BEFORE: Had drinks last night with two friends from college, who I have not seen in about 10 and 20 years, respectively. As a point of catching up, of course 9/11/01 was something of a focal point - "Where were YOU on that day?" is a common enough question in such a situation...
Michael Moore carries over from "Bowling For Columbine" -
THE PLOT: Michael Moore's view on what happened to the United States after September 11; and how the Bush Administration allegedly used the tragic event to push forward its agenda for unjust wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
AFTER: I feel the need to point out that when reviewing such a documentary, my rating is intended not as a commentary on the content (the items and actions depicted, assuming they're factual) but instead on the form (how said actions are presented, such as through editing or interpretation). Just as with the documentary about George Harrison, I could enjoy Mr. Harrison's music and life ethos very much, but I shouldn't let that impact how I feel about the film. Conversely, if I happened to hate Beatles music or George Harrison's lifestyle, I shouldn't let that color how I feel about the way in which it's presented to me. With all narrative films, my rating is intended as a snapshot of how much enjoyment I felt upon the conclusion of the film, and I don't think such a system will be applicable tonight.
With that said, I think the structure of this film was assembled much better than "Bowling For Columbine", which just went off on way too many tangents for my taste. This seemed much more focused, probably because Moore had such a deep hatred for the Cheney/Bush administration that it kept him on track. For the most part - near the end he drifted once again into his old bad habits, sandbagging Senators while they walked to work, asking them if they would sign up their own kids to serve in Iraq (duh, what did you expect they'd say?) Also, once again he sees everything in terms of how it affects Flint, Michigan - comparing the bombed buildings in the Middle East to the dilapidated homes in struggling Michigan seemed like a real stretch. However, profiling the family of a dead soldier from Flint worked fine - he could have come from anywhere, so why not Flint? But it's still worth pointing out to Michael Moore - it's not always about YOU, Mike.
This film also has the same problem, in my opinion, as "Bowling For Columbine" - which cast the blame for the Columbine shootings on everyone EXCEPT the two kids who pulled the trigger. There's plenty of blame to go around for 9/11 too, but Moore chooses to focus on Bush, Cheney, faulty intelligence, lazy senators - pretty much everyone EXCEPT the hijackers and Osama Bin Laden. Which seems like a strange omission, until you realize how focused Moore is on attacking Bush. I hated Bush as president too and didn't approve of most of "his" (Cheney's) policies, but Bush is Moore's white whale, so to speak. Bush is to Michael Moore what Saddam Hussein was to Bush - and that's really ironic.
Some of the information provided tonight I had prior knowledge of, namely the fact that Bin Laden's relatives were flown out of the U.S. at a time when all other planes had been grounded, the fact that Bush ignored the intelligence report from August 2001 about Bin Laden's plan to hijack planes, and of course the shell game that was played between getting attacked by one country and then retaliating against another. How Bush and Cheney avoided getting prosecuted for war crimes is beyond me.
There was also information about 9/11 and the Iraq/Afghanistan war that I didn't already know - Haliburton's proposed pipeline through Afghanistan, Bush's refusal to appoint an independent panel to investigate the 9/11 attacks, the fact that nobody really read the Patriot Act before signing it, and a confirmation that the color-coded terror alerts were a bunch of B.S. (I KNEW IT!) - this sort of reinforces that "climate of fear" argument that Moore started to talk about in last night's film.
However, Moore can't seem to decide whether George Bush was an evil mastermind, or an incompetent gadfly, or just some kind of corporate shill for Saudi oil interests. He seems to be whichever bugaboo Moore needs him to be at the time to make a point. But I don't see how he can be all three - this film would have been stronger if he could have just picked one of these and really emphasized that.
When you start to examine the "Bush doctrine", which I think just contained the line "It must be Iraq's fault" - and if you take as a given that we were attacked by Al Qaeda and not Iraq, that means that we invaded a sovereign nation for no good reason. Well, except to destroy the WMDs, which everyone was able to find on satellite images, but not when they arrived on site. So again, we invaded a country and killed people for no good reason. I know we've done it before, and we'll probably do it again. That doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make us any better than our enemies, in fact it kind of drags us down to their level.
I remember the weeks after the 9/11 attacks - there was uncertainty, sure, about what the U.S. response would and should be. And I remember thinking, "Wouldn't the best response be to not respond at all?" I kept silent, though, which I regret - because the prevailing wisdom seemed to be, "Well, we've got to do SOMEthing!" No, that's not entirely correct. I often find that doing nothing is the best, easiest or wisest course of action. In this case it would also have been the hardest - but don't all of these politicians claim to be good Christians, and aren't good Christians supposed to "turn the other cheek"?
"Well, we had to remove Saddam Hussein from power!" Did we? Did we really? Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but can anyone prove that invading Iraq was the BEST course of action? There seemed to be no way to do that without bomb strikes that killed innocent civilians, and again that makes us no better than the terrorists, and it makes more people hate the U.S., which leads to more potentially bad consequences down the road.
"Well, we had to destroy Al Qaeda for what they did!" Again, did we? This seems more of an focused response, but it's also revenge, and "an eye for an eye" often leaves both parties blind. What was the cost, financially and in human lives, of using the 9/11 attacks to justify two ongoing, decade-long wars? What happened to the U.S. economy, to relations with other countries, to our own consciences? As Moore pointed out, if politicians lied to drag us into a war, how can U.S. citizens ever trust them again?
I know the argument for the war - over 3,000 civilians dead in the attacks on U.S. soil. But nothing's going to change that. Sending troops to war and killing 100,000 Iraqis, losing 4,000 U.S. troops in the process, didn't that just compound the problem? Are we better off or safer than we were in 2001? Not really, and a lot more people are dead.
Or if you demand something, imagine if we could have skipped ahead to the endgame - put our intelligence to work for a few months, and then sent in Seal Team 6 for a surgical strike - how cool would THAT have been? How many lives could have been saved? Let's be honest, how hard was bombing the crap out of Iraq from planes? How much of an attempt, if any, was made to insure that civilians were kept safe and only "bad people" died? I'm guessing none.
We're right on the heels of something happening in Syria, and I don't mean to belittle the suffering that has taken place there, but here comes that old argument again - "We have to do SOMEthing!" And once again I think, "No, that's not entirely correct." We COULD do nothing if we determine that doing something would have short-term benefits but long-term consequences. Admittedly I'm not an expert on the MidEast, and I don't consider myself a pacifist either, but I think wars (including limited wars, or drone strikes, or whatever) should only happen once EVERY other possible solution has been tried. I maintain that there were other possible responses to 9/11 besides war, ones that weren't even considered, including doing nothing.
RATING: 4 out of 10 recruitment brochures
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