Kevin Shay, Washington
I recently saw Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, which even reviewers for conservative media outlets like Fox News have praised. I knew I would like the documentary, based on reviews I read. But still, I can't remember seeing a movie that has affected me as much. I can't remember ever seeing a movie where the audience gave it a standing ovation when it ended, which occurred in many more theatres across the country than just the Maryland one I attended.
Natalie Sorton, a 25-year-old moderate Republican and wife of an infantryman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina, where Fort Bragg is, that the movie changed her opinion of the war in Iraq. "All this movie did was open my eyes a little more to what's really going on", she said. "I think this is definitely going to have an impact on the election. I'm glad I'm a voter."
Moore portrayed soldiers accurately as doing what they were told, Sorton said.
Greg Rohwer-Selken, 33, of Ames, Iowa, whose wife, Karol, is serving in the National Guard in Iraq, was moved to tears and told Time magazine: "It really made me question why she has to be over there."
In conservative Indiana County, Pennsylvania, Eric Blank told the Indiana Gazette: "I have not felt this angry toward an administration ever. I wanted Clinton yanked from office, but I think Bush should go to jail."
Outside a Missouri theatre, Leslie Hanser told the Los Angeles Times she had supported Bush "fiercely" before but finally understood why many Americans opposed his policies. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before", she said.
At one point in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore said he was amazed that the people who received so little from this country, like the poor, were usually the ones who gave so much by dying and getting injured in war. Of course, not just the poor are in the military. A good part is middle class, but very few wealthy families put their kids in harm's way.
Only one out of 535 members of Congress, which largely supported the Iraqi invasion, had a child there, and few Congress members would talk with Moore when he tried to confront them about that fact outside the Capitol building.
Moore said on his internet site that he was heartened by military families' support for his film. "Our troops know the truth", he wrote. "They have seen it first-hand. And many of them could not believe that here was a movie that was truly on their side — the side of bringing them home alive and never sending them into harm's way again unless it's the absolute last resort."
Of course, there is Lila Lipscomb, the Michigan mother of a soldier who died in Iraq who played a prominent role in Moore's film. Once a conservative Democrat who loathed anti-war protesters, the movie portrayed her transformation. "I've since come to realise that the protesters of today are protesting against the act of war", she said. "I accept that. We have a right to protest that."
Moore went to great pains to get his facts right. He hired the former chief of fact checking at New Yorker magazine to comb the film for inaccuracies. "There's lots of disagreement with my analysis of these facts or my opinion based on the facts", he told Time. "There is not a single factual error in the movie."
The New York Times, which is not near as liberal as many people think, largely agreed with Moore, writing, "Central assertions of fact in Fahrenheit 9/11 are supported by the public record". For instance, Moore's contention that Bush spent 42% of his first eight months as president on vacation came from the Washington Post, which is also not as liberal as many think.
Television host David Letterman gave some insight into what Bush and other White House officials were really thinking with a Top Ten List on "Bush Complaints About Fahrenheit 9/11". Among them were that "The actor who played the president was totally unconvincing", "It oversimplified the way I stole the election", and "Couldn't hear most of the movie over Cheney's foul mouth".
Moore, himself, is not as partisan as those Republican groups that lie about being "non-partisan". He does not spare Democrats in his film. Moore points out how most Democratic senators, including John Kerry, not only voted for the Iraq war but didn't criticise Bush's decision to invade until recently.
In one scene, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle urged his colleagues to vote for Bush's Iraq war. Daschle attended the Washington, DC, premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 and told Moore after seeing the film that he "felt bad and that we were all going to fight from now on".
One scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 showed better than others who is closest to Bush. Dressed in a tuxedo, Bush tells a banquet room full of wealthy campaign contributors, "Here I am, with the 'have's' and the 'have-more's'. People call you the 'elite'. I call you 'my base'."
Moore's movie also touched on some dangerous precedents set in the USAPATRIOT Act, but didn't cover how Bush's decision to invade Iraq violated the United Nations charter, how the US violated the Geneva Convention in its treatment of detainees, how a US Justice Department memo proclaimed that torture of prisoners was legal — in violation of the International Convention Against Torture.
Seeing that Iraq was not really an "imminent" threat against the US before the war, that there were really no weapons of mass destruction there, that Saddam Hussein did not have anything to do with 9/11, what is this Iraqi war really about? Two words: Empire and oil.
In September 2000, two months before the stolen election, a neo-conservative think tank called Project for the New American Century released a report that advocated that the US assert its military dominance over the world to shape "the international security order in line with American principles and interests". It called for "regime change" in Iraq and China, among other countries, and to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars".
Vice-President Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, were prominent members of the Washington-based organisation. Some of them had lobbied the Clinton administration several years before to invade Iraq, which by no coincidence, contains the second largest oil reserves on the planet.
"The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security", the publication said. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
The report added the US military needed to be transformed to control not just the Middle East and other regions, but space and cyberspace, even to the points of establishing "US Space Forces" and developing biological and chemical weapons. This transformation would likely take a long-time "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor", the authors wrote.
A year later, the group had its "new Pearl Harbor".
Even as fires from Flight 77 burned on one side of the Pentagon on 9/11, Rumsfeld wrote down his thoughts on the other side: "Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at the same time. Not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]... Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
As the credits to Fahrenheit 9/11 rolled, I listened to Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World", reading the names of those who produced such a powerful flick. When I finally left the theatre after Moore's final message "Do something" — I turned only to see an empty room, except for two elderly women who remained to discuss what they just saw. A theatre employee handed me a pack of aspirin, saying it was for "in case of a headache".
"Thanks", I said. "But I think the people in the White House need this more than me."
[Abridged from <http://www.opednews.com>. Kevin Shay, a Washington, DC, writer, won a 2002 International Peacewriting Award for Walking Through the Wall, an electronic book about a transcontinental march for peace and justice he joined. The latest book to which he contributed, Big Bush Lies, was recently released by RiverWood Books.]
From Green Left Weekly, July 21, 2004.
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