GREEN ZONE

GREEN ZONE is a political thriller that simplistically attacks the problem of why the United States allegedly did not find any weapons of mass destruction when it defeated Saddam Hussein in 2003 in Iraq. The answer it comes up with is bogus and distorts what actually happened, apparently to fit movie star Matt Damon’s well-known leftist views.

The movie opens with U.S. troops rolling into Baghdad in 2003. Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) and his team of inspectors are looking for weapons of mass destruction, but they have found none so far. Careening from one treacherous site to the next, they encounter one major Iraqi general, who escapes their grasp. Miller decides to investigate what’s going on in the Green Zone, where State Department and intelligence bureaucrats clash with the CIA’s main guy. Miller and the CIA man search for answers to the absence of WMD stockpiles, a search that leads them back to the Iraqi general.

GREEN ZONE is engrossing but ultimately disappointing. And, its conclusion that the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq was just one big lie fostered by one person is historically false. Apparently, the movie is designed to fit with Matt Damon’s publicly stated, conspiratorial, leftist worldview. It also contains plenty of strong foul language and lots of intense action violence.

In reality, a lengthy July 4, 2004 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee (http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2004_rpt/iraq-wmd-intell_cover.htm) showed that there were no big lies in the Bush administration about WMD in Iraq. Instead, the report says that there were multiple serious failures in collecting and analyzing the information that the intelligence community in the USA and other countries had gathered on this complex subject. These findings were confirmed by another report released by the Bush administration and Congress on March 31, 2005 (CNN, April 1, 2005, www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/03/31/intel.report/index.html). Of course, it is also true that Sadam Hussein refused to let inspectors do their job, which led to the assumption that he was hiding something.

Trying to bring capitalist democracy to the Arab, Muslim countries in the Middle East may be a worthy, moral goal. But, it is a fact that democratic capitalism began to flourish in countries dominated by leaders with a Protestant, if not Calvinist, Christian worldview, like England and the United States. Also, as events played out, using a foreign invasion to bring democratic capitalism to Arab lands appears to have been an imprudent decision, aside from the issue of preventing terrorists and terrorist regimes from getting chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons designed to kill millions.

Whatever your opinion on these other matters, however, America and the world does not need any more misleading political thrillers like GREEN ZONE.