In Honor of the President's Visit to Iraq...

...we went to see this movie today. At once enraging and heartbreaking. See it if you can, no matter what your political affiliation.

http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/

And put this one in your Netflix queue:

http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/

Let the partisan namecalling commence.

 

The Why We Fight series in fascinating and enlightening on numerous levels: scholarly, historical and from a propaganda/PR standpoint.

And every time I see Dubya breathing the same air as real military men and women, I get physically ill.

 

geo bush: "why i kill your children."

 

Who does he think he's kidding going over there? I know it means a lot to the troops, and I'm glad he does it for them. But the fact that four years later a visiting head of state needs to be snuck into a country and heavily protected says about all I need to know about Iraq.

 

jmac --
Saw No End In Sight myself.
Strong stuff, but, to me, there as an awful lot of ass-covering from Powell's people.
Where were they when it counted?

 

Good question, F_B.

Loyalty trumps reality, I suppose. A few may have been feeding Sy Hersh some stuff around the time of the UN presentation, but certainly no one at State was stepping up in public (nor, apparently, in private) to loudly condemn the bloody knuckleheadedness to come.

What's fascinating to me is how Powell's role in all this has softened into mythology already - without the usual layover for the harsh judgments of history. He's become the noble warrior ill-used, his honor spent on behalf of a lie, his goodness undone by a mendacious king. Powell becomes a more classically tragic figure with every retelling. One gets the sense - from the books and movies and magazines - that he tried to put the brakes on, but didn't have the leverage to do so. That his staff remains loyal to him in that context and on those terms is no surprise to me.

Here's an interesting sidebar to "No End in Sight," arriving just this morning from the outbox of the idiot Bremer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/washington/04bremer.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

 

jmac --
I'm not buying the lack of leverage argument. Not for a minute. He was the one guy in that government who could have thrown sand in the gears with a single press conference and/or resignation. Would the idiots have launched the war anyway? Probably. But if there was one guy who had the power and prestige to stop it, it was Powell. At the very least, he could have told Cheney to shove his dog-and-pony show at the UN.

 

As much as I agree with you, the man was loyal.

He seemed to believe that 43 was owed his loyalty, based on 41's promotion of Powell.

Sadly, 43 has been anything buy loyal to daddy's gang, save Choker Cheney.

 

Of course I agree with you, F_B. I meant he didn't have the leverage of logic or argumentation within the lunatic bell jar of that perverse decison-making process as it existed in the White House. Were he as good a man as we might hope, he could have stepped outside the system and set himself (metaphorically) aflame to get it stopped.

Perhaps his training as a soldier - and an adult lifetime spent taking orders from people whose motives he assumed to be sane, if not pure - prevented him from doing so.

 

2 more days in Iraq and Bush will get his Combat Infantry Badge

 

OK, now THAT'S funny.

 

Harkens back those favorite medals of the '60's, the Baltimore Beltway Medal and I Was Alive In '65.