Blog

Opening this weekend, director Paul Greengrass (United 93) gives us Green Zone starring Matt Damon. In what plays like a dramatization of an extended edition of NBC Universal’s Hardball on MSNBC, with host Chris Matthews harping about the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, NBC Universal’s Green Zone takes the same non-controversial position, namely, that the initial motive for taking down Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, to eliminate so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD), was a bust. By now, everyone knows that. It’s a narrow perspective, too narrow for what the subject deserves (Greengrass had the same problem in his morally agnostic United 93), but this picture works as a straightforward fable about the Bush administration’s incompetence in waging war against America’s religious fascist enemies. Opening and closing with the chaos that was (and continues to be) Iraq, in an aimless, selfless military incursion which has killed thousands of Americans and accomplished nothing in our self-interest, the film features Damon as a lone soldier who eventually refuses to just follow orders. Steadying his trademark jerky camera only slightly, Greengrass depicts Baghdad’s green zone as a hedonistic haven for beer-guzzling slobs sending men off to die for no legitimate reason, stocked with ladies in bikinis and a press corps willing to go along with the government’s line of the day, usually spun by Greg Kinnear’s sniveling Bushie who could easily be one of today’s sniveling Obamatrons spewing about Iraq, Afghanistan, or, for that matter, Obama’s scheme to seize control of the medical profession and health insurance industry. Sneering Kinnear even looks and sounds like White House propaganda meister Robert Gibbs. With Amy Ryan as a Wall Street Journal toady for the U.S. government, who begins to question what she’s done (better late than never), and Kinnear dispatching teams to throw rogue Damon off the trail proving that the emperor has no WMDs (and worse than that no purpose), the character to watch is a courageous individualist named Freddy (Khalid Abdalla in an excellent performance). In two words, “for me,” Freddy declares the proper moral imperative for an act of military self-defense, yet, as Green Zone capably illustrates, nobody’s listening to Freddy until it’s too late. “We won,” someone asserts as a fact, after George W. Bush’s infamous Mission: Accomplished banner is seen flapping in the wind. No, we did not, we have not, and we will not, because winning by the anti-American standards set by Bush/Obama is impossible. Worse, as Green Zone amply shows with looters, snipers, and deposed generals, we have abandoned the idea that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack and the rising religious fascism of nuclearized Iran, it is urgently necessary to achieve total victory over our enemies, not coddle civilians, appease Islamism, and cater to those who seek to destroy us. If nothing else, Green Zone gives us a man who rejects the status quo and acts to slow, if not stop, the self-sacrifice in Iraq.

Posted in Movies, War