican and Democrat ideologies, the voters are scared and extremely angry and worried about the future for themselves and their families.
The public trial, so to speak, that probably should have taken place was the one regarding the banking crisis. Brad DeLong of Berkeley and Simon Johnson, co-founder of baselinescenerio.com and late of the IMF, have both argued quite eloquently that the Obama Administration missed a great opportunity on many levels by not delving deeply into the crisis as Sweden (if I remember correctly – an open question mark here) did. As a result of that country’s early and complete public hearings, the citizens backed the government in its banking reform programs, bought the government time to resolve the financial issues, and united the country.
As time goes on, and I read more economists, I realize that both Geitner and Summers have failed this presidency in so many and substantial ways.
Nevertheless, films such as this one and the many books and articles exploring the lead up to the war and its execution will do more to condemn Bush, Cheney, et al, than all the public trials, farcical congressional hearings ever would have. History will condemn them far more than a divisive public trial ever would have. Even Liz Cheney and her pals can’t save them from the condemnation of history.
The bigger question you should be asking is how do we put this broken country back together again.
Don’t you mean Doug Feith – aka, ‘the dumbest fucking guy on the planet.’ See here for more on Dougie: http://beclear.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
Why is it that the Tea Baggers and Red State ideologues cannot see that the MICC is who are destroying their financial security? We’re talking “wool over eyes” of the most major proportions in history here. It’s not health care; it’s not gays in the military; it’s not creationist control of text books; it’s not…universal health insurance.
It’s the myth of the “Marlboro Man”…the rugged cowboy who never existed (and he was probably African-American if he did), this construct of the Ayn Rand hero that ignores the corruption of capitalism. That illusion…whether it be Bruce Willis, Arnie, Chuck Norris, Stephen Segal, or Gary Cooper, has just plain fucked us up… It’s emotionally satisfying to the point where it absolutely erases intellect.
And that’s where Warstler and Papola have been sucked down into the illusion of the noble individualist…
It’s bullshit, folks. We are a society. Better get used to it or go live like Ted Kazinski. Now there’s a true individualist…
Clarke made it clear quite a few years ago that the Cheney administration knew it was going into Iraq before 9-11. They went for oil; for plunder. Immediately after the invasion we heard countless stories about Iraq historical and artistic treasures being boldly looted. Pallets of cash–literal pallets of cash–were left unguarded “by accident” and disappeared. The goal was to loot Iraq *and* us, and the plan was carried out to perfection.
So this scene won’t make my blood boil more than anything else I’ve already known since 2005. This movie won’t change anybody’s mind. The nasty, ugly truth about the neocon rape of Iraq and looting of the US taxpayer has been right out in the open for a long time. Even Friedman has said, “suck on this. Why did we invade Iraq? Because. We. Could.”
We don’t care. We’re concerned with our next Noble, Righteous, Freedom-Loving mission, stopping the unparalleled horror of socialized healthcare, beside which the deaths of a few paltry hundred thousand Iraqi civilians and the theft of a couple of chump-change trillions of dollars of American taxpayer money is insignificant. If we pass socialized healthcare, Rush Limbaugh might have to spend time in the waiting room!
Rick and Dan, you guys are getting positively eloquent. Keep it up, but eschew the big 25 cent words if you want to reach the Palinistas. And get subtle as a Newt, and post your notions over amongst the RedStaters, who by gazing only at their navels have developed a tantric mechanism for detecting fake conservatives, and whose mentation involves applying Ockam’s Battle Axe and Thor’s Hammer to reality, to pare it down to someting that fits with the Narrative that presses their fear and pleasure centers. Who by the way massed up in Orlando yesterday to hear the Queen of Cognitive Dissonance feed their limbic systems a good jolt of lotus juice and Tundra P-p-p-p-p-ropaganda. Eh?
Valerie, I have to wonder if a 2009 edition of something like Sam Ervin’s “just a country lawyer” approach to lighting up and aerating the Heart of Darkness might have done a huge service to the future of the country and addressed what I think is the heart of your concern, the part about “and people felt secure.” Now, we have this Deluge of Fear and susurrus of Doubt and a near approach to the “informing” state of Joe Stalin and Joe McCarthy and the Wretched Wright, where every man’s hand is secretly turned against ever other’s in a race to reductionist consistency in place of richness of spirit. All led by people who laugh all the way to the bank. Doing what was done has just BUILT mountains of fear and further instability, the conditions that weaken the immune system and homeostatic functioning of the Body Politic and let the aberrant cells and hepatic nematodes thrive.
All the well-remembered tyrants and tyrranies did like our current olikleptogarchs, the same thing that Dan and many others, maybe enough to leaven the whole loafer set into rising if the temperature was right, have remarked: figured out how to dominate the Narrative, all that stuff that people believe, and got the mopes to watch the faux black cloud on the horizon alternating with the pretty flashing objects and to enlist in the Fog of War generated to provide cover for the frauders and coercers, while the cynical and cowardly few rob the banks, the granaries, the warehouses and the cradles of those who actually produce something that can be honestly characterized as Real Wealth, that sustains life and society. Those folks who, like Hitler with his Grand Tragedic Gotterdammerung, and the little fucking Nazis that snuck off to Argentina or into the “American” secret police with tons of Grand Art and the gold from the teeth of the crematoria, live for self-gratification. Let’s keep the categories straight: it does not matter how much the CEO of Lehman or Bear or Goldman “contributes to the symphony,” these people are more like Goering and Eichman and Goebbels than like American Gothic. Nuremburg did not expiate or extirpate like a proper debridement of the gangrenous wound of “modernism” would have required, but it did at least inject a bit of backbone into the “righteousness” notion, for a little while, until the Orcs got back on top.
But of course seeing what’s wrong (from the standpoint of a “freier” or “loser in the Game of Life” who is not a Large Liver) is not the same as either seeing ways clear to treating and defeating the cancers and parasites with the necessary strong medicine, or having the individual or collective power to do the necessary surgery.
I wonder if the judgment of the future will be that Obama was just not wide and deep and effective enough to do more than give false HopeAndChange to, and just anesthetize the dying patient, or that he was an active participant in the slide to perdition. These folks are getting better at covering their tracks — destroying files electronically so much more effectively and otherwise “Wagging The Dog,” so as to make an honest judgment of their acts and motivations impossible.
Hey, Worgon, a phrase we can agree on: if we live, “we shall see.”
I’m with VC – it’s not that people forget, it’s that they’re being safely ignored by the very people they elected to Change things (2008, remember that?)
I was struck by these lines from A.O. Scott’s review.
In fact, I think the growing discontent with Obama (most conspicuous among twentysomethings) is that he’s the only one interested in forgetting, forgiving, and ‘just moving on’.
Substantial parts of the electorate are not happy with this. They hate the fact that torturers, war mongers, toxic bankers, and bog-rotten lobbies are all getting free passes – especially when they’re being handed out by the exact people who said they were opposed to this all this crap, who were elected to power based on their promise to address these problems head on, and who implied that their confrontation would center not on superficial measures, but on fundamental structural reform to the subterranean areas far from common view, but central to the cause of our dismay.
To find this in a Presidential candidate was especially important, since our embrace of democracy is (wisely) limited. As Americans, we are still dealing – fundamentally – with a representative government. That is to say, we depend on agents, and must contend with the agency problem.
In this case, our Agent in Chief, is not taking the forceful stands that only he can take. Moreover, he seems to systematically abandon whatever principles he says he holds, leading to no small amount of discouragement from people who, in truth, have little capacity for direct action (witness the persistence of TSA Security Theater, long after it’s become a grim and expensive joke).
It’ll be interesting to see if Green Zone success in a way that gives expression to enormously justified sentiment is frankly being ignored and suppressed.
If that happens, this case against Rumsfeld could become a much larger flashpoint. Fingers crossed that it does.
Separately, I can’t wait to see this. Greengrass is on my short list of most-very-favorite-directors. He’s a national treasure, even if he isn’t actually American.
There’s no mystery that none of those people are in jail.
The current administration has made it perfectly clear that it does not want to see the past administration’s transgressions dealt with criminally.
Obama didn’t even try to clean house. I’m not sure he’d have succeeded if he’d tried and I suspect it would not have been politically prudent, but that point is moot.
Obama came down hard (under the guise of bipartisanship) against any kind of inquiry or even a truth and reconciliation type deal.
There’s no mystery really…
One more thought – I suspect Obama’s largest and most over-arching fuck up has been his failure to understand the conservative mind.
On the one hand, it responds easily to hysterical fear mongering and a paranoid, almost tribal sense of being under attack. Glen Beck has probably done more than anyone to exploit this for profit, and the hyper-detached rationalism of the Obama administration should be seen as a welcome antidote to eight years of Beckism (lite, of course) in the Oval Office.
That said, the conservative mind also responds (and favorably, in this case) to unambiguous displays of moral authority. This is where Obama’s detachment works to his disadvantage. A significant portion of the country (which was never terribly keen on him in the first place) has seen nothing to suggest that this guy has something that their chosen representative have, somehow, forgotten.
Just think what would have happened to Goldman’s profits for 2009 if they’d been banned from buying T-Bills with 0% interest government loans? More to the point, think about the kind of doormat that would let them do this in the first place.
I recognize, by the way, that it takes a certain kind of nerve to take on a fight like health care. But just imagine how much better it could have been if our President entered the fray with an ‘I just fired the Air Traffic Controllers’ credit on his resume.
At a time when our most pressing political problems all seem to revolve around (largely) private interests with far too much control over public life, we need a President who is interest – chiefly – on the spectacular and very public breakage of undue political power.
Take your pick: out of control military contractors, agricultural lobbies that thrive on the causes of disease, banking interests that rape the economy instead of growing it, or insurance companies that have utterly colonized access to health care (and for what? profits margins of 2-3%?). They all fit the same pattern.
And what we need – as Americans – is to see one of these monstrosities come crashing down. We need to know that a lack of ethics isn’t a pre-requisite for success. We need to see the shock on the faces of people who have done horrific and lasting damage to our general well-being as the lights come up suddenly, and their parties end definitively.
More that a President who is willing to ‘roll up his sleeves’ and ‘show some passion’ – we (and especially, our less progressive and more conservative countrymen) need a guy with the balls and determination to land a fatal punch.
Bipartisanship means appealing to both sides. Arguments, by definition, can never do this. An open attack on an unbridled wrong is what’s called for especially by those on the right.
If Obama delivered that, he may find less opposition from the GOP, and – consequently – more leverage against the slimiest turds in his own party’s punchbowl (Schumer, Rangel, Nelson, Johnson,
Murtha, Bacchus, etc. ad nauseum).Deliberation if for Congress. The Executive is the one with finger on trigger. If Obama really wanted to remain above it all, he should have set his sites on the Supreme Court.
Conservatives get that. Progressives, by and large, do not. It wouldn’t be an issue if Obama gave Conservatives something to root for. He hasn’t. And the opposition to good Progressive policy has been furious.
Wasn’t it Wolfowitz who claimed that the Iraq war would be self-funding? The oil…the oil…
And now the Chinese are in a good position to get a lot of the oil…and if we subdue the Taliban for them, they’ll be able to run a nice pipeline through you-know-whereistan.
@RT – A folly wrapped in a fiasco, wrapped in enigma, wrapped in bacon.
Careful with the bacon…it is the Middle East we’re talking about…and pigs are a no-no there to a lot of people. I guess that’s why there are so many piggies at the trough here in the US…
Hey, can’t we invoice China for fighting their war for them? Check’s in the mail, guys…
“Why is it that the Tea Baggers and Red State ideologues cannot see that the MICC is who are destroying their financial security?”
– I wonder if these people are just projecting self-hatred onto anything they don’t understand and are afraid of?
“Rick and Dan, you guys are getting positively eloquent. Keep it up, but eschew the big 25 cent words if you want to reach the Palinistas.”
– I don’t think the Palinistas will be reached until things get really dire and they are forced to see what their ignorance has wrought.
Jon– Sorry if you have talked about this before, but how did you get into the movie business? Was it your goal or just one thing led to another?
[...] going to firmly side with my USC colleague Jonathan Taplin in heartily endorsing the new Matt Damon political thriller, Green Zone. Indeed, I would call it [...]
” but eschew the big 25 cent words if you want to reach the Palinistas”
Well I’ll keep using words as they pop into my head. Last night I was playing online with an internet friend of mine, and the topic of this movie came up. “Don’t go see that movie,” he told the group. “That movie makes America…it makes America look like a bad country.”
Not Dick Cheney. Not lies. Not wholesale murder and theft. No, a movie makes America look like a bad country.
You can use nothing but monosyllables with the Palinistas and it makes no differences.
Looks like this thread has about died the usual attentionspannoveltyovertaken death, but here’s another strand. Justforthehellofit.
I hear that SOCOM (that hotbed of fraud, corruption and deception Right across Tampa bay from where I sit) just “awarded” a couple-billion-dollar contract for field maintenance of the “deployed base” of the C4-5ISR (stands for Command, Coutofcontrol, Cgobbledegook, Cbullshit, Cfraud, Intelligence, Surveillance and Recoveringfromstupidcollateraldamageandconningthepubliconnaisance, or something like that), the Grand System that runs the Networked Battlespace that is doing such a great job of finding bin Laden and dealing with those pesky Insurgent IEDs, and more important, moving trillions of dollars out of Americans’ pockets and into the hands of military contractors, and paying Insurgents to guard our convoys and other Insurgents not to attack those same convoys.) The Deal is for ONLY a couple of billion, chump change these days, for maintenance of The System by civilian contractors who get paid $220 an hour PLUS 40% Hazard Pay PLUS ANOTHER 40% after a month and a half in country, for like $420 an hour. Assume a 160 hour work month and you got a monthly paycheck of like $67,000 a month. Not counting all the other benefits, including housing, free health care and such.
I’m told that except for the security clearance thingie, you can buy the same skill set in Mumbai for $20 an hour. Remember this is a multi-year contract, and these folks are unlikely to be seriously shot at, but they still are among that cadre of contractors that fields more bodies than there are actual GIs under oath and arms. FUCK US STUPID SHITS, ALL OF US. We are stupid, we are FREIERS every one of us, except maybe the ArgoSTnauts “making” $806,000 a year doing their magic on C4-5ISR…
And for further scaling and comparison, fielding an E-6 tech with such skills (if someone was stupid enough to sign up, with the alternatives available in the MICC) costs in salary about $35,000 a year, plus $250 a month hazardous duty pay plus another $250 per month “separation pay” if you are deployed away from your family for more than a month. Oh, and if you are deployed long enough, you don’t have to pay income taxes on your pay. Yeah, you have to add in all that “free” food and medial care and the chance, if you survive, to get a pension, if there’s any money left after running C27ISR for a couple of years. Lookie here for some numbers and links ot follow if you care at all about how we “support our troops.”
Why does it “cost a million dollars a man (GI) to send a soldier to Overthereistan for a year?” Well, I guess that must include his/her amortized share of all this “overhead.” And plain old stupid-American-public-take-their-money-they-are-too-stupid-to-follow-the-pea-under-the-shellism.
What I really like, from the following link to ArgonST, one of the “premier C5ISR support contractors, is their company motto/logo/canto: “Making Sense Of It All.” Oh, if only they could, or would… Gee, I need to see if Argon is publicly traded — probably a good investment opportunity for the next couple of years.
By the way, the official DoD Dictionary magically changed the definition of “insurgent” to remove that part that limited the term to people attempting to overthrow a legitimate government. Gee, Ministry of Truth, good move! Makes a better fit with what’s afoot in Iraq and Afghanistania and Pakitinistan!
Oh, and I have to torment myself by flipping to C-SPAN now and again, where today a Red member of some military oversight committee is pitching a nice underhanded 20-inch softball to a NORCOM 4-Star General. The Congressman asks the General what he makes of recent reports of at least 2 incidents where Goddam Rooskie “Long-Range Aircraft” dared come within a “sensitive distance” of Sacred American Airspace, somewhere West of the Aleutians, probalby visible from The PalinPorch. Implication, says the general, is that now that the Rooskies have some spare change from their OILANDGAS sales to get back into the Cold War Game, which means of course that us fucking stupid Americans now had better if we don’t want to be caught napping (seems “we” were wide awake enough to spot the Dirty Reds a long ways off) we have to dump billions and trillions more into new detection and interception stuff. Boy, aren’t we sorry that we aren’t building a shitload more of F-22s now? See, say the undead Cold Warriors, We told you so! (forget about the reality of a non-existent “threat” and the geography and all that – hey fella, the pea is right here!)
Why the hell do I trouble myself with this shit, which is just a few words about one tiny little bit of the flood of futile idiocy that is killing/has mostly already kilt this culture? Writing about it in places like this is just, as they say in the Navy, “Spitting upwind.” Yeah, Hugh, I am sure all the stuff SOCOM does is protecting us from the Bad Men. Which ones are those, again? Any more, they all look the same to a disinterested observer…
Fucking stupid humans. We deserve to join the dinosaurs, for letting these neodinosaurs, these lizard-brains, keep leading us blindfolded and bleating to the slaughterhouse..
Check the meds folks…
“No Country for Bold Men”
Exactly, JTM. “That *movie* makes America look like a bad country.” What can you do? Throw your arms up in despair. People will believe anything.
Now, if it’s a movie showing a fascist America where stormtrooper thugs round people up for…lessee, what is it again…oh yeah, government-subsidized health care, and a lone John Wayne-type hero fights to bring the nightmare crashing down, now *that* movie would be some top-drawer quality entertainment.
But a movie that suggests that we didn’t actually find WMDs in Iraq, er, I mean, that Saddam Hussain wasn’t involved in 9/11, er, I mean, that Saddam Hussein wasn’t getting yellowcake uranium, er, I mean that Saddam Hussain wasn’t about to launch another invasion of a neighbor on a *snicker* totally specious pretext for the sake of *snicker* cashing in, er, I mean, that Saddam Hussain didn’t *snicker* murder countless thousands of civilians in his pursuit of power over Iraq, er, I mean, that the world really wasn’t better off without Saddam, er, I mean, that we killed a hundred thousand civilians, er, I mean that, from the beginning, it was not understood that the one and only, the real, the true reason that we invaded Iraq was [insert here: whatever the hell the neocon cheerleaders are telling us as of 15 minutes ago], now *that* makes “America look like a bad country.”
The perfect metaphor is they that made this movie for $100 million. I would have been just as meaningful, just as emotionally resonant for $50M. Or hell, $20M. But instead they bloated up with VFX and toys until it’s now going to be perceived as a failure. So the take-away around town is going to be don’t make movies that criticize America. Don’t make movies about unpopular subjects. Don’t make movies that require thought.
JL — Anyone still have any belief in the long-term viability of Our Great Nation or the species, for that matter? There’s lots of sweetness out there still, I have a grandchild on the way shortly and the sunrise this morning was particularly poignant, even if the dogs triced me up and tipped me over with their leaches in pursuit of demonic squirrels. But why do all the retirees in the million-dollar condos just west of the marina look out on that same scene from the 13th floor and say to themselves, “goddam Arab terrorists are everywhere! Socialized medicine, my ass. Honey, where’s my Medicare card? Albert next door says TriCare is a better deal…”? And some GI in Bumfuckistan drives his Humvee over an IED…
What’s the takeaway again?