Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (3/15/10) offers a "narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told," that ends with:
And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.
The idea that Saddam Hussein fooled the U.S. into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons is a very popular myth that has no real evidence behind it. (See Extra!, "Saddam's 'Bluff'" by Peter Hart, 1-2/04; "From Speculation to History" by Seth Ackerman, 5-6/04.) Needless to say, when you're complaining that a fictional film isn't factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren't fictional.
About Jim Naureckas
"No real evidence behind it" is an understatement. EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT from Iran was that they did NOT have WMD (and that includes the 10,000-page or whatever it was document they provided to the U.N.).
Furthermore, the evidence is rather clear that the U.S. government didn't believe it either. I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know what the time frame of the Damon character's actions are, but if the U.S. REALLY believed that Iraq had WMD, they would have had teams of WMD hunters poised to begin the search from day one, and to secure any sites which were potential locations, before they got into the hands of the terrorists we were supposedly worried about. The evidence is abundantly clear that they did neither; instead, they carried out a belated, lackadaisical search, almost an afterthought.
[...] Douthat: Green Zone Was Fictional, But Not in the Right Way [...]
The Green Zone is an exercise in action obfuscation. It tells us some shadowy Pentagon figures wanted to prove that Saddam had WMD. It fails to mention that Veep Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby fed false information proving that Saddam had WMD to the NYT journalist Miller, which she faithfully printed in the NYT. That Chief of Staff was convicted of perjury but pardoned by Bush. The neocons in the White House and the Pentagon actively deceived the American people to push us into the invasion of Iraq. The neocons were directly responsible for getting us into the war. They are not mentioned in the film. Their favorite Iranian was Chalabi, whose baloney exile organization got millions from us. He appears in the film briefly but his neocon supporters are not mentioned. He ran in the first Iranian free election and got 1% of the vote. He also gave U.S. secrets to Iran, likely for pay. He is a slippery and utterly untrustworthy figure. He did publicly suggest that Iraq should sell its oil partly through a pipeline through Israel to the port of Haifa, so I guess he was not all bad.
I do not have the details, but back in 1991 a high ranking Iraqi military officer defected to the U.S. He stated that there were no WMD. Who was that defector?
In all fairness to the New York Times, and while I don't have a specific date, I very vividly recall reading Miller's breathless tales of Iraq's WMD possession on page 1 of the Times, and IN THE VERY SAME ISSUE, buried on page 17, a report from the UN WMD inspections team (led at that time by Scott Ritter, I believe) stating that no evidence of WMD possession whatsoever had been found by said inspection team.
So, New York Times: schizo, or just confused?
The questio to this day remains can we trust our government? Many would answer with a resounding no. Others would allude to national security and with it the need to keep information from the public for its own good.
I go to the movie to suspend belief and be entertained and some times that entertainment is centered on recent events and somewhat factual. Yet it is alway full of theatrical liceinse that throws it clearly into the realm of fiction
A leaked British document with notes taken at an emergency meeting between Bush and Blair about two months before Bush's war on Iraq revealed that Bush and Blair agreed that WMD would not be found in Iraq. Bush said he was going to start a war anyway but they needed a better "pretext." Blair said he would go along but that they must never say the war was for "regime change." Bush backed from one lie to another until finally stating that the war was for regime change.
The British parliament demanded to know if the notes were genuine. When the Blair administration admitted that they were, Blair was forced out of office. You have to go to British newspaper to read the full story The "liberal" media in the US pretended it never happened, although former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeznski read from the leaked document at a Senate hearing with press members in the room. Because of the failure of the US media, members of the Bush administration continued to lie that "everybody believed Iraq had WMD" when not even Bush and Blair believed it.
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi suspects, said that a war of aggression was â┚¬Ã…“the supreme international crimeâ┚¬Ã‚ and that war crimes â┚¬Ã…“are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."
We are no longer a nation that abides by the rules that we require others to obey.
It would seem that pretending to have WMDs weren't the smartest way to keep a grip on power knowing that it could likely lead to an invasion of his country and the downfall of his regime by any country with more military might and a leadership dumb enough to be fooled by the claim. (Or smart enough to PRETEND to be dumb enough to be fooled by the claim, anyway.)
In our name, and to our growing detriment, our government illegally and immorally invaded an innocent country with actual weapons of mass destruction, because of their imaginary ones. Far more American lives have been lost in this sociopathic projection than were taken at the World Trade Towers, to say nothing of the far more lives lost and ruined in Iraq, which is what is usually said: nothing. If protection or revenge were the motives, we might have invaded Saudi Arabia, where the alleged attackers were from.
Rather, we served Saudi interests, including attacking from Qatar rather from our bases in Saudi Arabia. There, our footing is precarious, so we sought a new base of Mid-east operations in Iraq, one of two flanks to mount an unneeded war on Iran.
None of this is the will of the American people, but we have a government out of our control, from the CIA to the new Blackwaters, teaching and launching death squads, overthrowing decent governments, invading hapless people for a lucrative return (for a few) and a shallow sense of macho conquest.
All of this not only injures others unjustly, it costs us direly. In the name of defense we are increasing our need to be defended. We launch mayhem in a culture where honor is satisfied by revenge. Where is our nobility, wisdom, simple fairness, or even self-protection in this hulking empire?
Having seen the movie (after my post, above) I find other points to ponder.
The movie was not as tense and exciting as the other two Bourn movies. It jarred in a wearing way. Too much shaky cam. Too much fictional speculation. Too close to Chalabi, as if he would have rescued the situation he helped create. I shouldn't have sat too close to the screen!
That said, I'm glad the public sees a deep questioning of the prevailing line. We were deliberately lied to, over and over, in a hurry. Remember the rush to war? Remember that the neo-cons read "Shock and Awe," advising inflicting utter horror as a way of subjugating people, before launching their battle of that same name? Only shaky old Robert Byrd stood up to the madness. (For that alone I take his last name as my new name.)
This movie, like Avatar, opens up the possibility of members of the military thinking more than obeying, acting for the innerly known good more than the told one. Since Vietnam, we're learning how not to kill those who have been dehumanized. Rather, the "gooks," "ragheads," etc. are human, and we're learning how to be humane.