I think Mr. Douthat's general point, if I understand it correctly, about making political films more balanced and realistic, is an admirable one in principle. Unfortunately, films, whether right-wing or left-wing orientated, want to make money and be entertaining and often stoop to a good guy/bad guy view which sells more tickets and popcorn. There aren't many blockbuster, balanced documentaries. Matt Damon and John Wayne are evidently good for popcorn digestion.

Nevertheless, I'm sorry Mr. Douthat has used "The Green Zone" as his example of the problem of which he is critical. I liked "The Green Zone" because I feel it essentially QUESTIONS the MORALITY of the War in Iraq, i.e., its justification. Although the film uses fictional characters of pure nobility (Damon) pitted against those of pure evil (Kinnear) and I don't believe there's any proof that any high-level Iraqi commander was specifically "hushed up" about a claim of no WMD, the evidence to me is strong that "evidence" known to be flimsy was specifically dredged up to provide an exaggerated pretext for this war. (Iraq had no connection with 9/11, no Al-Qaeda in Iraq when invaded, No WMD, Hussein was a murderer whom we supported once, but there are many such dictators in the world we're doing nothing about; suspicious motives regarding oil access for Bush's oil-rich financiers, while Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban retook Afghanistan and made inroads into nuclear Pakistan; See also Frank Rich's "The Greatest Story Ever Sold", 2006).

I feel our military actions in Kuwait and Afghanistan were/are justifiable, and I'm always grateful to American service men and women who sacrifice with good intentions to protect our country. However, please consider:

George Bush Jr. - preemptive war and torture advocate - never served in combat

Dick Cheney - preemptive war and torture advocate, war profiteer - avoided draft during Vietnam War

John Wayne - gung-ho enthusiast about war - never served

Ronald Regan - strong military advocate - never served in combat

Karl Rove - strong military advocate - avoided draft during Vietnam War

John McCain, Colin Powell, Howard Zinn, George Bush, Sr., Paddy Chayefsky, John Kerry, Max Cleland, Pres. Eisenhower - all served in combat and are/were against torture and are generally sober and cautious about or are against war, and some had their records smeared by Karl Rove, Bush Jr. and their acolytes, for political expediency.

I was against the War in Iraq the first time I heard Bush put the words "Iraq" and "war" in the same sentence after 9/11. I was against it for MORAL reasons. When we were "winning", I was against it for the same reason. When we were "losing" I was against it for the same reason. Now, when we were are sort of somewhere in between "winning" and "losing", I'm against it for the same reason. I feel that a good safeguard against unnecessary war is that we always explicitly address the morality of a given war, as this film did. The Catholic Church and most American Protestant and Jewish religious hierarchies came to the conclusion that the War in Iraq specifically did NOT meet the criteria for a just war. (Ron Paul, the libertarian has always felt that way too). Regardless of any good long-range outcome, which might have been achieved through peaceful or covert means, and balanced against the hundreds of thousands dead and trillions spent, ends don't justify means, and if it's wrong, it's wrong.
http://www.beliefnet.com...

no, you don't have any point, Mr. Douthat..You are slowing beginning to acknowledge the truth that everyone else knows..What do you think the Downing Street Memo is all about? Why did Bush set up Doug Feith as a separate group? What was Frances' objection to going to war? What is the relationship between 9/11 and Iraq, and how was it portrayed and verbalized by Bush, Cheney Rice et al, before the war, to sell the public? All these are facts that are available to you, as you continue on your course of self-examination. Keep going - answer these questions, with the facts..they are available to all..Lastly, did you watch ANY of the hearing the Brits recently had - the one woman was quite clear and vocal about her perspective, basically the same as most of the commenters here..What do you think of her testimony?
It seems this article is a small step towards seeing the truth..Bravo..Keep going!

But as a mostly politically moderate person *I* walk out of movies like this (especially any product by Michael Moore and most by Oliver Stone) rolling my eyes for much the reasons you do, AND I think you went way too far in ascribing the polarization of American discourse about how we got into the war on Iraq to how Hollywood handles it.

Other things in our culture of late, notably the segregation of a lot of our discourse to partisan blogs and cable TV, has had a much larger effect on the background of polarization of political discourse. When it comes to the Iraq war specifically though, the facts that have come out here and in Britain, and the obvious connection of prominent apologists and their own self interest (anyone named Cheney being an obvious example), leave little to even be seriously discussed. Against that background, your article of yesterday and recent posts are but reaching and groping for some sort of softening light to cast on the situation. Because that is the best you can do to help it.

It's only because the conservative strategy was a form of revisionism in advance that you get to take the rhetorical tack that there was any complexity at all.

But you would say that, writing in the Times.

Ross: Every time I read the line that "we invaded Iraq -— a war supported, if memory serves, by leaders in both parties, a majority of the public and a substantial portion of the American political class — ....da, dum." I'm reminded of that wonderful Man-on-the-Street series of interviews done by a British team in America which asked "which country should we invade next?". The respondents, of course were unanimous that it should be Iran. Then they were all shown a map of the world and asked what they felt would be the best approach for an invasion. Only one minor detail on this map had been altered - the placement of Iran on the Australian continent and Australia moved to the Middle East. Some interviewees did express surprise that "Iran" was surrounded by water, but all felt that it could easily be invaded - some with strategic bombing from Hawaii, others with a land invasion from the Philippines or Indonesia, still others with an assault through the Outback from Thailand. No one seemed to question that "Iran" wasn't right where the map said it was - just a little northwest of New Zealand. I think it was done about the time when it became obvious that members of Congress didn't have much of a clue about the difference between a Shia and a Sunni. To argue that the Iraq invasion was "supported" (if memory serves) by all these imbeciles is a little like arguing, as Goebbels so eloquently did years ago, that a nation of poorly educated fodder and their deeply ignorant representatives can be whipped into war frenzy by anyone clever enough to do it.

Is that what you meant to say with your "if memory serves"?

I know you were a theater critic and not a political scribe at the time when you said you "supported the war", but I hope you at least knew that Iraq was up there somewhere north of Zimbabwe and west of India and that the predominant religion, (if memory serves), was probably not Hindi. (That wasn't on the "Let's Invade Iraq" test but it was good to know). But you do, as you say, have "something of a point". They're not making a lot of movies about what an excellent adventure this turned out to be and how brilliant our leaders were in concocting it. And, alas, Dubya's "nuances" seems to have totally escaped the filmmakers. Perhaps these films are in final edit and post-production as we speak. But I wouldn't invest in studios bidding for distribution rights if I were you.

"And all my talk about the need for art that admits of nuance, that allows for good intentions, and that leaves room for real tragedy sounds to him like so much self-justification."

My objection to your view, particularly your invocation of Shakespeare lies in what appears to be your fundamental lack of understanding as to what kinds of stories classical tragedies tell. It is rarely the case, either in Shakespeare or in Greek tragedy, that the bad things that happen arise from the actions of people acting out of good intentions. Medea murders her children to hurt the husband who abandoned her. Macbeth murders a King simply because he wants to be King. Leontes in Winter's Tale (not technically a tragedy), afflicted by jealousy, accuses his wife of adultery and, having received proof of her innocence from the Delphic Oracle, ignores it and causes the death of his son. In The Oresteia murders are the product of revenge as are the ones in Othello. Lear, driven by vanity, does exactly what he is counseled against and the results are as predicted. Richard II, shallow, vain and unprepared to be a King, seals his doom by acting out of impulse and petulance. And Richard III? Nuff said.

My point is this; if tragedy has anything to tell us, it is to warn us of the dangers of arrogance, ambition, envy, moral certainty, moral blindness, and the pointless pursuit and irresponsible exercise of power. The so called "tragic flaw" is always in the end, a weakness of character. And no story of the Bush years grounded in classical tragedy is likely to point to anyone's good intentions.

As late as 2006, half of Americans believed that Saddam had WMD. http://www.washingtonpost.com...

You write that the apparatchiks who pushed for war didn't _know_ they were wrong about WMD. That may be true. But they were, at the very least, recklessly indifferent to the truth on the matter, eager to shout down those with whom they disagreed, and none too eager to correct the record.

Until you spend 30 columns calling for accountability for those key war supporters, your one column about too-stark art on the topic will receive this kind of reaction from those who were shouted down.

Ross, I've got to stress to you that it is fiction. Most people know that. I think this is also the problem you had with Avatar. You do not need to serve as the last bastion protecting fragile minds from a worldview you disagree with-in fiction. People know exactly what these movies are, fiction.

These are not history textbooks or valid documentaries. You should really be annoyed that Texas is striking Thomas Jefferson from the list of Framers to fit their historical narrative. . .that is true simplification.

Should the fact that The Wizard of Oz is a populist narrative about keeping the Gold Standard detract from its cultural value? No. And it should not.

You do absolutely nothing to counter Larison's point that your critique amounts to nothing more than a cry for a fairer representation of the warmongers. Since when is political art -- to say nothing of straight-forward political polemic, which ought to be even more scrupulous about nuance, pretending to factual argumentation as it does -- since when does political art concern itself with fairness to those it targets? Political art simplifies, exaggerates, makes black or white what is gray -- that is how it does what it does (except when it makes gray what is thought to be black or white). Your claim is that the Iraq invasion was beset by shades of gray in reality. leaving aside that such a situation seems to provide a clear condemnation in retrospect on its own terms -- should not the launching of an elective war on a gray-not-black-and-white justification be seen in retrospect as a black-and-white wrong? -- leaving that aside, if the reality was gray, then it seems the job of political art is to have a go at making the story a bit more black-and-white. Others can try to tell the same story in a way that makes it black-and-white the other way, or keeps it gray. in any case, this notion that art has an obligation to fairness in portrayal is a simple fallacy. Art takes a point of view. This is why Larison's point that if your critique should be applied to art about the decision, then it certainly should be applied to those making the decision. So many in the administration and in the media made as though there was a black-and-white case when it was in fact at best gray; ultimately their obligation to represent the grayness responsibly must dwarf that of people presenting the story in hindsight through dramatization. A simple assumption that destructive acts should not be undertaken when the reality of the case for doing them is blindingly gray would have forestalled these historical actors'their fate of being misrepresented by art in history because of the destruction their failure to heed that prudent maxim in fact wrought. Why shouldn't we see that fact in black and white?

Where were you in late 2002-early 2003 when Sean Penn went to Iraq with a camera to prove there was no threat to the US in the form of weapons of mass destruction? Where were you when Susan Sarandon complained of being targeted by the Bush administration to silence her outspoken views against the war? Where were you in Jan-Feb 2003 when French documentarians went to the Persian Gulf to interview US soldiers who were lying in wait for orders to invade Iraq, at the same that Bush was lying to the US media about their even being there? Where were you when George Michael created a scathing music video to denounce Blair and Bush for a war based on lies? Why are you waiting for artists to create Hollywood fiction about a war that many of us knew at the time was based on lies? As a journalist, it is your job to inform the public. The question then is not where's the Hollywood fictional version of the lies used to invade Iraq. The question that remains is why didn't you, as a journalist, do your job?

Without defending any of the particular films you condemn, Ross, I think you paint with far too broad a brush in your account of "real art, which is supposed to be interested in the humanity of all its subjects."

Take, for instance, Bob Dylan's "Masters of War." Is there "radical sympathy" for the war-makers in his epic final stanza?

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Not exactly a lot of sympathy, but, my God, what a song. There has to be a place in art for an expression of the kind of biblical anger that Dylan's articulating here, and I'm quite sure that someone could make an awesome film about Iraq that was coming from the same place. Which isn't to say that anyone's made it, just that it could be done, and it wouldn't be doomed to fail as art simply because it wasn't interested in the tragic flaws of Bush, Rumsfeld, Hitchens, Yglesias, Douthat, etc.

Perhaps you should question why so many of us, non-politicians, did see clearly what was happening and why you did not. What made it possible for you to not see how complicated it was and why did you think invading Iraq was a good idea? What happened to your ability to engage in critical thinking and reasoning? Was it purely an emotional reaction on your part? Addressing those issues would be much more interesting than reading a column about how you expect Hollywood to be anything more than fantasy.

The Reaganization of America has now been perpetuated for 30 years -- and youth is so scared of Muslim terrorists that they prefer the loss of freedom and the supposed safety to an open world. (We have to get 'em before they get us. -- and the press has never demanded that the Part Authroity of NY and NJ that built the twin towers out of code or the command post of the fFDNY take any responsiblity -- in the first case for inadequately fireproofed building with inadequate exits -- and a flimsy construction -- and in the second case having faulty communications equipment which led to the death of at least 400 firefighters plus the collateral damage -- which in this case was lots of Americans.

Greed is the new religion == which is why we need the 90% bracket and higher taxes ... starting if not at 60 at 106K -- but we prefer to create pretend solutions, even tho anyone more than 60 has to know more or less how things worked in the good old days. (I esp. miss making the flight by five minutes... now you miss a lfight with 59 minutes to go.!)

Examining art not as art but with political litmus test was something Marxist "art critics" used to do and was terribly wrong then and equally wrong now.

I will like to add to my previous comment:

Films are art, not politics.
Douthat's point of view of the the films is political.

In my view analyzing films only through the lens of politics is a grotesquely oversimplified approach of examining art. It was the limitations of Marxist art critics who saw art only as a tool for politics. I find it ironic that an art critic is complaining about the lack of nuance of the artists who made the films when in fact Mr. Douthat reduced the movie to the single dimension of politics.

Furthermore even the political analysis of a war that enriched those who started it, was just a mistake of inexperience, is rather naive and lacks nuance itself.

Why is it so terribly difficult for conservatives (a ridiculous definition for Mr Douthout) to utter the words "I was wrong." Instead, confronted with fact on fact, they must twist and bend to find some way to elude the simple humbling statement, "I was wrong."
Sociological surveys show that those who are "conservative" lean toward authoritarian structures, hard right/wrong views, are inflexible, and evidently inside that cocoon, can't say "Sorry, I was wrong." Be a real man, Mr Douthout. Fess up: you were wrong. Plain and simple. Doesn't that feel better now?

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