Improv-ing on Control Room

So, at long last, here are some random, only barely coherent thoughts on Control Room.

One crucial thing that the movie brings to the table is it gives some content to the Arab perspective on the war, something more nuanced than just, “They hate us.” And the movie demonstrates starkly just how clueless we are. We simply do not understand Arab nationalism. I suspect that there is, somewhere in the Pentagon, someone who can appreciate that Arab perspectives on the West have been shaped, first, by strong feelings of anti-colonialism, and more recently by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But there is a related point that even despite all of Bush’s rhetoric about the universality of freedom, we simply just don’t seem to understand: Freedom cannot be given from the top down (and certainly not by outsiders). It’s not like having an extra piece of pie that we don’t want, so we give it away to our friends. Freedom is something that must be taken—reclaimed—by the people themselves. And so the fact is that, even though we have “handed over” sovereignty (or should I say “sovereignty”) to the Iraqis, the Iraqi people will never see themselves as free until we’re gone, and when we do finally leave, they will see it as a victory for them and a defeat for us.

Another point that the movie really drives home is that the American media sucks. First, there is the problem of overwhelming laziness. Does anybody do any fact-checking at all these days? I mean, is it really so hard to get a translator to make sure the Iraqi kids you’re showing are actually, as you claim, cheering George Bush? And surely someone, somewhere must have seen the wide-angle shot of the square in Baghdad showing that, contrary to what we were led to believe, there was not, in fact, a mass, spontaneous uprising to pull down the Saddam statue.

But where was this story? This should have been huge; a blatant attempt by the American government to cook the books on the war. But no, instead we got fluff pieces on Jessica Lynch. I mean, I’ll grant you that she is cute and blonde. And was it a heartwarming tale of resilience, perseverance, pluck, and the American spirit? Sure. But, to be inappropriately flip about it, why should we give a rat’s ass about any of this? Why is this an appropriate story for national news coverage? This is the kind of story that belongs on local news and, at most, a show like Dateline. So, fine, you want to give me some soft-focus interview with Barbara Walters or Jane Pauley? Go right ahead. But don’t do cut-aways on CNN so you can show me Jessica Lynch’s triumphant return to the States.

And if al-Jazeera comes off looking better than it should in this movie, it’s mostly because it’s just so refreshing to finally get some news coverage that’s not spun silly by CENTCOM.

Finally, the movie makes clear that this military has learned at least one thing from Vietnam. This Pentagon will not have its war plans derailed by an uncooperative public, and it is accordingly obsessed with managing the home front, with ensuring that the perception of the war back in Muncie, Indiana stays positive. A lot of the “news” coming out of CENTCOM was ridiculous, and obviously meant for domestic consumption rather than winning over the hearts and minds of Iraqis, and it was specifically meant to basically distract us from unfortunate or inconvenient news.

The most egregious example of this is the Jessica Lynch story, which got pushed—conveniently enough—immediately after U.S. forces killed Arab journalists in Baghdad. (The movie suggests that we basically had these guys wacked because we were pissed at the way they were covering the war. The official explanation is that U.S. forces were being fired upon from that location, basically the wartime equivalent of “He was reaching for a gun.”) Anyway, even members of the American media were understandably salty about the idea of the journalists being bombed, and so out came the tale of Jessica Lynch. (One of the more depressingly hilarious moments in the movie comes when a CENTCOM press officer tries to push the Lynch story on the al-Jazeera team, and they are just baffled, astonished, and generally having none.)

In general, the obsession with spin control demonstrates how nowhere we are in Iraq, as though the problem in Iraq is one of message discipline and not a failed policy. You can see this same phenomenon all across the board, in both domestic and foreign policy. But you can’t just will Iraq to stability, or will the creation of jobs. Saying Iraq is stable doesn’t make it so, and saying that tax cuts will solve all our economic problems doesn’t make it so either. You can’t just message these problems away. A failed policy is a failed policy, and real problems demand real solutions. Talk all you want, but as Jason is fond of saying, “You can’t polish a turd.”