David Denby over at The New Yorker has written a couple of reviews I can relate to; he talks of the upcoming film Shooter (being released in Korea with the more descriptive title "더블타겟" (Double Target) and the film 300, both of which he describes in a way that hits the nail smack-dab in the forehead:
On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it’s angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The filmmakers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the Pat Buchanan conservatives who hate big government and multinational corporations and want American warriors to stay home. The clash of political currents suggests the degree of confusion roiling Hollywood at the moment. How do moviemakers find military heroes in the midst of an unpopular overseas war?
Aptly put. One problem I see in the present culture of war is that Americans are faced with a clear enemy, but no one to demonize. And not only is it not politically correct, it's not even politically – or militarily – useful. Sure, it's familiar and it feels better to talk of "Islamofascism" and how Muslims supposedly "are," but the fact remains that the vast, vast majority of Muslims aren't the enemy.
The sheer fact that there is so much strife and disagreement across theological lines in the Islamic religion, across ethnic lines in the Islamic political world, and that the West is totally unequipped to deal with this entire new (to us) geo-political-cultural mess – is testament to how far we've made even messier; but a singular, monolithic enemy is not what we are dealing with.
In traditional wars of late, we had uniform and uniformed enemies; dirty "krauts," shifty "Japs," and goose-stepping "Russkies" on parade – now those were enemies! Then things got more complicated with Vietnam, with guerilla warfare conducted on unfamiliar territory in the middle of someone else's civil war, with the line between soldiers and civilians being completely blurred. But there was still the VC – they were real, and they were somewhere – hiding, shifting, hitting and running.
But now, we have Osama bin Laden. Here's a man whose family was best friends to two of our presidents and our oil-dependent economy; a man who used to be on "our" side and whom we helped arm and train when he was a mujahadeen against the Soviets and then later against the Taliban in Afghanistan; a man who created a terrorist network that is the real enemy, but some of whose training in military and terrorist tactics came from us.
Yes, it's easier to see and hear the Muslim extremists in all this. But it's also easy to forget that it's mostly the crazies who jumped on his apparent bandwagon that spout the vitriolic hatred and commit the horrid crimes of kidnapping and murder that happen in the Middle East.
It's easy to forget that Bin Laden's demands are, first and foremost, political. I'm not saying they're more reasonable, but I am making the point that he's not crazy; as a terrorist, he uses extreme and public tactics, but he is not an insane man. In fact, that's beside the point. It doesn't even matter whether Hitler was crazy or not – he was still a man who commanded armies, made rational military decisions, and posed a problem to the world.
I would say the same for Kim Jong Il – as much as we Americans would like to think of our enemies as crazy, it just hurts our ability to deal with them. Whatever you say about Mr. "Lonely" over there in Pyeongyang, he is at the top of the world's list of priorities and the grain, in the end, keeps coming in every time he lobs a missile over Japan or otherwise rattles his saber. For a country whose infrastructure and economy has pretty much collapsed, it sure is doing a pretty decent job of surviving as a political entity, contrary to what pundits were saying since the early 1990's.
But even Kim Jong Il and North Korea is an easy one – here's a country with clearly-defined political borders and uniformed, goose stepping soldiers in parades. Hey – we know some guys like that! Pretty convenient! Too bad the US can no more easily invade North Korea than it can afford to further burden our already flailing economy or overstretch our military into three separate wars. Well, these factors are linked, so, duh.
And the funny thing is that the country that probably poses the most viable and actual threat to the US – and that's saying a lot, given that all these threats are pretty theoretical – is North Korea, but we can't do anything about it. Who has a better chance of actually utilizing weapons of mass destruction, or at least constantly made intimations and threats about using – Iraq before the invasion or North Korea? Come on – we know the answer to that, and the bullshit excuse of Al Qaeda isn't even necessary.
"Which brings us back to do, do, do, do"...doh! Al Qaeda. Let me make one thing clear – Al Qaeda is a band of horrible, ruthless motherfuckers. If I could push a button and have every one of them disappear in a horrible muzzle flash and rain of fire and death from the Vulcan guns mounted on the bottom of a C-130 or at the hands of our Army guys on the ground, it would make my day. It would be payback. It would be right.
I think that in order to protect American interests and fight back against a clear enemy, we had the right to invade Afghanistan to try to eliminate their network, and the lengths to which the US went to in order to reduce civilian casualties – the fact that our "enemy" was differentiated away from the Afghan people and even the odious Taliban government in place there, which would be easy to vilify and demonize – I thought that displayed a significant elevation in thinking in the American military response.
Imagine if "Russia" had attacked the US, or any other country before 9/11. Even until well after the Iraq war, the US dealt with threats by sending in bombs and cruise missiles from afar. At least in the present war in Afghanistan, significant effort was made to bring the war to the right people.
Al Qaeda's been a threat to the US since the early 90's, but we weren't in a "war on terror." We have been fighting these people and the network they comprise since well before 2001 – what happened was due to the startling unpreparedness and the wet-paper-bag security of American passenger planes and other sensitive facilities. It was a failure of basic, even commonsense security – not a sign of a shift in geopolitics against us, or the rise of an "Islamofascist" state with armies coming to kill us, or even the result of moves made by other world leaders and organizations who had made no bones about disliking us for a long, long time before 9/11.
And even Al Qaeda had attacked us before – in fact, the exact same buildings. The fact that they didn't succeed was the result of bad planning on their part – or good engineering on our part – whichever way you want to look at it. And we went on with our lives, confident that our governement and military were doing all that was possible to protect us – and that they would succeed in that task. But they didn't.
And Al Qaeda's stunning, horrible, unimaginable "success" on September 11, 2001 shook the world. But it was a terrorist attack from a group that had made a clear demand (remove American bases from Saudi soil) and had been attacking us relentlessly and regularly since 1993. For better or for worse, it was fucking a dramatic show of terror, but it wasn't a marker that anything had significantly changed. At all.
So it wasn't a surprise, a new player, nor a new set of politics. There were radical Islamic groups who've hated the US for decades. There have been terrorist attacks all over the world for decades. The world wasn't in any more danger then than it is now, frankly. The only difference is the scale of what Al Qaeda pulled off with good organizational skills and box cutters. Fucking box cutters.
So I can buy doing everything possible to eliminate that network of terrorists. But what are we doing in Iraq? Getting into it with Iran? Why aren't we in North Korea, if Iraq was enough of a threat (not!) to invade that country? I think these are key questions American are asking, although not directly.
Now, as a war drags on in Iraq (WTF?!) and Iran is feeling (rightly?) threatened, and as North Korea continues to all but directly threaten to nuke the US, or at least cover the Korean peninsula in a "sea of fire," with its blustery rhetoric and the US taking the diplomatic route (hey, we have to), all while we're in a war with a country that had no weapons of mass destruction – I think America's feeling pretty fucking confused about whom to hate right now.
Our traditional ideological tools with which we've constructed our enemies in the past are inadequately blunt; in fact, they do more harm than good. This is something that I think a lot of people are missing, even as the West tries to construct a singular Muslim enemy that becomes more and more real as we do it.
I'm not saying it actually is real, or will ever actually become real. But the single biggest boon to recruiter to the armies of the extremists has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Even the Taliban stepped out of the way and was all "waddint us – you can have 'em" after 9/11, back when America had the sympathy and general cooperation of the world.
The anti-war movement didn't start until Iraq, remember. I don't think most Americans had a problem with taking military action in Afghanistan. I don't even think people would have had a problem with extended occupation, which is something the Soviets infamously couldn't pull off. And I personally wanted to see Al-Queda dead. Vaporized. Incinerated. Eliminated.
I had no problem with that.
But why is Saddam Hussein dead? What's he got to do with anything? Despite whatever he did, the real question is for me, "Why him, why now?" It should be Bin Laden on trial, or slumping forward in front of a firing squad, or choking on deadly gas. Whatever.
Iraq? Iran? North Korea? Isn't this news I'd heard before? And the world wasn't falling apart then. I think that's what Americans can't tease through, even in our baddest-ass action movies or violent revenge fantasies. And to end my little rant, I'll leave you with another one of David Denby's very good points, this time made about the film 300, in the same review:
The film is, of course, less an act of psychological warfare than an act of capitalism. It was called into being not by a hunger for war but by the desire to exploit a market—professional-wrestling and X-treme Fighting saturnalias play into the movie’s atmosphere. Everyone screams at everyone, and specialized Persian warriors wearing masks and other freakish regalia turn up to do battle. Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement.
Still, the Iranians have a point: though first planned years ago, “300” is a political fable that uneasily engages the current moment. An all-volunteer expeditionary force of Spartans ventures forth, the warriors sacrificing themselves to stop the invading hordes from killing their wives and children, which may be an allusion to the Bush Administration’s get-them-in-Iraq-before-they-hit-us-here rationale. The Spartans also fight, as a lofty narration informs us, “against mysticism and tyranny.” Against mysticism? How many ancient armies went to their deaths with that as their battle song? And how many men have died, as the Spartans do, to defend “reason”? A whiff of contemporary disdain for the East—what the late Edward Said called “Orientalism”—arises from the mayhem: “300” turns into a dawn-of-democracy epic in which violence is marshalled to protect the future of Western civilization. Made in a time of frustration, when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, “300” and “Shooter” feel like the products of a culture slowly and painfully going mad.
Damn – ain't that the truth?
