BEFORE:Yes, I'm counting this as a war film, for Memorial Day, because it's about Gulf War II, or the Iraq/Afghanistan War, which is FINALLY coming to an end this year, after TWENTY years (or maybe 18, depending on where you start counting from...) So maybe the timing is perfect, because this film is all about the start of that war, how the Bush II administration pushed for it, and whether that was all legit in the first place.
Woody Harrelson Weekend wraps up as he carries over from "Lost in London".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Official Secrets" (Movie #3,724)
THE PLOT: A group of journalists from the Knight-Ridder news service covering President George W. Bush's planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 are skeptical of the President's claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction".
AFTER: Hindsight is 20/20, sure, but since no conclusive proof of WMD's was ever found, how do we all feel about Operation: Enduring Freedom now? The Bush/Cheney administration sold us a bill of goods, something about satellite photos and aluminum tubes, and years later, everyone from the Senators who voted for the war to the New York Times itself had to issue some kind of public apology. Colin Powell resigned, W. somehow got a pass and now spends his days making paintings, and Cheney got a heart from the Wizard and somehow never stood trial for war crimes. What gives? Did they all believe the narrative that they were using as a justification for the Iraq Invasion? Or was this all some foreshadowing of the Trump Administration, using the media to tell a story that wasn't true in order to divert more government funds to Halliburton, which just happened to have Cheney on its board of directors.
It was one of the biggest shell games in U.S. history - and we all fell for it. Terrorists from the Al-Qaeda struck the U.S. and toppled the towers, and their influence was traced back to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government finally decide to retaliate, by striking at Iraq. Wait, what? Imagine that when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt announced we were going to war against China. Maybe you could justify that by saying that China was a bigger long-term threat, but they weren't the ones directly responsible for the attack. I remember when Colin Powell made that impressive speech to the U.N. Security Council to claim that Saddam Hussein had these mobile biological weapons labs mounted on trucks and said there was "no doubt" that Iraq had bio-weapons and were working on obtaining components to produce nuclear weapons. History now has to decide if this was all based on faulty data, or some kind of intentional hoax to produce the desired result, the invasion of Iraq.
According to this film, only one news organization didn't buy any of it, and was actively working to question everything the U.S. government was putting out, and that was Knight-Ridder, who now own about 45 newspapers nationwide (and 10 TV stations), and those papers use a lot of articles generated at the conglomerate's headquarters in San Jose. Two reporters in particular, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, were writing pieces that were critical of the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Their reporting was counter to that of the New York Times, Washington Post and many others, but in retrospect they've been called "the reporting team that got Iraq right".
This all seems very familiar, especially coming out of the Trump Years, as we all are. Even back in 2001 there were two kinds of reporters, the ones who will write the article based on the information spoon-fed to them by the White House press secretary or the President himself, and the other kind, the ones who will fact-check and do more digging and maybe figure out if that narrative is, you know, really true. Can I trace the deep division in our cultural ethos right now back to the Bush administration? Or can we go back to Nixon - didn't reporters learn anything from Watergate? Fox News was basically a branch of the Trump propaganda machine, at least for the majority of his term - but can you really call them reporters if they're not interested in doing any research or fact-checking? Then everything got so muddled up with "alternative facts" (also known as "lies") and "fake news" (also known as any news Trump didn't like).
And so this is where we find ourselves - actions have consequences. Invading Iraq with improper justification led to over 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and over 155,000 deaths overall, another 2,400 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and over 170,000 dead overall. What if things had been different, and this false narrative wasn't put forth by Bush/Cheney/Powell? That's a lot of people who might still be alive. (By extension, the same goes for Trump, what if he'd taken any appropriate action at the start of the pandemic, promoted proper mask mandates, didn't just treat COVID-19 like a flu that would be gone in a couple months, how many people now dead would still be alive?)
Look, I get it, we were all upset about 9/11 - nobody more so than Bush and Cheney, who wanted a war so badly they pushed the country into one with the flimsiest evidence, and they wanted a WIN so badly they printed up those "Mission: Accomplished" banners about a month into an 18-year-long war. That's some wishful thinking, right? And Bush arrived on that aircraft carrier by plane, wearing a flight suit, as if he had flown the plane himself. (Umm, he didn't. Bush was never trained to land on an aircraft carrier, and anyway, they don't let the President take risks like that...). It was all great theater, and maybe that all guaranteed him a second term, but it was also a scam, a flim-flam, a con job on the U.S. people. (Why didn't we learn anything from it? Eight years later, we fell for an even bigger scam artist...)
Then the White House got some flak for hanging that banner, and tried to back-pedal it, you know, because the war still ran on after that May 2003 speech. First they said that the crew of the aircraft carrier arranged that sign (they didn't), then they said it referred to the deployment of THAT ship, not the entire mission of the war (more B.S.) and then finally the White House admitted they hung the banner, but still claimed it was at the request of the carrier's crew. (Doesn't this sound familiar - like Trump's flunkeys claiming his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama's?). Besides, what had been accomplished at that point? Saddam was still in power, Bin Laden hadn't been killed yet, that happened on Obama's watch. But the Bush administration never let the facts get in the way of their narrative, it seems.
My point is that it's great to live in a country with a free press - but if those press people are in somebody else's pocket, or they don't show a desire to do their jobs and check facts or do a little bit of investigating once in a while, then that's how freedom starts to die. The worst thing that reporters can have is a political bias, because that means at best they're only going to do their job half of the time. That's not the spirit that built this country and made it great - if you're just half-assing it, maybe reporting is not for you and you should find another line of work. So this is a very note-worthy film, but unfortunately it's not very cinematic to have a bunch of reporters just meeting with people, sitting at desks writing articles, and then having discussions about them. Maybe this should be right up there with "All the President's Men", "Spotlight" and "The Post", but I'm not convinced that it is.
Also starring James Marsden (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Rob Reiner (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Hunted"), Jessica Biel (last seen in "Hitchcock"), Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Al Sapienza (last seen in "Capone"), Wayne Pére (ditto), Luke Tennie, Terence Rosemore (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Lindsay Ayliffe (ditto), Margo Moorer (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Michael Harding (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Kate Butler (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Caroline Fourmy (last seen in "Supercon"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Anthony Reynolds (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Han Soto (last seen in "Heist" (2015)), Jack Topalian (last seen in "Argo"), Ned Yousef, John Newberg, Tony Bentley, David Moncrief, Terry Dale Parks (last seen in "The Last Stand").
with archive footage of Christine Amanpour, Osama bin Laden (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), George W. Bush (ditto), Robert Byrd, Dick Cheney (last seen in "The Report"), Donald Rumsfeld (ditto), Lou Dobbs (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Sean Hannity, Orrin Hatch, Ted Koppel, Joseph Lieberman, Judith Miller, Colin Powell (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Condoleezza Rice, Tim Russert, Jerry Springer (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine"), Paul Wolfowitz, Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Joe Galloway and the voices of Wolf Blitzer (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "Whitney")
RATING: 6 out of 10 death threats (with spelling errors)
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